After a long day, all you want is a delicious quick meal. Vegan stir-fry noodles are your answer, in 20 minutes max you’ll get your belly full.
Happy Chinese New Year! This is one of my favourite holidays as it often concludes the bleak January, it’s around my birthday in February, and it is a great excuse to eat Chinese food, one of the best cuisine of the world.
If your January went down in a slippery slope, forget about it and start anew with the Chinese New Year. You are fine, you are just more of a Lunar person rather than Gregorian…whatever that means! You have your second chance right here. Or at least that’s what I tell myself hehe.
London gets all dressed up for the occasion and China town is even more spectacular. Before Covid hit, we celebrated in full.
We were lucky enough to find a little temple near Soho and despite it’s not our religion, we were so warmly welcomed. We tried traditional Chinese typography, hung prayers to the wall, and wrote wishes for the new year on the cutest paper sheets.
There was also a huge parade with a colourful dragon and an epic show in Trafalgar Square. This makes me feel so nostalgic and wondering what will be of our lives, now that Covid is always with us.
I also love wearing red and this celebration is all about this colour. Indeed, red is a good luck colour in Chinese culture, it’s tradition to buy something red for yourself or the house on this day.
Funnily enough the same applies to Italy for new year and it’s tradition to wear red underwear on new year’s eve to bring you good luck for the rest of the year. Weird right? I also completely forgot to do this the last 31st December, but luckily, I have a second chance with the Chinese New Year! I’ll be fully covered in red this week as I need a lot of luck this year.
To celebrate together, I decided to share the simplest Chine-ish recipe I know. This is not the most traditional stir-fry, please forgive me, but it’s a go-to recipe in our house and we make it at least once a week. It’s such a quick dinner, packed with veggies and you can easily personalise it with whatever you like.
The secret is the sauce, it’s a game changer. I used to buy pre-made sauces as I thought it would have taken me too long to make it at home from scratch, or that I would have needed the most absurd ingredients. We then thought to give it a try, consulted a million recipes (literally), used up what we already had at home, and perfected it over the years. This recipe is now my remedy for a long day at work.
This sauce will make your taste buds sing and you won’t have a dull weeknight dinner ever again. I hope this recipe will become part of your repertoire.
Happy New Year, Xin Nian Kuai Le, San Nin Faai Lok 🐉 🧧 🏮
I hope next year we’ll be able to celebrate with a big parade once again.
Vegan stir-fry noodles
Course: MainsDifficulty: Easy2-3
big servings10
minutes15
minutesAfter a long day, all you want is a delicious quick meal. Vegan stir-fry noodles are your answer, in 20 minutes max you’ll get your belly full.
Ingredients
- The base
10 g ginger ( a thumb)
3 spring onions
1 or 2 garlic cloves, depending on your taste
1 tsp chilli flakes
Sesame oil
- The noodles
200 g noodles
Stir-fry vegetables (see notes)
250 g tofu
- The magic sauce
1 tsp peanut butter
1 tbsp dark soy sauce
2 tbsp light soy sauce
1 tsp rice vinegar
1.5 tsp sesame oil
1.5 tsp maple syrup
1 tsp corn starch or flour
- Decoration (all optional)
Sesame seeds
Spring onions
Coriander
A dash of lime or lemon
Method
- Make the sauce mixing well all the ingredients.
- Fry the garlic and spring onions cut into thin slices. This will take around 4 minutes. Now add the tofu cut into cubes and stir it for 5 more minutes.
- Boil some water and cook the noodles following the instructions on the packaging.
- Now add your favourite veggies to the noodles, cut into long stripes, make sure not to over do this, you want them to be crunchy.
- Add the noodles and sauce to your wok and mix it all at medium heat. Serve immediately.
Notes
- I normally have: ¼ of sliced cabbage, 2 sliced carrots, 1 sliced peppers, 1 sliced zucchini and 150 g beansprouts. You can also add 200 sliced mushrooms or half a small broccoli head. I also regularly buy stir-fry vegetable mix directly from the shops as this is my Iamhungryandinarush weeknight meal.
- Dark vs. light soy sauce? This might be obvious but to avoid confusion I thought to explain. Dark and light soy sauce are not the same thing, and they have two very different usages. Light sauce is saltier, dark soy is milder and sweeter. You normally use light sauce as a condiment, while dark soy sauce while cooking. Most of Chinese dishes have a combination of the two. You’ll never get a caramelly brown look and flavour if you only use the light soy sauce. So if you have struggled in the past, please know: it’s not you, it’s the sauce 😂I hope this helps.
