Soup up your soup

Residents on the East Coast of the U.S. are digging out from a record snowstorm, so chances are good that soup is on the menu. Nothing warms you like a hearty bowl of soup says Bo O’Connor, executive chef of The Pomeroy in Astoria, N.Y., and former personal chef to Lady Gaga. O’Connor provides advice on how to jazz up classics like cream of tomato and egg drop soup. 

Regarding the latter soup, O’Connor says, “People always associate egg drop soup with Chinese food but a soup that I love to do is an egg drop soup where I saute onion, celery, carrots and leeks, then add vegetable and chicken broth, kale, scrambled eggs and chickpeas then finish it off with gratings of Parmesan.” She adds that the eggs and chickpeas add protein to the soup.

O’Connor finds other ways to soup up her soups, by roasting vegetables or meats to give a smoky umami to the soup, as indexed blogger Heather Schmitt-González does in the Creamy charred tomato soup pictured above. Other soup upgrades include substituting unusual noodles or pasta like cellophane noodles or udon, or swapping coconut milk, almond milk or regular milk for heavy cream or half and half.