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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: blood orange curd-filled beet doughnuts

There is chocolate for the chocoholics and then there is fruity for the fruit lovers. It isn’t just that I love fruity flavors, but they tend to come in a nice array of colors too. Remember me? I’m a parrot and I love bright colors.

sometimes even pink

Today’s recipe is indeed intended for Valentine’s day, mainly because it is pink and cute. But it’s more than that because it is both fruity AND vegetable-y. I’ve been looking around for something sweet to do with beets. So, let’s get our vegetable on, people.

flour, milk, butter, powdered sugar, cardamom, oranges, beet, salt, yeast, egg, grand marnier, beet juice

peel and dice and don’t wear white

I found an interesting recipe for beet doughnuts on Almond Corner. Most recipes call for roasting beets, but I liked this one because it cooks the beets on the stove top, simmering them in orange juice. By the time the beets are tender (it takes a while) the orange juice has reduced considerably so there isn’t a whole lot of liquid left. I puréed the beets with the juice, which meant I added a little more flour to the dough later.

diced beets, cardamom pods, and orange juice

tender

puréed

Meanwhile, heat the milk and beet juice together. Now, beet juice isn’t something I commonly see. I worried that I would have to make my own beet juice, somehow, but thankfully I found an obscure bottle of organic beet juice at Whole Foods… from Switzerland. Because my beets had enough liquid from the orange juice for the purée, I just added all of the milk-juice mix to the yeast and let it foam up.

add beet juice to the milk

foamy yeast

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: blood orange curd

When we moved to Colorado, we quickly learned that you don’t wait for an opening in your schedule to do things around here… you take advantage when the opportunity presents itself. I’m referring to the weather, but it applies to life in general. But it’s the weather that dictates everything around here. These past few days have been perfectly calm, cold, and snowy. Calm is the operative word. Calm means the snow isn’t scoured from the trails. Calm means 4°F feels pretty warm in the sun. Calm is when you get out into it.

into the snow, that is

I had a lovely solo ski tour one snowy afternoon. Solo because Kaweah stayed home. I love taking her with me, but it’s always a short 3-4 miles with her. I wanted to explore further and really feel that burn in my legs, back, and arms.

solitude and the path you take

drinking in the vistas

And then we were greeted with five more inches of snow in the morning, which is the true Breakfast of Champions. Winds still calm. Grab the day by the bazingas! Here’s a little bit of what an awesome day looks like to me:

what a morning, what a view

bluebird here, socked in with clouds on the flats

lunch at sushi tora (in boulder)

meeting jason’s new puppy, buck!

While we’re talking about making the most of a good thing, blood oranges are in season! They’re in my local Whole Foods and I’ve been enjoying them as a snack or in salads. In my head, I think the blood oranges are less acidic and have a touch of a cherry flavor to them compared to let’s say, navel oranges. That could be me cuing off the visually striking red color, with which I must confess to being completely enamored. We love reds in fall colors, in sunsets, in birds, in flowers, in fruits and vegetables.

blood oranges, eggs, lemon, sugar, butter

zest and juice the oranges

Originally, the plan was to make a half recipe of blood orange curd. Then I found a cute recipe to pair it with and decided to go ahead and do the full quantity. It only really requires two blood oranges, but I kinda went grab-happy at the store last week.

more: butter, egg yolks, orange zest, blood orange juice, lemon juice, sugar

add blood orange juice to the yolks, sugar, and lemon juice

**Jump for more butter**