Taiwanese Beef... Noodle?

So today is beef noodle day! This is not a kitchen experiment because I have made this a few times and I don't fail it up (any more). So the ingredients are:
Beef (Briskets work really well, any tender part of the beef is good. You can also use tripes, tendons, etc. if you feel up to it.), carrots, daikon, tomato, onion, ginger, garlic, star anise, black pepper, chilli peppers, rock sugar, soy sauce, a little bit of vegetable oil, and water. All the vegetables are optional, but they add to the sweetness of the broth. All the spices are recommended, unless you are strongly adverse to any of them (like if you are a vampire).

So all you do is put a little bit of vegetable oil in the pan, infuse the flavour of the spices in to the hot oil, then start to brown your beef. After browning the meats you put everything into a big pot, then you can start cooking. The soy sauce to water ratio is about 1:3, add enough so most of the ingredients are submerged in the water-soy sauce mixture. Rock sugar is optional but I tend to prefer sweeter broth since anything braised in soy sauce can be very salty.
Cooking takes about 70-90 minutes depending on how tender you want the meat to be (taste test is always the fun part of cooking), or 30-40 minuties in a pressure cooker (fun!). Don't worry about the saltiness of the broth because you want to flavour to cook into the meat. You can always add hot water to your broth when you are actually drinking it. Just served over noodles with plenty of broth and some nice green vegetables, and you have a delicious bowl of Taiwanese Beef Noodle!

I know I know, this doesn't look like noodles. I forgot to take a photo of the finished product (or the cooking process actually). But if you thicken the broth with corn starch and serve it over rice, it becomes a great plate of Braised Beef on Rice. To top the rice I added some chopped up green onion and cilantro. Also some pickled mustard greens are great to add some acidity to cut the richness of the soup (chop up your pickle mustard green and stir fry with over some chilli pepper, spinkle in some sugar after you turn off the heat). If you don't have pickled mustard green (which you can find in anywhere including Superstore), a bit of white vinegar always does the trick. Oh! don't forget some garlic-chilli sauce on top to add a little kick.

So here is it... yum~