Hu Tieu Experiment

Sunday was a very disciplined day of staying at home and cleaning up our lil apartment, even though we could've made much better use of our time loitering at the Hollywood Farmers' Market or watching reruns on Bravo.

Staying in means cooking at home, and we were thinking about making pho, even though we didn't quite have all the ingredients.

Probably for some, hu tieu is very closely related to pho. For others, hu tieu is a carefully composed dish of various various meats and seafoods with fried shallots and a distinctly sweet broth.

For me, it's a catch-all for random odds and ends you have lying around. (Maybe I think this because my mom once told me never to order it at restaurants because they could just throw anything in there and I'd never know.) But it makes sense - don't you notice how pho is made from pretty much the same stuff, while hu tieu can vary drastically?

Anyway, my attempt at making hu tieu definitely followed the latter school of thought. Since we didn't have all the herbs and spices needed to make a proper pho, hu tieu was the next best thing


-E

A bunch of stuff (including two lobster tails unearthed from the freezer) + water = the stock

Sauteed lobster + sliced roast pork + shredded chicken breast = the protein. The rice noodles and scallions were what we would've normally used for pho. There are probably a bunch of other toppings we were supposed to add.

Accessories -- it benefitted from a squeeze of lemon and a little dollop of the chili garlic paste

Our wannabe hu tieu was pretty good, but don't take our word for it! Neither of us know what's really supposed to go in it, and what it's supposed to taste like. But not bad for a random ingredient use-up.