Cooking: Won Ton Soup

For lunch, we went to Amarin Thai in Downtown Mountain View which was myeh. I had the spicy beef noodle soup and Justyn had this Thai style bacon with spinach and rice. It satisfied my craving for Thai food, but I still want more! Our usual routine is going to this awesome Chinese bakery called Hong Kong Chinese Bakery which has extraordinarily good egg custards. Justyn loves these sweet pastries while I don't really care for them. As I waited for Justyn to order and pay for his egg custards, I spotted a sign on the wall that said that they sold won tons by the dozen for $3.25. I was already thinking ahead to what we were going to have for dinner so I said why not? We bought 2 dozen since 1 didn't seem like enough for two.

On the way home from work, we stopped by Lucky to get some veggies for the soup. Since I'm on a somewhat low carb diet, I wanted to pack the soup with tons of vegetables so I wouldn't still be hungry after dinner. I got some Napa cabbage, shiitake mushrooms and green onions.

When I got home, I prepped my ingrediants and all of the sudden a lightbulb went off. I looked at my ingrediants which were exactly what I needed to make Lion Head Stew (http://jadedskitchen.blogspot.com/2007/04/cooking-lions-head-stew.html). Instead of the pork meatballs, I would use won tons as my protein/starch. The only thing I was missing were the dried shrimps, but the soup still came out well.

I sauteed the mushrooms, ginger, garlic and green onions first.



When everything was fragrant, I added the washed, chopped Napa cabbage. Once that wilted down, I added the chicken stock.



I let that come up to a simmer before adding the won tons which cooked for 10 minutes. In restrospect, I would've cooked these for about 15 minutes so the skins could soften more.



Here's the final product. It was flavorful, spicy (I added red chilies) and very comforting for a brisk fall day.