Vietnamese crab noodle soup

This is from the dinner I hosted at my house a while ago for the Vietnamese student group on campus. The dishes were (from the top left): veggie skewers, fried tofu, crab noodle soup, rice, salsa chicken, bacon wrapped asparagus and fried meatballs.

The only thing that was truly Vietnamese was the "bun rieu cua" (crab noodle soup). I was quite proud of it because it turned out almost like the real thing I get back home.

That's me putting mashed tomatoes into the soup. The white thing in the other pot is rice vermicelli.

And the people who ate:

Midnight snack

Food:
Like Becca mentioned in her blog post, I stress cook. The actual soup was pretty simple (I put a short rib with two leeks, an onion, three cloves of garlic, half a can of corn, half a cup of brown rice, a dollop of reserved beef fat from the last time I made short ribs, spices, salt and pepper, and a bunch of water. That part took 10 minutes. After three hours, I chopped the beef into small chunks and mixed it back in), but there's an art to stress-cooking. Briefly, these are the rules:

1. Make something delicious that you wouldn't feel guilty eating, because you're probably feeling guilty already about cooking instead of working.
2. Only use what you have in your house already, because leaving the house will cross the threshold between benevolent procrastination (much-needed break) and harmful procrastination (waste time and cause you more stress later).
3. The recipe should be low-maintenance (for example, risotto is not a good stress cooking project because it requires too much attention)
4. The recipe should be fool-proof. Soup is good because you can add anything you want to it and it will always be delicious (case-in-point: rock soup), so it's stress-free to make. That is not the case with souffles.

and The People Who Ate It: