soups for the sick

So this past week has been exciting in the sense that I got sick right after Keelan recovered, then when I was kind of recovered, he got food poisoning from some take out, and now we're both in the recovering phase.

To be honest, highly do not recommend.

But I felt well enough to cook two soups this week, as we have some ridiculously warm (for March) days. The header is a winter melon soup, which I made with a winter melon that I grew at the farm! It had pork meat balls, carrots, and vermicelli in it, along with ginger and garlic.

This other soup is houtou, a specially of Yamanashi in Japan. I'd seen it first in YuruCamp, but since I'm planning my trip to Japan and will be going through Yamanashi, I've been seeing it a bit more frequently.

Houtou is a miso soup with wide flat noodles called houtou, and it's similar to udon – but wider and thinner. The noodles actually were quite easy to make by hand since I didn't need too many of them.

Typically houtou is a vegetable only meal, but it's pretty hearty. I used kabocha (also from the farm harvest last year) since it seemed all houtou recipes featured them, and a miso that I fermented myself. There's also carrots, napa cabbage, and enoki mushrooms.

Speaking of my miso though, I am almost out so maybe it is time to start up a new batch. I love the rich flavour of old miso, since my current one is over 2 years old now, but new miso is good too.

#food