feeding // fashionistas

December 11, 2007

Coldbusters

patrice wrote this around lunchtime:

It’s that time of the year. The time when you cash in the remaining paid sick days you’ve accumulated at work and find yourself suffering from some miserable virus your coworkers/roomates/significant other has bestowed upon you. It is times like these that call for two things: someone to graciously listen to you whine about how awful you feel AND something spicy enough to knock your virus clear into next winter. For the latter I choose dishes with either gallons of hot sauce or mounds of chiles.

Last week, I was battling a vicious cold of epidemic proportions, and needed something cheap and quick that
1) made me feel better
2) could be made effortlessly on my meager amount of energy
3) capitalize ingredients I already had in my fridge.

While chicken noodle soup is fine and all, it doesn’t have the spice I require. I tend to order take-out Pho when I’m sick because of the abundance of broth and because the flavor goes so well with both jalapenos and rooster sauce.
After a recent trip to the asian market with George, however, I found Pho bouillion cubes that I’ve been wanting to try out. They look like this:

I can’t actually read the packaging, but it was vegetarian and seemed like you could estimate the water to cube ratio based off of what you would do with normal bouillion.

Rare steak pho is my poison of choice when I order vietnamese take-out, but I’m uncomfortable with the idea of trying it out at home. So this was a vegetarian dish all around. I already had baby bok choy in my fridge, as well as some thai basil, and a lime. Even though you would normally use a lemon, I chose to stick with my on-hand goods.

Baby Bok Choy

I did end up picking up fresh bean sprouts, some rice noodles and a jalapeno, totalling all of $2 at my neigborhood asian market. These places are gems. Locate one near you, if you can.

rice noodles

I estimated four cups of water to one pho cube and brought it to a boil. This seemed to be about right. You can add more or less depending on the concentration you want. After that I threw in the baby bok choy (I usually just cut the very ends off and let the stalks separate from there) and rice noodles. Both of these ingredients cook up quick.

cooking the pho

Once cooked, I transfered them to a large bowl (in my case this was a large pyrex baking dish- all of my kitchen supplies play double duty) and garnished with lime slices, bean spouts and an entire diced jalapeno. I let the jalapeno soak into the broth for a while before I eat it. (IF you do choose to use meat, this would be the point where you throw in the raw meat and let it cook in the broth).

It made a huge 10 minute meal for under $5 and knocked my cold out like a heavyweight punch in the first round.

YUM