In 2018, Food & Wine named this recipe one of our 40 best: Chef and author Eileen Yin-Fei Lo’s Vegetable Hot-and-Sour Soup offers extraordinary depth of flavor from ginger, soy sauce, and sesame oil, and layers of texture from lily buds, mushrooms, and bamboo shoots — you won’t miss the meat. Dried lily buds, also called tiger lily buds or golden needles, are nutritious and slightly sweet. In Chinese dishes, they are often used with the dried fungi known as tree ear, or wood ear, mushrooms. Both add layers of chewy texture to this dish. The tree ear mushrooms can be substituted with dried shiitake mushroom caps; if dried lily buds aren’t available, they can be omitted.