Noodly

Today I had the day off, so this dish was intended as late breakfast or possibly lunch. But since I was running late, I decided it to go with popped rice and an apple instead and have this wait until later.

Ingredients:

The left-over bamboo shoots, frozen soya beans (I think this might actually be edamame), frozen spinach, conveniently sold as a bunch of small cubes rather than one solid block of frozen greens, some more tinned fermented stuff, instant noodles, water chestnuts (I used a little over half the tin), and santen (didn’t use the whole package, natch). I also added some five-spice, shoyu, and sesame oil.

After chucking all the non-noodly things in the frying pan, and adding the noodles after preparing it according to the instructions, I got this:

I’m not sure how healthy this is, what with the instant noodles and me using the entire spice packet and all (don’t those things tend to be very high in sodium?), but it sure was tasty. I had considered adding some harissa as well, but I’m glad I was too lazy to bother. I don’t know what it was (probably the tinned fermented stuff. IIRC, it had some supicious red flakes), but something I had added was already quite spicy.

The noodle-to-vegetable ratio was a bit off. Normally I prefer to have more vegetables and less noodles (or rice, spagetti, couscous, whatever). Still, as it was tasty and properly filling, I won’t complain.

Those fermented veggies are actually quite nice. I bought them because it looked interesting and new, but never quite got around to finding out how to use them until this week. Might actually get them again. This is the sort of lazy, random food I regularly prepare, and the fermented veggies work well with this. Mustn’t forget to properly check the ingredients, though. It might contain levels of sugar and salt that make me not want to use it too often.

While the water chestnuts on their own taste blandly pukey, combined with a bunch of other things they suddenly get pleasantly crunchy and have the ickiness masked by the other flavours. Though I don’t remember ever eating them before and the taste of lone water chestnuts was new to me, their crunciness was familiar.
Now to find something to do for the remaining few…