Cooking With TechyDad: Quick Faux Pho

Cooking, Food, Photos

A few weeks ago, I got to try pho for the first time.  The first thing I thought about it was: I love this!  The second thing I thought was: I’m going to have to try to replicate this.  Unfortunately, all the pho recipes I found online were highly complex.  They required too much time and effort for me.  In addition, they required ingredients that would be difficult for me to find.  (Especially since I keep a kosher kitchen.)

Luckily, while browsing the supermarket shelves, I stumbled upon Pacific Foods’ mushroom broth.  Now pho isn’t usually made with a mushroom broth, but the vegetarian pho recipes I read mentioned cooking the broth with mushrooms before straining them (and some of the other ingredients) out.

I decided to come up with a quick and easy pho recipe.  Now, I know this isn’t traditional pho.  That’s why I like calling it Faux Pho.  (That and I’m a big fan of alliteration thanks to years of watching Good Eats with Alton Brown.)

First, we start with our ingredients:

ingredients

For the record, that’s 1 package of broccoli florets (around 12 oz), 2 packages of mushroom broth (64 fluid oz total), rice noodles (16oz), snow peas (about a big handful), and onions.  (In my case, I selected 2 small Vidalia onions thinking they’re sweeter and my kids might be more likely to eat them.)

First, I cooked the rice noodles according to the package directions (boil water, toss in noodles, cook for 4-5 minutes, drain and rinse),

rice-noodles

Next, I trimmed the snow peas, sliced the onions into rings, and then sliced those rings in half.  Quick tip: to avoid the "onion cry", freeze your onions for a bit before slicing.  Not so much that you’re trying to cut into a frozen-solid onion, mind you, but just enough that the enzymes that make you cry don’t get released as much.

onions-chopped

After that, I sautéed the onions in a little olive oil.  (I remade this yesterday and added some garlic too just because everything tastes better when cooked with garlic.)

onions-cooking

When the onions began to caramelize, I tossed in the broth and increased the heat.

onions-and-broth

After the broth began to boil, I turned the heat down and tossed in the broccoli.

broccoli-added

Two minutes later, I tossed in the snow peas.

snow-peas-added

A minute later, I removed the soup from the heat entirely and pho was ready to be served.

pho-cooked

To assemble the pho, first put some rice noodles in a bowl.

noodles-in-bowl

Next, add some veggies from the soup pot.

add-in-veggies

Finally, top off with broth.

pho-finale

Serve with hoisin sauce and/or Sriracha sauce or neither if you prefer.  You could also toss some bean sprouts and/or jalapenos in just before serving depending on how you like your pho.

So how does it taste?  Well, it won’t ever replace real pho, that’s for sure.  Don’t make this and expect that you’re going to get the same pho that you’d get in a good Vietnamese restaurant.  (If they made pho this way, they wouldn’t be a good Vietnamese restaurant.)  Still, it’s a decent facsimile especially if you only have a short time to prepare dinner, are craving some pho, and can’t go to a Vietnamese restaurant to get some.

Blog Schedule

Blogging

For the longest time, I’ve published blog posts on a Monday – Friday schedule.  I’ve found some drawbacks, however.  There are days when I struggle on what to write about.  Other days, I’ll be up until well past midnight working on blog posts.  It’s gotten to the point that I don’t have much time for anything else.

I definitely don’t want to stop blogging, but I just can’t keep up this every weekday post schedule.  Plenty of bloggers post on weekly schedules or even less.  After giving it a lot of thought, I’ve decided to cut my schedule back for awhile.  I’m going to only post on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

This should give me some extra time to work on other projects and avoid bloggy burnout.

How often do you think someone should post to their blog?

A Fun Game of Nuclear War

Games

Last Saturday, NHL and I played a game of Nuclear War with each other.  He launched missiles at me, I retaliated, millions were killed.  A fun time was had by all.  Of course, I’m not referring to actual war, but to the card game by Flying Buffalo named Nuclear War.

I was introduced to Nuclear War by a co-worker years ago.  We played a few games together and she even gave me a few cards (since she had so many).  I purchased some more and played a bit.  However, I didn’t have too many people that shared my interest and so the game wound up packed away.

Recently, I realized that NHL might be old enough to play the game with me.  Moreover, he’s shown himself to be just the kind of geek-in-training to enjoy this kind of card game.  So, after some obsessive searching to find just where I put the cards so long ago, I found some time to play with NHL.

The basic concept of the game is that each player represents a country.  Each player gets a series of cards representing their population and another series of cards representing their weaponry (along with propaganda and other cards with special abilities).  As players put their cards down and play them, they might convince members of the opposing country to defect to their country.  They might wreck havoc with the opposing country’s defense/offense.  Or, they might just drop a big missile on the other country and wipe out some of the population.

Each time a missile is dropped, dice are rolled to determine just how much carnage resulted.  Was the missile a dud?  Did it kill the number of people that the card says it killed?  (Missiles and warheads come with differing megaton ratings which means differing numbers of people killed.)  Or did the attacking player get lucky and double the damage?  Once the dice are rolled, a special six-sided die can be rolled.  This can either nullify the damage, worsen it, or even make the damage happen to the attacking country instead.  It’s a risk that makes the game more entertaining.  Do you stay with 3 million killed or roll the die and try for more?

To be perfectly fair, we didn’t play the game "properly."  I couldn’t remember all of the rules, the printed materials I had online didn’t have key points, and I was offline for Shabbat so I couldn’t just look them up online.  So we made the best of it and altered our play as I remembered items or made mental notes to play any second game with the remembered rules.  (I’ve since found the rules online and plan on printing them out to keep with the game.)  We also played with cards face up instead of face down so I could help NHL in his first game.  I made sure to play as if I couldn’t see his cards, though.

In the end, NHL beat me.  He obtained a bomber which dropped bomb after bomb on me.  Meanwhile, my bombs kept going dud or, worse, wound up hitting my own population.  After he launched a stealth bomber with a 100 megaton warhead at me, it was all but over.  One final missile finished me off.

This is usually where Nuclear War players can have "final retaliation."  They can put all of the missiles in their hand into play in one last chance for revenge.  It can kill off players who then launch their own final retaliations leading to no winners.  In my case, though, I only had 2 missiles at my disposal and they were weak ones.  Not nearly enough to eliminate NHL’s people.

This might seem like a violent game, but the carnage is very abstracted.  You "make change" of population cards the way one might make change of Monopoly money.  The game also teaches valuable skills such as planning (do I use my propaganda cards before anyone launches a missile – since they’re useless after – or do I launch missiles first to stop others from using propaganda on me?) and risk taking (do I roll the "extra damage die" to get more casualties even though I’m risking the ones I already have?).  It can even teach how nuclear conflict might not quite be the best way to resolve real life conflicts (see Final Retaliation).  It’s definitely a fun game and I can’t wait to play more games with him.  Maybe I’ll even beat him this time.

What card/board games do you play with your kids?

Three Geeky Toys I Love And One I Don’t

Geeky Pursuits, Toys

Part of the fun of being a geek is seeing the various toys that tap into your interests.  Recently, I saw a few toys that tapped into my inner geek.

First, was a Lego set.  I’ve seen sets like these before.  You get the pieces and instructions to build three different items with the same bricks.  In this case, you can build a hawk, then turn it into a beaver, and then turn it into a scorpion.  The geek in me loves the idea of building so many things and the frugal shopper in me sees a 3-in-1 set as a bargain.

lego

Next up was a pair of Doctor Who items.  A 50th Anniversary game of Doctor Who and a set of Doctor figurines.  The latter came in a "TARDIS" box with information on each doctor and with one figure for each doctor.

monopoly the-doctors

Lastly, there was one toy I didn’t want.  I love superheroes, but this toy just struck me as wrong.

superman

Superman on a plane?  Superman can fly.  Why would he need a plane?  This is almost as bad as the Superman Motorcycle that I saw recently as well.  ("I could fly to the crime in progress faster than a speeding bullet, but I think I’ll take my motorcycle instead and drive there at 45mph!")  This just strikes me as falling into the "needlessly commercialized toy" category and not the "cool geek toy" category.

Happy Birthday JSL!

Birthday, JSL

JSL-Turns-SixToday would have been JSL’s birthday, but we cancelled it.  You see, he’s growing up too quickly.  We decided we liked 5-year-old JSL too much to give him up.  So we’re hitting the pause button and he’s staying 5 forever.

Rats, I seem to have misplaced the pause button. I know I had it here a second ago.

Well, it looks like JSL’s having his birthday after all.

This past year has been a big one for JSL.  He started it off in pre-K and not knowing many of his letters.  He is ending it a Kindergartener (but soon to be first grader) who not only knows all of his letters, but knows how to read and write stories as well! He’s also become adept at simple addition as well.

JSL has shown that he’s got a huge imagination.  He can entertain himself for a long time playing with toys on the floor or magnets on the refrigerator.  He makes up storylines and characters and acts out what they do.

He’s also turning into quite the little geekling.  He loves Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, all things Disney, Transformers, playing on the computer/iPad, or reading books.  He also loves riding his bike around the block with me.  (I walk currently, but I’d love to get a bike to ride.)

I’m so proud of my not-so-little-anymore kid.  Happy birthday, JSL!

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