Kiem Recipe (Vietnamese Vegetarian Pumpkin Soup)

This year, the Asian New Year celebration (called Tết in Vietnamese) will happen during the first week of February, according to the Lunar calendar. I've mentioned in the past that, traditionally, you're required to eat vegetarian food (ăn chay) on the last day of the previous year and the first day of New Year.

Today, I'm sharing a vegan dish called kiểm that's a staple during the celebration. The dish is a sweet, savory soup made of pumpkin, bananas, coconut milk, mung beans, lotus seeds, wood ear mushrooms, sweet potatoes, ginger, tofu and raw peanuts. This is not a very common dish and it's only made for the celebration. If you know its origin, please let me know in the feedback section.

The winner of this week's giveaway is Amanda O. Congratulations and I hope you enjoy using my first cookbook about gourmet potato dishes as much I did developing the recipes!

Sweet and Sour Soup Recipe

Here's a quick and easy recipe I came up with to make use of the leftover plum roasted chicken I made over the weekend. I shredded the meat and added it to chicken stock I had stored in the freezer. A few additional ingredients, including enoki mushrooms, shiitake mushrooms, cubed silken tofu, lily buds, kaffir lime leaves, young bamboo shoots, plum sauce and lightly beaten eggs and you have a lovely bowl of sweet and sour soup. The sweetness from the plum sauce provides a nice contrast of flavor with the freshness from the kaffir lime leaves.

Since the chicken and chicken stock were ready to go, it took me almost no time to prepare the soup. So basically, an investment of one afternoon spent preparing chicken is already paying dividends!