All foraged soup
So, I discovered a had a bag of frozen mushrooms in the freezer, that I had previously forgotten about, and this was a welcome discovery, as I was craving a nice mushroom soup. However, to make a good mushroom soup, I'd need some onions, and generally at this time of year, I have none. This is not because I am just so bad at growing onions; it's because I don't have the space or the bulbs. I am currently trying to trick an onion into going into seed in my garden, so that I may have onion seeds the next year. But, as of right now, I do not have onions, and this is something I usually remedy by using an infusion of chives as an onion replacement! But, not even chives are currently growing because there's so few hours of the sun in the day, they cannot be bothered to grow with this scarce amount of light.
So I remembered, there's another option! Wild onions. And, should I find wild onions out there, this would be a certified 100% foraged soup, as onions and mushrooms would come from out in the wild, collected by foraging.
I had to make an elaborate plan of cycling thu the city to get to an access point to the place with wild onions, I currently just know one spot where they grow! But I made it, and was sniffing around the grass, trying to find some blue-colored clusters. Wild onions can be difficult to spot, as they look very similar to the grass; their color is slightly more blue, they're thinner and they don't have blades like grass does, their greenery grows into elongated tubes instead. Here's some I found!
Even as they look almost like grass, they smell like onions once you pick them. There are a few similar plants that do NOT smell like onions, those are fakes! True onions smell deliciously like onions. I made sure to only harvest the green parts, because this way, I can come back in a week and collect from the same plants again, onions are great at re-growing from the bulb!
First thing I'm doing with these wild onion greens is washing them, which is convenient if you do it in a big frisbee, and then I'm cutting them in half and flipping the halves on the same side, to make it easier to cut into smaller pieces. When I'm done cutting, I put them in a jar!
This is because I'm not actually going to eat the onions, I'm just making an infusion, or a broth really, that's using the onions as a base. Their texture would not be ideal in a soup, unless for a little garnish on top (which I didn't think of at the time, so what I want is just to have them in a jar, pour hot boiling water all the way to the top, then close them up. Then I wrap this closed jar in a cloth, then wrap a few towels around it, so the heat could not escape, this way the hot jar will not cool down! At this point I also realized my frozen mushrooms are not thawing fast enough, so I put the bag into a container with hot water, to make the process faster.
At this point I'm leaving this all in the kitchen for one hour, so the onion broth gets the correct flavour, and the mushrooms get properly thawed.
*an hour later*
Here's how the onion broth looks like, taken out of the wrapping! It's nice and yellow. I'm going to strain the liquid I want to use, and I'm actually leaving some for another day; I don't need a ton of broth for this soup because it's supposed to be a creamy soup, so I don't want to make it too thin. The broth can stay in the fridge for 2 days, or it can be frozen for future use.
Now, to make the soup.
What I want to do first is to sautee some mushrooms on the oil, then make a roux. I wanted to put all of the mushrooms on the oil, but they were releasing a lot of liquid, and I didn't want them affecting the roux, so I just put a few, to intensify the mushroom flavour of the soup. I also added salt here! So after all of the mushrooms started smelling great, I added some flour on top, to absorb all of the oil, and stirred it until it started getting a bit more color. It's important while doing this, to have a glass with a bit of cold water in it! Putting a glass of water next to the pot was the first thing I did.
It's necessary to stir at all times because the flour burns easily, and before it starts looking bad (which is like, a minute in), I need to pour a glass of cold water on it, and stir. This will quickly make a paste! And this paste is a foundation for all thick and creamy soups.
After the paste has been established, I'm adding all of the rest of the mushrooms, and pouring all of the onion broth in. Then the soup is stirred until it's all the same thickness, and let to boil until it's really bubbly and rising up in the pot! I realized that the creamy soups only turn out okay if I let it bubble all the way up, this insures that the oil, flour and the water are properly mixed, and won't start turning back into separate mixtures.
This is basically all of the work. After it bubbles up, I'm closing the pot with a lid (or a plate, I don't have a lid), wrapping it up in the same cloth, towels and blanket as I did the onion jar, and I'm letting it sit there for 15-20 more minutes, and it can keep cooking in there, without me paying any attention to it. Otherwise you could just cook it on low heat for a bit longer, but it would take stirring and making sure it doesn't burn at the bottom and who's got that kind of patience.
After 15 minutes, I'm taking the pot out, and the last step will just be to blend it, since I have a blender and I can be fancy about it. The mushrooms taste mixes very well with flour and onion, really most of things do.
And here it is! All foraged (except for oil, flour and salt) mushroom soup! It was really good. Tasted like it had a real onion inside, even though I cheated.
