One of the main reasons that I make soup once a week is because I hate food waste. Homemade soup making is a good way to curb that in one's kitchen. (Spoiler alert: rant ahead).
About 40% of the food purchased by Americans is thrown away. Think of the effort expended to cultivate and/or raise all this, the extraneous materials ending up in already overfull landfills and - most importantly of all - the many people in the world who go to bed hungry every night. In the United States that statistic is 1 in 8 adults and 1 in 6 children, so imagine people in 3rd world countries. The sheer stupidity of this all this waste is just mind-boggling to me.
So I do my (truly tiny) bit. L. and I are so lucky and eat incredibly well but I do repurpose food, revisit ingredients and turn them into something else. I try to throw as little food away as possible. I make stocks from fish heads and shrimp shells or chicken carcasses picked of as much meat as possible. If I make asparagus tips, I cook the ends separately in stock and whiz them up in the blender with a little cream for asparagus soup. I freeze bones for the day when I will need them for soups or sauces and keep an air-tight container in my fridge where, on a daily basis, I put bits and bobs. For example, the roots from the bunch of coriander that I needed for some recipe, mushroom stems because I stuffed the caps, the one carrot left from a bunch, peels from onions because they give vegetable stock a really pretty color, that half lemon remaining from when I made drinks, etc. These items, and others similar, make a good base for the weekly stock that I often use in my soup or risotto, etc.
Also, on a happier and less shouty note, soup is usually really comforting and tasty. Helping to save the world, economizing some money, AND eating well? Win-win, says I. So - go ahead - make soup.
The broth that I used in this recipe was made from 6 cups of water, about 3 cups of assorted fish bones and heads, 1 bunch of coriander stems and roots, 1 thumb-sized piece of ginger, about half a cup each of basil and mint because I was cutting my plants back for the winter, a few stalks of Italian parsley discovered sulking in the hydrator, 1/2 of a lemon, a lonely Persian dried lime, one stem of lemongrass that I feel had been in the freezer for much too long, ditto 2 cloves of garlic remaining from a head, and salt. I threw everything in my soup pot, brought it to a boil, turned the heat down low, covered the pot and went about my business. 30 minutes later, I came back and strained the broth, pressing against the solids with a spoon to extract all flavor. So, in no time at all, there I was with a light golden and very fragrant, practically floral, soup base with which to work.
6 cups stock or water
3 cups assorted vegetables and greens (I used pencil asparagus, baby shiitake mushrooms, snow peas and part of the package of dandelion greens that I had left from Monday's salad. Use what you already have; reread the text above re. waste. Harumph).
1/2 package angel hair pasta or 3 packages ramen noodles (discard the flavor packets)
2 Tbsps soy sauce
1 Tbsp oyster sauce
Add the soy sauce and the oyster sauce to the stock described above (or one of your composition based on your fridge) that you have strained into a large soup pot. Bring the stock to a boil.
Add the vegetables and the pasta and cook for the amount of time indicated on the pasta package, about 5-6 minutes. Cut your various vegetables appropriately prior to cooking so that they will cook in the time allocated.
Adjust seasoning if needed with a little more soy or oyster sauce, scatter with some coriander leaves if you have them, and enjoy. As you can see from the photo above, I felt that this might not be enough for L. so I seared an 8 oz tuna steak for 2 minutes on each side, brushed it with a little oyster sauce and topped his soup with it.