Faux Pho

 "It smells like Mekong in here!"

In my eyes, this was a pretty good compliment and a fantastic accomplishment to hear from my husband when I got home from work, especially with minimal effort. To put it in context, Mekong is a local Vietnamese restaurant and is one of our favorite places to eat. It's become something of a Richmond institution and is actually better known for their beer than their food. Don't get me wrong though, their food is delicious - we've never been dissatisfied after a visit or after getting take out. Except for the one time I didn't check the bag when I picked up the take-out and didn't realize they had forgotten our crispy spring rolls until I got home. An amateur mistake. I think my husband almost shed a tear when that happened. It's still a bit of a sore subject.

Located in a small strip mall between a Latino market and a dance studio, Mekong is the kind of place you'd be likely to drive by without noticing, but it is absolutely worth a visit. It was just voted the Best Beer Bar in America by CraftBeer.com for the second year in a row. Both their beer and food menus are extensive and you really can't go wrong. Alright, you're probably thinking "What is this, a restaurant review?"...no, no it's not. So back to the reason for my tangent.

I was not this happy at the end of the game.

I recently came across a recipe for Korean-style short rib soup, which seemed awfully similar to pho, and we decided to give it a try for dinner this past Thursday (we again found ourselves out of town last weekend, celebrating our 1 year anniversary at the Ravens-Packers game, thus a mid-week crock-pot meal). As much as I enjoy having dinner ready whenever I'm ready to eat it on Sundays, I think I might enjoy having dinner ready when I get home from work even more. It can just be a little trickier to plan, but walking in the door and having our house smell like Mekong was well worth it.

The prep work for this soup was minimal, so I was able to get home at lunch time, throw everything together in the crock-pot, and be on my way back to work. The crock-pot part of this soup is really just the broth and meat, the rest comes later and you can pretty much make it however you want. We tweaked the recipe from Food Network just slightly:

Ingredients:

• 3-4lbs beef short ribs
• 4c low sodium chicken broth
• 1/3c soy sauce
• 1/4c sugar
• 1-2 teaspoons ground ginger
• 2 tablespoons red Thai garlic chili paste
• 2 tablespoons sesame oil
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 12oz package of rice sticks (these are easy to find in the supermarket Asian foods aisle)

For garnish:

• 1 carrot
• 1/2 cucumber
• cilantro
• lime wedges

Directions:

Place the short ribs in the crock-pot (leave the bones in for now)

Whisk the chicken broth, soy sauce, sugar, ground ginger, chili paste, sesame oil and garlic together in a large bowl. Pour the mixture over the ribs. Cover and cook on high for 6 hours.

About 30 minutes before serving, put the rice sticks in a large bowl and cover with hot water. Let soak for 30 minutes before transferring to serving bowls. At that point, the rice sticks should look like this:

Meanwhile, slice the carrot, cucumber and lime.

Transfer ribs to a cutting board to trim the fat and remove the meat from the bone. Skim any fat from the top of the broth in the crock-pot before adding the meat back to it.

Cover the rice sticks with the broth and meat from the crock-pot. Garnish as desired with carrot, cucumber, cilantro, lime and Sriracha or additional chili paste (if you're into that kind of spice).

Enjoy!



As you know, I'm not a fan of spice (I just can't handle it), but the amount of chili paste that goes in the broth adds a really good, unique flavor and is not too spicy. Of course if you want to add more to your bowl, you could make it pretty spicy. I didn't really know what to expect from this meal and it turned out to be SO. GOOD. We had just enough leftover for a third bowl.

Hers and his

We rarely have soup as our main dinner dish, but this soup was hearty enough to be the large part of our meal (and I just didn't want to stop eating it). We had it with a few pieces of warm, crusty bread (Billy Bread, a Richmond favorite) - perfect for a chilly October evening. I highly recommend giving this one a try!