Pan-Fried Noodle Cake with Stir-Fried Bok Choy

We have now discovered the upper limit of my cooking ability: the noodle cake. I'm really trying to stretch my comfort zone and explore new tastes and styles, so after using this book for many years now, tonight was the first time I have made this dish.

And let me say, that the flavors are fabulous. The bok choy flavoring includes hoisin sauce, so how could you go wrong, really?

A breakdown of my challenges:

1. This is my first time cooking with bok choy, and I weighed out the 1 3/4 pounds as the recipe says, but when I started prepping it, I realized that it had large stems but few leaves. Makes me wonder if Whole Foods got in a lousy batch and chopped off the leaves to make it look better? I'll be looking at bok choy in the markets now to see if it normally comes with more leaves. Thankfully, I bought a huge bin of spinach today, so I just threw in a bunch of that.
2. Fresh chinese noodles. Not so easy for me to find the fresh kind, so I went with dried noodles. Tasted fine, but I'm not sure if the measurements were off because of this. Which leads me to point 3...
3. My noodle cake was huge in the pan. So I had to use a serving plate to flip the cake. Sadly, I didn't have another serving plate close at hand, which meant my top plate was smaller. When I flipped the cake, the edges fell off. No surprise there. 
4. I think because I probably had too much noodles in the pan, it was too thick, so it didn't really form a cake per se. More like a large, fluffy, flat-ish brain.

In the end, what we got was an incredibly tasty, low-sodium, Ramen Noodles dinner.  Nothing wrong with that except that we had five bowls, two skillets, and a large pot to clean in addition to cutting board knives and spoons.

I'm giving this dish 2 stars, simply because I could not replicate it. Can you? I will give a $5 Dunkin Donuts card to the first person who can replicate this dish properly with pictures as proof. And, if you do succeed, could you please tell me how you did it?

Fine Print: to play, you have to have a copy of the book or get the recipe from someone else. My fingers are tired.

Soba Noodles with Chard and Raisins

Ok. That's a fine looking picture! Dr. Sanjay Gupta would once again be proud -- so many colors! I opted for Rainbow Chard, which is just gorgeous. Each of the stems is a different color. You can see in the picture how some of the pieces are red and some are yellow, for example. One great thing about this recipe is that it calls for the whole chard piece, not just the leaves. You saute the chopped stems and then steam the leaves until they wilt.

We loved this dinner. Like last night's entree, I haven't made this one in years. My blog is motivating me to make a wider variety of recipes. Thanks to ME for that! :)

Though Tommie wanted to give this one a 5, I'm going to go with a 4. The flavors are fabulous -- raisins, chard, pine nuts, olive oil, green olives, garlic, and red pepper flakes combined with soba noodles. I went with wheat and buckwheat noodles, and they tasted great. My only issue with the dish was that the noodles were extremely starchy, which made a mushy sort of texture. I rinsed them after boiling them as directed, but maybe I need to stir them around the next time when I rinse. Something to work on...

Stir-Fried Turnips with Greens

Asian Delight-ful! Despite my LOVE of turnips, this is only the second time I've made this dish, and it has to have been years since I made it the first time. What have I been thinking? This stir-fry is fabulous.

If you have not tried turnips, and if you like Asian flavors, then make this stir-fry your entree (pun not intentional) into Turnip World.

Couple thoughts: Tommie will disagree with me on this, but rather than put 1/2 teaspoon of red chili flakes in it, I might go with 1/4 the next time. It pushed the envelope in terms of heat for my delicate mouth. The other thing is that I definitely could have added more spinach. It never ceases to amaze me how massive the greens look going in and how small they are once they wilt.

Try this dish. It's really fabulous. We give it 4.5 stars. Delicious. Nutritious. But a lot of prep bowls to clean. Tommie's working on that as I type...

Black Sesame Noodles

She shoots, and she scores!!!!!

OK. The first thing you might wonder is "Black Sesame Noodles?" Yes. I couldn't find black sesame seeds, so I went with the oldy but goody white sesame seeds. And, the only thing I'll say about that is, that I wish I put more in, because, um, YUM!

I'm gonna tell you some of the flavors, but just know that it's super easy, even though there are a lot of components. You basically throw a bunch of stuff in a food processor, shred some veggies, and cook some pasta.

So here goes: fresh ginger, garlic, carrots, cucumber, radishes, peanut butter, soy sauce, rice vinegar, hot pepper, some other odds and ends, and then top it off with fresh cilantro and toasted sesame seeds. Yummmm-frickin-y.

Clearly, tonight's dinner gets the full 5 stars. I actually did not get a second serving, because I wanted to leave room to have a slice of my freshly baked bread tonight for a snack. Food just tastes so much better when you make it from scratch.

Golden Tofu Wrap with Warm Asian Slaw

This meal is standard fare in our non-animal eating home. Not unlike the majority of Jack's recipes in "A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen," the ingredients are few: some sauteed tofu cubes, some red cabbage, a little jalapeño, some garlic, a splash of some Asian liquids, and a whole lotta love. (JK.) But as is the norm, the results are delicious.

With this dish I've learned that I like to add a bit more of the seasonings to the cabbage to give it more kick, and I've also learned to not buy Whole Foods' lavash wraps ever again. They taste good, but they're way too flaky and rip too easily. The dish calls for 12" flour tortillas, and Whole Foods never has any big enough. So I tried the lavash this once. Once! Next time, I buy proper tortillas at Harris Teeter. Lesson learned.

As one of our fave dishes, we're giving tonight's meal 4.5 stars. We're not really depressed that we got full, but we're still looking forward to leftovers for lunch tomorrow.