Sweet and Salty Chicken and Rice Soup

I love Asian broth-based noodle soups of all kinds: ramen, pho, Thai roasted duck noodle soup. Sadly, living here in wine country (aka farmland), access to the ingredients I need to make those soups is tough. We have got to bite the bullet and drive in to Portland (or Beaverton, more likely) for a supply mission. I love living out here in the country, but....

The other day, I wanted such a soup so badly that I decided to improvise with what I had on hand.

Caramelizing Shallots and Ginger

From classic pho technique, I wanted to get color in the soup by caramelizing some shallots. In Vietnamese technique, you would char an onion and some garlic to get color. After the shallots colored darker than you see above, I added a quart or so of chicken stock.

While I wanted noodles in my soup, there's no source for them here and none in the pantry, so I added rice and let it cook until soft, about 20 minutes.

Similar to Thai roasted duck noodle soup, I wanted a sweet-salty component that I would normally get from balancing fish sauce and palm sugar. Having no palm sugar, I used agave syrup with fish sauce. It worked really well as a substitute.

I love soft-boiled eggs in ramen, so at the last minute, I poached a couple of eggs right in the soup. 

Sweet and Salty Chicken and Rice Soup
with Poached Egg, Green Onion, and Cilantro

This turned out to be a really great soup with all the flavors I wanted, even though I had almost none of the ingredients that I wanted. Necessity, as they say, provided us with a soup that I want to remember.