Make sure you have all the ingredients washed, chopped and ready before firing up your wok/kadhai. Cook on high heat. This is a dish that tastes a lot nicer when put together just before serving.
Ingredients:
- Egg Noodles – 225 grams
- Pepper – 2 tablespoons
- Ginger – 2″
- Garlic flakes – 6
- Soy Sauce – 6 tablespoons
- Raw sugar/ Jaggery or Honey – 1 tablespoon
- Vinegar – 4 teaspoons
- Mushrooms – 400 -500 grams, sliced thick
- Prawns – 1½ cup, shelled, washed and deveined (i like to keep the tails on for the additional flavour)
- Carrots – 2, cut into thin strips
- Spinach/ palak leaves only, chopped into large squares – 1½ cup
- Cornstarch slurry – made with 2 tablespoons cornstarch and 1 maggie cube of your choice in ½ cup water
- Spring onion – 6 whole, slit down the length and cut into 1″ bits
- Capsicum – 1, thinly sliced
- Oil – 2 tablespoons
- Omelette from 1 egg, cut into thin strips (optional)
Method :
- Cook the noodles in a large pot of mildly salted boiling water until just a little soft but not overdone (al dente). Drain, reserving a ¼ cup of the water, rinse the noodles well in cold water. Put the rinsed noodles in a large bowl, pour back the reserved water into the noodles, toss and set aside.
- Grind the pepper, ginger, garlic, soy sauce, raw sugar and vinegar as fine as you can. Now is a good time to taste the sauce and add salt if required.
- Add a tablespoon of the pepper paste to the prawns and set aside.
- To a wok/kadhai on high heat add a tablespoon of oil, toss in the mushrooms and cook until it loses all its water. Do not add salt.
- Add the prawns and carrots. Remember to keep stirring around all the time. Cook for about two minutes.
- Stir in the spinach, rest of the ground pepper paste and the cornstarch slurry. Cook until the sauce thickens to your liking.
- Take the wok off the heat.
- This is the part you do just before serving. While still piping hot, mix in the noodles, spring onions and capsicum coating the noodles well with the sauce.
- Add the omelette strips and serve right away.
Notes:
- Alternatives to:
- Egg noodles: flat rice noodles.
- Prawns (for a vegetarian variant): Paneer or tofu cut into 1″ squares coated with ground pepper paste and gently fried separately (they tend to break quite easily). Fold these into the noodles at the very end. Cook the rest of the vegetables as given above. And skip the egg.
- Maggie cube: Make the cornstarch slurry in a ½ cup of chicken or prawn stock.
- Other vegetables you can add include cabbage, baby corn, zucchini, pak choy, brocolli florets.
- The capsicum and spring onions are added at the end to retain the crunch. If you want them cooked through feel free to add them toward the end of the cooking process and before taking the wok off the heat.
- The noodles can be cooked until al dente, stir-fried in two tablespoons of oil and then added to the prepared saucey vegetable mix.
