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Recipe: taiwanese beef noodle soup

Our house sprung a leak. We don’t know when it happened because it’s somewhat of a slow leak, but when Jeremy discovered it Friday night in the ceiling of our ground floor, it had soaked four shelves’ worth of backpacking, ski, and mountaineering gear, as well as drywall. We pitched tents, spread out sleeping bags, poured water from boots, unraveled ropes, removed crampons and bindings from sopping wet boxes. This gear is meant to get wet, after all. Jeremy isolated the cause of the leak and our plumber is coming on Monday.

I kept thinking I should be really upset, but it didn’t dampen (ha ha! pun!) our spirits one bit. Freaking out adds nothing. Say NO to Drama, folks. Too many people self-destruct under the weight of their own drama. Energies are better spent on positive things like:

playing with puppies in the snow

baking carrot cake for your neighbors (and another for yourself)

…or sitting down to a bowl of beef noodle soup after ski touring the backcountry with your sweetheart. I’m not talking about western beef noodle soup. That’s not even on my radar. No, I am referring to the ultimate beef noodle soup – Taiwanese beef noodle soup. This is the noodle soup of my people.

beef shank, beef marrow bones, green onions, ginger, garlic, thai bird chiles

soy sauce, soy paste, dark soy sauce, chili black bean sauce, fermented bean curd, tomato paste

brown sugar, star anise, cinnamon sticks, dried orange peel, bay leaves, fennel seeds, cinnamon bark, sichuan peppercorns, black peppercorns

I’ve had a variety of homemade and restaurant versions of this beloved soup. I’ve flipped through many recipes and never found one that really called to me, until the other day when Carolyn posted a link to Chef Hou Chun-sheng’s winning spicy beef noodle soup recipe. Winning, because Chef Hou dusted his competitors at the Taipei International Beef Noodle Festival in 2011. I had most of the spices, but for those in short supply or those I didn’t have, I knew where to go.

got some more fennel seeds, bay leaves, cinnamon sticks, and picked up cassia bark

from savory spice shop, of course

chinese herb bags: cinnamon stick, cinnamon bark, orange peel, anise, fennel seeds, sichuan peppercorns

Savory Spice Shop in Boulder always has what I’m looking for. However, there were two items that I think are pretty specific to Chinese herbal medicine stores: the cassia buds and the angelica root. They didn’t have them (although they looked them up and told me what they were) and I decided it wasn’t worth the scavenger hunt at the Asian markets. My parents hadn’t heard of those either and my dad suggested I omit them. I don’t know if this is kosher or not, but I dried my own organic orange peel. I got beef marrow bones because the butcher said it would lend a deeper flavor to the broth. This soup is ALL about the broth. It costs more, but I am convinced it is worth it. As for beef shank, I rarely find whole beef shank anywhere but in the Asian markets, so I picked up a few pounds of the bone-in cut beef shank.

make broth from the bones

aromatics: green onions, ginger, garlic, thai bird chiles

adding soy sauce, brown sugar, and hot bean paste to the sautéed aromatics

Now, you can make this in one longish day or you can make this over the course of two days. It really depends on a couple of factors: 1) if you use a conventional stock pot or if you use a pressure cooker and 2) if you defat the broth and sauce (at all, the quick way, or the slow way). Personally, I feel the pressure cooker is the better choice because it is so much faster, more energy efficient, and achieves a tenderness in the beef that is effortless. Physics. It is totally your BFF.

let the sauce cook for a minute

then pour it into the beef stock

add fermented tofu, tomato paste, herb bag, bay leaf, and black peppercorns to the broth

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: chinese egg dumplings (dan jiao)

I’ve spent the better part of the past week getting ready for Chinese New Year, so much so that I nearly forgot about my mammogram and ultrasound from mid-week. I’m not traumatized by these appointments. The medical center I go to has really wonderful staff and technicians. I sandwiched the medical imaging into my busy errands schedule that day. At the end, the techs always walk me to the front desk, shake my hand, give me a card explaining to expect my results in 10-14 days, and wish me good health. For that split moment I wonder about those results. It’s the difference between nothing and everything. And then I strode briskly out the doors, my brain in grocery-hunting mode.

making dumplings

Most of the food is prepped or cooked for the big feast on New Year’s Eve. The house is nearly clean because once the new year arrives, you can’t clean for 2 weeks lest you sweep the luck out. Speaking of luck, it’s tradition to hang the Chinese character for luck (fu) on your front door, upside down (dao). Dao is also a homonym for the verb “to arrive” – so you definitely want luck arriving at your door, at your house.

here’s what fu looks like right-side up

Jeremy and I reached a stopping point in the housework Saturday afternoon and took Kaweah for a walk before the snow storm arrived in the evening. It was ridiculously warm out – 45°F! It felt like spring except for the sun low in the sky. There were patches of bare ground dotting the snow… sad, but not uncommon. What horrified me were the puddles. Liquid water shouldn’t be making an appearance around here until May!

splashy splash!

kaweah is an all-terrain kinda girl

Kaweah had a blast sniffing every.darn.thing.on.the.ground. Back home, a message waited in my in-box from my health care provider. Strange. I wasn’t expecting anything. It was a note from my oncologist that my scans were clean. I grinned. That was only four days ago. And my oncologist is working on a weekend AGAIN (of course – he is amazing). It’s been over four years since my first mammogram did NOT detect my cancer, so I take these negative scans for what they’re worth. I trust my yearly MRIs more. Even so, it’s a really nice way to start the new year.

Every Chinese New Year’s Eve we enjoy a big pot of cellophane noodle soup, a type of hot pot (huo guo) that is different from the more common Chinese hot pot. I make the cellophane noodle soup several times a year, but Chinese New Year’s Eve is the only time I go to the effort of making egg dumplings (dan jiao) to add to the soup. They represent wealth (any dumpling represents wealth).

the filling: ground pork, green onions, black mushrooms, bamboo shoots, ginger, napa cabbage

mincing the ginger

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: chicken congee

Is everyone back into the groove now? Holidays are over and all of the new calendars are up for 2012. I’m chomping at the bit to get this party started: things to do, places to go, people to see. There’s been more emphasis on the first two, but hopefully I’ll remedy the third one this week. I’ve been getting my physical and digital houses in order here (still not done, not by a long shot). How did the weekend treat you guys? Mine went a little like this:

we started with a nice show at sunrise

it only took me 6 months to get to our new ikea

It’s a bit of a haul from our house to the new (well, new to me) Ikea in Centennial, Colorado – just under 90 minutes. But hey, that’s better than a 9-hour drive to Salt Lake City, Utah. I think of Ikea as the OCD adult amusement park. They even provide sofas, beds, and a restaurant because you’re basically going to be there long enough for your body to require sustenance and rest as you try to find your way out of the store. If it sounds like I hate Ikea, I do not. It’s just that I am occasionally distracted from our seek and destroy shopping mission. Jeremy will have to come and fetch me from the children’s section or he’ll find me standing mesmerized in front of the colorful lamps and lights. And if the “we’re only going to be there for an hour or two”-trip-turned-7-hour-adventure wasn’t enough, you get to spend as much time assembling everything when you get home. But now we have clever Swedish storage for all of our junk!

did i mention it finally snowed? (why yes, we skied it)

and a hot bowl of ramen to warm up après ski

Mmmm noodles. I am a noodle girl. Every now and again I’ll wonder if I’m a rice girl, but no – I am true to the noodle. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy my rice. Now that we’re acting like winter again, it’s the perfect time to be making congee, jook, or xi fan – Chinese rice porridge. I like my mom’s chicken congee.

start with short grain rice

My parents used to make congee on the weekends for breakfast when I was growing up. It is a savory porridge which might explain why I have never been a huge fan of sweet breakfasts. In college, I’d make the basic rice porridge when I wasn’t feeling well because it was neutral and settled my stomach. These days I make my mom’s chicken congee because I love the ginger. I called them up last week to verify the recipe in my head with the recipe in their heads.

rice, chicken, ginger, green onions

i like to make my own chicken broth in my pressure cooker

Mom is so cute when I tell her I have a question about a recipe. She’s eager to help out and to make sure I do it right. Thing is, when they see that it’s me calling, they put me on speaker phone. So as soon as Mom starts to share her method, Dad butts in and says, “Let me tell you how to do it the right way…” See, Dad is just as eager to explain how he does it. It happens practically every time and I try my hardest not to laugh, but it’s really entertaining and a little insane to get a recipe from them. Most of my recipes are a marriage of the two versions and I think that’s a good thing. Whenever I eat these family foods, I feel a little tug in my heart.

wash the rice

add water to the rice and cook until mushy

add chicken broth when the porridge is thick

**Jump for more butter**