(So, my little trip is over, and I do have some glorious food stories, but need to dig out the photos and actually get around to writing things up. What can I say: being home is distracting. Until then, enjoy another guest post from The Husband—Asian noodle salad, served cold, which seems terribly appropriate given the recent multiple days of excessive heat warnings in the PHX.)
Here’s another one for y’all as you battle the frightening heat…
Once the summer hits here in Phoenix, it’s sometimes hard to convince oneself that turning on the stove or using the oven could possibly be a good idea. When you’re already living in an oven, turning up the heat is a recipe for sadness.
Yet your options at dinner can seem rather limited when you decide to completely eschew the stove/oven. Unless you’re a raw foodist, after all, finding true sustenance without cooking is a challenge. And while my Indian roots sometimes tell me I should go for hot (temperature) and hot (spiciness) food, in order to sweat and cool myself down, my better judgment sometimes jumps in and contradicts that logic, instead suggesting that consuming cold things can be cooling and refreshing. Well, it doesn’t have to be either/or. In these hyper-partisan, divisive times, you can instead choose to be a uniter, not a divider, to take the middle road between raw and cooked, and between hot and cold.
I speak, my friends, of salad. No, not a wimpy substance-free side salad. Rather, a salad with a variety of vegetables, with protein, with cooked elements, with fire and kick and oomph and pizzazz. And most importantly, the ability to cool you down on a hot day.
Wifey has written before on the gloriousness of salad, so there’s no need to repeat her wise words here. Instead, I give you a how-to guide to making a wonderfully delicious, (mostly southeast and east) Asian-inspired salad — a hybrid of sorts that achieves our two goals of minimizing use of heat-producing devices and also cools you upon eating it.
Now, before we continue, I must admit that I’m not so good with recipes — be it following them (Ravi Shankar never gets guff for improvising, so stop sippin’ on the Haterade, you recipe-obsessed fools; live it up a little) or providing others with instructions for making something I’ve put together in my own kitchen. This post falls a bit into the first category and a bit into the second. I think I probably pulled inspiration from three or four different Asian noodle salad recipes I perused at some point or another, and then I just decided to wing it from there and make some (many?) additions of my own. And now that it falls upon me to recount precisely what I did, I’m going to leave you instead with some generic instructions that pretty much ensure you’ll only get vaguely close to my original creation. Though that’s the fun of cooking, right? You get to experiment and do things your own way and come up with something that you want to eat.
With those caveats aside, let’s discuss making a delicious salad. Really, there are three crucial parts: some starchy noodle or carbohydrate-rich base accompanied by a protein to provide substance, a plethora of fresh vegetables to provide crunch and texture and a nice mélange of flavors, and finally a dressing which offers a way to tie everything together with a nice acidic bite and spicy finish.
For this salad, I started with some rice noodles — Trader Joe’s Thai rice sticks, to be specific, though really any Asian rice or bean thread noodles would suffice. Fortunately, cooking up noodles in boiling water doesn’t take too long, nor are you required to stand by the hot stove and observe as they cook, which is an important consideration if you’re trying to stay cool. Once the noodles have cooked, immediately run cold water over them as they drain, both to keep them from cooking further and also to get them to a cooler temperature. (I actually kept the cooked noodles in a bowl with ice, to make sure they were chilled and didn’t dry out.) While the noodles cook, sauté (in a small amount of grapeseed oil, along with a dash of teriyaki sauce, minced garlic, and some pepper flakes) some thinly sliced tofu. Again, not too much supervision required here — just flip the tofu over when it has browned. And once you’ve done that, you’re done with the cooking element. Set aside the tofu, and we’re ready to move on to the cooling and the crunching.
For the veggies, I went a bit crazy and threw together whatever we happened to have in the fridge; in this case, the list included: purslane, amaranth, cucumber, broccolini, a broccoli/cabbage/carrot slaw mix, and jalapeno.
The dressing was originally supposed to be a relatively simply mix of rice vinegar, sugar and lime juice, but quickly got out of control once I realized all the different bottles and jars we had in the pantry and on the fridge door. So I ended up trying to find a tasty balance between rice vinegar, brown sugar, and freshly squeezed lime juice, along with tamari soy sauce, mirin, sweet chili sauce, ground chili paste, teriyaki sauce, minced garlic, thinly-sliced shallots, and a nice bit of ginger. After some very precise kitchen science, I came up with the perfect ratio between those various items.
And finally, for garnish, I used a lot of basil and mint leaves, along with a couple slices of lime, and also a sprinkling of thinly sliced green onions and chives.
When all was said and done, it looked something like this.
A nice balance of cooling and spiciness, and some definite deliciousness was achieved.
Here’s another one for y’all as you battle the frightening heat…
Once the summer hits here in Phoenix, it’s sometimes hard to convince oneself that turning on the stove or using the oven could possibly be a good idea. When you’re already living in an oven, turning up the heat is a recipe for sadness.
Yet your options at dinner can seem rather limited when you decide to completely eschew the stove/oven. Unless you’re a raw foodist, after all, finding true sustenance without cooking is a challenge. And while my Indian roots sometimes tell me I should go for hot (temperature) and hot (spiciness) food, in order to sweat and cool myself down, my better judgment sometimes jumps in and contradicts that logic, instead suggesting that consuming cold things can be cooling and refreshing. Well, it doesn’t have to be either/or. In these hyper-partisan, divisive times, you can instead choose to be a uniter, not a divider, to take the middle road between raw and cooked, and between hot and cold.
I speak, my friends, of salad. No, not a wimpy substance-free side salad. Rather, a salad with a variety of vegetables, with protein, with cooked elements, with fire and kick and oomph and pizzazz. And most importantly, the ability to cool you down on a hot day.
Wifey has written before on the gloriousness of salad, so there’s no need to repeat her wise words here. Instead, I give you a how-to guide to making a wonderfully delicious, (mostly southeast and east) Asian-inspired salad — a hybrid of sorts that achieves our two goals of minimizing use of heat-producing devices and also cools you upon eating it.
Now, before we continue, I must admit that I’m not so good with recipes — be it following them (Ravi Shankar never gets guff for improvising, so stop sippin’ on the Haterade, you recipe-obsessed fools; live it up a little) or providing others with instructions for making something I’ve put together in my own kitchen. This post falls a bit into the first category and a bit into the second. I think I probably pulled inspiration from three or four different Asian noodle salad recipes I perused at some point or another, and then I just decided to wing it from there and make some (many?) additions of my own. And now that it falls upon me to recount precisely what I did, I’m going to leave you instead with some generic instructions that pretty much ensure you’ll only get vaguely close to my original creation. Though that’s the fun of cooking, right? You get to experiment and do things your own way and come up with something that you want to eat.
With those caveats aside, let’s discuss making a delicious salad. Really, there are three crucial parts: some starchy noodle or carbohydrate-rich base accompanied by a protein to provide substance, a plethora of fresh vegetables to provide crunch and texture and a nice mélange of flavors, and finally a dressing which offers a way to tie everything together with a nice acidic bite and spicy finish.
For this salad, I started with some rice noodles — Trader Joe’s Thai rice sticks, to be specific, though really any Asian rice or bean thread noodles would suffice. Fortunately, cooking up noodles in boiling water doesn’t take too long, nor are you required to stand by the hot stove and observe as they cook, which is an important consideration if you’re trying to stay cool. Once the noodles have cooked, immediately run cold water over them as they drain, both to keep them from cooking further and also to get them to a cooler temperature. (I actually kept the cooked noodles in a bowl with ice, to make sure they were chilled and didn’t dry out.) While the noodles cook, sauté (in a small amount of grapeseed oil, along with a dash of teriyaki sauce, minced garlic, and some pepper flakes) some thinly sliced tofu. Again, not too much supervision required here — just flip the tofu over when it has browned. And once you’ve done that, you’re done with the cooking element. Set aside the tofu, and we’re ready to move on to the cooling and the crunching.
For the veggies, I went a bit crazy and threw together whatever we happened to have in the fridge; in this case, the list included: purslane, amaranth, cucumber, broccolini, a broccoli/cabbage/carrot slaw mix, and jalapeno.
The dressing was originally supposed to be a relatively simply mix of rice vinegar, sugar and lime juice, but quickly got out of control once I realized all the different bottles and jars we had in the pantry and on the fridge door. So I ended up trying to find a tasty balance between rice vinegar, brown sugar, and freshly squeezed lime juice, along with tamari soy sauce, mirin, sweet chili sauce, ground chili paste, teriyaki sauce, minced garlic, thinly-sliced shallots, and a nice bit of ginger. After some very precise kitchen science, I came up with the perfect ratio between those various items.
And finally, for garnish, I used a lot of basil and mint leaves, along with a couple slices of lime, and also a sprinkling of thinly sliced green onions and chives.
When all was said and done, it looked something like this.
A nice balance of cooling and spiciness, and some definite deliciousness was achieved.
