Super-Easy Stir-Fry

What more is there to be said about this recipe? It's super-easy and quite tasty, too! It's even vegetarian and it may be vegan, too, but I forgot to check the ingredients on the Shanghai noodles package.

Anyhow, you will need the following ingredients for this recipe:

-1 Tbsp oil

-¼ tsp sesame oil

-1.5 oz beansprouts

-1 small red pepper, thinly sliced

-1 small yellow pepper, thinly sliced

-2.5 oz (about 7) white and/or brown mushrooms, thinly sliced

-5 oz Shanghai noodles

-¼ cup sweet chili sauce

-1 Tbsp soy sauce

Now, usually I would not recommend using olive oil for the 1 Tablespoon oil because olive oil has a really distinctive flavour and it doesn't really go well with this type of cooking. However, if you're short oil (as I was when I was making this), it turns out that olive oil works just fine because the other flavours are so bold, you don't notice the olive-ness.

So, you'll be starting out with your 1 Tbsp oil and your sesame oil in a wok. Heat it up. Always make sure to heat up your oil before you cook with it.

To be honest, I did not measure out 1.5 oz beansprouts. I just took a small handful. This is not a

recipe of precision. The proportions of the peppers, mushrooms and beansprouts look like the picture on the right, here. Feel free to use that for reference, or not.

Once your oil is nice and hot, add in the peppers, mushrooms and beansprouts and stir-fry until the peppers are soft.

At our grocery store, when you buy Shanghai noodles, they come in this tiny package all squished together and it just kind of looks like one mass of noodle. If that's how it looks for you, do not fret. They do come apart. It's a bit of a pain to do and you'll want to do it before you add them to the wok. Anyhow, 5 oz is approximately ⅓ of that noodle mass in the picture.

Add the noodles to the wok, as well as the sauces. Stir well and keep stir-frying until the noodles are nice and hot.

This is how your plate will look like when you're finished. This stir-fry does not mess around when it comes to yumminess.

But in the mean time...

Enjoy!

THIS RECIPE IS:

Cooking Tip: How to Care for Mushrooms

Holy moly, has it ever been a while! Well, never fear, for I am back (for now!) with another useful tip for the kitchen.

So, true or false: you buy mushrooms at the store, you pop them in the fridge in their plastic container and when you're ready to use them you take them out and eat them as they are.

If you selected "true," then you should read this post!

Mushrooms should never ever ever be stored in their original container. I was very bad and bought mushrooms the yesterday and put them in the fridge without changing the container and even in the past 24 hours, some of the mushrooms have gotten mushy in some spots.

The best environment for mushrooms is in the fridge in a brown paper bag. They need to breathe! However, they shouldn't be stored for too long because they tend to take on the odors of the fridge since they are so porous.

So, now you've taken your mushrooms out of the brown paper bag you put them in when you got home from the grocery store and you pop one in your mouth or in your stir-fry or on your pizza without batting an eyelash... right? WRONG!

Look:

See that mushroom? See those little brown spots? You may think that that's just part of the mushroom because even white mushrooms aren't perfectly white. Well, you're right about white mushrooms not being perfectly white, but not all those spots are supposed to be there! That's right, folks, some of them are....

dirt!

So, what do you do? Well, it's very simple. First you run the mushroom under cool water and rub it gently. The dirt should wash away easily. You might have to work a little harder at mushrooms you bought bulk (not American bulk, which is called "wholesale" in Canada, but Canadian bulk, which means that you picked which mushrooms you wanted and put them in the bag yourself, as opposed to the pre-packaged ones).

Then you pat the mushrooms dry with a paper towel and let them hang out with some of their mushroom buddies until you're ready to use them!

See? Easy peasy!