Complicated As Duck Soup

So this was the goal of Saturday's bike ride - the Fei Long grocery in Brooklyn's Sunset Park Chinatown (Brooklyn's got multiple Chinatowns).

As I mentioned yesterday, they were sadly lau lau less, but they did have all the duck soup fixin's I'd hoped for. 

These were NOT among the soup fixin's, I just had to take a photo because I don't think I've ever seen a vegetable the size of a husky toddler before (ok, excluding giant pumpkins). At first glance they resemble cucumbers but look a little closer! Never saw anything like 'em.

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Now HERE was the absolute best find of the day. When I started leaning towards trying to make the soup with ingredients in keeping with the deliciously pronounced Chinese seasoning of the broth I'd made from the frame of the duck TQ had brought home, I started by picking up bok choy and enoki mushrooms at the Flatbush Food Co-Op. I decided I also wanted to add dumplings, which was why I wanted to go to Chinatown. Knowing that that was my destination, I asked TQ if he had any ideas of anything that would be good in the soup.

He thought for a minute and then said "Fresh water chestnuts?"

Which sort of blew my mind - believe it or not, the concept that water chestnuts ever existed outside of their canned form had never crossed my mind! We looked them up, though, and the answers we found seemed promising.

Walking around Fei Long's amazing produce section, I found chestnuts first - then a few aisles away, aha! there were these things that looked exactly like chestnuts, except that I knew the actual chestnuts-roasting-on-an-open-fire variety chestnuts were elsewhere. Sure enough! Packed up a bag, got some fresh noodles, beansprouts, dumplings (so many dumplings to choose from!), and a packet of roast pork buns (consolation prize for no more lau lau), and then headed for home.

Fresh water chestnuts turn out (surprise surprise!) to have the same relationship to the canned variety as fresh peaches or green beans or corn have to their canned varieties.  TQ looked up how to prepare (he was so surprised when I walked in and showed him one and said "OK, this is a fresh water chestnut, what do I do with it?") and it's really simple - cut off the top and bottom and peel the rest of the brown rind. They can be eaten raw, so we tried one that way and it was delicious! I always think of canned water chestnuts as being more about adding crunch than flavor; biting into a fresh one, a lightly sweet flavor I never would have expected, and the crunch is somehow more delicate. The recommendations for cooking were to add them at the very last minute to preserve the crunch and flavor, so that's what I did. 

Making the soup! I mentioned that I was making duck soup yesterday on Facebook, and an old friend commented, "Is Duck Soup easy? 'Easy as duck soup' is an old saying."

My response: "Duck soup actually IS easy, if you have a duck. You take the frame and you cook it exactly the same way as you would a chicken carcass and the broth comes out so delicious! I chose to complicate mine tonight because the seasoning of the duck gave the broth (which I made last night) such a delicious Asian flavor that I decided I needed to roll with that. Hence the Brooklyn Chinatown trip today, and I ended up with some time-sensitive ingredients that had to go into the pot in a certain sequence. But you can also just slice up normal soup veggies - I've done that too."

But I had so much fun making my complicated duck soup. Even the noodles were special - fresh wonton noodles from a company right here in Brooklyn. Totally worth the bike ride, even with the accidental extra mileage.

The end result - onolicious! Another successful cooking adventure!