Wonton Glass Noodle Soup Shout Out for Chopstix in Salinas, California by Ruth Paget
I learned to love wonton noodle soup when my sister K. worked at the Ho-Ho Inn in Detroit, Michigan and later when I would order it for take-out from Mekong House in Chicago, Illinois after work when I ate at home in the Marina City apartment building next door.
Both the Ho-Ho Inn (Chinese) and Mekong House (Vietnamese) made delightful pork-scallion wontons soup. The dumpling wrapper was pinched together at the top to look like a little coin purse (so cute and delicious at the same time).
It is pretty safe to say that I am predisposed to like wonton soup even before tasting it, but I really did like the wonton glass noodle soup made by Chopstix in Salinas, California that I ordered for delivery recently. (I like having a reasonable priced delivery option. I would have used this all the time when I lived in snowy and icy Chicago).
The bottom bowl in the delivery kits was halfway full of transparent, glass noodles, which are usually made of mung beans. On top of these, Chopstix mounded up layers of steamed vegetables: broccoli florets, mushroom caps, slices of Napa cabbage, half moon slices of zucchini, thin slices of carrots with zigzag edges, and a few small slices of chopped onion.
Over these vegetables and noodles, you use the second container of broth and wontons to pour over the pork-scallions wontons, shrimp halves, shredded chicken breast, and broth. For a large container of soup, there were easily three pours of soup to go over the noodles and vegetables.
The broth itself tastes of onion, cilantro, and salt with the combined stocks of pork, chicken, and shrimp. I love flavorful, nutrient-rich stocks like these. Shrimp broth, for example, has calcium, selenium, protein, and antioxidants in it.
For a robust comfort food soup, wonton glass noodle soup with vegetables at Chopstix in Salinas, California is pretty hard to beat.
By Ruth Paget, author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
