Expiration Date Soup

Many of my family and friends have gifts for foraging--recognizing all the funky greens, vegetables, mushrooms, and so forth in their habitats, and knowing when and how to harvest. I don't have the gift--or rather, my repertoire is rather limited. I know cress, dandelions, and other basics, and most of the Rocky Mountain region edible berries, but that's about it. I think I recognize some mushrooms, but then I remember the great care with which my biologist mother examines mushrooms (spore patterns and all), the most recent headlines about mushroom poisonings flood in, and I let braver souls have the harvest.

I do, however, have a gift for pantry and refrigerator scrounging. I remember with pride an ex remarking, "Wow. You're really good at making whole meals out of nothing." Where she saw an empty refrigerator, I saw enough odds and ends for a soup, a funky salad, a crossover stir-fry, or whatever.

Today's lunch is a good example. I'm calling it "Expiration date soup." I just threw together several quarts of a hearty, yummy miso soup using almost nothing but food that was supposedly due for the dump:

• several quarts of water (nearly the only ingredient that was not expired)
• two packets of bonito stock powder dating back to the Clinton administration (I also have ancient konbu and hana katsuo and I am not afraid to use them, but starting my dashi from scratch adds twenty minutes and some risk, which is not ideal for a quick lunch break from work)
• the bottom of an ancient bag of wakame
• the bottom of an ancient bag of black fungus
• a tub of tofu that expired three months ago (but was unopened and fine), diced
• a few sad cloves of garlic, peeled and thinly sliced
• the dried-out sludge at the bottom of an ancient tub of red miso (I had to mince it and whisk it inside a strainer to get it to dissolve into my broth)
• a slug of semi-ancient sesame oil
• three eggs from an urban farmer friend of who knows what age, lightly mixed and stirred into the soup, off the flame (egg-drop soup style)
• several shakes of sesame seed/bonito flakes/mystery ingredients "rice topping" stuff that I think I bought when I lived in Chicago, which is to say before 1994

I prepared the soup by dumping these things into a pot over a medium-high flame roughly in the order listed above, as I found them, and by the time I had everything in the pot, it was ready to eat.

Yummy. Probably not something any self-respecting Japanese chef would acknowledge as food, but I liked it, and I'm going to enjoy it for several more lunches.