Cooking: Sweet & Spicy Pork Noodles

Today, Justyn was supposed to go eat Mexican food with his friends so that meant that I could have whatever I wanted for dinner. He doesn't exactly like eating aZn food twice in a row, so I decided to either hunt down a recipe or go out for Vietnamese food. The thing is that I needed dryer sheets so I opted to cook. I found a Ming Tsai recipe online by searching for pork noodles. Sounds good to me!

I picked up some serrano chilies (they didn't have Thai bird chilies), a couple shallots (the red onions were too big), 1 1/2 lb. of ground pork, black bean garlic sauce (they didn't have fermented black beans), and some stir-fry noodles (they didn't have egg noodles). So as you can see, I went to Lucky instead of Marina to get my groceries. I was a bit down because they didn't have all the ingrediants I wanted, but I also went in knowing they wouldn't.

I started by boiling water for my noodles and chopping up the vegetation. I combined the black bean garlic paste with grated ginger, minced garlic and serrano peppers. I also did a fine dice on the shallots and chopped up some scallion that I had leftover from yesterday's recipe. Do you like my froggy cup? Hehe..

I stir fried the ground pork until it was fully cooked and then seasoned it with salt and pepper. I didn't understand why the recipe said nothing about seasoning it to begin with so I used common sense here. I removed the cooked pork to set it aside.

Next, I added the serrano peppers, garlic, ginger, shallots and black bean garlic paste. Delicious, mouth watering aromas filled the kitchen immediately. My stomach growled but I had to finish in order to eat! Then I added a 1/3 of a cup of Chinese rice wine and let that reduce. Aw shit... I forgot to get Hoisin sauce. Grrr... Instead I used oyster sauce which I already had on hand. I know for a fact that Hoisin is sweeter than oyster sauce, so I added some honey to sweeten it up.

The pork went back into the mix along with 1 cup of chicken stock. Now, the recipe says to let it simmer until the mixture thickens, but I let it go for 5 minutes and it wasn't getting thicker.

So... I added cornstarch slurry to thicken it up. I let it simmer a bit and then added my chopped scallions.

Oh yeah and somewhere in between all that, I cooked an drained the noodles.

Plating time! I put the noodles at the bottom of the bowl and then topped it with the pork. A little garnish with some more green onion and you got dinner! It's such an easy recipe for another weeknight dinner and really delicious. There are so many different flavors going on. I've even got some for tomorrow's lunch! Justyn had a bit to try it and he didn't really like it, but then again, he didn't have a clear reason for it. Whatever... he wasn't supposed to be eating it anyway. On a side note, it turns out that his dinner plans got cancelled so it looks like he'll be eating last night's leftovers for dinner haha!

Recipe: http://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/sweet-and-spicy-pork-noodles