Dining Out: Pho 501

So I had to work all day Saturday, but that cloud had a silver lining: It gave me an opportunity to explore some of the culinary delights of East Hartford, where my place of employment is located. For lunch I checked out longtime local favorite Augie & Ray's Drive In, and for dinner, I finally made it to Pho 501, a spot I'd been longing to try for some time. A full report on Augie & Ray's will have to wait, because I was eating alone, and sampling just one item on their menu is insufficient data.


But no such problem exists at Pho 501, which appears to only serve one item — the Vietnamese noodle soup called pho (forgive me for lacking the HTML-fu to render it in proper characters) — and only one variety of it on any given day. Saturday, it was spicy beef, and it was delicious. I must say, this was only my second visit to a pho shop, and the two could not have been more different: The other shop, Pho 75 in Arlington, Virginia, which I visited with some Pharyngula friends last August while on business in Alexandria, boasted a huge range of choices, many of which seemed to differ only in ways too subtle for this non-Vietnamese diner to quite comprehend, and accompanied by a literally bewildering array of fresh herbs, chiles, and sprouts. It was all very intimidating; enough to make me google "how to eat pho." It seems I had guessed right, for the most part.

Pho 501, by comparison, is brutally simple: The only choice to make is whether to order a small, medium, or large bowl (I ordered medium, and it was the perfect size for me, as a Gentleman of Substance®), and the accompaniments to my meal were limited to a plate full of fat, crisp raw bean sprouts and beautifully fragrant Thai basil, plus a wedge of lime. As one online reviewer put it, Pho 501 serves a "clean" broth, without the unctuous tripe and tendon that I've seen Anthony Bourdain wax orgasmic over on more than one TV show... but that suits me fine. The broth was rich, deep, and flavorful, and the noodles and beef perfectly cooked. Gentle applications of sriracha and hoisin, a squeeze of lime, and periodic additions of shredded basil and sprouts and... mmmm, heaven! I know I'll be back soon!

A word to the wise, though: This is a small place, and even for a late-ish Saturday dinner, the dining room was nearly completely full. Many times I've driven past and seen people lined up outside the door. A fellow diner Saturday told me that the chicken pho served on Sundays is especially popular, and often sells out. "You have to call ahead and reserve a bowl," he told me, "Not a table; a bowl."

Apres Soup

So, even though I tried to halve the recipe, the batch of butternut squash soup I made yesterday was vastly more than my Lovely Bride® could possibly eat. Even after I gave a bunch to the very helpful neighbor who helped dig me out of the snowpocalypse, and accounting for the pint I plan to take to work for lunch tomorrow, there was still plenty left over.

So naturally I fired up the thrift-shop Seal-a-Meal, and sealed up and froze three pint bags, each of which should be one full meal or two side portions. It feels good to be filling the chest freezer with home-cooked meals for the future!

In addition, while seeding and scraping the butternut squash yesterday, I noticed that the seeds looked like slightly smaller pumpkin seeds. This should've been no surprise to me; butternuts are so similar to pumpkins that Alton Brown suggested them as a potential main ingredient for pumpkin pie on a recent episode of Good Eats. So I reserved the seeds and toasted them (~25 minutes @325°F), tossed in a tiny bit of canola oil, some curry powder, pepper, and kosher salt. Just like pumpkin seeds, they make a great snack... and just like pumpkin seeds, I couldn't stop myself from eating them all!

It Cooks!

It was a snow day today in Vernon, CT, as a consequence of our snowpocalypse, and that made it a good day to cook. I took up the challenge by making a dish well suited for a snowbound winter day: curried butternut squash soup.

This is the soup I mentioned in a previous post, but I haven't reached my imagined nirvana of being able to make it up myself based just on a list of ingredients; I got a proper recipe from one of my Facebook friends. I'll post it here at some point, if I can get my friend's permission, but in the meantime, the ingredients include onion, curry powder, apples, orange juice, and (obviously) butternut squash. "Good size" ones, specifically.


I suspect I got a little overeager with the "good sized" business when I was shopping, because even though I was trying to halve the recipe, to cover the squash in the pot I ended up needing almost the same amount of stock as a full recipe. As a result, I think the onions and curry may have been somewhat less prominent flavors in the final product than intended...but no worries, the soup was absolutely delicious!

Making it was fun, too. There's something really wonderful about stirring a pot of simmering goodness while warm, spicy aromas fill the house. Of course, making home-made soup isn't exactly going to get me a feature in Food & Wine magazine; it's the sort of thing that people who cook do all the time... but of course, I'm not really a person who cooks yet; trying to become one is what this is all about. So forgive me if I take inappropriate, immoderate pride in some of the smallest things.

Speaking of which, my thrift-shop stick blender worked like a charm... and I take silly delight in that, too!