Ginger-peanut noodles- super easy recipe

[sarahmichigan]

If you follow my food-related posts at all, you probably know I rarely use recipes, and when I do, I usually modify them a lot. I used this recipe for ginger peanut noodles almost exactly as directed, just with about 1/4 as much for all the ingredients since I was cooking for one. The only substitution was tabasco-like hot sauce in place of the chile-garlic sauce. I also used a lot more grated ginger than they called for. They're not kidding about how easy it is to make, either. SUPER easy, especially with the suggestion of throwing in frozen veggie medley at the end of the noodle cooking (which we do for other dishes at my house a lot), and tasty. My only suggestion: if you think you might want to make it, go ahead and use the full-sodium soy sauce instead of reduced-sodium, as the final result tasted a tad under-salted to me. I ended up shaking just a bit of table salt into it, and it was perfect.

I also baked a loaf of half-whole-wheat bread yesterday, and felt it was one of my most successful breads yet. I've been running ingredients through the "dough" cycle in my bread maker and then transferring to a bread pan because I like the shape of the slices better than when baking them in the bread maker. This time, I stopped it half-way through the knead cycle and started it over, to give the dough extra time to form gluten. I also let it rise for additional time, and the loaf was a superior consistency and shape to other loaves I've made recently, despite the high quantity of whole wheat, which can turn a loaf of bread into a brick if you're not careful.

Comments

[laughlovelive.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking of doing that - using the dough cycle and then transferring it to loaf pans and then cooking them in the oven. I read to put it in a greased loaf pan and let it rise for 30 mins, covered with plastic wrap, then bake. Is that what you do?

Do you add extra gluten to your whole wheat loaves? That was what I was planning on doing.

[sarahmichigan.livejournal.com]

I just left it in the breadmaker, which auto-warms itself, for an extra hour or so, but your plan sounds good.

I didn't add extra gluten since it was only half-whole-wheat. If I'd been doing 100 percent whole wheat, I'd have considered adding gluten. As it is, the half white white flour should be fine for forming gluten, especially with the extra kneading.