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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 sweet soup (tian tang)

Chinese new year is coming up this Monday, January 23 (2012). It will be the year of the Dragon, which makes me chuckle because my dad is a dragon and he likes to tell everyone that he’s a dragon. In my childhood years, he always told me that the dragon was the best. I would look at the Chinese zodiac place mat at Chinese restaurants and find my dad, my mom, my sister, my grandma, and me. I knew by heart what we were: dragon, snake, horse, rooster, and pig, respectively. In my mind I saw a cartoon family of these creatures sitting at the dinner table together – my family.

mandarin oranges, fragrant pears, pomegranate, and a red envelope (hong bao)

For several years now it has no longer become a question of whether or not to make traditional Chinese dishes to celebrate the lunar new year, but a necessity. It is the one holiday I take seriously. I largely ignore Christmas. I consider myself lucky to stay up for the western New Year. But Chinese New Year is the time when I spend several days gathering and preparing these special foods, all the while deep in thought thinking of loved ones both here and gone. Remembrance is an important part of the holiday and we honor those who have passed on with an extra place setting at the table. They are meant for your ancestors, but in my case I have one for my sister, Kris, and now one for Grandma.

eat peanuts (hua sheng) for luck (promotion)

I woke up the other morning and began jotting down the menu for this year. Potstickers, cellophane noodle soup, lucky ten ingredient vegetable (rui tsai), stir fried rice cakes, and soybean sprouts. Simple, right? I also had a strong desire to make tian tang, a sweet soup that my Grandma always had on the stove whenever we came to visit her in California. Why did I never ask her for a recipe when she was alive? I choked back the lump rising in my chest and gave my mom a call. Mom listed a ton of options as the soup is quite flexible, “If you can’t find lotus seeds, you can make it without them.” “No Mom, I want to make it the way Po po made it.” I knew she understood. I know she misses her too.

white fungus, rice cake, longan, lotus seeds, red dates, ginkgo nuts

closer inspection: (l to r, t to b) red dates, longan, lotus seeds, white fungus, rice cakes, ginkgo nuts

It’s a good thing I have a strong visual memory otherwise this illiterate Chinese girl would be screwed when shopping for Chinese ingredients. I had gone grocery shopping with Grandma countless times. She taught me to select the sweetest fruit, the freshest greens, the most tender shoots, the best quality noodles. Between my memory, my mom’s instructions, and Google, I was able to identify the ingredients I needed at the big Asian market in Broomfield (POM: Pacific Ocean Market). When I found the first one – the dried lotus seeds, I picked the bag up in my hand and examined them under my fingers through the plastic. And then I began to cry.

soak the lotus seeds, then simmer for an hour or longer until tender

soak the white fungus for ten minutes

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: albóndigas soup

With the arrival of each new month, I have a little routine of running through the house flipping all of our calendars. We have several calendars just like we have several clocks, because I’m all time-conscious. I could have sworn it was just yesterday that I flipped to November. Is this what happens when you get old?! December is going to be a good month, because I say so. We already have an inch of highly-anticipated snow on the deck as I type. I am hoping December will make up for what November was lacking in blessed frozen precipitation. And then I have my schedule of handmade gifts for those people that have been very good to us like Kaweah’s Camp Crazy, our Subaru service team, the local post office (yes, even the ornery employee), Jeremy’s administrative staff, our vets, and my oncologist (the best one in the whole wide world). It just so happens that we’ll have new toys of our own to break in this month.

(left to right) my waxless touring skis, my teles, jeremy’s teles

While I’m ridiculously excited to have all of this new gear, I’m also grateful that we only upgrade our skis every four to five years because we’re having bread and water for the next 12 months. Actually, it’s been 13 years since we upgraded our waxless touring skis and let me just say, technology can be a beautiful thing when you wait a decade.

So earlier this week I was sitting at my desk one morning, typing emails in a horrible posture when Jeremy said, “Come look at these birds in the yard!” I jumped up from my seat and *twang*. My back has been recovering rather quickly. Although it feels slow as hell to me, I recognize that going from being unable to stand to being able to ride my bike in 48 hours is definite improvement. This has happened before in the past, so I know what works. Ice is my friend. Say it with me, everyone. I ice my back a couple of times a day, lying with my back on the floor, legs bent at 90 degrees and calves resting on a chair. I lay a quilt and pillow on the floor, then go to the freezer to get my ice pack. And without fail, upon my return there is a little occupy movement going on. Every. Single. Time.

hey, thanks for setting this up for me!

I make her move, but only enough for me to lie down next to her. Kaweah loves it when people get on the floor because she thinks they’re going to play. We had to establish that there was no playing going on while I iced my back. She settles for resting her head on my stomach and cuddling, periodically raising her head and sniffing around to check for treats (I know, she’s crazy – she is food obsessed 24/7). She’s become incredibly sweet in her old age.

We are having a lot of soups and stews in this house and it is without a doubt very absolutely awesome amazing. I load them with vegetables, they serve us for several meals, and the cooking warms the house with wonderful savory aromas. I had a batch of navy bean soup on the stove this evening as the sun dropped below the Continental Divide. There were nice clouds that I expected to light up on the bellies, but they were duds – gray, lifeless. I stood at the windows tapping my foot on the ground and scrunched my mouth to one side. Back to the soup… But you know, there is a reward for patience. Most of the time, it is a fizzle, but I kept checking every 20 minutes and after nearly an hour past local sunset, I started to see a yellow glow. This was a good sign. I took my photo equipment out onto the deck. I set up my gear while watching pale yellows become golds which touched off oranges, pinks, and reds that painted these textured cloudscapes. Kaweah ambled about the deck checking the grill for any overlooked goodies. The clouds were not high, they hugged the horizon but stretched from east to west (as far as I could see). Even though most people think they need a wide angle lens to capture something big, I find I use my telephoto zoom as much as my wides if not more so.

seven image pano stitch

like fire

eerie patterns to the south

sunset rainbow of colors

You can find the entire set on my photoblog.

Now back to the soups. I’ve had this one in a couple of Mexican restaurants when I lived in Southern California. It was a simple meatball soup, albóndigas soup. Usually the broth was thin and there were swirls of cabbage, carrot, and onion floating about with a grain of rice here and there alongside three small meatballs. I found it comforting despite how plain it was and how cheaply it was made. I didn’t know it was cheaply made, I just thought they were all this way. At some point my mother-in-law gifted me this terrific New Mexican cookbook – The Border Cookbook, which I didn’t really cook from until my in-laws moved from New Mexico to Colorado and my supply of good New Mexican fare was cut off. When we moved to Colorado, I began to tag recipes until the book looked like it was growing a thick lawn of bright pink post-it tabs out the top. I had albóndigas soup marked forever and I finally made it this week.

soup base: carrots, zucchini, onion, cumin, oregano, rice, salt, garlic, chipotle chiles in adobo sauce, tomatoes

everything is chopped, shredded, ground, or minced

adding broth, tomatoes, carrots, chiles to the sautéed onions, garlic, and spices

**Jump for more butter**