Lots of folks here in Northern California are celebrating Lunar New Year. Since we are a family who likes to share in the celebrations of lots of cultures, we decide to make a holiday dinner of Asian treats. We started off with pot stickers. I cannot claim to have made them. The Ling Ling pork and vegetable pot stickers come in a frozen bag but I did have to follow directions and try to get them unstuck from the pan!

After our first course of pot stickers we completed cooking the Vietnamese soup, pho, with beef. I used a shortened recipe from Jet Tila of the Food Network. We started by enhancing some beef stock with spices, onions, ginger, and fish sauce. When the stock has cooked for a bit you sieve it and serve the soup with some cooked rice noodles, jalapeño, onion slices, bean sprouts, cilantro, basil, and some very thinly sliced beef. We took a short cut and used some rare beef sliced from the deli.

Here’s a link to Jet Tila’s recipe in case you would like to try making it.

Here’s a picture of how ours turned out. We had too many accompaniments for the amount of broth. Next time we will double the amount of beef broth.

We had fun trying some dishes that we don’t normally make. It was also pretty delicious!