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…)

Every now and then I crave some variation on the chocolate & peanut butter theme. Since I generally don’t like to eat a lot of sugar, and most recipes for chocolate & peanut butter confections involve a lot of powdered sugar, I usually end up with a delicious failure since cutting the sugar in half or more completely changes the texture.

I had thought to replace some of the sugar with flour, and went one better today when I made these Peanut Butter Buckeyes using protein rich quinoa flour.

(more…)