This evening for dinner, I was craving for some nice Asian noodles. You see earlier today while I was out running errands, my eye caught a new noodle restaurant in town and out of curiosity I looked up the menu to see if anything might be interesting. Nothing really stood out enough for which I was willing to spend $$ on enjoying. But the images on the menu were already signaling my foodie brain that I had to have some noodles for dinner.
So then I took a look at what we already had in our pantry. There weren’t many options.
The options for the noodles itself were just some ramen, egg noodles and linguine. Nothing close to the rice noodles or chow mein I wish we had.
I decided to settle for the linguine….and so set a pot of water to boil to cook that while I figured out the rest of the game plan.
To get the Asian flavors I was craving, I knew I needed some onions, chilli and garlic. But did I have any produce to go with it?
Yes, I was in luck. I had just washed and prepped some green beans earlier expecting to stir fry them later. Now I knew those beans were going to find a higher purpose in my quest to create an Asian flavored dish.
I got to work.
I set my frying pan to medium heat and added some Olive oil to it. Next I diced some shallots I had at hand and let it saute in the oil for a bit before adding some chilli-garlic paste I always have at hand for moments exactly like this.
While those flavors were blending, I cut up the green beans to nice bite size chunks and then added it to the mix.
Oh my dish was looking nice and colorful already. I just had to let it cook until the beans got tender and absorbed the flavors. As i was stirring this every now and then, I also added salt, pepper and some Oyster sauce, another handy Asian condiment I always have at hand.
It soon looked delicious:
Now I began to think that for the linguine noodles to really blend in the flavors it would be great to have a saucy base. That’s when I remembered I had Cream of Mushroom soup around (something I had bought to use for Thanksgiving but never used). So I added one can of the soup.
This looked even better…
Finally it was time to add in the linguine which had finished cooking now in the pot of boiling water. I didn’t really drain the linguine but instead used a pair of tongs to transfer it into my saucepan so that a little bit of the cooking liquid can help make the dish more saucy.
And the end result after everything was fully blended together was just delish!
Soon we were all eating it up and it was all gone in no time. Even my picky teens enjoyed it and my craving for an Asian inspired dish was satisfied.
Who knows what I would crave next and what new dish will evolve out of the at-hand pantry items.
Jubila 365 