KITCHEN PRACTICE 3 — Adding a Fourth Shared Dish: Soup
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Chapter: Chinese Cookery 10 — Capstone: A Family-Style Chinese Meal

TASK
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Add a simple soup as a fourth shared dish, reasoning through where
it fits into your existing backward timeline.

WHAT TO DO
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1. Choose a simple, quick soup — an egg drop soup or a light broth
   with a few vegetables both work well and need little active time.
2. Reason through where it fits: unlike the braise, it doesn't need
   hours of unattended simmering; unlike the stir-fry, it doesn't
   need to be cooked at the very last second either, since a soup
   holds warm reasonably well on a back burner.
3. Add it into your Kitchen Practice 1 timeline — likely sometime
   after the braise is underway but well before the stir-fry's own
   final cook, using a genuinely quiet window.
4. Cook and serve the soup alongside the other three dishes and rice.

WHAT TO EXPECT
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- The soup should fit comfortably into an existing gap in your
  timeline without requiring you to restructure anything else —
  a genuine sign the backward-planning approach scales to a fourth
  dish without much extra difficulty.
- Served family-style alongside everything else, the soup should sit
  naturally in the middle of the table, ladled into individual bowls
  throughout the meal rather than served as its own separate course.
- If you find the soup competing for stove space or attention with
  another dish, that's a useful, realistic signal about how many
  dishes one cook can genuinely manage at once.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
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This exercise deliberately hands you a new planning problem with no
worked example to copy, testing whether the backward-timeline skill
from Kitchen Practice 1 genuinely transfers to a new addition rather
than only being memorised for this one specific three-dish menu.
A soup is also a genuinely fitting choice for this particular test —
real family-style Chinese meals very often include one, making this
addition a natural, not arbitrary, extension of the capstone's own
menu.