Monday

Tonight we had a quick and easy Chinese-ish dinner: spicy Szechuan noodles (dan dan mian) from CI's international cookbook and a small salad. The salad dressing was an easy five-ingredient Epicurious find: a couple teaspoons minced shallots, 2 Tbsp rice vinegar, 1 Tbsp vegetable oil, 2 tsp. minced ginger, and 1/4 tsp. toasted sesame oil. It was delicious even on very American green leaf lettuce, with orange sections, sliced almonds, and black sesame seeds. I'll definitely make this again with spinach, as the original recipe suggested.

The noodles I had made before at least once. You can use either fresh Chinese noodles or just dried pasta (linguine), which any couponer always has on hand. A little briefly marinated ground pork is browned over high heat in a skillet, then a fair amount of ginger and garlic are briefly sauteed with it. You then add a sauce made of several ingredients, mainly peanut butter and chicken broth along with soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, red pepper flakes, and oyster sauce, and let it thicken for about 3 minutes. Off heat you drizzle a little sesame oil into the mix, and that's it. To break up the beige motif, and also for their nice flavor, you garnish with scallions. I crumbled part of a small Chinese dried pepper on top, because this dish really isn't very spicy at all. But it has a nice complex flavor and is about as easy as a stir-fry can get.