Very Difficult to Eat Soup With Delightful Garnishes

I have to say that I've made some dishes for the ages within the past several days, real epics.  I know I run risk of sounding like an insufferable braggart, but I'm really proud of them, and I could've written about each of them, but I've chosen to write about the soup, not least of all because I'm really amused with the name.  Very Difficult to Eat Soup With Delightful Garnishes, née Very Difficult to Eat Soup.


We were supposed to go to an event on Monday night, with promise of "light bites,"  but we were too wrecked, even for free food, prompting Plan B.  "Always have a Plan B" was advice given to me, but rarely heeded, as a teacher.  When it comes to food, though, there's always a Plan B, even if it's McDonald's.


Actually, McDonald's is more like a Plan ZZ, and I say that with all deference to the immortal ZZ Top.  Happily for me and ZZ Top, Plan ZZ has not been enacted in years.  It has less to do with the food (I used to crave those $1 cheeseburgers, but that's largely subsided) than it does because of practices like this.  The Jack in the Box on Montrose and Westheimer, I'll eat my own eyes before I eat there.  I'd love nothing more than to watch a wrecking ball go through one side of that dump and right out the other, with Jack the Mascot in attendance, crapping little antenna baubles.  Suffice it to say, "B" did not, nor will it ever again, stand for "Bisquick." That crap is clogging up a landfill by now, I'm proud to say.  


Plan B was soup.  For whatever reason, and this doesn't happen often, I wanted soup, the desire that won't be placated.  It was to be chicken soup, and it had to meet two salient criteria:  

1. It had to be quick.  We were hungry and tired and in no mood to eat past midnight.  
2. The chicken had to be prepared in a manner other than boiling.     

We went to the store, and I literally created the recipe walking down the aisles.  The soup began to take shape when I grabbed a nubbin of ginger and said, "This soup will be a faux pho."  We'd toyed with the idea of buying a a rotisserie bird, but the deli was almost closed when we got there.  After dick knows how long they roasted under greasy jaundiced light, all the chickens looked like catchers' mitts or George Hamilton.  They asked a song for breast quarters, so that's what we got..  

Once home, I hacked the quarters into smaller pieces with aid of a cleaver.  I'd like to say I did it with one graceful whack like Martin Yan of "Yan Can Cook" fame, but his cleaver is much bigger, with a laser-honed edge.  He chops onions and it looks like a shell game, but he's so humble about it.  I like what he says when he's finished:  "Loot at dat!"  

The chicken went into a flailing hot wok and after I'd moved it around some, I added, first, a nice viscous stream of soy sauce and an innuendo of sesame oil, and then finely-minced garlic and ginger.  I drained the chicken and skitterings on a couple of pieces of paper sack, and deglazed the wok with a blub of sake and chicken stock.  All this went into a stock pot, along with enough water to cover it.  With some shake still in the wok, I stir-fried shredded bok choy, added that to the soup, and then stir-fried a julienned zucchini.  Udon noodles were added last.  I saw them at the store during a trip previous and wanted to use them, so we bought two packages, which proved to be perfect.

One thing I like about Asian cuisine is that Asians don't blanch about adding condiments to their food.  In that spirit, we chopped green onion and shredded carrot with a potato peeler to place atop the soup with the sort of care reserved to a head of state in the grip of delirious fever.  I yanked out soy sauce, Sriracha, and hoisin sauce from the fridge to be added at the discretion of each diner.  

I'd read about Japanese soups that are garnished with tempura, and if you can think of a more irresistible way to top a soup, I'll prince about in a fish skin skirt some day.  Tempura was a last-minute idea, and I nearly didn't make it for fear of violating Criterion 1, but I couldn't help myself.  Sake, rice flour, soy sauce, salt, and water were mixed until it all achieved the consistency of slightly runny pancake batter that I could pour into the oil.  When the mixture hit the oil, it formed into some really cool shapes, like these:

This one reminds me of an H. R. Geiger construction, a cracker that H. R. Geiger designed to put on top of soup.

The tempura was a nice addition, but it tasted like a snack cracker I can't identify, good, but off somehow.  Undoubtedly, this had something to do with the properties of the rice flour, but since I don't really know the properties of rice flour, I won't enumerate them here.  

I did a dumb thing my mom had warned me about repeatedly and I'm not doing it anymore.  My mom would make fried chicken, and I'd scoop out the crispies and shovel them into my mouth straight from the pan.  They were hot enough to deform flesh on contact, but a tablespoon full of those crunchy, chicken-flavored morsels poised for my mouth made me take leave of my senses quicker than anything this side of angel dust.  

I was removing the last of the tempura from the wok with a spatula.  There was a piece at the end of the spatula that proved too tempting to pass up.  Without considering that the oil could boil a Ford Pinto, I wrapped my lips around the spatula, and they stuck instantly.  I ripped the implement off before I lost my entire upper lip, but not before a nasty blister formed on it.  Applications of ice and antibiotic ointment might ensure that I won't have a permanent bubble on the middle of my lip.  

The soup was probably done in an hour and a half, after much sweat and injury.  Though I improvised quite a bit, I considered each component really carefully so it wasn't like Kenny G in the kitchen.  There must be something about frying on hand-hammered steel because that element featured prominently.  It makes sense, really - almost everything but the water was fried.

Needless to say, the soup was delicious.  I can't imagine eating anything else at that particular time.  I can't praise a dish more highly than that.