Tomato and egg is one of those magic combinations that’s so much more than a sum of its parts.  Tomato stir fried with scrambled egg makes a fantastic accompaniment to plain white rice. Scrambled egg and ketchup tastes good in a “so bad it’s good” kind of way. It’s no wonder than tomato and egg soup serves as a wonderful base to geda tang.

You know how Chinese people invented everything, right? Even what the Germans call spaetzle!  In Mandarin, geda means “bump” or “pimple” and tang means soup.  Fear not though. Despite its unappetizing sounding name of “pimple soup”, geda tang is easy to make, delicious, filling, and vegetarian.

It can be made in five simple steps:

Step 1: Stir fry chopped green onions, whites and all.

Step 2: Add in chopped tomatoes. These don’t have to be fancy heirloom paste tomatoes. Even crappy pink supermarket tomatoes work here. Add a generous pinch of salt and a smaller pinch of sugar.

Step 3: When the tomatoes have softened and released their liquid, add in two cups vegetable broth and 2 cups water.

Step 4: Make spaetzle (see note below) and throw it into the now bubbling soup. Give it a stir to break up the stuck together pieces of dough.

Step 5: Beat two eggs and slowly drizzle into the bubbling soup so it turns into an egg drop soup consistency.

The spaetzle should be cooked in 2-4 minutes.  Try one and if it’s pillowy soft and not dry at all, the soup is ready to eat.

Note on making spaetzle:

I’ve never made German spaetzle before, but I do know how to make these little lumps of dough for geda tang.  Scoop out 1.5 cups of flour into a wide bowl. I used all-purpose flour, but I’m guessing bread flour works if you want more chew to your geda‘s. Sprinkle in a pinch of salt and stir with a chopstick.  Fill a cup or small bowl with half a cup of room-temperature water.  While stirring the flour with a chopstick, slowly drizzle the water from the cup into the flour, making a path around the flour bowl. Small beads of dough should start forming. If they look too wet, stop the drizzling, and stir the flour with the chopstick vigorously. That should incorporate more of the dry flour into the wet parts and break up the large, wet pieces.

Continue to drizzle the water and stop right before most of the flour has clumped up. Stir some more to break up the large pieces. After that, this spaetzle should immediately go into the soup before it clumps together too much. The uncooked spaetzle should look like this: