Flashback Friday - Soy Sauce Noodles

This post originally appeared on Minxeats.com on June 30, 2014.

One of my favorite places to shop is....an Asian grocery store. I love H Mart, but I really love the new Great Wall that opened on Rt 40 in Catonsville. While I dabble in Korean, Japanese, and Thai food at home, my real favorite (both to eat and to cook) is Chinese, and Great Wall (as in the Great Wall of China) stocks a nice selection of ingredients more familiar to Chinese cuisine. They also have a bar at which one can purchase hot foods, including whole roasted ducks, chickens, and roast pork. We've purchased the roast duck twice so far. For $20, one gets a whole duck, neatly chopped into pieces. Both times, I've frozen half the duck to enjoy another time. It reheats really well spread out on a foil-lined baking sheet and popped in a 350°F oven for 30 minutes or so.

The last time we bought a duck, I asked for it to be cut only in half. One half went into the freezer, and the other half was stripped of its meat. (While chopping a duck into umpteen pieces with a cleaver seems like a good idea, every damn piece has a bone in it, which gets annoying after a while.) I put the meat into the oven to crisp up the skin and served it with steamed baby bok choy and fried noodles, both also purchased at Great Wall.

I had never seen the pre-packaged, pre-fried, noodles before. The instructions on the bag say to put the noodles in a pan, add a little water, and cook until the desired crispness. Rather than adding plain water, I added soy, sugar, and sesame oil as well, to make a dish not unlike the soy sauce noodles we enjoy at dim sum. With the duck and the bok choy, dinner was tasty and pretty, too.

Soy Sauce Noodles

2 tablespoons water
1 tablespoon dark soy
1 tablespoons light soy
1 teaspoon oyster sauce
1/2 teaspoon sesame oil
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 pound pre-fried Chinese noodles (half a package - we found them in fresh noodle section at Great Wall)
3 scallions, chopped

Combine the first 6 ingredients in a bowl, stirring well to dissolve the sugar. Heat a large skillet over high heat and add the noodles. Pour over the sauce and mix into the noodles quickly (I used two forks). Turn down the heat to medium and continue stirring the noodles to coat with sauce. They should start to crisp up in a few minutes...and stick to the bottom of the pan. Give them a taste to make sure the noodles don't taste raw, then toss in the scallions. Turn off the heat and serve immediately.



Posted on Minxeats.com.

Soy Sauce Noodles

One of my favorite places to shop is....an Asian grocery store. I love H Mart, but I really love the new Great Wall that opened on Rt 40 in Catonsville. While I dabble in Korean, Japanese, and Thai food at home, my real favorite (both to eat and to cook) is Chinese, and Great Wall (as in the Great Wall of China) stocks a nice selection of ingredients more familiar to Chinese cuisine. They also have a bar at which one can purchase hot foods, including whole roasted ducks, chickens, and roast pork. We've purchased the roast duck twice so far. For $20, one gets a whole duck, neatly chopped into pieces. Both times, I've frozen half the duck to enjoy another time. It reheats really well spread out on a foil-lined baking sheet and popped in a 350°F oven for 30 minutes or so.

The last time we bought a duck, I asked for it to be cut only in half. One half went into the freezer, and the other half was stripped of its meat. (While chopping a duck into umpteen pieces with a cleaver seems like a good idea, every damn piece has a bone in it, which gets annoying after a while.) I put the meat into the oven to crisp up the skin and served it with steamed baby bok choy and fried noodles, both also purchased at Great Wall.

I had never seen the pre-packaged, pre-fried, noodles before. The instructions on the bag say to put the noodles in a pan, add a little water, and cook until the desired crispness. Rather than adding plain water, I added soy, sugar, and sesame oil as well, to make a dish not unlike the soy sauce noodles we enjoy at dim sum. With the duck and the bok choy, dinner was tasty and pretty, too.

Soy Sauce Noodles

2 tablespoons water
1 tablespoon dark soy
1 tablespoons light soy
1 teaspoon oyster sauce
1/2 teaspoon sesame oil
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 pound pre-fried Chinese noodles (half a package - we found them in fresh noodle section at Great Wall)
3 scallions, chopped

Combine the first 6 ingredients in a bowl, stirring well to dissolve the sugar. Heat a large skillet over high heat and add the noodles. Pour over the sauce and mix into the noodles quickly (I used two forks). Turn down the heat to medium and continue stirring the noodles to coat with sauce. They should start to crisp up in a few minutes...and stick to the bottom of the pan. Give them a taste to make sure the noodles don't taste raw, then toss in the scallions. Turn off the heat and serve immediately.



Posted on Minxeats.com.

Whole Rockfish

I had never purchased seafood from H Mart before. It seemed we never went early enough in the day to miss the crowds clustered around the array of fresh whole fish. But this time, we were among three whole people perusing the selection and jumped at the chance to make a whole fish for dinner. It all looked so good, and there were so many varieties, but we settled on rockfish because: 1) we knew what it tasted like; 2) I was pretty confident that I could prepare it successfully.

I found a recipe on teh Innernets and adapted it for the ingredients we had on hand. Luckily, we had purchased lemons, limes, and, on a whim, lemongrass, all integral to the original recipe.

The Raw

I thought we could make the baby bok choy we also purchased, along with some shiitake mushrooms, with the fish in our new non-stick roasting pan. (My brother-in-law delivered it last weekend. I admired his after it cleaned up so nicely post-Thanksgiving-feasting, and he thought we should have one of our own. Thanks, Craig!)

Baked Rockfish with Citrus

1 whole rockfish, about 2 - 3 lb, cleaned
juice and zest of 1 lime
juice and zest of 1/2 lemon
2 dried red chiles, broken into pieces
1 stick lemongrass, sliced
3 scallions, chopped
cilantro
1/4 cup olive oil
salt and cracked pepper to taste

Directions

Preheat oven to 400F.  Mix the lemongrass, chiles, lime and lemon zest, and olive oil.

Make three diagonal cuts into the fish on both sides. Place in a roasting pan. Salt and pepper the cavity and stuff with about 3/4 of the lemongrass mixture. Pour citrus juices into cuts on fish and top with remainder of the lemongrass and oil.

Roast in oven for 20-30 minutes, depending on the size of your fish.

The Cooked

Despite the exotic flavors, the fish was a bit on the bland side. It was extremely moist and tender though. The shiitakes took on a silky texture that was quite pleasing, and the bok choy were perfectly cooked - crunchy and juicy. But despite what I thought was a thorough cleaning with a long soaking, they were still a tad sandy.

I served the dish with rice and garnished it with cilantro and chopped scallions. I also made a little lemon butter to pour over the bok choy. But it needed something to add oompfh. At least to my palate - I'm sure other people would find the flavorings just fine.