Cauliflower and Wild Mushroom Soup
This soup began life as a way of using up the offcuts from a recipe for cauliflower with cheese sauce. Cauliflower leaves are also useful steamed and served as a vegetable with oyster sauce. The water in which the cauliflower cooks can be used for broths; so too, the water in which dried mushrooms are constituted. This recipe brings them both together.
Serves 4
Ingredients:
- Handful of dried mushrooms—shiitake or any wild mushrooms, especially morels or Porcinis
- 1 cauliflower
- 1 leek
- 2 stalks celery
- Handful of cilantro
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Instructions:
- Soak the mushrooms in 1 quart of boiling water to reconstitute for about 15 minutes. If they are bigger than a soup spoon, then snip them smaller with scissors.
- Put the cauliflower, whole, into a large pot and cover with boiling water. Trim and dice the leek and celery neatly and add to the pot. Add the cilantro stalks, reserving the leaves. Cover and simmer for 20 minutes until the vegetables are soft. Strain the broth and reserve a few cauliflower florets, the leek and the celery.
- Transfer the mushrooms and their soaking liquid to a clean pot. Add a cup of the cauliflower broth (the remaining liquid can be added to another vegetable broth). Break off the florets from the cauliflower—two per serving. Add in the leek and celery. Warm through and serve each bowl with several leaves of cilantro.
