Homemade pho

Vietnamese pho and ramen soup shops are popular in Seattle.  It isn't too hard to assemble a bowl of Asian noodle soup at home using whatever vegetables you have on hand.  And if you plan ahead, you can make something really special and healthy for dinner.

Those brown noodles are called soba, made from buckwheat flour. They are served a variety of ways in Japan but especially popular as inexpensive fast food, sold on the street and in railway stations.  Soba noodles are either served chilled with a dipping sauce, or hot in soups.  Soba noodles do not contain wheat.

For the last month I've been trying to eliminate (or at least limit) high glycemic foods from my diet. That includes refined grains like white bread and pasta, white rice and potatoes, and of course, sugar.  This sounds depressing, especially if you are John and believe pasta is required to sustain life.

Frankly, I soon lost my taste for sweets and bland starches.  It also helps that my genetic food cravings tend to be along the lines of bacon and sausage, not pie and cake.  Anyway, I feel much better on a diet heavy on vegetables, and there are some things I'm not willing to give up, like coffee and wine. So life is still good.

Anyway, on to Asian noodle soup. Unless you do it from scratch (I don't) the soup is made with a bottled, highly condensed sauce.  On the back of the bottle you will find some cryptic and confusing instructions on how to dilute it. Ignore them.

After I saute some minced ginger and garlic, I add a can or two of chicken or vegetable broth, then add the soup base "to taste."  The amount I used from that soy sauce sized bottle was enough to flavor a good sized pot.  So a little goes a long way.

After the broth simmered, I added some fresh bok choy right before serving so it stayed fairly crisp.    

The boiling broth is ladled over the room temperature noodles and whatever cooked protein, in this case a bit of shrimp and tofu. I had some fresh cilantro to top it off, but basil would be just as good.  It didn't take us long to slurp up two big bowls of the stuff last night.