Chinese New Year Long Life Noodles: Bonnie Stern’s “Heartsmart Cooking”

There are three Chinese Noodle recipes in Bonnie Stern’s HeartSmart: The Best of HeartSmart Cooking. One is for Shanghai Noodles, one is for Singapore Noodles and one is for “lo mein” (any kind of noodle that’s cooked and then mixed into a dish). You know, I have a whole book of Chinese Cooking that has an entire section on how to make fresh noodles and what sauces to put on them (Beyond the Great Wall), but I wimped out. I wanted North American flavour from a cook that I feel like I culinarily know. I didn’t want to be surprised. I also didn’t feel like messing it up.

It was Chinese New Year and I wanted to make an enormous dish of long life noodles.

Mistake #1: The recipe is actually very similar to one given in the link, but uses pork tenderloin for flavour. I skipped the pork tenderloin. If I was smart I would have thought to add more fat in the form of an extra tablespoon of sesame oil but I happened to run out of sesame oil just as I was making it, even though the recipe only called for a tablespoon to begin with.

Mistake #2: I wasn’t sure if I could use rice vermicelli, but since I kept seeing Chinese New Year noodle recipes for all sorts of noodles, I figured I’d be okay if I substituted. They were what I had, they’re so quick to cook since you just soak them in boiling water, and there are no preservatives or additives in them to upset my stomach or New Years festivities. Unfortunately my ingenious plan back-fired when the noodles soaked up all the sauce and left the dish way too bland.

Saving graces #1, #2 & #3: In an effort to make the noodles better in the end, I tried just about everything to give them flavour, from Guidhou Chile Paste (which didn’t add a lot of flavour, just heat) to balsamic vinegar (the closest thing I had to Chinese black vinegar) to barbecue sauce (not so authentic, I know…but it actually worked the best because of all the sugar). Kind of made it a sweet and sour noodle dish.

Ingredients
1 1/2 packages of rice vermicelli noodles
1 tsp sesame oil (would have used more if I’d had it)
2 tsp olive oil (didn’t have any other oil for stir-frying. Would have used sesame oil again)
garlic, finely chopped
1/2 tsp chile paste (I used home-made but Bonnie didn’t expect me to. She probably thought I’d use rooster sauce full of sugar. Would have helped the dish from all the extra sugar)
1 cup sliced brown cremini mushrooms (They’re supposed to be shiitake, but I don’t really like shiitake)
3 carrots, thinly sliced on diagonal (some of them were less diagonal than others…)
1 1/2 c. chicken stock
1/4 c. hoisin (I found a brand with only a few preservatives and it tastes okay)
1 tbsp tamari
1 tbsp water
4 green onions, sliced on the same quasi-diagonal…

All you do is boil a pot of water and when it reaches a boil, take it off the heat and add the rice noodles. Let the noodles sit, covered, until you need them. Then drain them of excess water.

Then heat the olive oil on medium heat, and when the oil is hot stir-fry the garlic and chile paste for 20 seconds. Add the mushrooms and carrots and cook for 5 minutes. Add the stock, hoisin, tamari and water. Bring it to a boil and add the noodles.

I didn’t add the noodles, though, because I knew they would just keep absorbing all the sauce. I’ve had this happen to me before. The first time I had takeout Pho’, the server packed the soup in two containers – one for the broth and one for the noodles. If you don’t, you end up with really watery noodles and you don’t taste the broth anymore. So I thought I was outsmarting the recipe. There was even a lot of sauce, so I figured when I poured the sauce over the noodles and served it immediately, it would be swimming in sweet stickiness. After I’d drained the noodles from the pot where they were soaking with the hot water and added the sauce I knew immediately that the dish was going to taste like nothing. Somehow those noodles just sucked everything in. I mean, it wasn’t bad if you like really, really mild flavours, but I wanted hot, sour, salty and sweet.

I now think dipping noodles in sauce is the way to go. It’s the only way to ensure flavour in every bite. It’s also messy, but that’s how it’s supposed to be. I also think I’ll try a different recipe next time with rice vinegar, some kind of sugar or molasses. Fortunately Bonnie Stern gives me a few more options from which I can pick and choose. Maybe I will discover some hidden courage and try making noodles from scratch from “Beyond the Great Wall”. Then at least when I mess up the sauce again, as is bound to happen, the noodles themselves will be my Saving Grace #4.