Lunch. Friday. 04/23/10.

One of Mr. Hawthorne's favorite soups is the Hot and Spicy Soup at China King in Kill Devil Hills. When we were doing our kitchen remodel, China King was our GO-TO place for takeout. I liken it to the McDonald's of Chinese fast food. The boys abhorred this soup. In fact, Middle Hawthorne would refer to it as "pig vomit" soup. Lovely visual for a food blog, n'est ce pas? Anyways, we would often call up the boys and ask them to stop by China King and bring back lunch or supper, with egg rolls and soups and all the packets of Duck Sauce, and Hot Mustard, and Soy Sauce. Middle Hawthorne would always comment, "Daddy, I asked them for the pig vomit soup and they knew exactly what I was talking about." So I give you Mr. Hawthorne's Pig Vom ... errr ... Hot and Spicy Soup.

We found the shiitake and enoki mushrooms on sale on the rack of rapidly rotting foods at Harris Teeter.

Mr. Hawthorne got to use his new gadget on the carrots.

Mushrooms, sliced celery, and carrots. I love sliced celery in broths. But I slice my celery differently. Long on the diagonal and bigger.

For this soup, Mr. Hawthorne would have liked to have used thin slices of pork. Now, I could have gone and pulled out a pork tenderloin from the freezer and shaved off some slices to add to the broth, but I didn't. I already had a grilled flat iron steak in the fridge, so Mr. Hawthorne thinly sliced the beef using one of my new favorite knives: Kiwi Knives From Thailand And thank you, Zzzadig, for recommending these to me. I don't endorse products on my blog but these knives are ridiculously sharp, lightweight, and inexpensive. I have the four in the picture. While I'm still not endorsing anything, I used to love my Magic Bullet. But I found something much superior - my Blue Ninja. The Ninja has two sets of double blades - one low and one higher. The bullet has only one double blade at the bottom. And the Ninja has two different sizes of cups. It's just what I wanted - something larger than the bullet but smaller than a regular sized blender.

I also had some shredded chicken bosoms from the other night.

Mr. Hawthorne wokked the carrots, celery and shrooms.

Just sweat 'em.

Mr. Hawthorne heated up a quart of chicken broth and added in about 1/3 cup rice vinegar.

About 4 TB sweet chili garlic sauce.

Maybe 2 tablespoons of soy sauce.

We still had some rice with Ro*Tel Tomatoes and Chilies that I made for the Chicken and Rice dish the other day.

Wokked veggies went in.

And that much chicken and beef.

Chick and beef into the pool.

Lastly, Mr. Hawthorne poured in a corn starch slurry. 1 TB cornstarch and 1 TB cold water. Stir to thicken. Now, one cannot have a proper Chinese-style soup without fried wontons. I would not presume to call what we made "Chinese" as we are not from China.

Mr. Hawthorne sliced some wonton wrappers into strips.

And fried 'em.

This wonderful broth is fogging up my lens.

It's hot. It's spicy. It's mushroomy. It's carroty. It's celeryy. It's wontony.

It's good.