Curry noodle soup - Sick at home edition

If you're truly, horrendously sick, you'll have to had done some planning before making this. Hopefully you have most of these items in your house, like homemade broth in your freezer, coconut milk in your cupboard, curry paste and noodles. You should also have some vegetables and proteins hanging around in general. And if you're sick, you need to have lemons/limes so you can drink lemon honey water all day. Anyway, I'm rambling. And possibly feverish. So let's go.

Ingredients:

• Homemade broth, or the stuff in cartons, which for some reason taste better than canned to me
• 1 can coconut milk
• 1 tbsp curry paste, or to taste. I made a batch of Penang curry paste and keep it in my freezer.
• Chopped up meat or tofu 
• Chopped up veggies (I had some zucchini lying around)
• Noodles, prepared according to the package. I used Korean sweet potato noodles.
• Optional: cilantro and lime

Let's do it!

1. Put coconut milk in a small soup pot with curry paste. Stir until well combined.
2. Add broth, until it's the consistency you like.
3. Add veggies and meat/tofu. Simmer until cooked through.
4. Put cooked noodles in your bowl.
5. Pour soup over noodles, garnish with lime and cilantro. Season to taste with salt/soy sauce or fish sauce. 

If you've got a well stocked kitchen, this should be totally doable, despite being feverish.

Serves 3.

Pan Asian Submarine

I've been craving Vietnamese subs, Korean food and vegetarian food lately. What to do? Put them all together in a crazy-delicious sub, of course! Basically everything here is a Vietnamese sub staple, but with Korean kimchi and Chinese egg tofu added.

Ingredients:
Vietnamese sub
Some kimchi, purchased or homemade
Pickled daikon radish, purchased or homemade
Egg tofu
Coriander
Mayo
Butter

Let's do it!.. Lunch it up!
This whole thing is put together at work (if you have a toaster oven there). I packed the kimchi and daikon together, the coriander separate, the egg tofu in the little sausage case it comes with and the bread in a bag (that does NOT go in the fridge). I do this because I have a big problem with soggy bread, so I like my sandwiches to be made and eaten with the least amount of time in between as possible.

1. Slice up the egg tofu into maybe 1/2" rounds and lay them on a piece of foil. I broiled them in the toaster oven until they darkened a bit. I only did this because I wasn't sure if you could eat these without cooking or not.
2. Cut the bun almost the whole way through, open it and place it face down in the toaster oven and toast it.
3. Put everything inside. Come on, I don't need to tell you how to make a sub.

So yes, you can make this ahead and eat it at work, if you don't have a toaster oven and if you're not quite as anal about bread integrity as I am.

Here's a pic of the little tofu-lets in the toaster oven. And yes, my coworkers do think I'm a bit too intense about food.

Lainey-style Gumbo

That's right, I have a pretty sweet cutting mat at work.

Full disclosure: I've never had gumbo anywhere else but my own home. For all I know, this recipe tastes NOTHING like the real deal. But it's loosely based on a gumbo recipe I found online, that also mentioned that everyone's gumbo is different, depending on the ingredients you like to use. So I'm going for it.

Call it what you like, it's definitely tasty. So here we go!

Ingredients: 

1/3 cup flour

1/3 cup oil

1 large onion, diced

5 garlic cloves, minced

1 cup veggies (I used a turnip)

3 bay leaves

1/3 tsp cayenne pepper

1/2 tsp smoked paprika

6 sausages (I used chorizo), sliced into rounds

1 can black beans, drained and rinsed (but use whatever beans you like)

3 cups or so chicken stock

1 can/jar diced tomatoes

Let's do it!

1. Heat up a soup pot with oil until it moves around the pot really quickly if you tip it. Add flour and whisk/stir with a wooden spoon for at least 25 minutes in low heat until it gets nice and dark. This is the roux that will thicken the gumbo.
2. Add all veggies into the pot and stir until onions are translucent. 
3. Add spices.
4. Add sausage and let them cook in the bottom of the pan for a few minutes.
5. Add beans, tomatoes and enough chicken stock to cover everything. Bring to a boil and let simmer for an hour or so.
6. Serve over rice.

Makes about 6 servings.

Easy? So easy. Yummy? SO YUMMY.