Jack is Cooking Some Kind of Beef Noodles (take II)

Well Hello Internet!

its been a long time.  almost a year since my last post!  don't worry i've still been eating cooking a lot!  but i've mainly been playing with old recipes and so didn't think i should post the same thing twice.  but since i've got this here website i figured i should probably start posting on it again!

So One dish that was really awesome that i made a while ago, (and took a picture of!) was this awesome beef noodle soup dish that i found in a magazine (Saveur).  I didn't exactly make what the recipe in the magazine said, i made my own thing out of it.

So here's what you'll need:

1 lb of beef - doesn't matter what cut, but its nice if it has bones in it.  i used a T-Bone steak, (which i am sorry to say had been in my freezer for too long, and had gotten a bit of Freezer burn on it.  it wouldn't have been good as a plain steak, but was perfect for this soup)

GROUP A
1/4 cup sake
2 teaspoons mixed pepper corns
2 cloves of garlic (smashed)
1/2 can crushed tomatoes
1 pod star anise
1/2 onion
2 dried red chillies
a bunch of ginger (like 2 inches)

GROUP B
1 teaspoon vinegar,
1  teaspoon soy sauce
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 tablespoon sesame oil

GROUP C
fresh spinach
fresh egg noodles - the really thin kind!
a green onion
sesame seeds

So First, cut up the steak into random sized chunks, and throw all the meat and the bones into a pot of water.  bring this to a boil, and then drain the water.  take the beef and the bones and put it back in the pot with everything from the list in Group A.  cover this with water, and bring it back to a boil.  let it simmer for about an hour.

Then! after one hour, remove the beef from this stock and set it aside on a cutting board.  strain the liquid  so that you have a nice broth, and discard all the onions and ginger pieces, and whatever else may have been in the stock.  Cut the Beef into nice bite sized pieces.  you can now get rid of the bones, as their delicious goodness has been transferred into the stock.

Add everything from GROUP B (the soy sauce etc.) into the broth, and add the newly bite sized beef back into the broth.

In a separate pot, cook the noodles for their specified cooking time.  if they are fresh that will only be 2 minutes or so.  remove the noodles, and place them in the serving bowls.  SAVE THE WATER!
then cook (BLANCHE!) the spinach in the water.  remove the spinach from the water and put it into the bowls with the noodles.

Then take a Ladle, and ladle the nice broth over the noodles and spinach, making sure to get the good beef stuff into the bowls too.  garnish it with some Green Onions, and Sesame Seeds, and you have a Delicious Beef Noodle Soup Dish!

Heres what it looked like, PLUS the original picture from the magazine.

mmm mmm delicious!

P.S.   the original recipe which i adapted this from can be found here:
http://www.saveur.com/article/Recipes/Hong-Shao-Niu-Rou-Mian-Taiwanese-Beef-Noodle-Soup