Curry Chick'n!

I checked out Pleasures of the Vietnamese Table, by Mai Pham, from the library a couple of weeks ago. I love Vietnamese food, but its always been too intimidating for me to cook-- I guess I'm not really used to using fish sauce and lime juice and so on. Finding this book really made me happy; its given me a chance to recreate some of my favorite dishes. I grew up in a town with a very large Vietnamese populations, so a lot of my childhood (and best) friends are Vietnamese. Eating this food reminds me a little bit of home I guess.

The dish I made last night was Curry Chicken Noodle Soup. Its actually a very simple dish.

First of course, was the prep. I washed bean sprouts, I chopped up green onion, cilantro and two cloves of garlic. I also defrosted some chicken; this I keep in the freezer in glass mason jars. (Due to the unpredictability of my schedule, I am forever looking for ways to preserve food and prevent it from going bad before I get a chance to cook it!)

I chopped up the chicken into bite-sized pieces and also defrosted four cups of chicken broth. (I also keep this in the freezer; btw, baking soda is one of the most amazing substances I have ever encountered! Using it, I managed to scrub off all of the burn marks from the pot I burned earlier in the afternoon!)

Anyway, so once I had everything cut up, I set out the spices and other ingredients on the counter for easy access: red chili bean paste (Mai actually specifies chili paste, but I already had the chili bean paste which I use to make ma po tofu), curry powder, coconut milk, fish sauce and sugar.

So finally after finishing this, I started to cook. First, I heated up olive oil in my pot. Then I threw in the freshly chopped garlic along with chopped garlic from a jar that I bought from Fairway. (I'd run out of fresh garlic!) For some reason, my pot always seems to turn brown on the bottom when I use non-stick pans. Maybe I don't use enough oil? After 10 seconds, I threw in the chicken, 3 tablespoons of curry powder and 2 teaspoons of chili paste. I let all of this sort of saute in the pan. After a while, I got worried about the bottom of the pan turning totally black (again), so I poured in the chicken broth, sugar, fish sauce and a can of coconut milk. (The coconut milk looked really weird to me. It was all sort of thick and gelatinous. I think I expected it to be more like fresh coconut milk, but I wasn't about to try to locate a coconut and split it open!)

While all this was going on, Homer had heated up another pan of boiling water and dumped in half a package of vermicelli noodles. He (or rather I at this point) let the noodles cook for about 4 minutes, then I dumped out the water.

I microwaved a couple of bowls for four minutes to get the bowls heated up, then I put some noodles and sprouts in the bottom of each bowl.

When the soup started to bowl, I turned it down to a simmer and then filled each bowl with the curry soup.

Top it off with scallions and cilantro, and voila,


there you have it, curry chicken noodle soup!

Surprisingly easy! I saved half to bring to work and eat for lunch, so I'm going to scare all my officemates with stinky curry noodles this afternoon (oh well!)