Noodle soup is as Asian as burgers are American. As a Chinese kid growing up in North America, I liked both of these foods, but I remember the particular challenges they brought me as well.

Crappy fast food burgers were generally not a problem, but a proper burger is just not engineered with tiny mouths in mind. The patty has to be thick in order to stay juicy and the toasted buns don't compress the way their low quality refined flour fast food counterparts do. Plus, proper burgers have a generous amount of veggies piled onto the patty, unlike the minimal-thin-as-possible "veggies" in fast food burgers. Added together, proper burgers are often taller than they are wide.

Noodle soup presented a whole other kind of problem for me. A proper noodle soup is served piping hot, and little me couldn't eat them so fast. What happened then, is that as I ate some noodles, the rest of the noodles would continue absorbing the broth and keep growing to refill the bowl. This conundrum often gave me anxiety inducing food treadmill flashbacks.

Of course, "too much food" is such a luxurious childhood trauma to have.

* This recipe is for 2 bowls of noodles.

Ingredients

• 1 pkg rice noodles
• 1 pkg shrimp balls
• 1 pkg tofu puffs -- I posted about baking these last time, but they are also amazing in soups because they absorb all the flavour!
• 1 carrot
• 1 stalk of celery
• 0.25 onion
• 1 slice of ginger
• 3 pieces of kombu
• 1 pkg instant dashi
• 2 tbsp soy sauce
• 1 tbsp fish sauce
• chopped green onions
• sesame oil

Method

• Chop the carrot, celery and onion into small-ish pieces.
• Add carrot, celery, onion, kombu and ginger into a pot with 2.5 noodle bowls full of water.

• Bring to a boil, add instant dashi and turn down to simmer for 20 minutes.
• Add soy sauce and fish sauce. Taste and adjust accordingly. You can turn off the heat now.

• Boil noodles in a separate pot until they are done. Don't cook the noodles in the broth, because it will make the broth all starchy.
• Drain the noodles and put them in the noodle bowls. Do this quickly before they become sticky.

• Boil the shrimp balls in the broth. Fresh shrimp balls are the best, but if you have frozen ones like I do, there's no need to defrost them first. The shrimp balls are done when they start floating.

• Place shrimp balls and tofu puffs on the rice noodles.

• Ladle the broth over the noodles until the bowl is filled.
• Finish with chopped green onions and a few squirts of sesame oil.

There are an infinite number of different noodle soups you can make. You can try this recipe also with egg noodles, buckwheat noodles, vermicelli, or even macaroni. You can use fish balls, beef balls, chicken balls, and also ingredients that don't have the word "ball" in them.

Have fun and enjoy!