ODDLY SUCCESSFUL PEANUT NOODLES

Tried my hand at adapting another Bittman recipe to my own nefarious tastes this evening, with surprisingly successfuly results. The dish I half invented was rice noodles with peanut sauce and chicken, which sounds dull, and so I shall rename it Ken-ichi’s Practically Awesome Peanut Noodles. Here’s a pic, and a sort of recipe (hopefully a new and continuing feature of these food posts, at Tomio’s behest):

To serve 2 (and some change):

1/2 lb rice noodles (broad, stick, thin, your call, or any noodle)
1 big boneless chicken cutlet (or two small)
vegetables (I used a red pepper)
1-2 cloves garlic
sesame or peanut oil (or plain veggie oil)
garnish (green onion, basil, or cilantro)

1/4 cup “natural” peanut butter (or the ordinary trans-fatty sweet kind, but omit the sugar)
1/2 tbsp. sugar
1/2 tbsp. rice or wine vinegar
2 tbsp. soy sauce
hot sauce
hot water

Sauce (from Bittman): beat together the peanut butter, soy sauce, sugar, and vinegar. Add a dash or two of hot sauce (or omit if cowardly), and add water by the tbsp. until the sauce has the consistency of heavy cream. Make sure it really is runny or it won’t coat all the noodles and your final product will seem a bit dry (like mine did).

Bring a big pot of water to the boil and cook your noodles (only 4-5 mins for rice noodles, as they cook devilishly fast). Put the cooked noodles aside.

Chop the garlic into helpless little bits. Cut the meat and the veggie into thin, stir-fryable strips (1/2″ thick at most). Turn the heat to high (or almost high if your stove gets ridiculously hot like mine) under a frying pan, get the pan hot, add some oil (a tbsp. or two), get that to smoke, and throw in your meat. Watch out for oily splash back (you probably shouldn’t have added that much oil anyway), and stir fry until the meat is cooked. Remove the meat, add a little more oil if the pan is dry, and stir fry the garlic and veggie until the veggie is almost tender. Throw the meat back in along with a few dashes of soy sauce. This should sizzle in a most satisfying manner. Stir it around until those veggies are tender.

Take the pan off the heat, and add the noodles and the peanut sauce. Stir everything around until you have complete sauce coverage. Hopefully you diluted your sauce enough that it still looks like sauce, as opposed to a glorified noodle coloring agent. Garnish it with the scallions or cilantro or whatever combination of little chopped leaves you got, and serve it up immediately.