Vegetable Dumpling Soup

Serves: 3
Prep time: 15 min
Cook time: 20 min

Ingredients

Dumplings:
• 1 dl all-purpose flour (maybe a bit more) 
• ½ tsp salt 
• 1dl water 
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• ½ tsp Herbs de Provence

The Soup:
• Oil or butter for frying
• 1 onion, finely chopped
• 2-4 mushrooms, diced
• 2 carrots, diced
• 1 stalk celery, diced
• 2 potatoes, diced (or any type of root vegetable. I used turnip)
• 2 bay leaves 
• ½ tsp ground black pepper 
• 3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
• 1,5 l liquid. Chicken, beef or vegetable stock. Or water with a bullion of your choice. 
• 1 – 1 ½ tsp salt (depending on what stock/bullion you use)
• Optional: finely chopped parsley, spring onions or coriander
• Optional: Ca 150 grams of diced bacon (or any kind of diced meat. Leftovers are great)

Directions

Make the dumplings first so the flour can set a bit and swell. 5-10 minutes should do it. Combine flour and Herbs de Provence with salt, add water and whisk. Add oil and whisk again. The dumpling batter should be a creamy mixture, almost like a thicker sour cream. Add more flour if it is to runny or more water if it is too dense.

Heat a sausepan to medium. Add oil (or butter), chopped onions, mushrooms and garlic. Cook for a minute or two while stirring until the onions gets slightly translucent. Add and fry the meat at this point if you are having any. Pour in the stock and add carrots, potatoes (or your root vegetable), celery, bay leaves salt and black pepper. Let the soup boil under a lid, until the carrots are halfway cooked (about 5 minutes).

Make sure that your broth to soup bits ratio is more to the broth side since dumplings with suck up quite a bit of the liquid. Take a teaspoon of dumpling dough and carefully slide it into the boiling soup. Continue, until you are out of the dough. Cover the pot with a lid and let the soup boil on a medium heat for 7 – 10 minutes. Try to avoid opening the lid while the dumplings are cooking. In the end, add chopped parsley/spring onion/coriander and serve.

The batter: Mix your favourite herbs or spices, or use Herbs de Provence like I did.
The vegetables: Almost any type of root vegetable would work in this soup, just make sure you cut them into approximately same size. I used white button mushrooms but you can swap them out with other types or cut them out altogether if you don’t like mushrooms.
Translucent onions: fry onions with oil or butter on a medium heat while stirring. After about 5 minutes they turn slightly more opaque than onion bits are when raw. If you are uncertain, taste it. The onion should have started to soften and lost its sharp onion flavour but still have some resistance to it.
The stock: the better the stock or broth the better the soup will be. What you can get ahold of varies from county to country. Propper soup broth is amazing but a bullion cube works well to. I found this amazing Vietnamese Pho stock cube that is both light, delicious and very cheap.
The dumplings: spoon in the batter in the boiling soup. Try to add the dumplings in different places each time so they don’t stick together. When you are done adding, try to keep the soup at a simmer with the lid on and don’t stirr the soup. This will make sure the dumplings keep together and get cocked through.