It’s been a long time since my last “Food Blog Post”. This was mainly due to my Chinese mother-in-law staying three-month at our apartment. She was doing all the cooking and made such a mess in the kitchen that I did not even wanted to enter the kitchen anymore let alone take pictures on how she prepared food. Now after she is already one month gone I finally got around taking some pictures of my wife’s cooking skills.
This one is called Peanut Butter Noodles 花生凉面 and can be quickly prepared within 15 min. The noodles themselves are not handmade by my wife butjust simple spaghetti noodles from the supermarket. The sauce for the noodle is as the name already implies mostly peanut butter, seasoned with garlic, ginger, vinegar, soya sauce and other dark Chinese kitchen magic. Usually my wife only uses cucumber to give the noodles a fresh taste as otherwise it would be just too soggy but this time she added also some fresh beans. The dish can be eaten both cold and warm but I usually prefer this one when the noodles are still a bit warm, I am just not in for the greasy taste which comes after they get cold.
What are your quick and easy dishes?
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Crazy Chinese Family 
Peanut butter is really awesome. It give Asian dishes a really nice taste.
I often make Japanese Curry rise. It takes a little to cook, but it is so easy. I only need to cut meat, onion, two carrots, one big potato, but it in the pot, add water and curry paste. And then I just let it cook, and make rice with the rice cooker. Super easy. Sometimes I add Wiener sausages instead of chicken 😀
Peanut butter is really great. I recently bought peanut mousse from the Reformhaus. Less additives etc (especially much less sugar) and it still tastes great so I even bought almond mousse 🙂
Where to get curry paste? I am pretty much a novice when it comes to cooking as I just recently started again cooking after over five years no needing to make any food at all (last dish I made before was end of 2009 as afterwards my wife brought me food over each day…)
You can get it in any Asian supermarket. All of them sell at least packs of Golden Curry, some also Vermont Curry. You just have to put it in cooking water and wait until it is disolved completely 😀
Need to check out the only Asian market here in this regions (it’s tiny!)
I love peanut sauce in Chinese food, Mmmm! Those little shasheng 沙省 restaurants are the best, and so cheap 😀
I love peanute sauce as well and its my number one dip for hot pot. But wait…what? 沙省 ?? Saskatchewan??
What is the character again? I’ll look outside.
Y’know, all those places with the Pacman logo…
You better look again, I have right now no memory of these places or perhaps I am just blind when going around
沙县!
Ahhh now I know after I checked there logo! Havent eaten there yet but seen some of them in Xi’an I believe
I’m mind blown. I never thought peanut butter could work with noodles!
It works perfectly :p
These noodles are often also made by using sesame sauce instead of peanut butter
I love this! There is a small restaurant in Shanghai which looks like it hasn’t been renovated since the 70s and their main dish is sesame sauce noodles (very similar to yours). One bowl is only 8 RMB (mind you, this place is right in the center of Shanghai, so that is very cheap, only surpassed by street food) and it is DELICIOUS. Every day there is a long line of people waiting and at night if you arrive after 19.30-20… well, sorry, but they will be out of noodles 😀
My wife also did once the noodles with sesame sauce and we had it in China however somehow I love peanut butter so much more.
Can’t wait to eat in China anymore, just a couple of weeks left for us!
Don’t forget your loose pants 😀
I have to buy new ones I guess, old ones got too small since last trip :p
This looks like a quick, easy and delicious dish to make. It’s the first I’ve heard of anyone using peanut butter to cook with noodles. Did it taste more sweet or savoury? I suppose it would depend on the peanut butter paste used. I love hot Chinese peanut butter soup, the kinds you get as desserts at the end of a big Chinese banquet. Thick and I love it 😀
These days if I have to cook myself dinner, it goes like this: boil noodles, meat, veggies in one pot. Add “dark Chinese kitchen magic” which is usually dark ABC sauce, some olive oil, basil, mix and eat.
I am surprised that there are some who didn’t know a bout sing peanut butter with noodles. In China I have often eaten similar dishes with either peanut butter with the noodles or sesame sauce.
The taste is not sweet at all, it’s savoury but of course it depends on the peanut butter itself (though I never had sweet peanut butter so far!). I never heard about this desert you described
Oh my, more dishes with peanut butter sauce. This is completely new to me. Now I feel like pouring peanut butter into each dish I cook…
The peanut butter soup dessert looks like this:
http://melspantrykitchen.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/sweet-peanut-cream-dessert.html
It is generally thick liquid. Perhaps your wife might know. In Chinese/Cantonese it is called Fa Sang Woo.
I asked her but she didn’t know about it either. I didn’t know about peanut butter for dishes till my first trip to China. In both xi’an and in Beijing we had some of those dishes 🙂
Looks just as delicious as it sounds! Who cooks the most at your place? And whose cooking does Nathan prefer? :=)
Now that my wife is super busy with her own business I do more cooking than her. I didnt cook for five years till now!
Nathan, well he has his own special taste so we never knows what he will like next but we do know that he loves bread! (easy to comeby.. :P=
I’ve only had peanut butter…..in hotels which clearly is not top quality. I did have peanut butter as a child. But for some reason, I don’t buy it to stock my kitchen.
Pure natural peanut butter is good.
My quick dishes: steamed fish with a bit of soy sauce, oil, onion and ginger or stir fried butternut squash (with onion, ginger and abit of soy sauce). Both very easy and Asian/Chinese.
I never really had peanut butter or similar things either. It’s only in our kitchen as my wife does few Chinese dishes with peanut butter these days. Recently I bought from a bio store peanut and almond mousse which and it tastes great. No additives or whatsoever, especially the peanut mousse dries out your mouth in an instant but the flavor is very intense
Don’t laugh – but I do a version of this with chillies too. Best with dry red but also works with fresh green chillies. Its just… well… yum! 🙂
Need to try it out with green chillies, good tip! 🙂
Yum! My fast dishes are lazy sushi, scrambled eggs or omelets, miso soup and for super quick meals, cereal. Shreddies to be exact. ;p
When I have really nearly zero time I just toast some bread and fry a couple of eggs. Not the most delicous but it fills up for a time.
What is lazy sushi?
Yup. Toast and eggs sounds about right. Homemade hummus on toasted English muffins is another favorite for us.
Lazy sushi at our house involves spooning rice that’s had soy sauce, mirin (sometimes), wasabi and sesame seeds drizzled on top along with canned salmon mixed with mayo and/or furikake onto a square of torn nori and munching it down. Other options instead of the salmon are canned tuna and avocado. If you’re interested, I did a post on it. Check under Japan Food or search lazy sushi on the blog.
Sounds interesting. I really wonder how Japanese mayo tastes like. So far I only heard that it is very different than what i know as mayo in Europe
Long time no read/write/see? You get the picture! As for Japanese mayo, I like it best when I’m in Japan. Hitoshi and I bought some here and proudly offered it up at a Japanese food gathering for relatives and the prize mayo was promptly dismissed as uninteresting. Ha! Maybe it was defective. It was on sale!
Yeah it’s been a while 🙂
Seems that they are all Majo experts, I would never taste any difference 😮
Noodles are one of my favourite things to eat quick and delicious. The other day had a go at stir fried tofu with noodles it was yummy too. Your peanut butter suggestion sounds good will have to try.
I just love noodles. Right now we are in xi’an, Shaanxi where every restaurant got their own special noodles dishes. I have the feeling it will take years till ihave tried at least half of them 🙂
Wow how wonderful, my favourite is Singapore noodles, the crispy kind just love them, but I reckon just about any kind of noodle would appeal to me.
I love fresh bean sprouts grilled/ fried with noodles. In Helsinki is a restaurant called Singaporean wok and both me and my wife just crave even now for their noodle dishes