Asian Noodle Soup

Recently we've been watching "The Mind of a Chef" on Netflix, which covers a lot of Japanese food culture and the many amazing things they do with ramen over there (which has very little to do with our concept of cheap packaged ramen noodles in the States).

The effort that goes into a bowl of authentic Japanese ramen really got me thinking it's something we should try, but I wasn't ready to jump in with both feet quite yet. As a sort of practice run, we put together an Asian noodle soup that's a little less involved.

To start our soup, we're of course making our own stock. Luckily we had made a whole chicken the week before and had the carcass ready to go. Here we're boiling the chicken bones with carrots, bell peppers, and minced garlic in about four cups of water.

For our soup we needed some Asian style ingredients outside the norm of what we're comfortable cooking with, so we picked up a head of bok choy and some rice noodles.

We also wanted to try some more exotic mushrooms, so we went with shiitake and oyster. These are more expensive (between $9 - $12 a pound), but we only needed a handful so it ended up being less than two dollars total for them. We're also using red onion, a red chili pepper, and a bulb of fresh ginger (the gray looking guy in the middle underneath the onion).

We diced or tore up most of the ingredients, which will get cooked on the stove top. The bright yellow slices in the back are the ginger. We've never used fresh ginger before, which has a very interesting taste that's "sharp" without being spicy. Before slicing it you also have to peel off the barky outer skin.

Our soup is going to be topped with slices of meat, and we went with a very thin beef steak. I didn't want a traditional steak flavor though, instead wanting flavors from other cultures, so I coated the beef in cumin instead of pepper or other seasonings.

The steak gets pulled off the heat after it's browned, and then we toss in our diced vegetables to soften.

What's this goop down here? That's our finished stock after it's been strained and placed in the fridge overnight to let the flavors set in.

Our soup will have rice noodles (we used Maifun), which is cooked a bit different from regular pasta. To cook this, bring a pot of water to boil, throw the noodles in, then turn the heat off and let it sit for 10 minutes. It's ready immediately, so if the rest of the meal isn't prepared yet, strain out the water and then toss the noodles in a bowl of ice.

The rice noodles are tossed in directly with the vegetables, and then we ladled in a few cups of stock. Everything cooks for a few minutes so the stock can flavor the noodles.

Here we start constructing our soup bowl by spooning in a handful of noodles and vegetables.

Next we ladle the stock over the noodles - just enough to cover them, but not enough to fill the bowl.

We finish off the bowl by layering on sliced beef and cracking open a beautiful soft boiled egg. For more heat you can also drizzle on some sriracha hot sauce.

Despite all the interesting ingredients going on here, the end result was a subtle and somewhat bland flavor in the soup itself, and unfortunately Megan didn't like it at all. I actually enjoyed it, but if we do this again I'll definitely change up some of the seasonings for a stronger flavor. I'm glad we made this though, as the experimentation was worth it and the fresh slices of ginger were fabulous.

Quiznos Night!

Megan loves her some Quiznos - especially their broccoli cheddar soup, which was weirdly the best in town. You may have noticed I wrote "was."

Unfortunately all the Quiznos shops in Great Falls have closed, and we didn't find out until we recently tried to go there for toasted subs and soup and to our dismay found the building empty.

We weren't going to let something like a restaurant closing prevent us from eating at it though! In honor of the departed fast food sub shop, we put together our own take on the broccoli cheddar soup and toasted sandwiches.

It seems likely the restaurant probably uses freeze dried or powdered broccoli, but that's not how we roll at home, so of course we're going with fresh broccoli - a whole mess of it!

Once the broccoli is chopped, we got down to the arduous task of grating a whole bag of baby carrots.

As with many soups, we'll be starting ours by cooking diced onions and several cloves of diced garlic in a tablespoon of oil. Put in a few tablespoons of flour and butter to make a roux, which will cause the soup to thicken as it cooks.

After the onion softens and the garlic becomes fragrant, we add in our primary liquid ingredients: half and half, evaporated milk, and homemade chicken stock. For a creamier soup, you could instead use heavy cream, but it also adds a lot more fat.

When it starts to heat through, we add in our chopped broccoli florets, shredded carrot, and 8 oz. of shredded sharp cheddar (it's not, as you might suspect, Velveeta) and let it simmer.

Eventually it will start to thicken and you'll get a consistency that is amazingly close to what we had at Quiznos.

But what about the sandwiches? Here we've cut some wheat bolillo rolls in half and slathered with them a mixture of mayo and sun-dried tomato infused garlic, then layered on sliced tomato, turkey, and cheese.

Since Quiznos toasts their subs, we decided to go the same route, putting the sandwiches under the broiler for about two minutes.

And here's the finished product - a bowl of soup even better than its inspiration and a custom made toasted sandwich. The restaurant may be gone, but it's spirit will live on in our kitchen whenever the urge strikes!