Recipe #10 - Thai Peanut Noodles

Do you ever have moments where you just want to slap yourself in the forehead and yell, "duh"?  Well, I had one of those moments today.  Actually, I had several, but just one related to this recipe.

Today's recipe is Thai Peanut Noodles, located on page 165 or online here.  I've never made this recipe, nor did I ever think it was one that my family would particularly enjoy.  I love Asian food, but fried rice is getting crazy-Asian with my family.  If its not basic, they don't like it.

This recipe definitely requires a trip to the store.  It has a ton of non-pantry staple foods in it.  Here is a picture of the ingredients I had ready to roll.

 

So my "duh" moment comes in at this point.  I have purchased Udon noodles many times.  I like to put them in my stir fry.  So when I saw Udon noodles in this recipe, I thought I knew what I was looking for.  Well, I was wrong.  Ugh, I hate saying that, but I was.  

Apparently there are two kinds of Udon noodles.  The first is the kind that I have always purchased.  They look like this:

 

The recipe calls for 8 oz. of Udon noodles.  This package was 7.4 oz.  I figured that was close enough.  Well, if I had been thinking about it, the recipe serves 4-6 people, and this is one serving of noodles.  Not sure how this is supposed to feed the entire family...

The other kind of Udon noodles, looks like this:

Eight ounces of these noodles are very different than eight ounces of mine... DUH!  But at 5:45 PM, its time to cook, not run to the store.  So I pressed on and started another pot to cook Ramen for my kids.

The sauce is pretty easy.  Its a little of this and little of that.  I would suggest really mincing your ginger well.  Mine was small, but it could have been smaller still.  Once you start mixing it up, it looks a little like this:

Yuck, right?  But it smooths out beautifully.  

This is a pretty fast dinner to prepare.  I'm not sure how long the noodles really take to cook...since I didn't do that correctly, but I would guess that this meal takes 20 minutes from start to finish.

We just served it up with lots of extra sauce tonight, and it was delicious.  My kids only got one bite, so I could get their thumbs up or down.  They all surprisingly liked it and were a little bummed that they got Ramen (one of their favorites) instead.  But once I broke out the chopsticks, all was well again.

We'll have to try this one again.  I have handwritten into my cookbook the word "dry" next to the Udon noodles in the ingredients list.  Lesson learned.