I've been wanting to try out WanderingChopstick's recipe for Mi Vit Tiem Chay (vegetarian five-spice duck and bamboo shoot soup with egg noodles) for a while now. A few weeks ago I asked the hubby to especially take me to the San Gabriel's market to buy the mock duck :-) hehhe the cans come in smaller than I thought, so I bought two. I also picked up the dried bamboo shoots. These have been sitting in my kitchen cabinet for a couple weeks, but I just haven't had a chance to make them.
Last week with the cold raining weather and all, it just seemed like a perfect time to make noodles for slurping dinner.
I didn't follow W.C.'s recipe axactly (well, you can read my post on my cooking philosophy, you'll see that I'm quite informal when it comes to cooking measurements). Anyways, I used
+ 2 cans of mock duck meats.
+ 1 package of dried bamboo.
+ 10 fresh shitake mushrooms.
Turned out it was a bit too much bamboo and mushrooms for our pots....but we both liked lots of mock ducks the way it was. So for next time, i'll scale down my bamboo and mushroom, other than that everything else seemed perfectly good. For vegetable and garnishes, I had beansprouts, watercrest, cilantro and green onion, and a little bit of siracha chili sauce gave it that spicy touch which helped bring out the spiciness of fivespice and ginger in the broth.
The hubbie asked why didn't I use real duck ? Um....I answered, well...b/c it's a vegetarian version! But I guess the truth is I never realy care for real duck that much, a mock duck version is perfectly fine for me. Hubbie liked the Chinese crispy duck for the greasy crispy skin, but other than that I guess he doesn't care much for a simmered duck in a noodle broth that much either. So yeah, this recipe is good for us, satisfied, I say two thumbs up !! Thanks W.C. !
3 comments:
Hi Trang,
Very interesting for this recipe. I really like hot soup. Yumm...
Tell hubby that's b/c real duck takes a bit more work. Marinating the meat, searing it, and cooking it for much longer. You could sub with roast duck too, but it's not quite the same.
I'll probably do a meat version at some point, but I like to keep my meat and vegetarian recipes separate. That's partly because I have some vegetarian readers and also because the preparations for vegetarian and meats are different.
Anyway, thanks for trying out the recipe. I'm glad you liked it. I believe recipes serve as a basic framework but everyone makes their own adjustments.
I'm not much of a duck fan either, so I understand what you mean about duck in soup.
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