Hearty Miso Soup Recipe

Forget chicken soup! If you want something to really boost your immune system, go with this  Miso Soup full of mushrooms, antioxidants and phytochemicals. Every ingredient in this soup has something significant to contribute to healing or infection fighting, and just as important is what it does NOT have in it -- namely decaying flesh loaded with inflammatory endotoxin, nor large amounts of fat to muck up your digestive system, increase insulin resistance, or clog your arteries and divert your body's resources from healing and repair to digestion and removal of additional toxins.  I LOVE South River Miso (shown here) -- they are all packaged in glass, and quality made products from a small private company.

This can be made fairly quickly too. If you use fresh shitakes, the soup can be ready to eat in less then thirty minutes.

Ingredients:

9 cups purified water -- reserve two cups for the third step
5-6 large shitake mushrooms, (preferably) fresh or dried
1/2 cup dried arame (sea vegetable)
1/2 cup dried wakame (sea vegetable)
3-4 large cloves of garlic finely chopped
3 carrots washed and sliced thinly
1 bunch (about five cups chopped) of La Cinate Kale (aka dinosaur or black kale)
1 piece about the size of a golf ball of fresh giner root
6 TBS non-gmo Mellow White Miso (or chick pea miso to make this soy-free)
1 TBS non-gmo wheat free tamari (omit or sub 1 tsp sea salt to make this soy free)

Directions:

1. Rinse shitakes and put them into a large pot with 7 cups of the water, the arame, wakame, and garlic. Bring pot to a boil on high for five minutes. If using dried shitakes turn off the heat and allow pot to sit covered for thirty minutes before adding anything else. If using fresh shitakes, go right on to the next step.
2. Turn stove to low and add the carrots and allow them to simmer for five more minutes. Then add the kale, stir well simmering for another minute, then replace lid and turn off the heat.
3. Coarsly chop the giner root and put it into the blender with the two cups of reserved water. Remove the shitakes from the pot using a slotted spoon, cut the steps off and add the stems to the blender. Slice the mushroom caps thinly and return the caps to the pot. Turn the blender on high until the stems and ginger are totally blended. Then add the miso and blend again until smooth. Pour the entire contents of the blender into the pot.
4. Add the tamari or salt, stir and serve.
5. Garnish with freshly chopped scallions and serve with gamasio for everyone to add at the table.

Make sure that you use always use only organic or non-gmo tamari and miso -- otherwise, most soy now is genetically modified. More and more data is coming to light suggesting that genetically modified foods, contain toxins in amounts that our bodies are not accustomed to. For example, animals fed gmo products had livers and kidneys larger then normal and sometimes had more difficulty getting pregnant or carrying pregnancies to term.

If you would prefer a "soy-free" version of this, omit the tamari, and substitute chickpea miso for the mellow white miso. Also, if you are sick and/or can tolerate more ginger and more garlic, by all means add more then what I have listed here (you can double the amount) -- they are really great for fighting infections.

---