Noodle Fu!

I learned to make this Cantonese dish when I worked in a small town Chinese restaurant. It's amazingly simple to make, but it really doesn't taste simple. It's 3 of the 4 food groups in one dish, so it's healthy, and it uses a relatively cheap cut of beef (and the other ingredients cost virtually pennies) so it's a great budget dinner. And it's fast. From start to finish you can be eating in probably about 20 minutes.

The trick to the fast cooking is a hot pan. You're going to have to be ready for it. Crunch time can create the feeling that multi-tasking is the best way to go, but this, you really need to just take a breath and do all the chopping first before you start putting things in the pan. Besides, there isn't much chopping and 5 minutes of doing one thing only won't kill you. It might kill me, but you should be fine. 

Chow fun noodles, the namesake of this dish, are wide flat rice noodles. You (well, I) buy them fresh in the deli part of the grocery store. They're usually near the tofu, so if yours keeps tofu near the veggies, that's where they might be, but mine keeps all the asian foods next to the sushi stand which is near the deli...

Anyway.

Beef Chow Fun

What you need (you need to take the freaking coffee pot of the counter when you're taking pictures of dinner):

1/2 lb flank steak, or some other not expensive cut of lean beef
2 tsp peanut oil
1 tsp sesame oil
1 inch chunk of ginger, minced or grated
a few cloves of garlic, minced
1 onion, sliced
1 pkg noodles (separate them by hand a bit before you toss them in)
soy sauce
few handfuls of beansprouts
2 green onions, chopped,
handful of cilantro, chopped
lime juice (optional)

What you gotta do:

Since you need to have everything chopped and ready to go before you start cooking, do the fresh stuff first, then the veggies you're going to cook, then the meat. You'll end up needing (and having to wash) only one cutting board that way, and still manage to avoid cross contamination. 

If you're using the lime, chop it in half. Chop the cilantro, and the green onions. Set these aside on a clean plate to keep them away from the raw meat. 

Mince the garlic and ginger. If you have lemongrass, and feel like using it, mince about a tablespoon of it. I had lemongrass, so I used it.

I also had a few lemongrass stalks that I'd put in water a while ago... they've got roots!

Cut the onion in half and then slice each half into widths similar to your noodles. Noodle widths will vary but are usually about half an inch (or 1 cm if you are anywhere in the world other than the US).

If your onions are freakishly strong and your eyes water just looking at them, cover them with a wet paper towel. Onions contain sulphur compounds that combine with the water in your eyes to make sulphuric acid. (Inorite! Ouch!) The water in the towel will absorb the compounds and prevent it from getting into your eyes. And yes, it's safe to touch, it's not strong acid or anything, it's just that the amount it takes to irritate eyes is ridiculously miniscule.

Slice the beef into thin strips, going against the grain of the meat.

Now that you've got everything chopped and ready (see, took no time at all) heat half the peanut oil in a wide flat pan (or a wok if you have one) over medium high heat. Add half the sesame oil, half of the ginger, half of the garlic, and all the beef.

Stir fry until the beef is mostly browned, just a few minutes, and then remove it from the pan.

Add the rest of the peanut oil to the pan, and once it's hot, the rest of sesame oil, the rest of the ginger and garlic, and all the onions.

Give them a minute or so of being shoved around in the hot oil before you add the noodles and soy sauce. All you're really doing to the noodles is heating them until they separate from each other. Breaking them up by hand a bit before you add them helps, as does a minute with a cover on the pan.

Once the noodles have softened and separated, put the beef back in the pan, add the beansprouts, cilantro, green onion and lime juice. Toss until it's all combined and heated.

This makes dinner for two and a bit of leftovers for lunch the next day.

Chopped peanuts probably wouldn't be out of place in this dish, but they didn't add them at the restaurant so I don't.

I love noodles. It's really hard to get anything decent in Winnipeg that's got good noodles in it. For some reason, chow mein here means stir fried cabbage with deep fried egg noodles on top as a garnish. No, I have no clue why; it makes no sense to me at all. It just means that I never go out for Chinese here. Why would I? I can make it myself. And it's only one pan to wash! ;)

What's your favourite noodle dish?

Cooking Green

Okay, so we totally dropped the ball on the St. Patrick's Day green beer and soda bread thing. Me, I'm not Irish anymore. I thought I was until last year when I found out that my paternal grandfather wasn't an Irish osteopath, but an American conman who did time in Ohio State Pen then went on to have a less than glamourous career as an amateur boxer before moving to Canada and wooing my grandmother with various and assorted tales, none of which were true.

And though I did grow up in a household that served boiled potatoes and soda bread on a regular basis, I never managed to develop a taste for them. Besides, neither of them are green.

The green in this recipe comes mainly from cilantro. It's a bright leafy herb with a flavour that is either loved or hated. Me, I love it. It's crisp, sharp, and just tastes... fresh. Apparently something like 30% of the population thinks it tastes like soap. Those people need to look away. They can check out Taneasha's mac and cheese (contains green onion and served with asparagus), or try my lime (green!) and ginger scones.

Green leafy things are super healthy; they contain fibre, iron, magnesuim, anti-oxidants, and most importantly for this recipe: things that lower cholesterol. Which is good, because coconut milk contains yummy saturated fats.

Green Thai Curry

This recipe makes enough for two, maybe three, or two and a bit for lunch the next day, but the pics are of a double recipe, which I made and froze (so that I'd have food on hand during finals next month)

What you need:

(note to self: you need to remember to take pics of all the ingredients!!)

• 3 Thai chiles (um, or more if you like things really spicy. I like things really spicy)
• ¼ C red onion
• 4 cloves garlic
• 1 inch chunk of ginger
• 1 stalk lemongrass
• ½ tsp ground coriander
• ½ tsp ground cumin
• ½ tsp ground black pepper
• 1 C cilantro (with stems)
• 3 ½ T fish sauce
• 1 T sugar
• 3 T lime juice

***

• 2 chicken breasts
• 1 tin (~15 oz) coconut milk
• 1 red bell chile
• 1 zucchini
• 1 chinese eggplant (the long, skinny, light purple ones)

What you gotta do: 

Remove the tougher outer leaves of the lemon grass, and slice the tender inner ones into rounds. Remove the stems from the little chiles, and coarsly chop the onion. You don't need to bother pre-chopping the garlic, or the cilantro.

Yes, that's more than three chiles. I said I like it very spicy.

Combine all of these, with the cilantro (pics! moar pics!) in the food processor.

Add the corriander, cumin, pepper, sugar, lime juice and fish sauce, and then whiz until it's a nice green paste.

If you're not familiar with fish sauce, here's a pic (yay pic!):

Fish sauce is a salty extract made mosty from anchovies. It contains no squid (as noted in the pic). It's a common seasoning in Thai and Vietnamese cuisines, and if it's not in the import foods section of your grocery, you can easily find it in Chinatown. And it's fragrant. Whatever you do, don't spill it. You'll spend days trying to figure out what that strange smell is, and then once you figure it out, you'll spend more days cleaning the freaking kitchen top to bottom because you missed wiping up a single freaking drop of fish sauce somewhere in there...

Um. Or maybe it's just me.

Dice the chicken, red chile, zucchini, and eggplant.

Heat a pan over medium with a small amount of oil. Add the paste and and fry it for a few minutes until it's fragrant.

Stir in the coconut milk. Bring to a simmer.

Add the chicken and veggies, and simmmer for about 20 minutes, until the chicken is cooked through, and the veggies are tender.

Now, since I was treating this as a make ahead meal, I filled medium sized freezer bags with enough for a dinner and lunch the next day in each one.

Then, I laid them flat in the freezer until they were solid, then stood them up like books on a shelf to save space. A double recipe gave me 4 dinners and 4 lunches in 4 bags.

A quick pot of rice, and a freezer bag of curry makes a delicious quick dinner.

Serve it with a bit of prik-nam-pla (a Thai condiment made from 2 parts water, 2 parts fish sauce, 1 part lime juice, 1 part sugar, a bit of garlic, and a bit of hot chile sauce), and if you've got fresh basil handy, it makes a great final topping.

Oh, and lemongrass from the grocery will root if you put it in water. Look for stalks with as much of the root intact as possible, put it in a jar of water with a drop of plant food, and in a few weeks, you'll be able to put it into the dirt and have fresh green lemon grass any time you want.

Yay for green food!

What's your favourite green food or grow at home food?