Viet World Kitchen

Refrigerator Gold: Leftovers Panfried Noodles

In Vietnamese, there’s a term called thanh toan, which means to take care of loose ends, settle the accounts per se. Every week, I have to thanh toan my refrigerator by using up all the bits of leftovers from prior meals and recipe testing. I don’t like to waste food and need to make space for new food too!

One of my favorite strategies for clearing out the fridge is to make panfried noodles with a stir-fried topping. Practically anything can go into the topping and the noodles are the carbs for the meal. Panfried noodles are an easy one-dish meal that my husband and I often make together. It’s a team cooking effort and we chat and sip wine as we prepare dinner.

Based on the leftovers panfried noodles tonight, this post outlines the master game plan that we've developed over the years. Follow it and tweak accordingly.

Sichuan Crescent Dumplings Recipe (Zhong Jiaozi)

 
Sometimes the simplest ingredients come together more marvelously than you expect. This dumpling recipe from Sichuan province in China is one of them. My friend Carl Chu, a Chinese food expert and author, told me about the crescent-shaped dumplings, saying that I needed to check them out when I went to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province. I put them on my hit list for this most recent trip to Asia.

Zhong jiaozi – the dumplings are named after their creator, a person named Zhong – were among the first things that we ate at a xiao chi (snack) joint located kitty corner from the Chengdu Sheraton. Frankly, they were not great. The dipping sauce was overly sweet and the filling lackluster.

 I sampled one and moved on to the other dishes we’d ordered. But I’m obsessive about dumplings and kept thinking about the little plump crescents and how they could be made to taste really delicious.

Once home I poured through my books and realized that the filling was ridiculously straightforward. It’s basically flavored with lots of ginger-infused water, according to Fuchsia Dunlop’s Land of Plenty cookbook.

The ginger that I saw at Chengdu markets were small relative to most ginger sold abroad. Given that, I decided to pump up the ginger. After a several trials and tinkering with the seasonings, I came up with the filling recipe below. It’s soft and wet so be sure to neaten it up as you shape the dumplings. Get fatty ground pork for the best flavor. And, stir/beat the filling to incorporate the liquid really well.

Cold Udon Noodles Recipe (Zaru Udon)

Last week’s homemade udon immediately turned into a satisfying meal of cold noodles dunked in savory sauce, which was perfect for the blazing heat that hit us here in California. You may be familiar with udon served in hot broth as a noodle soup, but in Japan, I had cold udon twice. Those experiences opened up my eyes to the wonders of udon. When udon is served cold, you taste the noodles and savor their chewy texture.

There are a couple of ways to serve cold udon, one of which is just like how you’d serve Japanese soba noodles, atop a zaru bamboo tray, hence the name zaru soba. Zaru udon is what I had in Tokyo and what I prepared at home. After cooking off the homemade udon noodles, I let them sit at room temperature to cool. Meanwhile, I made the sauce and let that cool too.

Don’t be put off by preparing the dashi stock, a requisite for the Japanese kitchen. In the main, I make dashi from scratch, but many people like the convenience of instant dashi powder. If you go for the instant, find one that does not have MSG. This brand, available at Japanese, Korean and some Chinese markets, is what I typically have in my pantry:


You can make dashi and keep it refrigerated for several days. That way, recipes like this one come together in a jiffy. For the garnishes, set them out on small dishes and let guests help themselves and craft their personal set of flavors.

Homemade Udon Noodles Recipe

During my trip to Asia I was bowled over by fresh, handmade noodles not just once but three times! The first two times were in Japan. Michael Baxter of Kyoto Foodie took me to a favorite udon shop near his home. (The noodles were separate from Michael's Kyoto sukiaki lesson.)  The udon noodles were served with mountain yam and raw egg as a rich sauce. Sitting on a tatami floor at a traditional low table, we swirled, stirred, and slurped until there were no noodles left.

In Tokyo, my friend Mayu took me for a cold udon lunch, and the noodles were served on a zaru bamboo mat, very much like the way cold soba is prepared. Both Michael and Mayu prefaced the noodles by saying that the noodles were handmade and freshly made.

Their words impressed me because up until I went to Japan, I’ve not been an udon noodle fan. What I realize during my trip was that the udon noodles in the US are mostly often gummy and as thick as pencils. In Japan, however, the udon noodles are sublime with a wonderful chew and good wheat flavor. I was converted.

On my last night in Chengdu, China, we had hand-pulled noodles at a crusty shop run by a charming Muslim family. As I watched the noodle maker, I wondered if I could make such noodles. It was simply flour and water that he’d combined and stretched.

Once home, I did a little research in my Japanese cookbooks and found a recipe for udon in Shizuo Tsuji’s classic, Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art. Even though Tsuji called for dried udon in his recipes, he repeated told the reader that homemade is better. Then he quietly provided an udon noodle recipe. I studied the recipe, then tried it out with Gold Medal unbleached all-purpose flour, which I felt best approximated the flour used by a Japanese home cook.

Taiwanese Spicy Beef Noodle Soup Recipe (Niu Rou Mian)

Tomorrow my husband and I will be celebrating our 14th wedding anniversary. (I was a child bride. Ha! -- NOT.) We were discussing what we should do, where we could go out, what we had eaten on past anniversaries. We didn’t make any concrete plans but I started thinking about the meals we shared when we first started dating in 1989. Yes, we’re an old couple.

One of our favorite places was the Mandarin Deli in Chinatown, Los Angeles. It was a hole in the wall that my sisters introduced me to when they were attending USC down the way. I loved the Mandarin Deli’s giant pot stickers that burned my mouth with their hot juices (they’re mentioned in Asian Dumplings).

An order of dumplings was always paired with hot bowls of beef noodle soup (牛肉麵, niu rou mian). Its inky spicy broth, plump wheat noodles, and chunks of red-cooked beef were perfect with the dumplings. It was good in the cooler months as well as the hotter months. I ate it year round.

Since then, I’ve made various versions of the soup from recipes found in Irene Kuo’s classic, The Key to Chinese Cooking, and Fuschia Dunlop’s enlightening work on Sichuan cuisine, Land of Plenty.  I’ve also ordered plenty of beef noodle soup from Taiwanese joints, such as A&J Restaurant, which has outposts in Southern and Northern California.

Overall, I like the Taiwanese version of niu rou mian (literally beef meat noodles) better than other versions of the Chinese soup. The Taiwanese take usually has more complexity in the broth but I didn't know why until this past weekend.