Pho

Pho is a Vietnamese noodle soup and one of my favorite foods. Oddly, though, I never make it. I always go out for pho. Perhaps simply because it's so darn cheap, and in my previous hometown of Seattle - Pho is everywhere. Really, really good pho. And it's always served with a complementary cream puff (though I was recently informed that not all pho places in Seattle do this).

First things first, let's get in the mood for pho with some quality Seattle hip-hop:

Pho is pretty much the perfect food. It's hydrating, filling, cheap, centering, grounding, revitalizing, energizing, cleansing, comforting, invigorating, delicious. I've eaten at several pho spots in my current place of residence (Berkeley, CA), and yet none live up to Seattle pho. Thus, I have embarked on a quest to make my own pho.

Pho is all about the broth, and good broth starts with good stock. Pho is traditionally made with beef stock, but you can certainly do whatever you want. I used lamb stock for this pho, because that's what I had in my freezer. I had a lamb bone leftover from Thanksgiving that I boiled in water with onions, carrots, celery, and parsley stems overnight. Then I strained out the solid things, boiled down the liquid into a dense demi-glace that I froze into cubes in an ice cube tray. Anytime I need some stock, I just take out a few frozen cubes and add water.

Stock is the foundation of a broth, and a key ingredient in Pho broth is charred onions. This give the broth its distinctive dark brown color and earthy flavor.

Quarter two onions and char them under the broiler.

When the first side is blackened, turn them over.

The onions are done when they are good and black on both sides.

Raw meat is often added to pho just before serving. If you want your meat fully cooked, then I recommend searing the meat in a large pot, remove the meat and set it aside for later, and then use the pot to build your broth. I seared lamb sausage in a deep pot until it was good and brown. 

Then I removed the sausages, set them aside, and added lamb stock, charred onions, a cinnamon stick, a few star-anise pods, and one whole clove. Let these boil for about 30 minutes before straining.

Use a spatula to thoroughly scrape out the pot into the strainer, then put the pot back on the stove to continue making the soup. You could just pour the strained broth back into the pan, but I decided to sauté some chopped green garlic stems first. Onions, leeks, shallots, garlic cloves would all be appropriate here.

I also sliced the lamb sausage and threw that in to brown with the green garlic. Pho is all about flavor, so do everything you can to add and accentuate the flavor of the ingredients (i.e. browning, sauteeing, charring, etc.)

When the garlic and sausage was good and brown, I added the broth back in and brought it to a boil to cook the noodles.

As the noodles cook, prepare the raw garnishes. Pho is generally garnished with bean sprouts, thai basil, jalapeño, and lime. Sometimes mint, cilantro, green onion, red onion, or lemon make an appearance. 

There's at least two ways to slice green onions, if you slice on the diagonal it makes them about 10x more fancy.

Lemon is honestly kind of blasphemous in pho, but we have a lemon tree and there's a lime shortage currently in the US. So lemon it is.

In summary, here's how I made pho:

1. Make stock (beef (or lamb, chicken, etc.) bones boiled in water with onions, carrots, and celery for 4-10hours)
2. Strain stock
3. Make broth by boiling the stock with charred onions, cinnamon, star anise, and clove for about 30 minutes
4. Strain broth
5. Sauté onions or garlic, brown meat (optional)
6. Boil broth
7. Cook noodles in broth
8. Serve immediately with bean sprouts, basil, lime, jalapeño, hoisin, and Sriracha (or whatever else you want).

To be a true pho purist, it's not just about the flavor, but the clarity of the broth as well. Vietnamese cuisine was influenced by French occupation and one could think of pho as a Vietnamese consommé. Consommé is a French soup that is served as a simple broth with minimal to no garnish. It's crystal clear and full of robust flavor. To achieve the clarity of the broth, it's boiled with ground meat bound in a "raft" by egg and leeks. The meat raft acts as a filter, collecting impurities, while also imparting extra meaty flavor to the broth. The raft is discarded when the both is done, which always seems a bit wasteful to me, but it does produce a brilliantly clear and richly delicious broth. Stay tuned for a new-and-improved pho recipe with consommé-method included!

Reference: The Food Lab - How to make traditional Vietnamese Pho

An Edible Marriage

Well, since my last post I graduated college, got married, went on honeymoon, packed up my entire life, and moved to California where the new hubby and I have been in limbo for a few weeks between a storage unit and my dad's house. Needless to say, things have been a bit crazy...

Anyway, first things first - I must give props to the deliciousness that graced our wedding:

Edible Flower Bouquets - I wanted my bridesmaids and I to have completely edible bouquets, so I grew lots of edible flowers in my own yard, but ended up using flowers grown by the folks at Colinwood Farm.

Also, my friend Sarah figured out how to make roses out of bacon!! She put a dab of hot glue on a skewer, topped the glue with lettuce, and topped the lettuce with bacon baked in the shape of a rose bud. The glue gave the structure integrity while the lettuce acted as a barrier between bacon an glue. Brilliant!  While I was freaking out before the wedding, my bridesmaids assembled our bouquets with bacon roses, pea vines, bachelor buttons, squash blossoms, calendula, nasturtiums, and my favorite - columbine! Then immediately after the ceremony we chowed down.

Madres Catering - These ladies were an absolute pleasure to work with. They were totally chill and down for anything. They used local and/or organic produce and let us provide the meat and bread from our favorite folks at the farmers market (Skagit River Valley Ranch, Stokesberry Farms, and Tall Grass Bakery).  After our ceremony, we were greeted at our reception venue by Madres' lovely staff and a selection of appetizers. We chose to have a "heavy appetizer" style reception so our guests could be free to eat and drink as they please without having to conform to a set dinner plan. Here is our menu with pictures where I have them:

Salad Cups! 

Soup Shots 

Shots of zesty tomato soup that I found to be an important injection of calories between hugs and conversation!

Crostinis with:

Shredded chicken tinga

Roasted cumin mushrooms with parmesan

Dilled salmon

Polenta Triangles with Roast Tomato Chutney (so good!)

Bacon Wrapped Cesar Potatoes

Roast potatoes with Cesar dressing, wrapped in bacon (delicious!)

Sausage Bites with a Trio of Dips

Skagit Valley sweet and hot Italian sausages wrapped in pastry dough

Slider Bar:

Cuban pulled pork

Beef patties

Vegan roast veggies

Condiments

Tall Grass Bakery brioche or mutli-grain slider buns

NON-ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES:

Heather's Groovy Drink Mix

(Heather is one of the owners of Madres, she is a wizard with a blender and whatever happens to be in season!)

Dry Sodas

ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES:

Homebrew!

Made by me, Alex, and our friends!

(and supplemented with Elysian beer and Charles Shaw wine)

The only one not on the list is the beer we toasted with - a brew that Alex and I concocted together:

Lavender Ginger IPA

(Also Sarah designed this gorgeous drink menu!)

Trophy Cupcakes - Dessert was a couple hundred mini cupcakes of three different flavors: Snickerdoodle, Triple Chocolate, and Hummingbird (a more savory dessert cake made with banana, pineapple, and coconut).

In addition to Trophy cupcakes, Alex's sister made gluten-free vegan cupcakes ( you can see a few at the edges of the photo above, at the base of the tier).

T'was a delicious wedding indeed!

Love Soup

Several months ago I heard a friend of mine had caught a nasty cold, so set out on a mission of creating the most healing soup I possibly could. This is something I do for my friends every once in a while, and making soup for people always gives me the satisfying feeling that I'm some sort of good witch brewing up healing potions.

I started by making pasta.  This is where that magic ingredient of "love" comes in. I kneaded a lot of love into that dough!  Also, I find freshly made pasta is just generally a special treat.

Fresh made pasta is a simple ratio:

1lb. All Purpose Flour

4 Eggs

1oz. Water

1oz.Vegetable Oil

These ingredients are combined all at once and kneaded for at least a couple minutes either by hand or in a mixer. I usually eye-ball the amount of water and oil, I probably actually use more than 1oz. of water because it's much easier to add flour to a moist dough, then it is to add water to a dry dough later on. Anyway, making pasta honestly just takes practice to know what good pasta dough should feel like.  It should be neither sticky nor dry and it should have a tough elastic quality to it. After the initial knead, the dough must rest for at least an hour, preferably two, or overnight in the fridge. Then you can start rolling it out.  You can simply use a rolling pin (or a wine bottle!) and a knife to make noodles, but I have a manual pasta machine, so that's how I make my noodles.

To make the soup, I sauteed onions, leeks, carrots, fresh-frozen ginger, and garlic (I used a lot of ginger and garlic - for good health!). Then I added duck stock made from Stokesberry Farms magical ducks and let it simmer with a cinnamon stick and some dried chanterelle mushrooms. Meanwhile I roasted a chicken. When the soup was done, I added the fresh pasta since it only needs a minute to cook and will continue to absorb moisture as long as it's in the soup.  I finished the soup with pieces of roasted chicken, pesto, salt, and pepper.

Yay healing soup of love!

This Aint White Castle

Tall Grass Bakery was selling mini hamburger buns at the farmers market this week, so I took the opportunity to make sliders! I mixed up some Skagit River Valley Ranch ground beef with their signature spice mix and some left over Mt. Townsend Seastack cheese. I mixed this together with my hands of course. I'm all about cooking with my hands, here is how I check to see if the burgers are done:

There's a trick I learned somewhere a long time ago to train your finger to be like a meat thermometer. If you touch your pointer finger to your thumb with one hand and use the other hand to poke the flesh just below your thumb, it's about the exact same texture as a medium rare piece of meat. Each finger touching your thumb then corresponds to a done-ness of meat, like so:

Anyway, back to the sliders... Here's the line up with Alex making some french fries:

There's Golden Glen Creamery cheddar cheese, demi-glace mayonaisse, salad greens, caramelized onions, garlic and peppers, mustard, and way in the background I was toasting the buns with the bagel setting! (Finally owning a toaster from this century is really exciting).

I need to digress from the sliders for another minute to talk about demi-glace. This is something I've thought of doing for a while and I have no idea why I'm just now getting around to it. Demi-glace is just very concentrated, reduced stock. I made about four gallons of stock and then boiled it down to less than a gallon of thick rich deliciousness. I then froze this in an ice cube tray so it takes up less space in the freezer and then I can just mix an ice-cube with some water to make stock for cooking in the future! Also, demi-glace by itself is pretty amazing...

Anyway, Sliders!!:

I swear burgers taste better when they're tiny...

Something Pho-nny

I really wanted to make pho, but I didn't quite have all the proper ingredients, so perhaps this is just a soup inspire by pho. I started out boiling chicken stock to condense the flavor. While that was boiling I seared some Skagit River Valley Ranch pork stir fry meat, deglazed the pan with a cup of the stock and added it back to pot of boiling stock. Then I cut up a delightful rainbow of veggies!

Carrots, peppers, red onion, leeks, ginger, garlic, and shiitake mushrooms

I lightly sauteed all the veggies, sliced the pork into bite-size pieces and then mixed it all in the bottom of a soup bowl:

Last but not least, I seasoned the stock with salt, pepper, and an Iranian Herb Mix and then ladled it over the pork and veggies in my bowl to make a delicious soup!

Soup in Stormy Weather

It's stormy out and I got inspired to make something I don't make very often: soup! Nothing fancy, just sweet Italian sausage, white beans, onions, carrots, celery, garlic, ginger, chicken stock, and some chopped up carrot tops. Simple, quick, and delicious....I should make soup more often!