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S. has already written about his peanut noodles. He made a big batch of the sauce the other night -- delicious as usual. We didn't have any rice noodles, so we used udon instead, which worked beautifully. I'm becoming very fond of the simple dried udon I can get at the co-op; there's something so neat and tidy about the way it's bundled, and the length of the noodles is perfect with chopsticks. I've found that it really is important to rinse them in cold water after cooking (if you want hot noodles, you should plunge the cold rinsed noodles into boiling water for a minute, which is sort of a pain, but not much of one if you have a tea kettle): it rinses away the extra starch and gives them their characteristic slippery texture.
Anyway, now we have some leftover peanut sauce, which is a great treat. It's good over lots of different kinds of vegetables, particularly green beans and eggplant. It's also excellent, thinned, as a dipping sauce for lentil or other vegetable croquettes.
What I did tonight was to roast broccoli and green beans. There are very few vegetables, it seems, that do not benefit from being tossed in olive oil, sprinkled with salt, and roasted in a good hot oven. I was never particularly fond of broccoli as a kid, maybe because the usual ways of cooking it -- steaming or even stir-frying -- don't do it justice. But roasted in the oven it gets toasty and dense and very good. There's no need to stop while it's crunchy, because it won't get waterlogged or mushy, and this is a great boon, in my view. A fully-cooked vegetable is a lovely thing. Best of all, they're so easy to make that they hardly qualify as a recipe. Here's what you do:
ROASTED BROCCOLI AND GREEN BEANS
Preheat the oven to 425° F.
Cut up one bunch of broccoli. You can use just the florets, if you are feeling inclined that way, or peel the stems and cut them into chunks. Irregularly sized pieces are fine; the little ones will get crispy and the big ones will provide substance. Take a handful of green beans, or more, and snap off the stems.
Pour a tablespoon or two of olive oil into the bottom of a large baking pan. Tip in the vegetables and shake the pan until they're coated evenly. Sprinkle some nice salt over top and shake again.
Roast for twenty minutes to half an hour, giving the pan a shake every now and again. Serve hot or at room temperature, by themselves or with a sauce; the peanut sauce is very nice indeed, as I said, but so is a shake of sesame oil, or a vinaigrette, or lemony garlic butter, or a fried egg, or nothing at all.
Posted by redfox at November 22, 2003 08:03 PM (dinner reports)all breads | breakfast | dinner reports | drink | eating out | essays | etcetera | lunch | news | recipes | salads | snacks | soups | sweets | tips | travel | vegetables | weekly meals |
