Long before I discovered the secrets to making dan dan noodles, lo mein or drunken noodles, I had clipped a recipe for Spicy Szechuan Noodles from a local neighborhood newspaper. This simple, but flexible and pleasing dish has been a family favorite since 2002. The kids call it Peanut Butter Noodles and it is fantastic served simply or with optional toppings. As it tastes equally good hot or at room temperature, a big bowl of these noodles disappears rapidly on the potluck or buffet table.

As my children were growing up, there have been a few one-pot dishes that stand out as favorites -- both for flavor and ease of preparation. The first are these scrumptious noodles coated with a light, peanut butter-sesame oil sauce, using ingredients readily found in our grocery store. The recipe for Spicy Szechuan Noodles by Chef Kelly was clipped from the North Journal Star in 2002, and modified for ease of preparation and to accommodate both a child that loves and a child that feared spicy foods. 

Over the years, this dish has been a favorite with classmates and neighbors alike.  Due to its make ahead nature, it frequently graced potluck tables at school picnics and neighborhood gatherings.  Whether made as a double or triple batch, it always disappeared rapidly.

We have enjoyed this dish using a variety of noodles. It it fantastic with semolina or whole wheat spaghetti as well as dried Chinese noodles by Quon Yick Noodle in California, or fresh lo mein noodles. I have even made it using 1 and a half spaghetti squashes (roasted for 35-40 min in a 350°F convection oven). 

While the original recipe included shredded chicken and toasted cashews, I have also served it with thin strips of ham and julienned cucumber or carrots. As time went on, we found ourselves eating the saucy noodles simply with some scallions on top.  

We use bottled Szechuan sauce by Kame or Dynasty, which are carried in the Asian section of our local grocery store. However, I have included the original recipe at the bottom of this post should you wish to make your own chili sauce.

When my son became a teenager, he started making the dish when he got home from school. He noted that since he liked things extra saucy, he was deliberately sloppy with the measurements to add a bit more of everything. It was glorious to come home from a long day of work to find dinner waiting for me and my husband. Even my daughter, who has now grown to enjoy moderately spicy foods, told me that she liked my son's version better. 

So he became the Peanut Butter noodle chef. I recently realized that we have not enjoyed these noodles much since he graduated high school. Instead, we occasionally enjoyed coming home to Tortellini with Smoked Salmon in a butter-cream-dill sauce, my daughter's favorite dish. 

This week, I asked my husband to make the base noodle recipe, while I prepared toppings of shredded carrot, spicy stinky tofu and some miso-maple-glazed Chinese eggplant on the side for a vegan meal. 

Love2Chow Peanut Butter Noodles (Spicy Szechuan Noodles)   Serves 4.

Ingredients

    8-10 oz dry spaghetti or Quon Yick noodles

Sauce

    3 Tbs smooth peanut butter (Optional. See Note)

    1 Tbs soy sauce

    2 Tbs vinegar

    1 Tbs sesame oil

    2 Tbs olive oil

    1 Tbs sherry or rice wine

    1 Tbs water

    *1 Tbs Szechuan Sauce (or make your own)

    1 tsp sugar

    *2 cloves garlic, minced

    *2 scallions, chopped

    2 Tbs chopped cilantro (optional)

Optional toppings

    6 oz (w) cooked chicken or ham, shredded or sliced

    Cucumber, peeled and sliced into thin sticks

    Shredded carrot

    Wilted spinach

    Thin slices of dry tofu or spicy tofu

    Toasted sesame seeds, white or black

    Black pepper or toasted Szechuan peppercorns to taste

1. Boil water and cook noodles per package directions

2. In a large bowl, mix the sauce ingredients from peanut butter to sugar until smooth. Stir in remaining sauce ingredients.  

(If you are cooking for someone that is sensitive to spicy or strong flavors, hold off on adding the ingredients with asterisks.)

3. Drain hot noodles and immediately stir into the sauce. 

(Remove the serving for the person that dislikes spicy foods, and then stir in the asterisked ingredients).

4. You can either serve the toppings on the side, or mix them right in.

Note: If you dislike peanut butter, the rest of the sauce ingredients are also delicious without it.  The more traditional Chinese dish that this is based on uses Chinese sesame paste. You can use any combination of peanut butter, sesame paste or tahini, as long as the total is around 3-4 Tbs. Adjust thickness of sauce with water if necessary. 

🐾 Note: If you dislike peanut butter, the rest of the sauce ingredients are also delicious without it. The traditional Chinese dish that this is based on uses Chinese sesame paste instead of peanut butter. You can use any combination of peanut butter, sesame paste or tahini, although we find including some peanut butter improves the texture. Adjust sauce thickness with water, if necessary.

🐾 For potlucks, add the scallions and cilantro just before serving.

DID YOU TRY THIS RECIPE?

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If you love the taste and texture of sushi rice, sticky, vinegary and slightly salty-sweet, you will love these easy vegan maki rolls. While you are frying the sweet potato tempura, it is easy to add in stretched tempura shrimp for a pescatarian delight. Like the famed California roll, these Japanese-American adaptations have no raw fish at all, and are fun to make, serve and eat!

Shrimp tempura or portobello mushroom maki rolls with wasabi and homemade sriracha mayo.

Vegan futomaki rolls with sweet potato tempura, carrots, portabello mushrooms and sesame spinach

Today is Vegetaruary Day 28, the last day of a Vegetarian February Challenge issued by our daughter. And we celebrated with a light lunch of muffin tin eggplant parmesan stacks. It has been a fun adventure trying out new recipes and revisiting old favorites. Early on, we relied more heavily on cheese, but as our cooking vista expanded, we found ourselves eating vegan dishes more and more frequently. Among the new discoveries are a super easy, super fast browned butter radish couscous, tofu sofritas tacos, and a hearty two-bean loaf with homemade tomato jam. We also enjoyed standbys such as silken tofu spinach soup with Sichuan chili crisp (instead of prosciutto bits), vegetarian spring rolls, vegetarian chili and a spiced lentil curry topped with yogurt. Although the challenge is over, I suspect we will be eating similarly on most days going forward. There are so many more recipes we want to try!

Eggplant Parmesan Stacks

Eggplant Parmesan Stacks

This is my second time making individual Eggplant Parmesan entrees from the Muffin Tin Chef cookbook by Matt Kadey. His technique of oven baking the breaded parmesan slices results in a completely non-greasy dish where the sauce, cheese and eggplant melds into rich, satisfying stacks. I also like the addition of broccoli rabe (although I used regular broccoli). Best of all, as with many of my Asian eggplant recipes, there is no time-consuming and messy salting of the eggplant slices required. 

Spiced Braised Lentils, a Food52 Genius Recipe (vegan-friendly)

This Melissa Clark recipe infuses lentils with all the flavor of a good Madras curry powder, with tantalizing toppings of crunchy mustard seeds on creamy white yogurt. The satisfying bites of rich lentils play well against the contrast of textures in the toppings. Not having unsweetened coconut flakes, I substituted toasted bread crumbs the first time I made this, and then tried smoky wok-crisped mushrooms the second time. 

Try using lentils of different colors.  Here I have a combination of brown and red lentils with some split peas. It's also a great recipe to use up zucchini squash and other vegetables. 

For vegans, simply omit or substitute soy yogurt for the topping. It is truly deserving of a place in the Genius Recipes category.

Hot and Sour Soup (vegan-friendly)

We love this warm and cozy soup, which uses pantry staples to create a rich and hearty sensory experience. In another post, I covered my odyssey of trying multiple recipes for hot and sour soup to arrive at the perfect texture and flavor. In the process, we decided that we liked the soup better vegetarian as the pork slivers could end up tough and did not add much in the way of flavor. The best part of this recipe is that it relies heavily on dried mushrooms and long-storing pantry staples such as eggs and tofu.  

For vegans, omit the egg -- which adds pretty yellow streaks but is not necessary. The luscious flavor comes primarily from the vinegar and white pepper, and the tofu and mushrooms offer plenty of protein. 

Bean Loaves with Tomato Jam (vegan)

This was another recipe from The Muffin Tin Chef cookbook. The homemade tomato jam made from red Roma tomatoes was fabulous (next time double or even triple the jam)!  The mixture of garbanzo beans (chickpeas), pinto beans, pecans (I did not have sunflower seeds) and the seasonings yielded a very meaty aroma and appearance. My husband thought I was making beef stew when he walked in the door!

I did not have a whole onion, so the mixture ended up on the dry side. I tried to compensate by adding half a red bell pepper, but in retrospect I should have mixed in some oil, broth or even egg to help bind it together. Nevertheless, this is definitely a keeper and may even form the basis of a new veggie burger!

Vegetable Spring Rolls and Celebration Rice Cake (vegan)

When my daughter picked February for the challenge month, it seemed reasonable given that it is the shortest month. What I did not realize, however, was that the lunar New Year and Lantern Festivals both fell in February. Grace Young and Yotam Ottolenghi to the rescue!

Grace has a wonderful vegetable spring roll recipe in The Breath of a Wok, as well as a delicious char siu (Chinese bbq pork version) in Wisdom of a Chinese Kitchen. Back in 2020, I had made both of these, even making my own spring roll wrappers out of flour and water as I was trying to minimize trips to the store. Click here to read about how easy it is to make spring rolls, whether you prefer yours to be deep-fried, air-fried or even non-fried!

And I had previously modified Yotam Ottolenghi's savory vegan celebration rice cake to include dried Chinese mushrooms and other "treasures" available to me in a nod to the Eight-treasure sweet sticky rice cakes traditionally served for the Spring Festival. So I pulled out my Instant Pot Bundt Cake pan and made another wreath-like sticky rice cake with a rich, enticing mushroom gravy moat. 

Savory Sticky Rice Celebration Bundt Cake

🐾 My tip for this dish is to soak the glutinous rice for at least 8 h as I did the first time I made this, as some of the rice on top did not get as soft and sticky as I would have liked in this version.

Silken Tofu and Spinach Soup (vegan)

This is one of my all time favorite tofu dishes. Indeed, the luscious soup base with tiny white cubes of tofu set off against emerald green spinach and garnished with a sprinkle of prosciutto is one of my suggested entry dishes for people that believe they could never like tofu.  The original soup recipe from Fuchsia Dunlop's Land of Fish and Rice had pork in it, but I had modified it to our tastes.  Click here for the recipe. 

Silken tofu with spinach soup - vegan version garnished with Sichuan Chili Crisp

Hot and sour soup with cubes of clean-out-the-fridge zucchini.

To make this into a vegan dish, I substituted vegetable broth for chicken broth and omitted the crispy bits of proscuitto that I used as a garnish. While tasty, it was lacking a bit of umami oomph. The solution was this amazing vegan condiment called Sichuan Chili Crisp by FlybyJing, featuring lots of fantastic ingredients including fermented black beans, red chilis, garlic, sesame oil and Sichuan peppers. A drizzle of Sichuan Chili Crisp raised this fantastic soup to the sublime level. 

Brown Butter Couscous with Spring Vegetables

This recipe by "EmilyC" on the Food52 site is a true winner!  As I put in my review, "Fantastic, quick and easy! This is a great weekday meal with wonderful flavors, colors and textures. Will definitely be used a lot. I kept the radish greens and added them with the spinach. It all disappeared with no leftovers."  

New Year 2021 started off rainy, but with high hopes for a better year, and perhaps by summer, a chance to reconnect with family and friends. I wanted our New Year dinner to link future hopes back to childhood memories. This delicious, stunning centerpiece entrée based on a recipe by Chef Yotam Ottolenghi fit the bill perfectly. It combines elements of several traditional Chinese sticky rice treats, both savory and sweet, into a new vegan interpretation redolent with the flavors of mushrooms, maple syrup-sweetened soy sauce and warming spices. I took it a few steps farther by substituting several of the ingredients in a nod to the Eight Treasure Rice dessert traditionally served at New Year, and cooked it quickly in an Instant Pot Bundt cake pan for a stunning and delicious meal. 

The ultimate comfort food is the dish your mother makes when you return home from semesters away. For me, this was a version of the famous soy sauce chicken or 紅燒雞, translated literally as "red-cooked chicken." My mother perfected this recipe in my later college years, dispensing with fussy, unnecessary steps to arrive at such an easy and carefree procedure that she called it 懶人雞, which translates to "lazy person's chicken". I further adapted it by adding vegetables to create a one-dish meal that had my own children fighting over the flavor-drenched cabbage.

Lazy chicken with cabbage