the 'we miss pho' club

so my mom, in a mom-like quest, decided to bring pho soup spices with her to china because she'd heard through my sister my many laments about a lack of vietnamese food in shanghai. don't get any bay area kid started on how shitty vietnamese food is here - and we aren't even vietnamese - so addicted are we northern californians to our weekly pho lunches. and dinners. and saturday brunch. the only way to roll my ass out of bed on a saturday morning is with the promise of food, and good pho i will rise for. i will even shower.

we couldn't actually track down any beef bones for the broth until the last day of their visit, when my mom happened to wander into a hair salon for a wash 'n set that was owned by a fellow cantonese. they got to talking and he tipped her off to both an excellent nearby guangdong restaurant and a local butcher who sells beef.

when we finally located this 'butcher' i was a bit doubtful... he was completely passed out on his butcher block with one lone leg bone hanging on a meat hook behind him, and several empty seafood buckets in front of his shack. who sells beef AND seafood? as it turns out, cantos never lead other cantos astray, and he quickly whipped out an assortment of bones appropriate for soup, multiple strands of tendon, and several hunks of beef. despite lacking any proper tools (who says you can't beat a leg bone with a hammer?), we quickly made the guy's day by dropping over $10 USD on a ton of cow parts. beef in china is not cheap. and it's actually more like veal.

we spent part of their last day cheerfully lamenting the size of my soup pot (the bone stuck way out of the pot in some grisly jeffrey daumer way) and debating the wisdom of my mom's pho talents, browning the onion and ginger in my toaster oven, and taking turns sticking our faces into the pot.

today it was ready and i invited the girls over for dinner. one conference call, a huge thunderstorm, and a last-minute project later and it was just me and viv inhaling that distinctive anise-cinnamon-clove-meat broth smell that only fellow pho addicts understand as delicious. the approximations of the other ingredients were rough - the basil missing, the onions sliced too thickly, the bean sprouts overly mature - but the broth was there and right now i'm appreciating my mom and dad's thoughtfulness in lugging such a finely curated assortment of expat goodies for their kid.

thanks mom and dad.