This noodle salad isn’t just to feed sixteen 15 year olds coming over to celebrate your daughter’s birthday, this is a good salad to make for family meals, pack lunch, to have in the fridge over the weekend giving you the answer to, ‘..what shall I snack on..’. This was a one of very two large bowls of noodles I made for the hungry teens, it’s a very economical and easy way to feed a large group. It seems among my daughter’s generation that noodles is on their top favourite list.
I’ve made the dressing simple and adjustable to taste, and it goes without saying the same for the choice of vegetables, leaving it vegetarian or adding cooked meat or fish such prawns or crab meat. Your favourite soft herbs will go well in here parsley, coriander, chives, basil, chervil (hard to find). If I was making a prawn and crab salad I would add chives, parsley and a little dill.
Meat & Dressing
It’s important to add the dressing before the noodles cool down completely because they’ll absorb it while warm. For the meat in this salad I added chicken and beef. I sliced and marinated a beef steak in soy & mirin for an hour before stir-frying it medium rare, then cut it up into tiny pieces before adding to the salad. The chicken I had some leftover roast chicken and again shredded to spread evenly throughout the noodles.
Noodle Salad
Serves 4
1 pack of noodles cooked to packet instructions.
If they’re fine noodles my method is to plunge the noodles into boiling water let the water come up the the boil and turn off the heat and let them sit there for 3-5 minutes depending on the noodle variety and thickness, just take a bite to see if soft enough.
1 large pepper, sliced thinly
1 large courgette (zuchini), grated (raw)
1 large carrot, grated
3-4 spring onions (scallions) thinly sliced
1-2 tablespoons of your favourite soft herbs such as parsley, chives, coriander, chervil, basil
a bunch of cress (optional)
Cooked meat or fish of your choice – you don’t need a lot of meat here to make it a substantial meal.
Dressing
1 tablespoon of vegetable oil
2 tablespoon of soy sauce
1 tablespoon of mirin (Japanese sweet cooking wine) or chinese cooking wine
1/2 tablespoon of hoisin sauce
1/2 tablespoon of pomegranate syrup, or honey or syrup, alternative add half teaspoon of sugar preferably brown sugar
1 teaspoon of grated fresh ginger (optional)
Mix all the dressing ingredients together
Once the noodles are cooked and drained add the dressing and the vegetables.
Note: Sometimes after draining the hot noodles they have a tendency to stick together because the remainder of the heat will continue cooking, the hot starchy strands like to stick to each other, so I like to run a little cold tap water over them just to wash a little of the starch but not making them completely cold because you want the dressing to get absorbed by the noodles.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
What a colourful noodle salad, Azélia! This is something that I would love to make, because I’m eating much lighter meals now and need something to keep in the fridge to snack on. I have all the ingredients, but have pomegranate molasses rather than pomegranate syrup. Do you think that it will be too strong?
Superb photography!
hi Renee – same thing, can’t remember if my bottle actually said molasses and I put syrup!