Hi, foodies in the Hive!

Are you one of those amateur cooks who believe that soup cures everything, from hunger, to sickness, to the ailments of the soul? I am a true believer❤️ Most of the time it'd be vegetable soup or chicken soup, but today I made fish soup.

It doesn't matter if it's a big bowl of soup instead of a tiny one, if it's made to brighten your day and comfort you it'll always be "sopita" 😋 Today I made fish sopita for lunch. It was something special, as I made it using my father's little trick to make a flavorful broth.

INGREDIENTS

I used local root vegetables and fish... a whole cojinova chopped into three pieces and two heads. Every good soup maker knows that the heads give the best taste to the fish soup; it's in the genetic information of us cumaneses who make our own soup 😄

In my town, the amount of root vegetables in a soup depends on the interpretative capacity of the vendor who chooses, chops and weighs the vegetables. One kilo becomes two kilos if that day the vegetables were plentiful and cheap. So at home, the soup is left with little or a lot of root vegetables depending on external agents, only controllable by mysterious quantum means. Today it was a lot of root vegetables.

From left to right: taro, white taro, topocho banana, cassava, and pumpkin.

Soup for 3:

1 kilo of your favorite root vegetables for fish soup (I used the ones you see above)
500 gr cojinova
1 cup white onion
1/2 cups green bell pepper
1 cup sweet chili pepper (I used "jobito")
6 garlic cloves (about half a head)
1 spoonful salt
2 lts. water
freshly squeezed lemon juice to taste (a few drops in the hot soup and more if you like directly in the soup once served)

Serve with arepas (or toasted cassava cakes)

Next time we will have some slices of ripe 🥑 Promise 😁

THE PROCESS

Peel, wash, and chop the root vegetables.

The size in which you cut the root vegetables will depend on how long each one takes to cook. Usually you can cut them all about the same size, but the pumpkin will almost always be added to the cooking pot about ten minutes after the rest, to prevent it from falling apart (unless you put it in very large chunks, about three times the size of the others).

For the traditional fish soup of my hometown, everything is boiled. Here there is no stir-frying or sautéing. You peel the onion and cut it into large pieces, sometimes just in half. The favorite chili pepper for this soup is "jobito," a local variety--which some have tried and failed to reproduce; the reason is that they should have the same composition of our soil (in a specific area near my city).

Some chili pods go whole with seeds and all. You just remove the pedicel as if you remove a cap. The seeds are removed from the rest and cut coarsely with your hands. You must remove the seeds and veins from the green bell pepper. Tear it into pieces with your hands.

As for the garlic, I could've cut an unpeeled head widthwise and pour it into the soup water, but today I peeled and crushed the cloves. I used my father's little trick to make a flavorful broth: I saved part of the onion, chili pepper and garlic to add them almost at the end, when the fish is added to the boiling soup, which happens when the root vegetables are almost cooked.

Onion, peppers and garlic is what we call the seasoning. They go into the pot along with the root vegetables along with the total soup water and salt. That is, at this point everything is added except the pumpkin and fish (and the remaining seasoning).

Add the pumpkin when the root vegetables are almost cooked. This takes about 15 minutes.

These pumpkin chunks take about six minutes to cook.

By the time the pumpkin begins to soften, the broth has begun to take on a nice color and texture.

Time for the fish 👌

You'll want to place the pieces of cojinova (cleaned and scaled) on top of the vegetables and keep them there, so that they do not break when you take them out when finally cooked.

Once the soup is done, you can remove the excess of vegetables so you can enjoy the nice broth.