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.

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I’ve been travelling pretty much constantly for the last two months. I haven’t been home for even 48 hours at a time since mid January. Needless to say, I haven’t been cooking much.

It can be hard to eat vegetables on the road. Not to say that I’m limited to fast food places, no I’m not driving around, but flying. As a *shudder* “foodie” I take the opportunity to eat at highly rated restaurants like Lupa in New York (wow, best tortellini ever by the way) and end up scarfing down the complimentary foccacia and ordering dishes heavy with cheese when all I really need is a nice raw green salad.

The other problem with eating out in general of course is the portions, especially in cities that serve “American” sized portions. At home, I generally eat about a fifth of the amount of food that is served on a typical restaurant entree plate. Eating out in San Francisco, I don’t generally run into this problem as not many restaurants here have such heavy servings, and the ones that do - well, I can always take home leftovers. Not so much when traveling.

So when planning dinner for my first meal at home in weeks I wanted something simple and light. Digging through the “to try” recipes I pulled out Heidi Swanson’s Caramelized Tofu with Brussels Sprouts recipe.

Initially I intended to serve the dish with some purple rice, but after a heavy breakfast of near perfect Huevos Rancheros at the Fire Sign Cafe in Tahoe City (highly recommended, best breakfast we’ve had in Tahoe so far this season), I decided to keep it light and when I saw what 1/2lb of brussels sprouts looks like at the grocer I decided to double the recipe.

My cilantro allergy & aversion to using much sugar in my cooking led to a couple of other modifications. I didn’t find my adapted version very satisfying for dinner and initially tossed the recipe. However, I just had the leftovers cold for lunch and wow, this is a delicious simple dish when the flavors are given a chance to meld.

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I have four recipe binders, two of new, untested recipes that are always being added to. While many of the new recipes I try are “keepers”, I hardly ever make them since there are so many new recipes to try! Not so with this chard dish that I’ve adapted from a recipe on epicurious. This versatile side is my go to dish for any entree that is just a little to plain on it’s own. This is also a great way to use up chard stems from dishes that only call for the leaves.

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I made good use of some of the carrots from the massive Costco bag that we keep buying because it’s cheaper than buying the amount of carrots that we would actually generally choose to eat with this carrot salad adapted from the Vegetarian Times. In this case, adapted means that I couldn’t see why I shouldn’t double the amount of nuts & cheese! This simple salad makes a surprisingly flavorful lunch.I feel that the figs could be easily omitted, they mainly add a textural difference, the salad could easily stand on it’s own without them.

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I’ve been making Indian for the last week or so, it’s so easy to make enough for leftovers and then add another dish every couple of days. I had a small amount of cauliflower that needed to be used up so I made a second attempt at the Parmesan-Cauliflower Fritters recipe from the Vegetarian Times.

The first time I made these fritters I found them very bland, but I wanted to work with the recipe because it was easy, healthy, and the fritters actually held their shape well (which can be alot to ask of a fritter), so I made a note to try them with something saucy and spicey, like Indian food.

This time I added cumin to the mixture, but the Indian dishes I ended up making were new to me and didn’t turn out especially saucey, so the fritters still seemed bland and boring. I finally found thier place though, the next morning, when putting together our lunches for work. I had made a slightly modified version of the Cannellini Vinaigrette that Lydia from The Perfect Pantry adapted from Perfect Tapas, which itself had seemed a bit of a failure at first taste; a bit off tasting from substituting white wine for wine vinegar, overly oiling from perhaps undercalculating the ratio of dry beans to canned.

I paired the Marinated Cannellini Beans with the Quinoa Cakes on a bed of Mache, and the sum was better than all it’s parts. I finally figured out where the Quinoa Cakes belong and the extra oil in the beans became a flavourful salad dressing. A perfect lunch . . .

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