Hot and Sour Soup!

I had a craving for some Asian-inspired cuisine and came across this recipe on cooks.com. Admittedly, I didn't have a lot of the ingredients on hand (for example, garlic chili sauce or sesame oil), which is sort of a downfall to this recipe. On the other hand, I do like to try my hand at Asian cooking every now and then, so I will end up using the sesame oil eventually.

Ingredients

4 cups chicken broth (or veggie!)

1/4 cup cooked, shredded chicken or pork

3 tbsp soy sauce (I use reduced-sodium)

1/2 cup mushroms, diced

1/2 tbsp garlic chili sauce

1/4 tsp ground white pepper

1/4 white vinegar

1/3 cup canned bamboo shoots, julienned

1/2 cup cubed tofu

2 tbsp cornstarch

2 tbsp cold water

1 egg, beaten

2 green onions, diced

1/2 tsp sesame oil

Directions

1. Bring broth to a simmer.
2. Add soy sauce, shredded meat, mushrooms, and garlic chili paste.
3. Simmer for 5 minutes
4. Add white pepper, white vinegar, bamboo shoots, and tofu.
5. Simmer for 5 minutes
6. While it's simmering, combine corn starch and cold water in a measuring cup. Mix until smooth.
7. Add cornstarch mixture to soup and stir well.
8. Simmer for 5 minutes until soup has thickened.
9. In a fine stream, slowly pour beaten egg into soup.
10. Stir several times.
11. Wait about 30 seconds (for egg to cook).
12. Add sesame oil and green onions. Stir.
13. Remove from heat and serve!

A few notes about this recipe:

• I didn't have any shredded meat, so I cooked up some ground turkey and used that instead. It tastes alright but I will probably leave it out next time.
• I also didn't have white pepper, so I used black. Same diff.
• I'm not sure I added the egg in properly. I was stirring as I was pouring the egg in, and I ended up with little flakes of egg everywhere. I think you're supposed to pour the egg in and then stir, so that the egg goes into little ribbons. Oh well. It still tastes alright!
• You could leave out the tofu if you preferred. I found it didn't really add anything extra, other than it kept with the Asian theme.
• The spice level was perfect for me, but you can adjust how much chili sauce you use depending on what you like.

All in all, this was a very yummy dish! It was very easy and quick, but it does require you to be in the kitchen the whole time (as opposed to other soups where you can just let them simmer away!). I will definitely make this again!