Late-Night Asian Noodles
TIME/SERVINGS
Total: 5 mins
Active: 3 mins
Makes: 2 servings
By Aïda Mollenkamp
These bastardized noodles, a godsend for dorm cooks, emerge from somewhere between the college-town thai noodle shop and the corner bodega. Our Asian-influenced recipe combines chile-garlic paste with peanut butter and ramen noodles for an ethnically confused but surprisingly appetizing late-night snack.
What to buy: For the chile-garlic paste, we prefer the one made by Huy Fong Foods (with the rooster on the jar!).
Buy the precut coleslaw vegetable packs that are sold (without dressing) in the produce section of most supermarkets.
Game plan: Heat water to boiling by passing it through your automatic drip coffeemaker or heating it in a microwave or on a hot plate.
This recipe was featured in our 2007 dorm cooking story.
- 4 cups boiling water
- 2 (3-ounce) packages ramen noodles (without seasoning packets)
- 2 cups prepared coleslaw (vegetables only)
- 3 tablespoons crunchy peanut butter
- 4 teaspoons freshly squeezed lime juice
- 1 tablespoon chile-garlic paste (such as Huy Fong)
- Place ramen noodles in a mixing bowl and pour boiling water over noodles; let sit 2 minutes.
- Once noodles have soaked, pour off all but 1/2 cup of the water and add remaining ingredients. Toss together until noodles and coleslaw are well coated in peanut butter and chile-garlic paste. Season with salt and black pepper. Serve.
COMMENTS | ADD YOUR OWN
If we're REALLY cooking this in a dorm kitchen, the chile-garlic paste is not going to be a priority for busy students. Ditto to the lime "freshly squeezed" lime juice. You expect us to have fresh limes available "after a night of frat parties?" If you found good substitutes for those two ingredients, this could be stellar, like the ingenious dorm rice pudding.
my college apartment often had limes leftover from margaritas...
Ah, well I'm in a dorm, on a dry campus no less, so I doubt that would be likely. Anything put in the kitchen is pretty much fair game for the taking.
so buy some roses lime juice, some siraccha sauce and some garlic powder. maybe not stellar but it will work just fine.
Sriracha already has garlic in it so I don't think the garlic powder is even necessary there. Also, since Rose's lime juice is sweetened you probably want to use just plain old non-fresh lime juice.
If you like asiany food enough to make this, you should definitely keep a bottle of the mentioned chili sauce or sriracha.
I would guess that you can substitute vinegar for lime.