Thursday, September 20, 2012

Spicy Tomato Asparagus Noodles

Last evening, our neighbor brought us some tomatoes from her garden. They looked beautiful, and after thanking her like a dozen times, and shutting the door, my immediate thought was ooh, gotta make some spicy tomato noodles!

The tomatoes, freshly picked from my neighbor's very own vegetable garden, were nice, and red, and firm, and simply gorgeous. Oh, and a 100% organic of course!

Gorgeous organic tomatoes, fresh from my neighbor's garden!
Prepping:

1. I first chopped up the tomatoes. Also minced some garlic. You can make it as garlicky (if that's a word!) as you want. And I roughly chopped some beautiful tender asparagus.


Delicious Tomatoes
Psst: While chopping the tomatoes, I ate up one raw tomato- it was the best tasting tomato I've ever eaten! Sweet like heck, with just a mild hint of tang in the background. My son tried some, and he couldn't stop either! In fact, I felt bad to cook those gorgeous beauties. They definitely don't deserve to be cooked, I thought. And so, I decided that instead of really cooking them, I'll just throw them in at the end.

Tender Asparagus
2. I cooked some regular chowmein style noodes from a packet. I thought I ought to take a picture of the instructions on the packet. OK, not trying to be mean or anything--- but, it was quite funny. Very straightforward, but funny!

Very straightforward instructions (disregard the spellings.....!)
Cooking:

1. A wok would have been nice, but since my wok is not all that great (I got it for free from one of those online orders I made one time), I just used a big pan. Put some cooking oil, got the stove running, and then threw in the garlic. I didn't want to brown the garlic, just sort of get the oil infused with the flavor. I then added about 1/2 teaspoon of red chilli powder for some kick.

Garlic and red chilli powder in oil
2. Then in went the asparagus, that was quickly stir-fried for about a minute or so, you know, to retain the beautiful green color as well as the crunch.

Asparagus
3. I added some salt to taste, and also some freshly ground black pepper. And then threw in the noodles that I had previously cooked. Normally I would have added the tomatoes along with the asparagus, but remember, I didn't want to kill those lovely tomatoes by cooking them. Therefore, I added the tomatoes right at the end. And gave it all one good stir, to get the flavors rolling.

Spicy Tomato Asparagus Noodles
My spicy tomato asparagus noodles turned out pretty darn good. Well, it wasn't all that spicy like I intended it to be. Guess I should have added a good couple teaspoons of red chilli powder. But then, I can go overboard with the spice, sometimes!

The best thing was that I finally, after all these years, successfully ate my noodles with chopsticks! Two thumbs up for that!


Mm mm!




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