Fish Ball Soup

Another vaguely Asian dish (Chinese or Vietnamese depending on what you put in it), this is pretty easy to throw together when you want to make something really good, but you’re too lazy or pressed for time to do anything complicated.

Ingredients:

• Fish sauce – this is the primary flavor in the broth so in this case it is definitely NOT optional.

• Soy sauce

• Rice vinegar or white vinegar

• 6 – 8 scallions, chopped

• Half an onion, sliced

• Vermicelli rice noodles

• Frozen fish balls – my nearby Asian grocery store has a freezer with at least 10 different kinds of these, if not more. If you’re not familiar with them, they’re just pulverized white fish paste formed into balls. They’re going to taste pretty similar to imitation crab, since that is basically the same thing formed into a different shape. You can make them yourself if you have a food processor, but then your kitchen is going to smell like fish for the rest of your life and do you really want to live like that?

• Broth base – I used chicken stock this time because I had a jar and I needed to use it before it went off. It’s good that way, however, a fish based broth might complement the dish better, since the broth is going to pick up most of its other flavor from the fish balls and the fish sauce. Just using water is also not a bad idea if you want it to be more subtle. I thought about using dashi, but you don’t usually see dashi and fish sauce in the same recipe (I think) so I was worried they wouldn’t taste right together. But it might work, who knows?

• Chili flakes and black pepper for spice.

• Half a can of anchovies, chopped into tiny tiny pieces.

Directions:

Cook the rice noodles in a different pot than you are planning to make the soup in. That’s right, this is a two pot recipe. Why, you ask? It’s all going to be soup anyway, right? Here are a couple reasons:

1. Rice noodles are INSANELY starchy. If you try to cook them directly in your soup, they will get cooked just fine, but your broth will be HORRIBLE and if you are serving it to someone you love for dinner they will DUMP YOU and you’ll NEVER GET LAID and you won’t even be able to jack off later because the soup is so bad you CAN’T EVEN GET IT UP ANYMORE.

2. Rice noodles glue themselves to stainless steel worse than any food I have ever seen, even when you’re boiling them in plenty of water, so probably whatever you cook them in is going to need to be retired to soak for the evening. Have a clean pot ready for the soup in case this happens, because it’s probably going to.

The rice noodles should have cooking directions on them but this should work in general for regular, dry vermicelli:

• Boil in water for 15 minutes.

• Drain in a colander. Run cold water over the noodles for a couple minutes until you can touch them with your hands.

• Put a little olive oil or vegetable oil on top of the noodles then mix it in with your hands so it gets on all the noodles. This will keep them from forming one massive noodle ball while you’re cooking.

Heat some olive oil in a pot over medium heat. Add the onion, black pepper, chili flakes, and anchovies and saute them for a little while. This step isn’t typical for this kind of soup, so at this point, you might be questioning whether I know what I’m doing. I don’t, but what I do know is that plenty of recipes for soupy Asian dishes on the internet don’t saute onions at all because that’s just not how they do shit over there, but I’ve tried it, and I don’t like the ultra powerful in your face onion flavor you get by just chucking them directly in the soup. Your mileage may vary, feel free to skip this entire step if you don’t think it’s worth a shit.

Add the broth base. If you decided to use chicken stock, like I did, you’ll want to water it down some. You don’t want this to come out tasting like chicken soup. It’s preferable in this dish if the broth is watery, it will pick up its flavor from the other stuff in it.

Add about 1 tbsp each of soy sauce and fish sauce, and about half that amount of rice vinegar. Also add the fish balls and the scallions. Bring it to a boil and cook it for about 12 minutes.

Add some noodles to a bowl and dump everything else in after. Pretty easy.