Waga-Laksa Noodles

When we’d visit El Punko during his long ago undergrad days, we usually went to Wagamama’s for lunch.  This past Christmas, the little dickens slipped a Wagamama cookbook under the tree for his old hag of ma who’s finally learning how to cook. 

Getting ready to cook chicken tama rice.

The book itself, which includes a DVD, takes the mystery out of Japanese cooking while convincingly selling the company ethos.  To do the latter, there’s a sacrifice of recipe photos for Happy Cook and Happy Customer shots.  

As luck would have it, the first recipe I took a stab at – chicken tama rice – had no photo.  It had garlic.  It had ginger.  It had wine and mushrooms and sesame oil.  How could it fail?

Right, like why suspect an online dating profile without a photo?

It's a fiddly recipe – hours of marinating the chicken, then grilling and slicing, followed by sequential quick quick quick cooking of the other stuff.  Then thickening of the sauce with cornflour, an egg briefly cooked so it wouldn’t curdle, a dollop of sesame oil and are your noodles ready?

I’d opted for bulgur wheat, which I dearly love.  My version turned out like this:

My chicken tama rice.

And tasted about as bland as it looked.

Other’n the bulgur wheat, there’d been no Hag Improvs.  Either the wheat soaked up all those flavours or the recipe itself was too bland.  So I thinks to meself, what is it I like in the flavour department?  I couldn’t get my mind off the laksa soup recipe by Lucinda McCord.

I didn’t want soup.  I wanted a noodle dish.  It seemed logical that the first step into making something I loved – study the Wagamama book.  Here’s what I learned. 

Marinade the meat in a sauce you like.

Grill or stir fry the meat, then remove.

Stir fry the veg.

Add the main sauce you like.

Put veg on noodles.

Top the veg with your meat.

I could do that.  Below is the concoction I came up with that gives me laksa flavour in a noodle dish.  I’ve got 3 sets of ingredients here, so if you’re making a grocery list from this, scroll down for all of it.

Marinade

Marinade

2 chicken breasts or 270 quorn (or mixture of the 2)

1T horseradish

1T honey

1T Mirin (or port)

4T oyster sauce

Combine ingredients in a shallow bowl.  If you want to grill your chicken, don’t slice it.  If you want to stir fry, then cut into bits.  Cover & marinate in the fridge for at least three hours. 

Sauce – made in a handheld food processor

6 spring onions

1½” ginger, grated

2 garlic cloves

4T desiccated coconut*

3T peanut butter

5-6 limes  (I like my lime.  If you want the lime to be more subtle, use 3 limes.)

1T muscovado sugar

Making the sauce.

I usually make the sauce right after I make the marinade so that it can sit & get itself all flavourful, but it’s pretty good when it’s cooked right after making it.  

Chop the onions, grate the ginger, press the garlic, slap in the peanut butter & sugar.  Squeeze out the lime juice.  If you like a real kick of lime, take that old grater you used on the ginger & make yourself some lime zest.  

Blend it all up.  If you don’t have a small blender, chop the chili & onions up very fine – a curved herb cutter works really well here – then mix it up well with your other ingredients.

I prefer a 2 bladed herb cutter.

*If you like a creamy sauce, omit the desiccated coconut.  Later, you’ll add either a tin of coconut milk or a packet of coconut paste as explained below.  If you use coconut milk, you’ll need to thicken it with cornflour, which I’ll tell you about when the time comes.

Other ingredients

1 tin coconut milk OR 1 packet coconut paste for creamier sauce

Corn flour, if you use coconut milk

1T duck sauce

Rice noodles, whatever thickness you like (very-fine in the photos)

Cooking oil of choice – I tend to use rape seed oil, but I also always seem to have left over oil from the sun-dried tomatoes & that works really well, too.

Sesame oil to drizzle

Colour!

Veg – whatever you have & like, with an eye to giving yourself some variety in colour – bell peppers, red onions, mushrooms, peas, broccoli, spinach, or more traditionally oriental style veg.  When I cook this for Siobhán (who hates veg), I have to temper the visible veg content down quite a bit.  My trick is to spiralise courgette & carrot, then add them to the noodles to hide the fact she’s eating veg.  It seems to work.  Even though she knows the veg is there, she can’t see it and so really loves it. 

Ding dong formation.

My spiraliser was a free gift with an order, so isn't a high grade model.  You can see from the photo that the middle never gets touched, so forms a little ding dong.  If your spiraliser does the same thing, cut the ding dong off in small sections & toss in with the rest of the veg.

Note on veg prep.  You can compost all your veg scraps or you can put them in a freezer bag to make veg stock later.  This includes everything from roots on the spring onions or stems of herbs, outer skin of garlic or onions, ginger peelings if you peel yours (which I don’t), thick stalks from broccoli & asparagus, etc., etc., etc.  Put the bag into the freezer & add veg scraps until the bag is full, to make your own veg stock later a la Thug Kitchen.

Now to cook it all up.

Break up the noodles into a medium bowl, 

Broken noodles.

cover with boiling water, then cover the bowl with a saucer.  

Add boiling water & cover.

I leave this on my plate warmer.  It takes about 15 minutes to cook properly, so you can cut up your veg while this is happening.

Grill or stir fry the meat or quorn, including all of the sauce.  If you grill the chicken, slice the cooked meat up when it’s done. 

Two handed stir fry.

If you stir fry, let the wok heat up until it’s nearly smoking.  Put in a little bit of the cooking oil (1-3T), then cook the meat for a (very) few minutes.  Being squeamish about raw meat, I do a bite test on the largest piece to make sure it’s all well down.  Using tongs (so that some of the marinade is left behind), put the cooked chicken back into the bowl, cover, & set on a plate warmer while cooking the rest.

Hiding the veg in the noodles.

If you’ve spiralised the courgette, give it a bit of a quick stir fry now in the leftover marinade, then put it on the plates (also on the warmer).  Add a little more cooking oil.  While it heats up, refresh the noodles with cold water, then divide between the plates.  I mix the spiralised courgette with the noodles so that Siobhán can’t see it.

Stir fry the garlic & ginger for about 10 seconds, then add the rest of your veg.  Stir fry for about a minute, then add the sauce.  If you’re not using desiccated coconut, let this cook for about a minute before adding the coconut milk or paste instead. 

Cooking the veg.

If you used coconut milk, make a paste with about ½ t corn flour & the tiniest bit of water.  Add about 2T of liquid from the wok & mix well.  Put this combination back into the wok to thicken.

Cook until the veg are the texture you prefer, then stir in the duck sauce for a few seconds only. 

Put the veg & sauce on top of the noodles, then the chicken on top of the veg.  Give it all a drizzle of sesame oil & enjoy!

Waga=laksa noodles.

Don’t Let The Laksa Stop Your Gob

Warming the bowls.

I’m cooking chicken noodle laksa this week, & thinking about people who tell other people to shut up.

In these post-election weeks, I hear rational voices advise liberals, men & women alike, to not get over it.  To not be so politically correct, to stop politely looking away, stop being tolerant of people with bigoted opinions, stop giving dangerous people a chance to be better.  Instead, call them out for what they’re doing when it’s wrong.  I hear liberals, men & women alike, admit they have to consciously make eye contact, make themselves speak up, confront, complain about the outrageous, as if that’s outrageous in itself. 

I look for myself on that spectrum, think about all those male voices that’ve told me to tone it down, get back in the femininity box, & I wonder how much of that was about them not wanting to hear something true, rather than about me being a jerk. 

Because, you know, I got myself a veritable talent at being a jerk.  Or as I’d rather call it, being an enfant terrible (French for jerk).  Did I ever mention El Punko’s poor 7^th grade teacher . . . I probably scarred that girl for life.

She was one of those ‘90s fresh face, big hair, all American middle school teacher types who, despite living in rural West Virginia, didn’t know there was any side but the bright side.  Imagine the assault to my misanthropy when at our first (& only) parent-teacher conference, she went all Judy-Garland-Mickey-Rooney-let’s-put-on-a-show because she saw a physical resemblance between El Punko & myself. 

I kept it together for about four choruses of, ‘I can’t get over how much you two look alike.’  Then my mouth simply opened & said, ‘Really?  Because he’s adopted.’ 

See the non-flinching resemblance?

El Punko's father threw me under the figurative school bus for lying.  El Punko himself politely asked that I never attend another parent-teacher conference. 

Twenty years later, El Punko doesn’t flinch at the type of person his mother is.  Well, there was the time I asked the guy on a Dublin bus how much fucking room he needed, but usually my son takes me with a grain of salt.  I sometimes wish his message of self-acceptance had come earlier for me.   Mostly I wish I had a better filter between my brain & my mouth.  At 60, I’m only slightly better.  I don’t swear as fucking much.

When we decided he’d host Thanksgiving this year & invite a few of his friends whom I hadn’t met, it sat in the back of my mind, that little demon of insecurity who asked me => how are you going to not be an asshole?

One of El Punko's friends agog
at our Thanksgiving bounty.

Neither said demon nor myself came up with an Asshole Prevention Plan, so I focused on sharing the fruits of my new cooking lark with El Punko.  No better place to start than chicken noodle laksa.  

As it turned out, I learned something more than cooking from that soup.

I can’t find a link to the recipe I used, but it came from Mary Berry’s Foolproof Cooking & was developed by one of her staff, Lucinda McCord.  Here I say – Lucinda, you’re my Soup God.  Fantastic recipe, but being me, I had my wicked way with it.

Spicy paste fixin's.

You'd think that since Siobhán now includes my ingredients in her weekly shop, I’d be done with Hag Improv, but no.  There were a gaggle of shrivelled up limes in the crisper at the time, so I didn’t order more.

A thinking person might consider whether shrivelled up limes have as much juice as fresh limes.  Me, well I didn’t think about that until I got to the squeezing part.  My first Hag Improv was to juice six* wrinkly ole limes for the spicy paste, after which I promptly forgot myself & doubled both the chillis & the ginger, then threw in an extra garlic clove or two.  Just to be on the safe side, you know.

The recipe suggests a mortar & pestle to mix this bad stuff,
but I used the chopper thing.

The paste also includes peanut butter & muscovado sugar, in case you’re wondering what else is in it.  Too yum!

Hag Improvs out of the way, there came one of those, well-shit moments.  Someone who knew what they were doing would’ve taken the chicken breasts out of the freezer ahead of time.  However, after making that kickass spicy paste & smelling that kickass spicy paste & yes, tasting some of that kickass spicy paste, no rock solid chicken breasts were going to stand between me & my laksa.  

Problem solved.

Hmm . . . so, I got me a big-ass ole knife & what do you know?  It cut through that frozen bad boy like it was butter on a summer day.

There's also the upside of not having to grab squishily old dead chicken flesh.  

Defrosting the chick chick.

I put the bowl of sliced chicken on the plate warmer & they defrosted themselves nicely.

Browning the pasted chicken.

The chicken got pasted & browned, after which the spring onions got themselves fried a little, so then it’s time to put in all the liquid stuff.  

I opened the first tin of coconut milk, saw this thick white gunk inside, turned the can over & gave it a hefty thwack into the wok.  If, like me, you don’t know anything about coconut milk, then you might not’ve expected this result:

Spilt coconut milk.

Fortunately, Siobhán threw herself between me & the 2^nd tin of coconut milk.  

Adding the 2nd tin
of coconut milk.

In addition to more lime juice & Thai fish sauce, you use one lemon grass stalk.  Mary Berry suggests that you beat the feck out of it before putting the lemon grass in, so that’s what I did.  

Medium rice noodles.

The recipe uses medium rice noodles, but this soup is so delicate in flavour that after my first batch, I switched to fine noodles.  I hear there’s even extra fine rice noodles out there somewhere, so if I ever find those, I’ll try them next.

Lastly, my brain says coriander tastes like soap.  Since in this instance, coriander’s only used as a garnish, I skipped that part & didn’t look for a substitute.

Chicken noodle laksa.

Isn’t this fantastic looking?  

I made that.  I did.  

Despite how well my Hag Improvs turned out, when I cooked the laksa for El Punko’s pre-Thanksgiving lunch, I obediently followed the recipe, used fewer limes, chillis & garlic, grated less ginger, & didn’t even freeze the chicken.  El Punko thought the flavour was good, but not strong enough.  

I’d toned things down so he’d like it, & he didn’t.

Now there’s a life metaphor . . . here’s me, who sometimes (a lot of times) says things that I shouldn’t.  As a result, people’ve told me to tone it done, to shut up.  A lot.  Enough that my little black heart believes my voice is something too caustic to take out of the box.  And even though I haven’t shut up, the idea that I should is the single belief by which I define myself.  I measure myself against a standard I can never in my wildest dream hope to meet.

And I shouldn’t measure myself in only that way.  As a card-carrying introvert, I’ve never really mastered the art of social finesse, that's true.  But I’m kind & generous, occasionally tolerant, funny (at least in my mind), a great problem solver & a kickass good listener.  I love my dogs & brush my cats.  My garden is my biggest vice, I recycle like a crazy thang, & there are actually 3 digits in my I.Q.  Oh, & if I’ve known you for more’n 30 seconds, there’s a good chance I’ll knit something ugly for you.  So why shouldn’t I speak?  Why shouldn’t you listen?

Besides all that, if those yappity rational voices are right, speaking out is a trait a lot of Americans are going to need over the next 4 years.

Anyway, the day after Thanksgiving, El Punko & I wake up to a kitchen full of turkey & brownies, cinnamon swirls, apple crumble, the world’s best cornbread, stuffing, ice cream, candied carrots, cranberry bread.  He looks around at all this food, then says to me, ‘I’m hungry for your soup.’

El Punko at work.

You gotta love that guy.

*After making this recipe several times, I’ve learned that 3-4 limes work fine, depending on size & freshness.