I made about a quart and a half of cream of mushroom soup, using some dried mushrooms I bought at an Asian market a couple of months ago. (I buy stuff because it looks interesting, then don't know what to do with it) The mushroom-looking ones I think were shitakes. The others were "black fungus", a.k.a. "tree ears". I used about equal parts of each. I soaked them in hot water for an hour, then chopped them up and sautéed them in butter with the shallots. I used the soaking water for broth.
Turns out, the tree ears never really get soft (they do soften to a point but then stay kind of rubbery no matter how long you cook them) and have no flavor, they absorb whatever flavors are in the broth and add texture.
![Face with tears of joy :joy: 😂](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f602.png)
The soup was still good from the shitakes, shallots, and a small beef bouillon cube. And it has a lot of fiber.
I'll make this again soon using all shitakes (I bought a *big* package of them) and try to find some other use for the ears.