as big as my arm.

This looks pretty unassuming. But it's something I'm going to keep making until I get tired of it or I can't find daikon anymore. This sounds familiar, I know.

I guess you'd call it chicken and daikon soup/stew. Basically chicken soup with carrot and daikon as the featured vegetables. But you dress it like pho, so: scallions, cilantro, mint, and a squeeze of lime if you want, followed by the appropriate amount of sriracha. You almost don't miss pho anymore.

Now we're making Elana's pumpkin bars. Nice to be cooking with the squawker again.

+++

UPDATE: By popular demand, more deets on the soup. I didn't include a recipe b/c this was basically an inefficient kind of improv thing.

What I did: I made a neutral but delicious chicken soup, with 4 liters of water, a whole chicken, onions, celery, and carrots, seasoned only with salt and black pepper. Maybe there was a clove of garlic. Oh and there were definitely 4 or 5 uncut chiles in there, the ones I think of as "Szechuan chiles", about the size of your pinky, dark red, not scarily hot. When the soup was done, I took the chicken out, ate half of it, shredded the rest and put it back in the soup.

That was Day 1. Day 2, I ate it as regular chicken soup.

Day 3, I had this big fucking daikon that needed using, so I cut half of it into cubes (I pickled the rest via Momofuku's recipe), probably 3 cups' worth, and added a little water to the leftover soup and simmered this new version of the soup for about 45 minutes, until the daikon was totally soft. Oh yeah, I added four more little carrots as well.

To bring this new version up to taste I used soy sauce instead of salt, maybe 2 tbsp, you could probably use fish sauce as another interesting variation. At this point, it's ready to go, served with plenty of chopped scallions, mint, and coriander. And the sriracha bottle.

Next time I try it I'll probably add some whole aromatics to the initial broth and remove them afterwards, I'm thinking lemongrass, ginger, turmeric, or galangal would all be welcome additions.

+++