cheater's pho

After weeks of gorgeous summer-like weather, it rained today!* Grrr. Cold, gloomy, it puts me in the mood for a nice, hot soup, so I made some pho (the cheater's version).

This recipe is faaaar from authentic but it's still tastes good and it's MUCH faster, so I'm calling it "cheater's pho". Authentic pho takes hours of simmering beef bones and spices and then ideally refrigerating overnight to make fat removal easier.

I usually don't like to go out to by stuff for one particular dish, so my garnishes aren't traditional either, but they are what I had in the fridge/pantry already. Typically, your garnishes should include thinly sliced onions, bean sprouts, mint, lime, cilantro, and thinly sliced rare beef (or meatballs or beef tendon, etc).

*Note: I started this post a while ago and now the weather is back to being sunny and gorgeous. Yay!

Ingredients: Soup -
- 1 can of beef broth (or chicken broth if you want to make pho ga - chicken pho)
- 1/2 onion quartered (and a few thin slices set aside to add into the noodles)
- 1 star anise
- 5-10 thin slices of ginger
- a pinch of cinnamon
- 5-10 coriander seeds
Noodles -
- 1.5 cups of thick, flat rice stick noodles
Garnish -
- 4 slices of roast beef (because it was the closest thing I had to rare steak in the house)
- a handful of spinach (becuase I had none of the proper veggies)
- 2 thin slices of onion

Directions:
- Boil all the broth ingredients for ~10 minutes to extract all the flavors. The longer the better, but at least 10 minutes.
- Boil the noodles according to the package directions.
- Strain the broth.
- Put everything in a bowl - broth, noodles, garnishes into a bowl and slurp it up!