Poor Lady's Pho

I have recently become a member of a fabulous bulk retailer (who shall remain nameless) and took all three of my kids shopping there a couple of weeks ago.  We actually had a pretty good time, tooling around the store, trying samples and finding all of those "extras" that weren't on my original list.  One of the samples we stopped for was pre-made, frozen meatballs which were sold in either Pineapple-Teriyaki or Mango-Jalapeno flavor.  We opted for the pineapple version, since my kids aren't that big on spice, and stuck them in the freezer when we got home.  I wasn't really sure what I was going to do with them until inspiration (in the form of cleaning out the fridge) struck. 

I had about 3/4 of a box of chicken stock in the fridge, along with a bunch of cilantro, a jalapeno and a few onions (from our garden!) that needed to be used up.  I asked my husband to grab a box of Thai rice noodles (wide, flat noodles, not unlike linguine) from the store and, when he got home, I set the frozen meatballs to simmer in the chicken stock (plus a cup or two of water).  After they came up to temp, I added soy sauce, hoisin sauce and the remnants of a bottle of vegan Worcestershire sauce to the stock, stirred it around and let it continue to bubble away.  I boiled the noodles as per the package directions and, when they were tender, I rinsed them in cold water and drained them thoroughly.  I washed the cilantro, sliced the jalapeno and onion and grabbed some Thai basil from our garden.  I added a couple of wedges of lemon (I didn't have any limes) and we were good to go.  Everyone got a serving of noodles and meatballs (some with more broth than others) and could top it as they saw fit.  The kids mostly went plain Jane (one of them adding a teeny squeeze of lemon), but my husband and I loaded up on herbs, peppers and onions.  It was super tasty and everyone ate (almost) all of their dinner.....but.  But, the next day, both my husband and I were feeling distinctly queasy.  Could it have been the meatballs?  Possibly.  The kids felt fine and, in fact, finished off the meatballs the next day for lunch.  As for me, I love any and all kinds of pho (even my fake, multi-ethnic version), but I could not stomach the thought of eating any more of that meal.  I don't think I will be buying those meatballs again.....

How do I Love Thee, Soup?

Let me count the ways...nope.  Not gonna do that.  I thought I might throw some free verse in there, but I'm too tired and this has to be done in a matter of minutes (rather than the hours it could potentially take me to write a poem about my soup, which would probably be a complete waste of time, right?).  I think I have discovered what my true addiction is: soup.  For a while now, a particular kind of soup: Annie Chun's Thai Tom Yum soup, which I have found is like crack in a recyclable, compostable bowl.  You know...having never tried crack or anything.  My point is this though - it.  is.  good.  It is pretty spicy (not of the burn your face off variety) and has the savory-salty-sweet balance that is so characteristic of *real* Thai dishes.  It has noodles (who doesn't love noodle soup?!), chunks of deep fried tofu (better than it sounds, really), slices of shitake mushrooms and Thai chiles, and dices of bok choy, all floating around in a rust colored, salty, spicy broth.  Of course, this is all freeze dried when you put it in the bowl, but, man!  Once you rehydrate it with some hot water, cook it off in the microwave and let it sit for a couple of minutes....yum, indeed. 

The final product: Thai Tom Yum soup...in just 2 minutes!

Thai Chicken and Rice Soup!

That's right!  Thai Chicken and Rice Soup!  Can you tell I am really excited about this post?!  Can you tell I was really excited about this meal?!  The correct answers are yes and yes and I will try to curb my exclamatory sentences from here on out.  Also - FYI and my bad, because I don't have a photo for this one, but please, let my words paint a gorgeous rendition of a richly flavored, deeply delicious and fantastically fragrant soup that I quite literally threw together the other night for dinner.

Let me give y'all some background here: first of all, this past week was Spring Break, so my older kids were out of school and my husband took the second half of the week off.  Second of all, although I haven't done it in a while, I do occasionally participate in a food co-op called Bountiful Baskets; since I did not have any cakes booked for the week and I knew I would have extra hands to help with my youngest, I decided to buy a basket (you get 1/2 fruits and 1/2 veggies, you have the option to buy other "packs" of veggies and can also buy bread) and get a "Thai-veggie pack".  You know, just because I had all of that extra time this week to prep a bunch of fresh veg.  Anyway, when you do this, you pick the baskets, etc. up on Saturday morning (at the crack of dawn no less) and, ideally, do any additional grocery shopping that is required for the week after you see what you get (since it is a co-op, they buy what they can in bulk and so you get different stuff every time).  I however, due to an abundance of over scheduling last Saturday, grocery shopped the day before and purchased several generic cuts of meat (chicken tenders, flat iron steak, chicken sausage) to use with whatever veggies I happened to get.  I had it in mind to use part of the Thai-veggie pack to make a Chinese chicken salad, but here's the thing:  I was SUPER lazy this week - mostly of the take-meat-out-of-the-freezer-to-thaw-in-the-refrigerator-so-I-can-cook-it-the-next-day variety of laziness.  I pulled a lot of sink/water bath defrosting, which requires thin cuts of meat - i.e. full chicken breasts take forever - to make meals this week.  Anyway, long story short: the Chinese chicken salad (with shredded chicken breasts) didn't happen, but what did was even better!

I decided, kind of mid-day on Wednesday, that I wanted to make a Thai-inspired soup (http://makingeverydaygourmet.blogspot.com/p/favorite-recipes.html) for dinner that night.  That Thai-veggie pack had everything I needed to do it - onions, carrots, celery, lemongrass, chiles, ginger, limes, even a coconut!  I had the chicken tenders and a bunch of leftover cooked rice from an earlier meal of fried rice (a catastrophe in and of itself, but that is another story).  I lacked a couple of rather important items, however: olive oil (which I typically use to saute) and chicken stock (always a component of my soups).  My husband arrived home early that day and having made his weekly pilgrimage to his favorite liquor and fine foods store (yes, he DOES have a favorite), where he had procured not only a variety of adult beverages, but had also pillaged the half price food aisle, finding something called "rice oil".  I had never heard of this, but apparently it can be used for cooking and in a wide variety of homeopathic medicinal applications.  Best of all, it was, as far as the Internet could tell me, a hypoallergenic oil with a high smoke point.  Score!  As for the chicken stock, I seriously considered making a special trip to the grocery store, but then I remembered: duh!  You are a trained chef, you moron!  Make the flavor happen without the chicken stock!  (My inner voice is pretty bitchy sometimes.)  So, I did!  (And crap, here come the exclamation points again.)

So, I started with your basic mirepoix: onions, carrots and celery, which I seasoned with kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper and sauteed in my newly acquired and vetted rice oil.  I got some really nice caramelization on that trio before I added 5 or 6 minced garlic cloves.  I let those cook until they were fragrant (about 30 seconds) and then I added something like 3 quarts of plain old tap water.  Then, this is where things got interesting: I cleaned a stalk of lemongrass (peel the outside couple of layers off and wash), whacked it with the back of my chef's knife to bruise it (releasing the essential oils), cut it into four 2-3 inch lengths and chucked those into my pot.  I took a hunk of ginger root, washed it and cut into 5 large chunks, tossing those in, peel and all.  I added two dried chiles (likely de Arbol chiles, though the BB people probably wanted me to think they were Thai Bird Chiles instead.  Tricky, very tricky.), two dried bay leaves and a large bunch of basil (stems and all).  I let that mixture bubble while I prepped the (partially) defrosted chicken tenders.  Now before I tossed raw chicken into my lovely little Thai court bouillon, I tasted it for seasoning and added the following: a fair amount of kosher salt (I rarely measure salt, since I season as I cook), 6 tablespoons of low sodium soy sauce, and 3 (?) tablespoons of vegan Worcestershire sauce (vegan because the baby hasn't done his fish challenge yet and regular Worcestershire sauce is made with anchovies;  this is of course in place of the more self explanatory fish sauce that is typical in Thai cooking.  WS will totally work in pinch, though the flavor is a little different.).  I tasted it again for seasoning, pronounced it lovely and pitched the raw chicken in to simmer.  After the soup came back to a boil, I added my leftover rice (a weirdly gelatinous combo of brown and arborio rice); whereas that type rice did not make for a good, dry fried rice, it worked amazingly well for the soup, adding just the right amount of starch to the broth, giving it a touch of unctuousness and viscosity.  I fished out the bay leaves, chiles, lemongrass stalks, ginger and whole leaf basil, resigning them all to the depths of our compost pail.  To finish this great experiment, I added a large bunch of minced cilantro, several tablespoons of finely sliced basil, a bunch of sliced green onions and the juice of two limes.  I soaked a few of the dried chiles in hot water so that I could slice them for my husband and I to sprinkle on top of our soup rather than adding the additional spice to the main pot.  (My kids don't care for heat in their food.) 

I was seriously excited about this soup for a couple of reasons: I LOVE Thai food being the most pertinent.  The second, still very important reason: I LOVE using lots of leftovers and things in my fridge to make a lovely and tasty new dish.  This soup combined both of those passions, but I was still a little wary from my French Onion experience - a dish whose scent and flavor profile did not match up at all.  This soup....well, this soup met and exceeded all of my expectations!  It was savory, it was spicy, it was a little tart, it was distinctly Thai and damn....it was GGGGOOOOOOOOOOODDDDD.  As I said on Facebook afterwards, I don't always make Thai food *because it is usually a labor intensive meal that I don't often have time for*, but when I do, it is SO worth it!  Bonus: my oldest kids ate theirs without complaint (without seconds, I should also add, but still) and the baby scarfed down two full bowls!  I will take that as a win and will remember that Thai is a popular flavor profile in our house. 

French Onion Soup

I am a soup girl.  What can I say?  If there is one thing, almost above all else, that I would choose to eat as comfort food, it would be soup.  I like pretty much everything - tomato, mushroom-barley, broccoli-cheddar, chicken tortilla, chicken noodle, split pea, just to name a very few that I have made or enjoyed recently.  I am also recently VERY enamored of my crock pot, particularly on nights when we have a billion things to do and dinner preparation would just get in the way.  So, when I watched a recent episode of Cook's Country on PBS and the chef prepared french onion soup in the slow cooker, I decided, then and there that I MUST try the recipe (which will follow at the end of the post).

Because I knew that I would not have time to do all of the prep work last Friday morning (I needed to be at the gym for a class at 8 am.....yes, NEEDED to be there), I decided to do all of my choppin' and measurin' the night before.  I purposefully left my contacts in all day (not an easy feat for me, by the way because I have really dry eyes) which was necessary as I needed to chop 6 large onions for the recipe and my contacts protect my eyes from the sulfuric compounds way better than my glasses.  I chopped onions until my eyes streamed (despite the stupid contacts), minced thyme and measured brown sugar, flour, apple butter, soy sauce and salt and pepper, placing everything in tidy little Tupperware bowls in my fridge, just waiting patiently until the next morning when I could dump everything into my crock pot.

Friday morning was hectic, as usual, but I managed to get all of the ingredients into the crock pot to bubble and simmer away all day long.  Seriously: this recipe says that the soup should simmer for a MINIMUM of 10 to 12 hours on high.  Anyway, I figured that starting everything off at 6:30 in the morning should give me more than enough time for a 6 pm dinner time.  I did as the recipe told me: I melted four tablespoons of butter in the crock pot, which took A LOT longer than it did on TV.  While that was (not) melting, I placed two pounds of beef bones in the microwave to cook on high for about 10 minutes.  Let's pause here, shall we?  On the show, the chef had these lovely, innocuous looking (presumably) leg bones with little to no meat attached and which, when microwaved, turned a lovely, burnished brown color.  I, on the other hand, was only able to find "beef neck bones" at my local grocery store, so mine were meaty, kind of grisly and rather gnarly looking.  If you have ever taken an anatomy class (I was pre-med in college), there is nothing left to the imagination about "beef neck bones".  I am not a squeamish person, but I had to direct my mind to NOT call these bones "vertebrae".  My hope for you, should you choose to accept the challenge of this recipe, is that you can find some boring old leg bone cuts.  Beef neck bones will work in a pinch, but I would say that they are not for the faint of heart.  Moving along.....

So, the butter sort of melts and I add the onions, 1 tablespoon of brown sugar, a teaspoon of minced thyme, a teaspoon of black pepper and 2 teaspoons of salt.  I tossed all of that together and then added my liquid mixture: five tablespoons of flour, 3/4 cup of beef broth (substituted for dry sherry, 'cause who has THAT in their pantry?), 1/4 cup soy sauce and 3/4 cup of apple butter.  I mixed all of that together and nestled my microwaved beef neck bones into and around the onions (while thinking, "these are not vertebrae.  These are not vertebrae".  Lies.  *shudder*)  I placed the top on, turned it to high and left to begin my day.

I came home periodically during the day (partly because I am paranoid and I am always a little afraid to leave the crock pot sitting and stewing all day long) and my house smelled ah-mazing! Seriously, it was pretty pungent, but the onions gradually lost their sting and because caramelized and so very gorgeous.  Even the neck bones looked appealing, which is saying something.  I was so excited - when we got home, after a very long afternoon of running around to set up for my oldest child's regional science fair, I made Swiss cheese topped ciabatta croutons and finished off the soup (after removing the neck bones and discarding them - good riddance!) with 1 cup of chicken stock and 1 cup of beef broth, heated until just simmering.  I checked the seasoning for the soup, adjusted with a little salt and pepper and dinner was served!

The soup smelled so good and it tasted......boring.  I don't know what to say about it other than that.  The flavor was dull, the onions, which maintained their texture due to the way the recipe instructs you to chop them, were alternating versions of crunchy and slimy.  (I have battled my hatred of onions for a very long time.  I thought I had won, but this soup showed me, yet again, that I do not like eating heaping spoonfuls of nothing but onions.  One would think that I would not have attempted french onion soup, knowing this about myself, but other versions that I have had have been infinitely more palatable.)  The broth, which I expected to be super meaty and flavorful was instead lackluster and really sweet.  (That is another thing that I can't stand - sweet soups.  Soup is savory!  It should be hot!  Oh, wait....that is another rant.)  This was hot, but it really didn't do anything for me.  My two oldest choked their portions down, my husband had seconds, but the baby swept his entire bowl onto the floor, splashing me in the process.  Fail.

Ah, well....this recipe isn't for me, but maybe it is for you.  Good luck.  I am going to go back to the drawing board, especially with the enormous amount of leftovers that I have.  I can't bear to throw food away, so I went ahead and pureed the stuff (catching an errant neck bone in the process;  I am lucky I didn't wreck my immersion blender).  I plan to serve it later this week with a healthy dose of blue cheese blended in.  I hope that those steps will improve the flavor and texture issues for me.

French Onion Soup in a Slow Cooker (adapted from Cook's Country)

6 large onions, sliced pole to pole (end to end, though I would recommend slicing them or dicing them much smaller than into 8 sections)
4 tablespoons of butter, melted
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1 teaspoon of fresh thyme, minced (could use about 1/3 of a tsp of dried thyme instead)
2 teaspoons of salt
1 teaspoon of black pepper
2 pounds beef bones, microwaved on a paper towel covered plate on high for about 8-10 minutes, until well browned
5 tablespoons flour
3/4 cup dry sherry (I subbed out with beef broth)
3/4 cup apple butter
1/4 cup soy sauce
1 cup chicken stock
1 cup beef broth

Melt butter in slow cooker.  Add onions, sugar, thyme, salt and pepper and stir to combine.  Combine flour, sherry, apple butter, and soy sauce and pour mixture over onions.  Toss to coat.  Nestle beef bones under onions, around the edge of the slow cooker.  Cover and cook, on high, for 10 to 12 hours.  When onions are soft and caramelized at the end of cooking time, heat chicken stock and beef broth before adding to soup.  Remove beef bones and serve with Swiss cheese covered toasts. 

Split Pea Success!

This is a bit of an experiment today as I am attempting to write using our iPad, rather than our home computer, which has gotten to be a chore to even boot up.  So far, I am a little frustrated as I can't seem to be able to type directly on my publishing tool and have had to resort to composing in my email.  Blerg.  Technology, advancements, blah, blah, blah, right?

Anyway, I had a culinary breakthrough last night and I thought I would share.  Let me first say that, in my cooking, there are hallowed recipes, prepared by my mother all throughout my life, that I dare not attempt to make for my family.  My very favorite thing to eat in the world is my mother's chicken spaghetti, which, from an ingredient standpoint, is not a particularly complicated thing to make.  When I moved out of the house, she even wrote her recipe down for me and I have tried many, maaaannny times over the years to recreate it faithfully, only to have made an edible but decidedly disappointing bowl of pasta.  There are others: fried chicken, peppersteak, chocolate chip cookies and.....split pea soup.  

Almost every winter, for as long as I can remember, my mother has made a huge batch of split pea soup in her crockpot.  My sister and I (not my brother, oddly) lived for split pea soup days, especially since they came around so infrequently.  There was something about the creamy, salty soup that tasted so comforting, even in spite of its rather nasty olive green color and the way the smell would permeate the house for days afterward.  Even when we grew up and moved out of her house, my mother would cook the split pea soup and my sister and I would tote home little containers of mushy green love.  Despite how much I love my mom's split soup, I have only once tried to make it myself, using a crockpot recipe (not hers, I might add) that yielded an undercooked and vastly under-flavored "soup".  So, based on that experience and my chicken spaghetti disasters, I abandoned the effort.....until last night.

I don't know why I suddenly decided that it would be a good idea to make split pea soup, but, as I was writing a grocery list late last week, I wrote it down, thinking that, surely I could make a better go of it this time.  I had a bunch of leftover ham in my freezer (again, thank you, Mom) and a few carrots in the fridge that were begging to be used in a soup of some kind.  The weather had finally cooled off (which means that it is a chilly 68 degrees in Texas right now....brrrr!), so soup sounded pretty freaking awesome.  I happened to be discussing menu ideas with a friend one afternoon, as we walked the kids home from school, she mentioning that her kids detested lentil soup, which my kids love.  I said as much, adding that my plan was to make split pea soup this week and I was not sure how it would go over.  She said something to the effect that they were pretty much the same thing.  Lentil soup and split pea soup are pretty much the same thing!  This was a total revelation to me!  They are, really - slightly different ingredients, but the preparation is about the same: so, I made my split pea soup last night almost exactly as I would have made my lentil soup.  I sautéed some onions and carrots in rendered bacon fat, added the split peas, chicken stock and a little bit of water, seasoned with salt, pepper, thyme and bay leaves and simmered with copious amounts of diced, leftover ham until the peas had disintegrated.  When I was ready to serve, I added just a couple of tablespoons of red wine vinegar to brighten it up, et viola!  An amazingly delicious and richly flavored split pea and ham soup that everyone in my family LOVED!  It was so wonderful that my oldest took it for her lunch today!  Miracle of miracles!  Split pea success!

My First Food Musings

First of all: check me out! Blogging twice in one week! My wonderful husband took my children to school for me this morning, so I am taking the time to write a little food entry (as promised) about something kind of sublime I made for dinner last night: roasted vegetable noodle soup. Let's start with me stating a little known fact about myself. I generally do not like vegetable soups for one reason: celery. Love the flavor it imparts, but hate hate HATE the texture. I hate seeing chunks of it floating in soups, stews, what have you and I certainly hate the misfortune of having a piece end up on my spoon or, God forbid, in my mouth accidentally. I don't gag on many things any more (yes, Mom, I know that surprises you, considering that I was the child that spent many an hour picking onions out of every dish you ever made), but celery remains my food nemesis. I should also note that I can tolerate raw celery and often enjoy it with a variety of dips, but even then, my preference is for other, less offensive crudite.

Back to the soup. I made a roasted vegetable noodle soup using fresh organic vegetables that I received from my local CSA (or as my children like to refer to the man himself, "Farmer Tim"), among other components. I actually got my children involved (which, for anyone that knows me, was a big step since I am so OCD about my cooking) and had them peel orange-yellow carrots and a couple of creamy, lemon yellow parnips (they could have been rutabegas, but I am not sure). They stripped the leaves off the stems of deep blue green kale and dark and waxy collard greens. They watched me chop the root vegetables, including those they had peeled, as well as some radishes, extra baby carrots and yes, celery. We tossed all of the vegetables together with olive oil, salt and pepper and spread them on a baking sheet to roast in the oven. Of course, they were pretty impressed with themselves and their cooking abilities before running off to play with their toys.

Oh, the aromas that came from all of those vegetables roasting! I would not normally roast that combination, but what with some leftover celery and the odd grab bag from the CSA, it is what I had. (Thanks to Savuer's latest issue for giving me the idea to roast the radishes. Good gracious, those are AMAZING! Tender and sweet with the barest of peppery bites.) While the vegetables were in the oven, I chopped and sauteed a few baby leeks and green onions, again from the CSA, then added some canned, diced, no salt tomatoes. I pulled the roasted vegetables from the oven just as the edges began to caramelize and chopped most of them (especially the celery which got an extra fine mince) further once they cooled enough to handle. I added them to the leek-tomato mixture, poured in a quart of low sodium chicken broth and sprinkled it with kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper. After stripping some fresh thyme from my own herb garden into the pot, the soup was ready to simmer for a bit. At this point, it smelled sweet and savory, with just a hint of the spicy herbaceousness of the thyme that floated on the top of the liquid. After a bit, I added the chopped greens, a can of drained garbanzo beans and some rotini pasta. Fifteen minutes later, we had an amazing soup on the table for dinner!

The soup was a bounty of incredible flavors with enough textural differences to make it really interesting. The roasted vegetables were savory and sweet, whose vastly different flavors had melded and mellowed during their cooking time in the oven. They were amazingly tender, still retaining their structure in the bowl, but literally dissolving in the mouth. The beans were creamy and slightly nutty with a lightly chewy texture which stood out due to their late addition to the pot. The greens, once so deeply colored, took on a olive tone, but were tender and richly flavored by the soup itself. The pasta cooked beautifully in the soup as well and, with its own al dente texture, provided another level of textural contrast, especially with the twists and turns which acted as yet another vehicle for flavor. The tomatoes at the base of the soup, combined with the chicken stock, gave the overall dish depth while adding an acidic component that offset the other, more richly flavored vegetables. Truly, this dish was a feast for all the senses - beautiful and delicious, with an amazing mouthfeel.

Please don't think that I am only lauding my cooking abilities. I did actually find a recipe that gave me the idea for the soup and, like every good cook says, I started with wonderfully fresh ingredients. I also had a couple of really cute little helpers who so enjoy cooking with me for any meal. I did not actually expect those same little helpers to eat the meal that they helped to prepare, so I was stunned when they both ate every bite. It wasn't even dessert night at our house, so bribes to finish dinner were not offered, but my children actually ate with only the barest amount of cajoling. Ultimately, those vegetables were delectable, each and every one of them. Including the celery. Which I ate. It was minced and it was surrounded by much more appealing vegetables, but it was there because, despite my attempts to disguise it, I saw it. And, like I said: I ate it. And loved it.