Feeeed me

One large daikon
One leek
2-3 carrots
Green leafy vegetable such as bok choy, spinach, etc
Tofu
A mild soup broth such as chicken, veggie, or fried onion paste
Soy sauce
A bundle of dried bean thread noodles (optional)

Cut veggies and tofu into bite-sized pieces. Put everything non-leafy into a large soup pot. Simmer for 30 minutes. Stir in the leafy bits right before turning off the heat.

Serve with sesame oil and/or hot chili oil.

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Pretty much I just made all that up in the last few weeks, though it's very loosely based on a soup recipe I saw on a Korean recipe blog.

The reason I went looking for daikon soup recipes was because, when I was in Brisbane a couple months ago, we went to a Korean BBQ restaurant that had all-you-can-eat side dishes, and one of them was a super simple soup that was basically just daikon slices in a clear broth with a tiny bit of meat. It was astoundingly delicious, and reminded me of the daikon soup that my mother used to make, and I think my body was trying to tell me that I desperately needed the health benefits of eating more daikon.

There are leeks in the recipe because right before I started making daikon soup, I made Welsh cawl and discovered that I really like leeks. It's kind of like a more delicate version of a cross between onion and spring onion. So, probably a good substitute for scallions.

The carrots, I originally put in to add some colour, since otherwise it's a very white soup.

As for the green leafy vegetable, something Asian seems appropriate. My first two batches had cabbage from the garden. The "cabbage" from my garden is some sort of southeast Asian Brassica, which I'm pretty sure is one of the four varieties of mustard where one of the other varieties is used to make Szechuan spicy pickled radish/mustard. Which is yet another comfort food from my childhood that is quite hard to find in New Zealand, so I was disappointed to find out that the version I have isn't the right one.

Anyway, there's a ton of it growing in the garden. The landlords say that they were originally being grown here two tenants ago, and that said tenants ate them daily. I guess the outside conditions are just right for it to be a super weed. (Said tenants also apparently introduced cilantro, but we don't have as much of that as the cabbage.)

The third batch of this soup had bok choy because those were suddenly in season and plentiful while I was buying more daikon. It works pretty well, but since the green leafy part cooks much faster than the stem, I separated them and put the stems in with the roots, and the leaves in at the end.

Then there's tofu because I figure there should be some protein in it, and I didn't feel like messing with raw meat. Tofu only comes in two firmnesses here - "soft" or "firm." The "firm" is what I usually use for everything, though it's more of a soft-medium kind of firm (it falls apart easily when stir-fried).

For the broth, I happened to have a jar of "fried onion" flavoured paste, which I found in the soup paste aisle of the local Asian grocery. It turns out to work really well in this soup. But it should also work fine with chicken broth or vegetable broth.

The soy sauce is in there because there was soy sauce in the Korean recipe I based this on. There's a note in the Korean version to use a Korean-specific soup soy sauce because regular soy sauce is too sweet. I'm not sure what kind of soy sauce she means; my Chinese all purpose soy sauce isn't sweet at all, and is what I'm using. (Pearl River Bridge is a good brand if you have access to it, otherwise anything that is Chinese and not Japanese (or Korean?) would probably be fine. My current soy sauce is Lee Kum Kee.)

Dried bean thread noodles (they're thin and translucent) also go well in this soup. They do add a bunch of long stringy bits that make it harder to ladle out of the pot, and Brett doesn't like noodles (!) so I stopped putting them in after the second batch.

And finally, it's called "winter health soup" because somewhere on the Internet I read that it's eaten daily in the winter in east Asian places for good health.