Stewed pork ribs in chicken and dried honey dates soup

Simple and comforting home cooked meal.

I dont know why, but I have been feeling so dehydrated these days. I havent missed soups lately until now. So I bought 5 pieces of drumsticks to make clear soup, with the packet of dried yellow dates (I think its called "mut cho" in cantonese)I have in the pantry.

Ingredients
Chicken drumsticks
1 stalk of fennel
1 carrot
A dozen of golden/honey dates ("mut cho" in cantonese)
A pinch of salt

We use a le creuset cast iron pot (it seals all the flavours well).

Place chicken into the pot with cold water, enough to cover the chicken.
Turn heat on high.
When it starts to boil, remove the layer of white/grayish foam that emerged. This takes away the impurities of the meat which floats to the surface when boiling.
Put the rest of the ingredients into the boiling water.
Turn heat to lowest heat. Boil the chicken soup for 2 1/2 hours.

The finished clear soup was nice and sweet. The chicken was lovely, falling off its bones. We had it with soy sauce and fresh chilly, accompanied with plain steam rice, and fried choy sum with eshallots and garlic and a dash of oyster sauce.

With the leftover clear soup, with its sweetish flavour, we thought it would make a nice sort of Thai/Vietnamese noodle soup.

I added about:
5 star anise,
another fennel stalk,
1 chopped onion
a chopped tomato
a teaspoonsful of corn starch powder
and boiled the soup for about 45 minutes.

The corn starch powder makes the soup slightly thicker so that it will bind better onto my taiwanese noodles. The fennel stalk gives it a nice licorish taste which blends well with the star anise.

While the soup was simmering, I boiled some taiwanese noodle and blanched some lettuce and placed them onto a bowl. To keep the noodle separated I tossed it with a dash of sesame oil and tiny weeny bit of oyster sauce for flavouring. When the soup was ready, and the ingredients drained, I then poured it onto the bowl of noodles. I hesitated whether to put in some fesh basil leaves, but opted to leave it out, so that I can enjoy the pure simple sweet taste of the soup. As this was meant to be a fast food nite, we opened up a can of chinese stew pork ribs (Gulong brand), heat it up in the pot, and put the ribs on top of the noodles (minus the juice that comes with it in the can, as I didnt want it to change the flavour of the soup) I must say I enjoyed the soup very much. The soup was clear but tasty with the natural sweetness of all the fresh veg and dates.

The best way to describe it is to imagine a fusion between a taiwanese brisket soup noodle and a indochine beef soup noodle, just minus the beef :-)

Bon Appetit!