I want this newsletter to be filled with recipes that not only stoke you out and make you excited to get into the kitchen and cook, while at the same time, giving you a peek into the truly incredible secret lives and superpowers of our food; the energetic, seasonal magic that literally makes every ingredient precious, and every meal we make a special concoction (even if it just looks like a bowl of noodles or a chocolate chip cookie.)
I give a good amount of thought to what I want to share with you here because I want every single recipe to be an epiphany – a peek into this wild and amazing world of food and how it fuels, heals, and connects us all at the same time. But sometimes, it doesn’t need to be that well-thought-out. I don’t need to plan a recipe around the magic – the magic is automatic. The best recipes – the ones that you need, want, and deserve most – are the ones I’m making on repeat in my own damn kitchen because they’re easy, fast, good, and of course, already laced with this magic I’m talking about. It turns out that I don’t make the magic, nature does.
This week’s recipe for Vietnamese Ginger-Lemon Grass Chicken + Noodle Salad is one great example. I’ve been making some riff on this main-course meal all summer long; swapping the chicken out for beef or tofu, subbing in vegetables depending on what’s in season and what I have on hand. But the formula is still the same – an easy, one-pot meal that comes together in a snap, with an easy, crowd-pleasing sauce. This salad eats like a meal and – in the event that you have leftovers – is a lovely lunch too. Besides this, there are a few great reasons that this is what’s on repeat in my kitchen right now…and I have a feeling that this one will be on repeat for you too.
This noodle salad is a riff on a Vietnamese dish called bun bo xao, typically a cold sesame noodle salad served with stir-fried lemongrass beef, toasted peanuts, and fresh, crunchy raw vegetables. This is to say that the only “cooking” you do is boiling the noodles and stir-frying/sautéing your protein. Yes, you do have to chop vegetables and whisk together a sauce but this is not cooking, friends. But the meal altogether is divine.
It’s a dish I’ve been making forever because it’s about as quick as it gets when it comes to making a meal at home; so long as you have rice noodles, a few key liquids to make a sauce, some kind of protein and a few fresh veggies around (the nubs of carrots, a sad red pepper and a handful of peas and greens will do, but you can be fancy AF too.) But this summer, in particular, as I’ve been craving something not too hot, but not cold, and also grounding, easy and fresh. It’s a salad, but almost not. It’s PERFECT.
There are four “components” here: the noodles, the sauce, the fresh veggies and the protein. Depending on the season, I switch them up while still working with the same blueprint of a recipe…and you can too.
This recipe calls for thin rice noodles that are easy to digest and lovely to serve at any temperature; a perfect transitional nood. As the weather turns chillier, however, I’ll swap in a thicker noodle (more satisfying) or an udon or buckwheat noodle that has a little more heft, a little more nutrition, and stands up better to stouter fall vegetables. The latter don’t mind a little broth, so this noodle salad can kinda become a soup….
You get my point, I hope. Use what you have on hand, and what feels right in your body for the weather outside.
I don’t often share recipes containing animal protein here, not because I don’t eat it myself, or because I think you shouldn’t eat it. I elect to leave the protein out because I know that you have the wherewithal to choose the protein sources that you align with, and to add them to plant-based recipes to boost your own nutrition. I never want to write a recipe that includes a meat ingredient, have you write a grocery list and run out to the grocery store to check everything off the list, without knowing the source of your meat. (See what I mean about thinking a great deal about these recipes?)
That said, fall is a season when – as an Ayurvedic practitioner – I actually feel quite strongly that athletic bodies and lives benefit greatly from high nutritional density foods, and specifically from the highest quality animal proteins. This isn’t true in all seasons, but during the fall – when our bodies are striving to replenish, ground and nourish for the long winter of rebuilding ahead (just like all other living things,) we need the boost and nothing can do that for us like virtuous animal protein.
The chicken that I used in this recipe for myself at home was from Wisdom Farms. When I use beef, it’s typically coming from Grama Grass and Livestock. Using products from these purveyors puts my mind at ease about the impact that occasional consumption of animal products has on the planet; these farms are local to me, leave almost no carbon footprint, and contribute to regenerative agriculture systems where animals are honored, respected, raised humanely and helping to ensure that the soil our vegetables is grown on is nourished before being replanted.
If you choose to add meat to your noodles (which I highly recommend,) I hope you’ll feel the same way about your purveyors.
We’re still in the season where eating raw veggies is A-OK for our digestive systems; we have such a tremendous bounty and the vegetables are so tender, they want to be consumed in their original state. I’m thinking of the snap peas, carrots, bell peppers, crunchy cucs, fresh leafy greens and herbs that are my favorite ingredients in this salad. As the weather wanes, I’ll start eliminating some of these – they’ll stop appearing at the stands of the farmer’s market.
I’ll have a couple of short weeks when I may roast slices of pumpkin, or steam sweet potato and add it with wilted greens to this “warm” noodle salad. But by the time these crunchy veggies aren’t options anymore, this noodle salad will be too cooling for the body + it will be time to switch it up and let our noodles swim in broth instead.
Use whatever veggies you have on hand here that are crunchy + delicious fresh. But, as soon as those veggies are out of season, so is this salad…so put it on the shelf till next summer/fall when something not too heating/not too cooling is on the menu again.
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