Noodle Craving
Again, I am at the mercy of a magazine article on food - Asian noodles in fact.Pretty much anything Japanese or Chinese can put me in drool mode. It's home cooking, comfort food. I was lucky enough (damned lucky indeed) to be adopted at 2 months old, by my parents - a German American man and a Japanese American woman. While she is a seriously accomplished gourmet with a very impressive repertoir, it's her stir-fries with noodles that remind me of being a kid. Mom does Chinese food as well as or almost better than Japanese food.
Mom's noodles always included pork or chicken for the meat, scallions, slices of egg omelet, mud mushrooms and thick lo mein noodles. The noodles were cooked in water and then fried a bit in the bottom of the wok and tossed with the other ingredients. They had a crispy texture on the outside and noodle-y on the inside - which contrasted well with the meat and mushrooms. We used to shake rice wine vinegar droplets on top to eat. Salty-sour heaven.
Mom used to work when we were little and we knew by what we had for dinner if she had had a bad day. If dad was out of town, our meals on these days would consist of cold, canned, tuna which was flaked over tofu with grated, fresh ginger, on a bed of sticky rice accented with dollops of salty, seaweed paste from out of a jar. Chopsticks thrown on the table, bowls stacked ready. That was Mom's ultimate comfort food. To this day, I think she would prefer to have that meal for dinner almost any night, alone, with a pot of green tea.
When we had colds or the flu, Mom would drive us out to Wilson Boulevard in Arlington, Virginia to Vietnamese Pho restaurants - before they were so hip. She would make us deeply inhale the hot spicy broth to clear our heads. If we were particularly stuffy, it would be the Korean place. The soup there could give your nostrils second degree burns. But it worked. Off to school the next day.
The noodles in the magazine have all the glistening, gelatinous, mouth-watering texture of my noodles growing up. Rice vermicelli - tiny strands of see-through rice noodles with Chinese broccoli, enoki mushrooms and bean curd. Flat, wide rice-flour noodles with brown, soy/ginger glazed meat. Thick, worm-like udon noodles with slices of pink and orange coloured fish cake, scallion and benito flakes in almost clear broth.
The article in the magazine provides a list of must have ingredients to buy at the grocery. Aside from harissa, (strangely part of this list) I have all of the ingredients just as anyone would have ketchup, mustard and mayo. Soy sauce in light and dark, sesame oil, mirin - rice wine vinegar, sambal, fresh ginger at all times, birds eye chilies, garlic, fish sauce, tamarind sauce, star anise and lemon grass when I can get it. I have all of the noodles they suggest too.
So, tonight I'll go home and whip up a small stir fly noodle dish just like my mom makes. I will sit on the couch with Bunny Dog and watch Master Chef Goes Large .
posted by Brussels Confidential @ 11:38 AM
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