French Fridays With Dorie: Spicy Vietnamese Chicken Noodle Soup

Or something like that.

I had a plan. The plan went something like this: I would take a day away from the freelance editing that has consumed the past week of my life and get something accomplished around the house. I would run errands — including grocery shopping, hunting and gathering what I needed to make the latest Dorie recipe and the next couple — and then cap off the day with yummy soup. What could go wrong?

Well, when I went to get into the car, I discovered that the battery was dead, so dead that I couldn’t even use the power door locks. That’s dead.

So, regroup. I found chicken breasts and stock in the freezer, and Tim helpfully stopped on his way home from work and picked up cilantro and limes and alfalfa sprouts (because he couldn’t find any bean sprouts) and egg spaghetti, which generously filled in for the Chinese egg noodles the recipe called for. I left out the ginger and chilies, but I’d have done that anyway.

We managed to eat by 7, which is pretty impressive any evening, let alone one so jury-rigged.

I ate the soup plain, and it was delicious. Tim added alfalfa sprouts and cilantro and hoisin sauce and extra fish sauce to his, and it was delicious. Ben was somewhere in the middle — and it was delicious.

The first thing Tim said after he tasted it was “Alex would love this.” That made me sad. But only for a few seconds, till I started eating my own soup.

Given our new avoidance of carbs, I think I would have liked more chicken and fewer noodles. But it was yummy — completely unexpectedly yummy, because as Alex will tell you, I don’t like all that weird Asian stuff.

And my horizons got just a little broader.