Recipe: Basic Vegetable Noodles

I've cooked my first meal, so I thought I'd share it with you:

INGREDIENTS

Potato

Carrot

Parsnip

Red Pepper

Spring Onion

Ground (Black) Pepper

Soy Sauce

Noodles

Note: These are just the ingredients I used tonight, you can actually mix and match your own desired veggies.

Step 1: Boil water in a saucepan, ready for the noodles. Which kind of noodles? Really doesn't matter, you choose. Tonight I used rice noodles, as those are the only authentic noodles you can buy in the Czech Republic; my personal favourite to use are the Japanese udon noodles.

Step 2: Begin dicing the hard vegetables: potato, carrot and parsnip in this case. To make the noodles look a little more authentically Asian, I recommend peeling along the carrot to make carrot strips. It's easy, once the carrot skin is peeled away, just chop away one end, grip the other, and slide the peeler as deeply into the carrot as possible.

Step 3: Now is the perfect time to put the noodles into the boiling water and to warm up the frying pan. Lightly grease the frying pan with a drop of oil (don't use olive oil, it heats up far too easily) and pour in the hard vegetables. If you had peeled the carrot for carrot strips, don't add those just yet.

Step 4: Stir the hard vegetables every so often while cutting the soft vegetables (half of the red pepper and a stalk of spring onion in this case). Once the potato has turned a deep yellow and appears to be nearly roasting, add the rest of the vegetables.

Step 5: At this point, the boiling water cooking the noodles should have its heat turned down. While stirring the frying vegetables, mix in black pepper and light amounts of soy sauce. If you prefer to have other kinds of ground pepper put into the mix, go right ahead.

Step 6: Once the noodles are done and the vegetables almost ready, drain the water from the noodles. When using udon noodles, I like to add them to the frying pan after the water has been drained away, stirring some more for a minute or two until the meal is ready. This should also work with ramen, phad thai or ho fun noodles. With the rice noodles though, they seemed appetising on their own, so I just served the food as it was.

Bon appetit!