N.O.O.D.L.E.S.


We're busy people. Between work, school, travel, the dog, housework, and the million of other things that eat away at those shriking minutes in the day, we've barely had the chance to breathe this past year.

Sadly, busy-ness translated into the temporary exit of the culinary Squid. After all, what's a ceph to do if there's no time to cook pork chops, lemon rice, or even fish tacos?

She fries up some noodles, of course.

M and I fall back onto this old favorite on nights when cooking is the last thing that we want to do. We had our first transcendent experience sampling this dish after biking 20 km in the Indonesian heat and winding up in a dusty little town, where a kind lady fed us a heap of savoury, saucy noodles with perfectly fried eggs and fresh, hot sambal. Since that transformative meal (and the dozens of other near-perfect versions of the same that we had through the rest of our trip), packages of Indonesian-style instant noodles have been a pantry staple in our house.


So, as my triumphant return to the blogosphere, I present to you: Pop Mie. In all of its salty, spicy, sweet perfection, with al dente fried noodles, lightly blistered cherry tomatoes, flash-thawed veggies (YUP) and 2 gooey, ginger-garlicky fried eggs. This is a lazy, sloppy, one-bowl meal to keep in your back pocket as delicious free dinner pass, but hey - so many of the best dishes are.


Pop Mie (Indonesian fried noodles)
Serves 2
Active time: 10 minutes
Cooking time: 20 minutes

Ingredients
- 2 packages of Asian-style instant noodles (such as IndoMie)
- 2 cups cherry tomatoes, halved
- 1 clove of garlic, minced
- 1/4 white onion, diced
- 1 tsp crushed ginger
- 2 cups frozen vegetables
- 4 eggs
- 1 1/2 tbsp vegetable oil,  plus more if needed
- 2 tsp chili-garlic sauce (optional)
- green onions, for garnish (optional)
 ***If noodles do not come with spicy oils and sauces, add, to taste:***
-1- 2 tsp hoisin sauce
- 1-2 tsp hot sauce, such as Sriracha
- 1-2 tsp sesame oil + a pinch of garlic powder
- splash of soy sauce

1. Cook noodles as indicated, drain, and set aside.

2. Thaw the vegetables and set aside.

3. Heat 1 tbsp oil in a large, non-stick frying pan on medium heat, and add the ginger and garlic. Stir-fry for 1 minute, then add the onion and stir-fry for 2 minutes. Add the oils from the noodle package or the sauces and oils listed at the bottom of the ingredients list. Add the tomatoes, turn up the heat, and blister for 2 minutes.

4. Turn the heat down and add the thawed vegetables and noodles. Mix in the noodle flavour packages (read: MSG) and the combine everything well. Fry for 2-4 minutes, to heat all the ingredients through and to give the noodles a bit of crunch.

5. Remove the noodles and vegetables from the heat, and serve into dishes, making sure to scrape any fried noodles off of the pan.

6. Return the pan to the stove and heat up 1/2 tbsp oil on medium heat. Crack 4 eggs into the pan and fry, over-easy.


7. Remove the eggs from the heat and carefully place 2 fried eggs atop each dish of noodles and vegetables. Garnish with green onions and consume alone or with a friend.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Scone Witch

Image
There is an amazing little restaurant in the outskirts of downtown Ottawa called The Scone Witch, which makes scones in more varieties than you can imagine.   Savory scones with ingredients such as fragrant rosemary, cheese and scallions; sweet scones in which are embedded bits of candied ginger and tiny, tangy currants. M and I ate there recently, and our exceptional lunch reminded me of how much I love the decadent and infinitely adaptable pillows of butter and cream. I have previously only attempted to make scones once – the effort, thought valiant, was somewhat subpar – but this week I decided to try my hand at it again. In browsing the web, a recipe caught my eye, from my favorite food blog, Smitten Kitchen (featured prominently in many of my posts). The recipe, though not too labor-intensive, took more time than I had anticipated, and M and I ended up indulging quite late in the night. A delicious bedtime snack, no doubt, but also the recipe for a burnt
Read more

Birthday torte

Image
M loves chocolate, adores it in fact. He will always make a beeline for the chocolatiest dessert on the menu at dinner, and we always have some iteration of dark chocolate stashed away somewhere in the apartment. So, it seemed appropriate that his birthday cake request was as chocolately as birthday cakes get, in the best way of course. Home for the weekend, we spent a lovely, relaxed evening together, starting with a fantastic dinner at Brooklyn Warehouse, a low-key bistro in Halifax's North End; definitely a culinary gem in the city. Dessert was, of course, M's cake of choice; a luxuriously rich torte made with a sinful amount of dark chocolate and butter, bourbon syrup and just a touch of flour to hold the whole thing together. We paired it with a sweet-tart mixed berry-orange compote, scotch, and 'Blade Runner'. Bayou chocolate torte with bourbon and dark chocolate, with mixed berry-orange compote (recipe to follow) From 'Rebar Modern Food Cookbook&
Read more

Decadence

I am recovering from a weekend of gastronomic hedonism. Too much sushi, wine, 4 am pizza (incidentally, the best ever, even the next morning), poutine, more ethanol, maple syrupy French toast etc etc etc….so good, but 48 hours of indulgence leaves one feeling a bit….heavy. As would be expected, lethargy descended upon us on a cold and rainy spring Sunday night, and all I wanted to was to eat something filling, that was easy to make, and that was light . Because let’s face it, this squid’s diet can only take so much of a beating. So I turned to my old stand-by, Madhur Jaffrey, the queen of vegetarian and Indian, cooking. She hold a special place in my culinarily-inclined heart, ever since I discovered her classic cookbook in my mother’s cupboard a few years ago, “An Introduction to Indian Cooking”, which is unfortunately now out of print. Her’s is one of the only cookbooks that my mom has that is not annotated to death – it’s as though every recipe she writes has been tested to perfe
Read more