What the Pho?

Yesterday I set out to make a vegetable broth from scratch for the first time. This is more or less the same recipe that Andrew Weil gives in The Healthy Kitchen. I started by sauteing 4 small onions (chopped), 2 leeks, 6 carrots, 3 stalks of celery and a small bunch of parsley in a tablespoon of olive oil. To that I added 3 bay leaves, 2 teaspoons of dried marjoram and 1/2 teaspoon thyme and filled the black soup pot with water. This simmered for over an hour and then I strained it before I had to run to catch a reading by a Ukrainian fiction writer that a friend of mine was hosting.

He read an interesting story about a man who buys something he can't identify at a flea market, but is thrilled nonetheless with netting something for the bargain price of $1.90. It was shaped like a loaf of bread and wrapped in an old Russian newspaper. Through a process of deductive reasoning, he determines it to be Lenin's brain. The man, who is not Russian and never knew much about the dictator, slowly transforms into a middle age reincarnation of Lenin, his psyche filling with the dictator's memories cinematically as the brain- wholly preserved all these years- begins a process of decomposition. The crowd was subdued in spite of the deadpan hilarity of the writing. I wish I were better at being the person in the room with the infectious laugh.

When I got home I put the broth in the fridge for the night without much of an idea about what kind of soup it would become.

This morning I woke up with a notion that the soup would become a spinach and black-eyed pea number. So I got an onion going in some olive oil in the pot and a clove of garlic, then two, then five. It would be garlic-spinach-black-eyed-pea I decided. The spinach, the remnants of a bag of frozen Trader Joe organic that I've been craving since the big spinach "scare" a few weeks ago, danced on the surface in bright green ribbons. As I waited for the flavors to cook together, I started peeking online to see what other spinach and black-eyed pea soups did, and I nearly got swayed to add a can of diced tomatoes since that appeared by my survey to be du jour. Going one better, I thought to add some of spicy chipotle salsa to give it a kick, but I wavered at covering up the flavor of the broth I had worked so hard for. J seconded this after a taste test, remarking that the mildness of the broth reminded him of pho. "What do we need for that?" he wondered out loud.

Chili! I delved into an unopened bag of mystery frozen chilies I had gotten Patel grocery on Devon Ave. a few weeks ago. Tiny little nuggets of fire, the exact species of which went undocumented on the packaging. I threw a dozen of them in there for starters. Then it was off to the local Jewel- whose selection isn't great, but I knew they would at least have some organic broccoli and rice noodles to round out my burgeoning pho-like substance.

I also recalled from the freezer a tofu experiment from earlier in the week.. pre-pressed nuggets frozen in a baggie that I thawed in a pot of boiling water. This is the key to tofu I've been missing all these years. When I finally unzipped the baggie, the warm nuggets of tofu had a firm texture I'd often eaten in restaurants, but had never been able to replicate at home. I reheated a baggie of extra shitakes I had frozen earlier in the week too. I chopped a few scallions, put out a bowl of chili paste, a.k.a. "rooster sauce." Quickly steaming the broccoli florets and giving the nest of dried rice threads a quick boil for about 10 minutes, we had the build-a-pho set-up pictured above.