The plan today was to make the French Fridays cookies, but I just didn’t feel like it. I wanted something easy, and I wanted soup, so I made an easy soup.
First, I pressure-cooked some stock. This is almost as easy as opening a can, and it’s so much cheaper and more flavorful than store-bought. Today’s stock ingredients were some things I’d saved from previous meals: the remains of the other day’s roast beef, and the shells from two pounds of shrimp (remember the shrimp scampi?).
I know it sounds weird to make a stock of both beef and shrimp, but a) think Thai food: even beef dishes in Thai food have shrimp paste and fish sauce in them; and b) I’m about to add kimchi to all this, so the weirdness is just getting started.
To the stock, once it was strained, I added:
1/2 onion, sliced
2 chinese sausages, sliced
1 chicken-apple sausage, sliced
the meat from the soup bones
a cup or two of kimchi
a few ounces of long noodles (I used angel hair pasta; rice threads or udon or whatever would be fine)
I brought this to a boil, stirring to keep the pasta from sticking, and then simmered for about five minutes to cook the pasta. At the very end, I added soy sauce and a little mirin to taste.
SO. GOOD.
James: “I may die of yum over here.”
Weird but good. Just the way we like it around here. And a great way to use up things that aren’t being eaten quickly enough, like that monster jar of kimchi my mom bought us the other day.