Lasang Pinoy 18 Part 2: Monggo Soup

Ok so I go on years not joining LP and then bam, I have two posts for event number 18. Toni will be pleased. In any case, another Filipino vegetable dish that I truly consider as comfort food is Monggo Soup (mung bean soup). Mung bean is where bean sprouts come from, in case you don't know.

My mom cooked Mung Bean soup a lot back in Manila every time it would rain. I don't really know the connection. To this day, she still associates Mung Bean soup with rain or chilly weather. When we moved here to the states, my mom would make monggo soup (when it's raining or cold outside) as an accompanying vegetable/soup dish with fried/grilled porkchops, steaks, or fish. We never ate it by itself. Always with something protein.




My Americanized version of Monggo soup is influenced by a local actress named Jenny who opened an eatery in town not too long ago. She's pioneering the "fresh" concept wherein she comes in at 5am daily to cook 6 kinds of soups, 1 pasta, 2 salads, and 2 sandwiches. She only uses fresh ingredients available locally so the menu changes daily. Because it's an amazing concept, people line up all the way out the street before opening time at 11am (she closes at 3pm). One day, I came in (after waiting 20 minutes in line) and had the most amazing barley-artichoke-mushroom soup I've ever tasted in my life. So I had an epiphany -- why not use or include barley with the usual Monggo soup? So I did!



My Monggo-Barley soup started with using the right kind of barley. I didn't know there were several kinds so I used common sense and chose Peeled Split Barley because that's how the barley looked like in Jenny's soup.

Ingredients:
1 cup barley
1 cup mung beans
olive oil
minced garlic
chopped onions
lots of chopped tomatoes
sliced shitake mushrooms
dried shrimp (hibe)
bitter melon slices
fish sauce and freshly ground pepper to taste

Method:
1. Wash barley thoroughly. Boil in 3 cups water for 70 minutes.
2. At the same time, and in another pot, boil washed mung beans in 5 cups water until mung beans just begin to crack open.
3. While waiting for the beans and barley to cook, in a pot, saute onions, garlic, and lots of tomatoes (I used about a pound), and mushrooms in a little bit of olive oil until the tomatoes are mushy (about 10 minutes).
4. Add a pack of dried shrimp. Cook for a minute or two.
5. Add the cooked barley and beans and all of the water where the mung beans were boiled. Cook until a rolling boil.
6. Add bitter melon slices (we don't have leaves available here), then season with fish sauce and lots of freshly ground pepper. Turn off heat.

The result: extraordinary! There were a lot of textures in this dish: softness from the mung beans, chewy from the barley and mushrooms, mushy from the tomatoes, and crunch from the bitter melon. This is one amazing mung bean soup and I am proud to say, it's my invention (and I should call this PurpleGirl's Monggo-Barley Soup)! In any case, it's Pinoy comfort food.

Lasang Pinoy