I’ve long had an obsession with the garlic noodles that are served in Vietnamese seafood restaurants throughout San Francisco (and elsewhere too, I’m sure). I don’t tend to cook a lot of noodles, pastas, or grains so I never really attempted to recreate the dish outside of clipping recipes for various peanut/garlic noodle salads. These recipes always call for dry udon or soba noodles. In last week’s recipe planning I pulled a recipe from the Vegetarian Times for Sesame Noodles with Napa Cabbage.

The recipe called for udon noodles so I put them on my list and carried on. I needed to buy a bamboo steamer for a different recipe, so I did some of my produce shopping at New May Wah (an awesome Asian market on Clement St that stocks tons of fake meat products). Next to the tofu, I spotted the fresh egg noodles.

Obviously, fresh noodles from the Asian market are the answer to delicious garlic noodles or sesame peanut noodles. Not sure why it never occurred to me before. So here’s my adapted version of the Vegetarian Times recipe. I doubled the cabbage and completely changed the cooking instructions (which originally had the hot water from cooking dry udon noodles employed to wilt the cabbage). Dangerously delicious. Note to self - only make these when you have guests to prevent leftovers & weight gain.

(more…)

I cook Indian often, ever since I fell in love with a particularly ghee filled dal on an otherwise uninspiring thali plate and discovered the next day that I could recreate it perfectly for a third of the cost.

Indian is a fantastic cuisine, at least to my probably untrained palate, because I can make three dishes the first night, planning for leftovers, and then add a dish or two a night, and all of a sudden the week has passed with delicious meals every night that didn’t require too much thought.

This particular recent batch of Indian dishes have also had the uncharacteristic trait of being relatively quick to make. I started off on this latest Indian cooking bought with a half a head of cabbage that needed to be used up. This curried cabbage (adapted from somewhere on the internet that google does not want to reveal) has turned me into a cabbage lover:

(more…)