Viet World Kitchen

Refrigerator Gold: Leftovers Panfried Noodles

In Vietnamese, there’s a term called thanh toan, which means to take care of loose ends, settle the accounts per se. Every week, I have to thanh toan my refrigerator by using up all the bits of leftovers from prior meals and recipe testing. I don’t like to waste food and need to make space for new food too!

One of my favorite strategies for clearing out the fridge is to make panfried noodles with a stir-fried topping. Practically anything can go into the topping and the noodles are the carbs for the meal. Panfried noodles are an easy one-dish meal that my husband and I often make together. It’s a team cooking effort and we chat and sip wine as we prepare dinner.

Based on the leftovers panfried noodles tonight, this post outlines the master game plan that we've developed over the years. Follow it and tweak accordingly.

Pot au Feu Recipe (Sup Thit Bo)

Last week I made a dish from my childhood: Pot au feu. I grew up eating the French boiled beef dinner with my parents on wintry days. (Yes, we had cold days in Southern California!) It was effortless for my mother to simmer the beef and vegetables in the afternoon and then present it for supper, the beef and vegetables on a platter and the golden broth in separate bowls. We’d eat the meal with salt and pepper, making individual piles of it to dip the vegetables and beef in. The pot au feu was always warming and satisfying.

The Vietnamese approach to pot au feu tends to be rather simple. In my 1975 copy of From Julia Child’s Kitchen, the pot au feu recipe called for roasting the beef bones and aromatic vegetables to generate a good color to the broth. In the 1940s Vietnamese classic cookbook, Lam Bep Gioi, Mrs. Van Dai suggested charring the onion (like for pho noodle soup) and adding caramel sauce (nuoc mau) to the pot au feu to create a rich color; she translated pot au feu as sup thit bo, which literally means beef soup. Vietnamese cooks didn’t have large ovens to brown their beef and vegetables so they made due. Like the original French version, Mrs. Van Dai's pot au feu had plenty of vegetables to go along with the beef. (And if you're wondering, the connection between French pot au feu and Vietnamese pho is tenuous at best.)

Sukiyaki Lesson with Kyoto Foodie

I traveled to Kyoto last week to check out its beautiful temples and delectable foods. Among the people I met was Michael Baxter, an American expat who has lived in Japan for a good 15 years. Kyoto has been his home for over a decade and he is the man behind Kyotofoodie.com, a terrific site on the foodways of Kyoto, once the ancient capital of Japan.

Michael and I first met over a dinner of handmade udon. He then invited me to his home the next evening for sukiyaki to showcase the best of Kyoto’s wealth of vegetables and tofu. Kyoto is famous for its special seasonal vegetables and multicourse meals based on tofu. Really.

He surprised me with a bounty of wonderful goodies – Japanese people are nuts for seasonality. In fact, Masa Fujiwara, a cultural and culinary tour guide in Kyoto, explained to me that it’s (1) important to enjoy foods at their seasonal peak but (2) it’s also good to have things ahead of their seasons so as to prepare one’s body for the seasonal changes ahead.

Peking Duck Meal at Home -- LA Times Article

 

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Remember my experiments with Sichuan and Peking duck earlier this year? After those initial forays, I wanted to make a whole 3-course Peking duck meal with the Mandarin pancakes, stir-fry and final soup. Editor Russ Parsons of the Los Angeles Times "Food" section let me go at it and the article was published today.

I cooked a lot of ducks to perfect the recipes, and the photos above give you the highlights. The roasted duck. Its crisp flesh in a homemade pancake (it's like a flour tortilla but better), the stir-fry with the roast duck meat, and the final soup made from ducky broth and cabbage.

Don't be daunted. It surprisingly doesn't take much to produce this wonderful Chinese meal in your home kitchen.  My husband and I ate it multiple times during recipe development. We never tired of it and didn't even develop duck tummies. Seriously.

Check out my journey toward Peking duck-dom, recipes, and techniques:

Dine-in Duck  (Los Angeles Times, July 29, 2010)

Start practicing on your family and friends. Let me know your thoughts!

Related Chinese duck recipes:

Chinese Fragrant and Crispy Duck - Version 1 (Xiang Su Quan Ya)
Chinese Fragrant and Very Crispy Duck - Version 2 (Xiang Su Quan Ya)
Homemade Peking Duck

• Step 1: How to blow up a duck
• Step 2: How to scald and give the duck a tan
• Step 3: How to roast the duck

Taiwanese Spicy Beef Noodle Soup Recipe (Niu Rou Mian)

Tomorrow my husband and I will be celebrating our 14th wedding anniversary. (I was a child bride. Ha! -- NOT.) We were discussing what we should do, where we could go out, what we had eaten on past anniversaries. We didn’t make any concrete plans but I started thinking about the meals we shared when we first started dating in 1989. Yes, we’re an old couple.

One of our favorite places was the Mandarin Deli in Chinatown, Los Angeles. It was a hole in the wall that my sisters introduced me to when they were attending USC down the way. I loved the Mandarin Deli’s giant pot stickers that burned my mouth with their hot juices (they’re mentioned in Asian Dumplings).

An order of dumplings was always paired with hot bowls of beef noodle soup (牛肉麵, niu rou mian). Its inky spicy broth, plump wheat noodles, and chunks of red-cooked beef were perfect with the dumplings. It was good in the cooler months as well as the hotter months. I ate it year round.

Since then, I’ve made various versions of the soup from recipes found in Irene Kuo’s classic, The Key to Chinese Cooking, and Fuschia Dunlop’s enlightening work on Sichuan cuisine, Land of Plenty.  I’ve also ordered plenty of beef noodle soup from Taiwanese joints, such as A&J Restaurant, which has outposts in Southern and Northern California.

Overall, I like the Taiwanese version of niu rou mian (literally beef meat noodles) better than other versions of the Chinese soup. The Taiwanese take usually has more complexity in the broth but I didn't know why until this past weekend.