This was a really easy, delicious and extremely filling dinner. I am pretty sure it was in the lunch section of the superfood book but we have been enjoying the lunches as dinners since we often just have a simple toasted sandwich for lunch and we’ve found most of the lunch suggestions so far are big enough meals to be dinners. I think I could pretty easily say this is the best noodle salad dish I have ever eaten but to be honest I haven’t really tried many different versions other than the common pub style meals like “Thai beef salad” that you often see in various establishments in Sydney. For my first attempt at a noodle salad I think it was great and with a tiny couple of changes next time, we would gladly have this pretty regularly. You really feel good after eating this as it’s not heavy sitting in your belly for a while afterwards so it’s perfect for dinner especially if you happen to be eating late and a bit too close to bedtime.
Ingredients & Substitutions
At first when I was doing my usual online grocery order, I could not find any brown rice noodles. There was brown rice, there were noodles, there were rice noodles, wholegrain noodles, egg noodles, brown long grain rice and all the usual white varieties that I know will give my blood sugar an instant high and my hormone specialist would tell me to avoid, but no brown rice noodles. In addition to the noodle situation I couldn’t decide on a low salt soy sauce because the only one available was more than triple the price of all the other types. I decided to walk up to the shops and look in person to see if there was more variety in store than online. It was a nice little outing with Little Miss Pattz in the pram, we had a quick shop before meeting our friends for mother’s group and coffee as we do every week. I wasn’t feeling optimistic but sure enough, even though our local Woolies recently renovated and moved everything to more complicated locations that don’t seem to make much sense, I did manage to find the noodles I wanted. They definitely were thinner than pictured in the Jamie dish and I have seen the episode where he makes this so I knew mine wouldn’t be perfect but close hopefully. Then I read every price tag and bottle of soy before deciding to just go with the cheap brand, regular soy and save over $10. The only other substitutions are not really make or break details as the salad ingredients are suggestions and give you ideas for your own version so replacing watercress with snow pea shoots shouldn’t be too far from the original but I did try to stick to the rest of the salad suggestions including our first try of red radish.
Nuts & Noodles
The first 2 steps are easy but it’s essential you get them done first so you can focus on the other details. Toasting the peanuts is quick, simple and makes the pan smell almost like peanut butter on toast in the morning. Don’t over do it, just a light colour change and you notice the oils start to glisten on each nut, then you take them out and put them aside. This also means you can reuse the pan, without washing up yet which is great if you are like me and only have one really good non stick pan. The noodles don’t take very long and again don’t over do them or you will get a sloppy, sticky, starchy mess with no texture or flavour. Read the packet instructions and follow their steps, then this is pretty fool proof. Ideally you might prefer to have hot noodles, hot nuts and hot beef all coming together with the cold salad ingredients at the end but considering you are eating it as a salad I enjoyed having most of the elements luke warm/almost cold with just the sizzling beef on top.
Ninja Dressing
Not having a mortar and pestle means I am probably not getting the exact same flavours or textures as the original but my wonderful Ninja is quick and easy and still does an adequate job with everything I’ve used it for to date so I am sticking with it for now. This dressing tastes a bit like the satay sauce that you would have over chicken kebabs which is delicious and I probably could have had more dressing in my salad. Though I must say, while adding the ingredients for the dressing, the fish sauce was foul smelling but I guess fermented fish bits creating a dark black liquid can’t be expected to smell any good but it’s worth it because the result is super tasty and you don’t notice the fish sauce once it’s all mixed together.
Crisping Up Your Beef
The star of the show is this delicious crispy beef which only makes up quite a small portion of the total meal. We could easily sit down to a pile of this beef, maybe over fluffy potato skins or something but that doesn’t meet the healthy standards we are trying to live up to so we stuck to the correct portions. I think cooking the small amount is how you make sure it crisps up well so even if you made more I would recommend doing it in small batches to keep the texture and flavour accurate. An overcrowded pan usually doesn’t brown things very well.
You start off toasting your spices in the dry pan which is another enjoyable fragrant experience and it’s rewarding to see and smell it all coming together after trying to finely slice ginger and garlic without the samurai knife skills chefs seem to have. Having never used star anise before I was excited to try it, I’ve seen it in so many cooking shows (including Poh’s Kitchen which I love) and I have always wondered what it would be like. It smells great and definitely gives a bit of an aniseed note but different to fennel seeds. The recipe doesn’t specifically say to remove the star anise before serving the dish but I assumed that it’s used similar to bay leaves that you don’t really eat but rather use it to add flavour during cooking so I removed it from the meat after I took it off the stove.
With the meat itself I wonder if the result would have been any different if I didn’t use heart smart (lean) mince which we always prefer. The meat still crumbled (a potato masher can help this process if needed – another TV cooking tip to add to my growing knowledge), the flavours mingled and the beef browned and crisped up but I think the final texture was maybe more granulated and a little less glossy than the Jamie version. At first with the liquid in the pan as the juices come out of the meat I was thinking, this is never going to work but sure enough with the continued monitoring the pan dried up again and the toasty crispiness came up beautifully. Don’t be fooled by the images below, I didn’t burn it at all, the dark caramelised honey and spices made it look burnt but it tasted amazing.
Serving It Up
Continuing with your knife skills (or lack there of), you prepare the salad while keeping an eye on the browning meat and as you know by now I do love any chance to multi task and save time, just don’t forget your meat! I put the leafy salad down first then added batons of carrot and cucumber, half moons of radish with the pure white insides contrasting with their lipstick pink outside (and they were yum), threw in the snow pea shoots and made sure the salad was piled up on about half the plate. Then I added the noodles (we may have had a slightly larger portion of noodles than recommended but I didn’t want to have a tiny bit left in the cupboard so I just cooked the full pack) on the other side, mingling with the salad in the centre of the plate. Then the delicious sizzling meat which sadly wasn’t so sizzling now but I sprinkled it over the centre so it fell over the noodles and salad and piled up ready for the final touches. Throw on the crushed brown nuts that you could easily have forgotten by now but it does add a lot to the overall flavour so try to remember them, then drizzle your dressing over and a final touch of fresh coriander and red chilli. You have to sit back and admire the dish for a minute before you can dig in, the colours, the fragrances you just know it’s going to be amazing.
How Do You Eat It?
So we have this beautiful dinner in front of us, I’ve taken a million photos of the bright food art I have created and we are ready to eat but we had no idea how to attack it. Mr Pattz got his knife and fork and started pulling the noodles and salad from underneath and mixing it up sort of how you would use salad servers. I followed his lead and ruined the prettiness of the dish but making sure the flavours were spread throughout every mouthful was more important by then. We were both blown away by how delicious it was and every bit seemed to have a crunch, a warmth, a nuttiness, a sweetness, a hint of spice… it really was the perfect meal.
However, there are two points that we will be aware of when having this dish again in future. Firstly it was really hard to eat, the meat was in such small particles and it was almost impossible to get a good amount of everything on your fork. Perhaps our problem was that these types of dishes are best for chopsticks but I am one of those people that have no idea how to use chopsticks (despite Mr Pattz offering to teach me numerous times over the years) but maybe I should learn so we can try eating this in a more successful way.
The second thing to remember is to try your chilli before you put it all over your food. We really like chilli, we use it in various dishes but this is the first time we have had it fresh and on top of a meal rather than cooked through a meal. I have seen Jamie Oliver bite a tip off a chilli to first check how hot it is and then decide how much to use and if he will keep the seeds in or not. I have never understood people who can bite a raw chilli like that without fear for the possible burning to come but that’s just me. Not thinking this through, I followed the instructions, cut the red chilli in thin pieces, kept the seeds in and scattered it over both plates. At first we were commenting to each other that the chilli was hot, then our faces started leaking, then I must have bitten through a seed in the front of my mouth and I have never had such a strong chilli burn in all my life. It wasn’t the nice back of the throat warmth, it was prickly fire on the front half of my tongue and I was in all sorts of pain. But the food tasted so good! We brought out a litre of milk and kept refilling our glasses. At one point I stuck my tongue out and dipped it in my milk to try to calm it down. Then we started picking the chilli out of our food so we could enjoy the rest of dinner with a lot less pain. It was pretty hard to search through a mixed plate of beef, noodles, salad and dressing to find these tiny little bursts of fire but we did and finished the meal with some full fat Greek yoghurt to properly extinguish our tongues.
Little Miss Pattz was enjoying tummy time and gave us some pretty confused looks as our expressions changed throughout this meal, she is finding any unusual or abnormal behaviour quite entertaining at the moment so at least she enjoyed herself even if it was at our expense.
In summary this was a fantastic meal, very filling, very tasty, full of delicious, nutritious vegetables and I highly recommend you give it a go. Just be careful with chilli.
To see the full recipe and other great Jamie Oliver ideas click here.
Mrs Pattz Kitchen Adventures 