REVIEW & REJIG: Hungarian mushroom soup recipe

I was off sick from work today and slept most of the day away. When I awoke, I was feeling much better, but was absolutely famished. I considered calling and ordering some take-out chicken soup from Swiss Chalet until I looked up the nutritional value. For one bowl of chicken and vegetable noodle soup was over 1000mg of sodium!! No thank you!

My husband suggested that I make my own. The problem with that was that I had no chicken in the fridge! I had veggies and broth and whole wheat egg noodles (no yolk) but no chicken. Can’t have chicken soup without chicken, can we?

But by this point, I knew I wanted soup. So I went scouring around the web, looking for ideas. I knew I had about a pound of mushrooms that needed to be used up soon, so I based my searching on that ingredient. What I found was an intriguing recipe over on AllRecipes.com called Hungarian Mushroom Soup. I was surprised to find out that with the exception of the fresh parsley (I just had dried), I had all of the ingredients.

Hoisin beef stirfry

I think I posted something very similar to this a while back, but I’m revisiting it. I’ve changed up the ingredients a bit, including the amount of hoisin sauce and spices, as well as adding a can of water chestnuts (which were a fantastic addition!).

Stirfry lunch or dinner is a nearly no-guilt meal for me. So long as I watch the sodium, don’t add much in the way of oil, and am careful with what sauces I add (and how much), I think it’s a pretty healthy way to eat. And loading it up with veggies but just a little bit of meat allows you to spread out a small portion of meat (especially if that’s all you have) between more people/portions.

You see, I’m not much of a raw-veggie fan, but stirfry needs to be crunchy. Warmed through but still undercooked enough to have that crunch. A floppy, mushy stirfry is just nasty, so the key here is a high enough heat to warm quickly while preserving the crunch of the veggies, but not so high that it burns, along with cooking it very quickly. Cooking it on a lower heat just boils or simmers it in whatever you’re cooking it in. I am by no means a master at this. I just kind of eyeball it and judge by how the food feels against the spatula.

So I had some strips of an Eye of Round roast in the freezer that I hadn’t cooked up yet and decided that was going to be the meat of the dish. Here’s what I did…

Low-carb adventures: Asian beef salad

I had actually made this Asian beef recipe for some lettuce wraps but the problem was that I only had Romaine lettuce, which does not  roll up too well. It turned out to be more like Asian beef lettuce tacos! *laughs*

I figured this  would be too messy for my lunch at work the next day, so I made up a green salad and simply topped it off with the flavourful ground beef mixture. Please have a look at the original recipe for the Asian Beef  Lettuce Wraps at the Comfort of Cooking website, but I made a few adjustments along the way for my own tastes and based on what I had on hand. Here’s the recipe for the beef mixture:

Low-carb adventures: quick sweet beef stir-fry

I was craving Chinese food one lunch-hour while I was on vacation. But Chinese can get expensive and I’ve been trying to cut back on MSG (which gives me migraines), sodium, and extra spending. 😉 So I raided my fridge and freezer to see what I could do. Before long, I had drummed up the fixings for a really quick stir-fry for lunch. Here’s what I did…

My totally fake slowcooker “Stroganoff”

There are going to be people who look at this and say, “That’s not Stroganoff!!” and I will say, wholeheartedly, that they are correct. This is more of a Stroganoff-inspired dish that was more about using up some ingredients in my fridge before their best before dates and less about being authentic.

Here’s what I did…

Thai-inspired dinner

Thai food is not something I normally indulge in. I can’t handle spicy-spicy foods. (Yeah, I’m a wuss.) But I was in the mood for something different tonight, so I poked around online for a dipping sauce recipe that would strike my fancy and dove into whipping something up.

First, I cannot claim the Thai Peanut Sauce as my own. I did cut back slightly on the amount of chili powder and added more brown sugar for my own tastes, but otherwise, check out the recipe at tasteofBBQ.

All I did with the chicken was cut it up into strips and then marinaded it in a bowl in the fridge filled with half a bottle of low fat Italian dressing for about an hour. Then I skewered them on metal skewers and grilled them on my indoor grill for a few minutes. Carefully, I removed the chicken from the grill with tongs (as those skewers would be hot)! and pulled the chicken off the skewers into a serving bowl, sprinkling it all with a little bit of coarse salt.

Tomato soup that doubles as sauce!

Tonight, I had a hankering for tomato soup. Not that over-pureed gunk out of a can, but a nice, homemade soup with a bit of texture to it. Apologies to those who are fans of the stuff out of cans; I’m not a lover, I fear.

As soon as I got home, I started pulling ingredients out of cupboards and the fridge, seeing if I had all the ingredients.