Chicken Soup, People, and Books for the Weekend

Also proof that I am a sucker for listicles.

My weekend promises to be exhausting, which is contrary to what I expect from my weekends, I will not lie. As a married and childless woman, I have a husband who is self sufficient enough to make himself pancakes for breakfast and keep himself busy with his lectures and rereadings of Dostoevsky and Vonnegut, until I’m up for the day. Plus, no random questions from children to answer sleepily either.

So, this is what I’m planning to do for the weekend.

The chicken soup

I mean, just LOOK at this soup.

The pho recipe that’s part of my repertoire is my Vietnamese colleague’s family recipe from Saigon. I always stress on the word traditional every time I talk about it. The recipe is that. But, like all well-loved recipes, over the years I have adapted it to suit my time constraints and ingredient availability. It’s now a pared down but a delicious and stupendously nourishing dish that we swear, especially during the winter months.

Recipe for my faux pho

You’ll need a deep-bottomed soup or stock pot for this. Take a whole bunch of spring onions (4-5 at medium ones at least) and chop them. Saute them on medium heat in 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil till they’r fragrant. You don’t want them to colour. Add 1 tablespoon each of minced or paste garlic and paste ginger. Stir them in with 2 tablespoons of rice wine vinegar (white vinegar or apple cider vinegar will do in a pinch). Saute for a minute more. Now comes the magic ingredient — fish sauce. Add in 1/4 cup of fish sauce into the onion mix (4 tablespoons). It’ll stink up the kitchen but its liquid gold so just you wait. Saute for a minute more till the mixture is a bit saucy. Add in 1 whole chicken. We like using a large corn fed one, but it really depends on the size of your pot. Add enough boiling water to just cover the chicken so that either its submerged by a centimetre or peeking over the top of the water level by a centimetre. You could also use chicken stock, of course, just ensure its low sodium or salt-less. Leave room at the top of the pot so that the soup doesn’t spill when it boils. Add salt, to taste. Cover and cook on medium low heat till the juices run clear when the chicken is pierced. For a large chicken, it takes about 45 minutes on gas mark 5 or 6.

Take the chicken out of the soup and portion it. Serve with flat rice noodles (the ones that are used for either ramen, pho or pad thai). Ladle the soup on top of the chicken and noodles. Top with soy sauce, sesame seed oil, a squeeze of lemon or lime (very important!). Other toppings may include chilli crisp, toasted sesame seeds, chopped green ends of spring onions, finely chopped coriander, sliced red onions, beansprouts, mint leaves, toasted peanuts or black bean paste.

The people

You may already be on to Miranda July’s Substack but I wanted to add it to my record because who hasn’t been a fan of her since Roy Spivey (that one had something of a grip on me in my early 20s)

Anna Wharton’s piece on the trial of Dominique Pelicot, What Would A Woman Do To An Unconscious Man If She Thought No-One Would Find Out?, is brilliant.

Keeping track of American politics now is like watching a car crash but you can’t look away, but here’s Seth Abramson on Bluesky for an unabashed and critical eye on it.

The book

I have had New York Times critic Dwight Garner’s book, The Upstairs Delicatessen, on my TBR list ever since I knew the book was out and then came across the ever-brilliant Emmeline Cho recommending it on her channel. Eating and reading, reading about eating, and eating while reading. I mean, is this heaven?

And also, I’ve been supporting Thriftbooks and Bookshop over Amazon, which is now more important than ever. Get the book from Thriftbooks.

The to-do list

My new hyper-fixation is the Teddy Graham Latte trend I found on TikTok and I don’t care if I’m judged for it, so there! I’ll be making this multiple times this weekend, till I feel a cold coming on from all the ice in the middle of this dead English winter.

I am — are you listening? — I am sorting through the list of short stories I want to include in my short story collection! I feel like I should say more than just drop a plain “short story collection” in the middle of this, because this is quiet possibly the biggest news of my life thrown up in the last year. But I myself am a bit dizzy from what has been happening, so I will wait for a few moments before giving you the full deets.

Make the soup, get on Bluesky and read the book, people!