Receipe Weekend: Noodle Soup Recipes, Techniques, Obsession by Ken Albala

Disclosure / Disclaimer: I received this ebook free of charge,from University of Illinois press, via Netgalley, for blog review purposes on this blog. No compensation, monetary or in kind, has been received or implied for this post. Nor was I told how to post about it,  all opinions are my own. 

Today is Chinese New Year, 
so it only makes sense that our recipe for the day comes 
from a book that celebrates Asian inspired cuisine!

Synopsis:

Every day, noodle shops around the globe ladle out quick meals that fuel our go-go lives. But Ken Albala has a mission: to get YOU in the kitchen making noodle soup. This primer offers the recipes and techniques for mastering quick-slurper staples and luxurious from-scratch feasts. Albala made a different noodle soup every day for two years. His obsession yielded all you need to know about making stock bases, using dried or fresh noodles, and choosing from a huge variety of garnishes, flavorings, and accompaniments. He lays out innovative techniques for mixing and matching bases and noodles with grains, vegetables, and other ingredients drawn from an international array of cuisines. In addition to recipes both cutting edge and classic, Alabala describes new soup discoveries he created along the way. There's advice on utensils, cooking tools, and the oft-overlooked necessity of matching a soup to the proper bowl. Finally, he sprinkles in charming historical details that cover everything from ancient Chinese millet noodles to that off-brand Malaysian ramen at the back of the ethnic grocery store. Filled with more than seventy color photos and one hundred recipes, A World of Noodle Soup is an indispensable guide for cooking, eating, and loving a universal favorite.

Review:

Ever thought to make noodles out of potato chips? With this book, you will not only learn how to do that, but learn to make your own stock easily and better than anything you can buy in the store! From there ken takes you around the world and shares different 'noodle soup' based recipe. Some may seem familiar, like Minestrone or Ramen. Others might seem off, but the recipes will intrigue you! I was thrilled to see a recipe for Pansit, a Phillipine dish, that we had lost a recipe for, that an old friend had given us eons ago, as it was very close to that recipe! Now we can make it again! If you are homeschooling and want to bring in a culture lesson for different geography regions or countries, this book could be a good way to not only get kids cooking, but enjoying simple noodle dishes! Most of the recipes are similar in featuring a base stock, base meat and veggies. It's the added ingredients that make the dishes unique to the locales. It's a fun book and we highly recommend it!

Recipe:

Here's a local dish, perfect for late night eating, from the book!

About the Author:

Ken Albala is a professor of history and food studies at the University of the Pacific. He is author of Three World Cuisines: Italian, Mexican, Chinese and coauthor of The Lost Art of Real Cooking: Rediscovering the Pleasures of Traditional Food, One Recipe at a Time . He blogs at kenalbala.blogspot.com.