Bok Choy dumpling soup

Chopped bok choy ready for cooking

Like I said in my last post, having a CSA is a lot of work.  Lately I've been shopping mostly based on one or two meals in advance, and now I get all my produce at once.  But no one wants to eat just collards or broccoli for dinner, so I have to plan how I'm going to dress up and highlight my veggies.  I've been scouring my favorite food sites for recipes, and consulting with friends and family.  Luckily, I've been able to find good recipes that require very little extra shopping, and the ingredients I need to buy aren't too fancy.  It does help that I have a fairly well-stocked kitchen to begin with.  Which is why when I saw that this soup required star anise and cloves, I didn't bat an eye.  I keep those in my pantry for mulling wine in the winter, and am always glad to find another use for these spices.  If you don't have a lot of spices, try to find a store that sells them in bulk, so you can just buy what you need.  In my area, this store has saved me a ton of money!

The final product

On to the soup. I have a good friend who is Japanese, and introduced me to "shortcut" miso.  Rather than adding miso paste to a finished soup, she cooks her vegetables in just water, and then adds a paste of miso *with stock*.  It means that you can't follow the recipe for how much to add, but it also means not buying broth, which always seems to come in the wrong amount for the recipe and sits in my fridge until it goes bad.  We also really like spicy food, so I used about 3 times as much sriracha as called for.  So here's the recipe, and here are my comments:

• This recipe really is fairly simple. It just has a lot of steps
• I couldn't get ginger: apparently the heavy rain on the east coast is making it difficult to grow. I used some powdered ginger to at least get the flavor in there
• I didn't want to toss out the tough bottoms of the bok choy, so I sliced them up and added them to the soup with the dumplings
• I had a lot of shallots, and my bok choy was 4 cups, not 3, so I added extra soy sauce and sesame oil. Somehow we made closer to 60 dumplings...
• I added an extra 4 cups of water to account for the extra dumplings.  Since I was using miso with stock, the flavor was still great, but I used about a cup of the paste

 I love making dumplings, so this recipe was already a winner in my eye.  The soup was incredibly flavorful.  I will make it again, with ginger, and fewer shallots.  The dumplings were also good, and the toasted sesame oil came through.  Now I just need to find some help eating the leftovers...any takers?