pdq hot and sour soup
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I love hot and sour soup, but the authentic-looking recipes called for things like "black fungus" and "wood ear" and "tiger lily  buds" Wasn't Tiger Lily the Indian Princess in Peter Pan?? Even in the San Francisco Bay Area, these things can be tricky to find.

I also combed the Food Network/Epicurious/AllRecipes sources--ingredients range from 1/2 cup of shoyu(!), lime juice, kaffir lime leaves, mushroom soy sauce, and one recipe took 2.5 hours. Cooking dinner should not take longer than a watching hockey game!

The recipe I distilled uses commonplace ingredients, dials down the salt content, and the taste and texture still works. Good to have on a cold winter night, and can be done in 30 minutes flat.  My kids said, "Wow, it actually tastes like takeout."
3T shoyu (maybe less, since there is chicken broth)
1T good shakes of Worcestershire sauce
5-6T Japanese vinegar
1T sesame oil
1-2T chili oil
2t chili garlic sauce
3T cornstarch
A bit of canola oil
1T fresh grated ginger
2-3 stalks of green onions, finely chopped
1/4 pound (just a bit) of pork or chicken, thinly sliced into ribbons
Fresh shiitake, thinly sliced
2 cartons of chicken broth
1 cake of firm tofu, cut into thin columns
White pepper, to taste
1 egg, beaten
Optional--fresh chopped cilantro to sprinkle at the end.
Mix together shoyu, Worcestershire, vinegar, sesame oil, chili paste and cornstarch.

Drizzle a bit of sesame oil and canola oil in a dutch oven or soup pot. When the oil is hot (cascading sheets), add ginger and half of the green onions. 

Give it a very quick stir, then add pork and mushrooms. Cook until just done--maybe 2 minutes. Add chicken broth and bring to full boil. Add the liquid mix of spices, stir and let it simmer so that the cornstarch can thicken the soup. Add tofu and stir. Add white pepper to crank up the heat as much or as little as you like.

At the last minute, drizzle in the beaten egg while stirring. This is so that you get 'strings' of egg and not a boiled scrambled egg blob. Toss the rest of the green onions in and eat hot.