ethnic soups/or even any ethnic recipes

[meemee]

cool weather is here. spam me with cultural recipes for soups please. it doesnt matter if i have to buy some unusual ingredients. i live in california. i can find it. 

i would love to try some vegetarian soups. what i am esp. interested in is vietnamese soups. a bunch of veggies in yummy broth. i do have fish sauce. 

anyways just recently i learnt to make my own zataar  - an arabic spice mix. i tell you it has brought wonderful new taste to our food. 

so mama's help me out of this rut i have gotten into. 

for instance i would love to try some mexican cooking. but i need to know what typical mexican spices are. 

[MissMuffet]

The soups from this website are a hit with my family. We especially enjoy the cauliflower soup, spinach soup, and the lentil soups.

http://www.turkishcookbook.com/

[mumkimum]

This eggplant-peanut stew surprised me a few years ago.  Very tasty & hearty, lots of good warming spices.  We had a glut of eggplant that year so it was a good recipe find.  

Here's a creamy chickpea soup with (really, really delicious) spiced oil to drizzle on it.  The oil is also good on all kinds of other food - you'll probably have some extra having made it once.

Not exactly a culturally inspired recipe - but I also love this beer cheese soup with salsa verde in it.  Made it a lot last winter.

[Bokonon]

I haven't yet made pho (Vietnamese rice noodle soup) at home, because I go out for pho more than I care to admit, but I absolutely love vegetarian pho with tofu and veggies.

Here's a recipe I found:

http://www.food.com/recipe/Vegetarian-Pho-238765

[nyssaneala]

This Asian noodle soup is popular with the whole family:

http://www.nickjr.com/recipes/hohos-chinese-noodle-soup.jhtml

For some unique (to us) soup recipes, I like:

Anything from The Congo Cookbook, but especially this one:

http://www.congocookbook.com/soup_and_stew_recipes/groundnut_stew.html

Yummy Nigerian stew, somewhat hard to find ingredients. If you google Nigerian fish stew, or "Obe Eja", you'll find other recipes. Delicious with fufu (and fufu is super easy to make once you get the hang of it, and uses a very common ingredient, I use Bob's Red Mill semolina flour) 

http://www.allnigerianrecipes.com/soups/banga-soup.html

My hands down favorite stew is Sancocho. It's a personal favorite taught to me by a Dominican friend. This link has the closest recipe I can find online, the key is to use small amounts of lots of ingredients. The cassava, yam, spanish pumpkin (it's green on the outside), and plantains really make this dish shine and none should be left out. I don't use nearly as much meat this recipe calls for, but generally I do throw in a very small amount of stew beef, one sausage, chicken thighs, and a ham bone. Occasionally some goat, but I don't have that on hand very often.

http://www.dominicancooking.com/125-sancocho-de-7-carnes-7-meat-hearty-stew.html