It's January and here in Hong Kong is freezing to the bone. We have a thing called hotpot here and people have hotpot all year round. I will get to this later. What I'm trying to say is, what's better than a big bowl of steaming hot soup in such weather? Speaking of soup, my mum is an expert in making Chinese style soup. Chinese soup claims to have different cures to health problems. And I am still amazed at this. But for me, I am always up for the western style of cuisine. One of my favourite dishes is cream of mushroom. (Or some people call it mushroom soup??) Anyway it's made of mushrooms.
For convenience I always get store-bought canned soup. One brand makes pretty good soup but I was thinking why not make it from scratch? It should be fun and the outcome should top any canned soup on the shelf. So, I was in it for the mushroom hunt.
We don't have a large variety of mushrooms here but I got to buy a few common kinds. I got the white button mushrooms, the brown button mushrooms and the big fat portobello. The method of making the soup has nothing special but you need a lot of patience and ... patience. The preparation time is much longer than the actual cooking time so give it some love and maybe sing to the mushrooms would help.
I am sorry to say that I didn't follow any recipes and you just follow your heart! So here is the recipe I can remember.
Cream of mushroom
1 pound mushrooms of any kinds
Half onion
3 cloves of garlic
About 5 cups of chicken stock
Half cup of single cream
Salt of pepper to taste
1) Finely chopped the mushroom, onion and garlic using a food processor.
2) Put the mixture in a pan over medium high heat.
3) Fry until everything is soft and tender.
4) Bring the chicken stock to boil in a separate boiler.
5) Using a ladle, gradually pour boiling chicken stock in the pan with the mushroom mixture.
6) Bring it to boil and turn to low heat and let it simmer for 5 minutes.
7) Add cream, salt and pepper. Serve hot with toasts.
