There’s something so comforting about noodle soup. I’ve ranted more than enough about the wonders of pho’, the layer of fat, making the rich broth, browning or not browning bones, the hours of simmering, the straining, and the intensifying of flavour. I’ve also talked enough about my pasta maker and my new-found love of gluten-free flour blends.
So I’d had some fresh fusilli pasta sitting in my freezer along with a big container of home-made lamb broth for a few weeks. These were the practical things for this meal. The inspiration came from “Beyond the Great Wall”, whose recipes of the ethnic minorities of China include a whole lot of soups with noodles, made from big hunks of meat simmered down. A meal isn’t a meal without soup, and broth isn’t broth without a whole lot of long simmering. The above-pictured soup is very much not Chinese (fusilli?), but it is very much traditionally-made. I took the best broth I’d ever made (a day’s-worth of browning, simmering and reducing), brought it to a boil, and tossed in my frozen fusilli for a grand total of 5 minutes. It was so simple, so rich, so thick, and so meaty that it was filling but at the same time so comforting and slurpable that you really had to go slowly so you didn’t end up wishing you’d stopped about 10 minutes ago.
The point is, you should go make your own meat broth and either make or buy some very good pasta. Combine. Enjoy.
I always find it strange how inconsistent the prices of stock bones can be from location to location. Some butchers will give you copious pounds for practically nothing, while others (especially supermarkets) charge you per portion like you're buying osso bucco.
Still, bubbling stock is one of the smells that makes a home, like fresh-baked bread, to me, and few things in life are more satisfying to eat (not by itself, mind you… well, that too.)
I very much agree about the comforting homey-ness of boiling soup stock. I spent yesterday watching dogs gnaw at enormous bones, though, and it's kind of turning me off gnawing them myself.