Lovin’ Lena

A Damn Good Bowl of Soup at Pho Lena

My first experience at Pho Lena was in 2008, shortly after the space was vacated by the Hen (if you’ve been in Anchorage for a while you know what I’m talking about).  I ordered some sort of Thai chicken curry because I didn’t know any better and hadn’t realized yet how wonderful Vietnamese and Lao food are.  The best and worst things I can say about that curry was that I remember little else about it.

The next meal I had at Pho Lena was a bowl of a classic pho combo with tripe, thinly-sliced beef, and meatballs.  This was in the course of a personal quest to identify the best bowl of pho in Anchorage.  Unfortunately, the bowl I had at Pho Lena was not even in my top three in town (number one for me is currently Pho Vietnam on Denali Street).  As a result, I didn’t visit this restaurant again for another couple years

A Long Way of Saying We Made Fried Chicken and it was Bitching

The Boring Background Bit

There were several factors that came together to result in me cooking fried chicken (not a meal I would commonly cook or order out) on Sunday night.  The first being that, based on the advice of Bittman and Ruhlman, I started making my own poultry stock this past winter.  The impact that homemade stock has had on my cooking is so profound, that I vowed to never use store-bought chicken stock again.  The main hurdle with this has been procuring chicken carcasses with which to make said stock (this is actually a separate topic that I would like to expand on later; suffice it to say, I’m roasting a lot more chickens these days than I used to, often for the primary reason I’m in need of stock).  I used up my last bit of stock last week making some risotto, so this weekend I was once again looking for a reason to cook chicken.

Noodle Soup for Breakfast

I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but there are an AWFUL LOT of food blogs out there.  There are food blogs with gorgeous, professional quality photography, blogs that document impressive make-everything-from-scratch foodie lifestyles, and blogs that beautifully illustrate and explain how to make the type of food that makes you swell with pride when you pull it off.  There are blogs devoted to virtually every genre of food you can imagine, blogs dedicated to dealing with dietary restrictions, and blogs that offer helpful real-person-perspective restaurant reviews

So what can I contribute that’s new or unique?  I’m not a great cook, and I’m definitely not a great photographer.  I’m not much of a writer at all.  I don’t have a particularly refined palette, nor am I particularly knowledgeable about food in general or some foodie niche in particular.