Vietnam, revisited: Pho ba

Having barely made a dent in my to do list of countries - I've done 15 so far - there really isn't any time to go back for repeat visits.

But I guess sometimes in life instead of moving forward we do go back to places we've already been. Maybe there's something we missed the first time around. Maybe there's something comforting in knowing what to expect. Maybe we just like it.

In this case, I decided to have another go around with Vietnam after trying the roasted chicken soup at this place in Sarasota, Miss Saigon.

I was skeptical at first when my friends raved about the dish. I've never been a big fan of chicken soup. Or chicken for that matter. It can be so cliche. Would all of those Asian spices really kick it up to my palate?

Despite my wariness, I decided to try it on this cold, crappy day right before Thanksgiving.

It was amazing.

It comes as a subtle broth with rice noodles in a big bowl, a crisp, roasted chicken on the side along with jalapenos, bean sprouts, etc. The lightness of the broth really lets the anise stand out, and I love that flavor.

It's so simple I figured I should be able to replicate it at home. So I did some Internet research to come up with key ingredients and set out to create my own version.

My first stab at it was pretty good. Not quite like the restaurant, but still tasty.

I'll fully acknowledge I cheated and used store bought broth, rather than making my own. (Vietnamese cooks would probably cringe to hear this since the broth is the focus of many of their dishes). I used the Kitchen Basics all natural kind. This worked out OK for the most part, but the flavors of the broth were a little overpowering and kind of took over the dish more than I would have liked. Next time, I'll try it with the low sodium version, which has a milder flavor.

I also just used a rotisserie chicken from the supermarket. Come on. Aren't return trips supposed to be leisurely and easy?

Here's what I came up with so far. Thoughts?

What you need:

2 cartons Kitchen Basics stock

2 yellow onions, sliced

2 cinnamon sticks

5 pieces star anise

3 inches peeled ginger

1 tbsp. coriander

1 rotisserie chicken

1 package rice noodles

For serving:

Basil leaves

Scallions

Bean sprouts

Sliced, fresh jalapenos

Soy sauce

Sriacha sauce (the really spicy Asian kind)

What I did:

I started by putting the two cartons of chicken broth in a pot and adding a few cups of water and the coriander. I put the cinnamon sticks, star anise and ginger in a coffee filter, tied it with kitchen string and added to the pot to bring to a boil. I let it simmer for about an hour before adding the sliced onions and simmering for another 10 minutes until they were tender.

While all of this was going on, I cut the chicken into soup size pieces and prepared the rice noodles as instructed on the package. When the broth was done, I removed the coffee filter with spices.

Pour the broth over some noodles and add desired mix ins to taste.

I know, kind of anticlimactic after all of that. But easy, right?

Poland: Mushroom Soup

I couldn't let my holiday vacation start without making one last legitimate global blog effort.

A few weeks ago, when I meant to get back on track, I tried my luck with the wine bag of fun and drew Poland. Immediately, my mind flooded with memories of the best thing I ate when I was in the country - mushroom soup.

(And seriously ... I did not cheat this time. I really pulled out Poland!)

Anyway ... I visited Poland when I was in college on a tour for college newspaper editors. The trip involved spending two weeks riding around on a tour bus through three different countries with people I didn't know, but shared some sort of odd passion with. That's the same trip that took me to Israel. Anyone who ever worked at one knows it takes an interesting person to run a college newspaper. We had a whole bus full of them.

Poland was the first country we hit, the first phase of the trip when everyone was still feeling each other out out to determine who would be the most fun and who would, well, be a little creepy.

We visited Auschwitz and Warsaw and Krakow. I remember seeing the old ghettos, walking through a beautiful rose garden dedicated to Chopin and touring the castle where all of the Polish kings are buried. Then there was some story about a fire breathing dragon that went after sheep and young virgins until being defeated by a noble young suitor. I still find that story amusing for some reason. Maybe because there's a large, metal statue that spits fire at the castle in the dragon's honor. I didn't see a memorial to the dashing young suitor.

But anyway...

I'm sure we ate all of the standard Polish fare - kielbasa, pierogis - the few days we were there. But the only thing I remember eating was the mushroom soup. Maybe that was because I found it warm and comforting when everything else around me was kind of odd and unfamiliar.

It was a day or two into the trip, but we were running around doing and seeing so much it felt like we had been at it forever. I remember it was cool and dark outside when the bus pulled up at this dimly lit tavern. I was tired and drained, overwhelmed and still a little jet lagged when I took my seat at the long wooden table with the people I barely knew for my pri fixe dinner.

The soup was probably a starter to some other standard Polish meal, but it's the thing I remember most about being in Poland. That and the dragon.

It came in a bread bowl that absorbed the yummy juices from the mushrooms. It was somewhat creamy but with big chunks of delicious wild mushrooms, apparently a big staple in the Polish diet.

I don't know where we ate it, or what exactly was in it, but it stands out in my memory as one of the best things I've ate in my life. Seriously. Maybe it was just my memory.

So soup was the first thing I thought of when I pulled Poland out of the wine bag. Finding an awesome mushroom soup recipe.

I studied different versions on the Net and came up with my own that seemed to combine some of the best flavors, and then some. I used a combination of dried porcini (extremely flavorful), shitake and portobello mushrooms.

It's pretty good, but still doesn't stand up to the one I remember. I guess all good things come with practice.

Polish mushroom soup

6 tbsps. butter
3 yellow onions

6 carrots, chopped

4 stalks of celery chopped
1 cup Italian parsley, chopped

1 cup fresh dill, chopped

1/2 cup thyme, chopped

1/2 cup rosemary, chopped

3 bay leafs (dried)

2 oz. dried porcini mushrooms, chopped

1/2 lb. shitake mushrooms, chopped

3 large portobello mushroom caps, chopped

8 cups beef broth

Salt, pepper

2 cups sour cream

2 cups whole milk

1 loaf sourdough bread

What to do:

Bring half of the beef stock to a boil. When it is boiling, add the dried porcini mushrooms to "reconstitute them." Cook for about five minutes and then let drain, saving the even more yummy beef broth for later.

Melt 3 tbsps. of the butter in a pot and then saute the onions until soft, about five minutes. Add the carrots and celery and then let look for about 10 minutes. Season with some salt and pepper.

Meanwhile, melt the rest of the butter in a saute pan. Add all of the chopped mushrooms and let cook for about five minutes until soft.

Add the mushrooms to the other vegetables and stir in the herbs. Add the beef broth - both the reserved and the rest - and bring to a boil. Let simmer for about 30 minutes.

After the soup has simmered some over low heat, add the sour cream and milk. Add salt and pepper to taste. Let cook over low heat until ready to serve. The soup will thicken as it cooks. Serve with crusty bread.

Germany: Holiday non-traditions

This week I got an e-mail from my uncle inquiring about German holiday traditions. Apparently my nine-year-old (soon to be ten-year-old) cousin is working on a class project that involves researching the food and desserts of her heritage. Me being an advocate of education, food (especially desserts) and different cultures, helping her was right up my alley.

Given that - as noted before - my family is made up of bad Germans, we didn't really have any cultural holiday traditions. So I turned to some of my German friends for answers. It then only seemed appropriate to make a virtual return to the homeland to blog about it.

The first person I hit up was one of my editors who lived in Germany for a few years. He suggested something I later learned is a Feuerzanger Bowle, which involves heating red wine and traditional holiday spices in a fondue-like pot. Sounds like a pretty good idea, but perhaps not appropriate for an elementary school holiday celebration. (Although, I'd be amused to score an invite to that party and write a story about it.)

I then turned to my friend Nina, who was born in Germany, for some more kid-appropriate suggestions. She came through big time with some of her holiday favorites.

Without further ado ...

Stollen: This appears to be a yeast bread filled with nuts, currants, etc. Kind of like a fruit cake, I guess. And what do you know, Food Network gives us this recipe from Sara Moulton's old show. (I actually met Sara Moulton on one occasion ... this was before my current heyday of stalking celebrity chefs. We'll save that story for another blog posting).

Springerle: These are anise flavored sugar cookies made with molds to create intricate impressions on them.

Brat Apfel: Baked apples. Pretty self explanatory. Some of the "recipes" I found for baking apples involve serving them with ice cream, caramel or cinnamon.

Lebkuchen: Cookie (apparently Germans like cookies) similar to gingerbread, but softer. The Internet abounds with recipes.

And of course, Germans can be credited with coming up with Advent calendars, the Christmas tree and gingerbread houses (in the spirit of Hansel and Gretel).

I guess that means we weren't terrible Germans. We did do all of that. In fact, we used to go over to my Grandma's house when we were little and decorate a little gingerbread house. And last year, my sister decided to resurrect this tradition and we did a house on Christmas with Grandma. The difference is now my sister and her boyfriend take their cookie baking and gingerbread house making quite seriously, a warning to Bobby Flay if he ever comes around looking for a Throwdown.

The joy of a well-stocked spice cabinet

Some of my friends and I recently had a conversation about the cost effectiveness of cooking. There is a prevalent belief out there that cooking at home saves you oodles of money. Yes and no.

The major expense comes in the upstart costs of stocking your kitchen cabinets, especially when you have a palette for exotic dishes from dozens of different ethnic styles.

There is a distinct satisfaction, however, when you start accumulating so many of these ingredients - namely spices - that you have them on hand and don't have to be buying new ones with every recipe. That's when your grocery bills really start to plummet.

Even just two months into this little game, I am finding that I have built myself a sturdy arsenal of spices and am getting to the point I don't need to buy any. Take, for example, the pho I made this week. I had most of the spices I needed, along with the onions, garlic and some other veggies. I ended up spending just $25 at the grocery store - most of that on meat - and will likely get five days worth of dinners.

Now that's what I call cost efficient.

Appreciation

One of the things about cooking is that it really helps you appreciate the art of coming up with a good recipe.

Take, for example, cooking something out of From Emeril's Kitchen, which features recipes from his restaurants. Most of the recipes are extremely nuanced and complex. Not difficult, per say. Just extremely detailed, right down to making a veal stock for the Creole Meuniere Base that goes with a number of recipes.

Same goes for Bobby Flay's Mesa Grill cookbook. One recipe for a habanero duck pancake requires three different sauces, at least one of which requires you to make a completely different sauce. Oh. And the duck recipe also calls for chicken stock. But no worries. The recipes for all of these sauces and stocks are in the cookbook.

To think these guys have people doing this every day at their restaurants.

I have had several moments of zen appreciation preparing some of the recipes for this blog, particularly when it comes to the detail that goes into working with certain ingredients. The pho was definitely an example of this.

I mean, come on. Simmering a broth for 10 hours? Who ever thought of that?

There were a few things with the pho recipe I found suspect, so while I was waiting for the broth to finish I did some research. It seemed as far as basic technique goes, and ingredients for the most part, Emeril was right on.

The big thing that kept tripping me up was the accumulation of what seemed to be copious amounts of fat in the broth, especially after I put it in the fridge. A thick, jelly-like substance layered across the top of it.

It seemed like my takeout from Vietnamese restaurants had done the same thing, but it still bothered me. I thought maybe using the short ribs was a bad idea. Other recipes I found suggested ox tail, which might have been leaner. I had also skipped draining the broth through the cheese clothe the first night, so I reheated it to do this and that did seem to skim some of the stuff out of it.

Some more research indicated that there might not be anything wrong with my broth. Apparently the gelatin-like substance is not actually fat, but collagen from the bones you boil. That made sense. Some Vietnamese people will let their pho broth sit over night and then scrape the layer off the top before serving. Others apparently keep some of it on hand to add in extra for flavor.

Either way, at some point there was clearly a lot of thought put into this issue, which I can appreciate.

Vietnam: Pho, Part II

The first time I ate Vietnamese food I was a freshman in college.

A group of us from the college newspaper, The Daily Orange, had driven down to Washington, D.C. to cover some protests at the IMF and World Bank. This was on the heels of the big World Trade Organization protests that year in Seattle.

We traveled a lot at The D.O., and those trips are among some of my best college memories, despite the fact you always ended up with an eclectic mish mosh of personalities with nothing in common except for a passion for journalism.

It seems like there were five of us on that trip, driving the five or so hours together from Syracuse, NY and crashing at a Super Eight motel just outside of Washington. We packed so many people in those rooms that somebody always got the floor. I'm not sure how I got through my four years there never having that privilege.

We registered as credentialed members of the media and met up with some kids from SU, spending the better part of the day traipsing around Washington following these peace-loving activists.

The most vivid memory I have of that day was walking with this group of 20 or so protesters as they stopped outside of the World Bank building. All of the sudden, about three times as many police in riot gear appeared and came charging at us. Protesters started running everywhere and the riot police went after them.

For some reason it seemed like a good idea to pull this reporter I was with into a little alcove of a building we were standing in front of to get out of the fray. But one of the riot police saw us there, came up and pointed his gun of pepper spray right at us.

"We're with the media," I yelled, holding up my press credentials.

"I don't care," he said, dousing us with pepper spray.

I guess it could have been worse. I watched one of the guys we were with get clubbed by another officer. But the thing that really sucks about pepper spray is that after the initial sting, it calms down, but reactivates when it gets wet.

Then it started raining.

We kept moving forward though, tired, wet and burning, following the protesters around Washington and covering the story. I don't remember how we did it or when, but at some point we must have filed something.

I don't think we ate all day, and at the end of many hours out and about we all agreed to meet up on M Street. Somehow we ended up at this Vietnamese buffet.

It was a small buffet, no bigger than a typical kitchen table. I don't remember what I ate. All I remember is that everything was amazing. There was just something about the the wholesome warmth of the flavors that I found so comforting after all this drama. Besides, I was really hungry.

I fear my pho pales in comparison to my memories of this first Vietnamese experience. The broth seems to greasy, despite my efforts to skim the fat from it. The short ribs were probably a bad call. Some other recipes called for ox tail.

Still, for some reason as I sat on the patio last night smelling the aroma of the beef stock brewing with the scent of the onions and anise it brought back all these memories.

I guess it's one of those things I may never know whether that Vietnamese place was really that good, or if it was the moment that made the memory.

Vietnam: Pho

So I cheated again this week, but for good reason. As previously noted, I've been feeling a little under the weather and was craving a hot, soothing, yummy soup to make me feel better.

At some point this week I found myself craving Vietnamese soup, the spicy liquid being a perfect remedy to clear your sinuses. I hit Pho Cali on Main Street and had the beef stew (which is actually more like a soup) that I love. It made me feel so much better that I decided this weekend I would make my own version of the national dish of Vietnam, Pho.

I searched Food Network and found this recipe for "Emerilized" Banh Pho Bo, Vietnamese beef noodle soup. Emerilized sounded pretty good to me, so I figured I had a winner.

I went back and forth a few times on whether to actually try this today, given that it would take six hours to cook the broth. Would it really be worth the wait to eat it? Please reference "Emerilized." Yes. Yes I decided it would be.

The recipe calls for a meaty bone, and I decided to go with short ribs. I also don't have a grill, so I just stuck the onion stuffed with anise under the broiler until it got blackened. The best thing about this dish is the smell of the anise as it boils on the stove for six hours. It made my kitchen smell amazing!

I threw a few serrano peppers in as the broth cooked just to, well you know, kick it up a notch.

But I got a late start to all this, and with three hours left to simmer the broth at 6:30 I started to come to the realization that this wouldn't be ready for dinner. Once the broth is done, there's all sorts of other things that needed to get done. And quite frankly, I was pretty tired.

So the plan at this point is to let the broth boil some more, and then finish the pho off for dinner tomorrow.

To be continued ...