Herby Rice Noodle Salad w/Nutty Creamy Cilantro Sauce

If you’ve been following me along on Instagram these past 10 days, you know that I’ve been embedded in the desert cooking for the ladies of Red Bull Formation. WHAT AN EXPERIENCE.

Breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert and popsicle drops in the 95°F weather at the top of a desert mesa were on the menu everyday for the most talented, brave, grateful + deeply inspiring women I’ve ever met. I’ve never been so very aware that I’m exhausted, and so completely able to ignore it on account of the high vibes swirling. I’m sure that in the next day or two, I’ll crash, but not until I get all of the recipes I pulled together out into a place where they can live forever…to be made again and again to fuel badassery over and over. This Herby Rice Noodle Salad w/Nutty Creamy Cilantro Sauce is one such treasure!

How to cook for a superhero

When the invitation came to cook for the event, I just about lost my mind. Red Bull Formation is a first-of-it’s kind progression session for women’s freeride mountain biking. I was flattered before I even got there, and so determined to fuel these riders to the best of my ability. Planning a menu ahead of time would have been one way to tackle the task. But instead, I chose to riff on seasonal ingredients – literally making our meals up as we went because while I knew a million recipes that I *thought* would help keep them feeling fresh, rested, grounded and powerful, there were lots of things about our days that I could never have known until we were there in it.

The day that each of the ladies had a serious crash meant manipulating the menu to soothe their senses. The hottest day meant layering cooling ingredients to bring their core temperatures down so they could rest easily. The day that a few of the trails collapsed or had to be rerouted meant more calories and extra hydration to account for the extra hours in the sun, and so on. Plus, ensuring adequate macro and micronutrients to fuel them all week long.

Feeding your body right — for sport and life — has everything to do with taking inventory of what’s on your plate. The emotional things, the physical things, the mental things. If you have a stressful day at work, get into an argument with your partner AND have a high-intensity workout, you can’t expect to fuel for just the workout. You have to fuel for the LIFE behind the work. So for these ladies, whose sport is literally standing on top of a cliff, mentally and emotionally preparing themselves to ride OFF OF IT, we needed to fuel the strength + power required to take jumps at top speed, the emotional groundedness needed to make decisions clearly, and the mental fortitude to be decisive. AND, to consider the stress of travel, media pressure and more.

The ingredients needed to fuel this kind of event was about proteins, carbohydrates and fats — sure. But it was also about making sure that the food — literally the fuel to help bodies and minds go — served its purpose of clearing the unuseful, nourishing with good, illuminating every cell of these women’s bodies. There was no space for crap. So that’s what I cooked in.

Slaying (+ staying balanced) in the kitchen

At the same time, it was important that I keep things balanced in the kitchen and maximized time for myself. With just 5 hours each day to prepare everything the ladies would be eating for the next 24 hours, every moment mattered. Plus, I needed to make sure I was keeping on top of my own self-care so I could really be there for them. This meant I needed fast, fresh, smart solutions to the mighty task of these power-packed meals. 

This is very similar….in fact, IDENTICAL to what I think we all experience when we’re home cooking. We don’t have a lot of time or energy. We need our recipes to work for us, to be adaptable, to be straightforward, but optimal in their offering nonetheless. This Herby Rice Noodle Salad w/Nutty Cilantro Sauce is just about as close as I can get to a versatile meal, packed with everything bodies/minds/souls need to power on. (Except for the bi bim bap bowls we made but I’ll save that recipe for another time.)

A super rice noodle salad

There’s a lot going on in this bowl; the reasons I put the recipe together the way I did and the ingredients I included, so I’ll dive in.

• Versatility: One of the things I love about this recipe is that all of the ingredients can be made separately and used together – or apart – to build any number of combinations, and to suit the preferences of all who belly up to the table. One person doesn’t love carrots? No problem. Another wants more noods and fewer greens, while the other wants a salad with negligible noods. All good.
• Make-ahead + portability: this is a perfect example of a make-ahead meal that can be enjoyed for lunch, dinner or even riffed on to make a noodle bowl breakfast. Simply pack up all of the components separately, put them together as you like. The salad also ports easily (as seen in my road-trip snapped lunch shot above!)
• Easy to find ingredients, with a twist: I spoke before about how potent the ingredients were in the dishes that I selected, and you may be surprised to see that what I’m talking about aren’t a whole bunch of far-flung, hard to find potions and powders. They’re ingredients that you already have in your pantry or within your grasp. Then, I used flavor agents to doll them up.
• Rice Noodles: after a very long day in the sun, the ladies were inevitably dehydrated. Eating heavy, hard-to-digest foods when your system is even a little bit low on hydration is a surefire invitation to constipation, digestive distress, restless sleep, and congested thinking. None of which were invited to the tippy top of the mesa where the girls were riding off into the valley below. While I LOVE gluten and am a 100% bread supporter, bread can be a bit tricky to digest and it’s more sticky than other grain products. Rice, on the other hand, holds a lot of water itself and is easier to digest, meaning that the girls were able to reload their carbohydrate stores, take advantage of the grounding properties of the rice, and all without taxing their digestion.
• Nutty Sauce: We actually enjoyed two different sauces at the table during formation – a Peanut Sauce and a Cilantro Tahini Sauce, both of which were loved equally, and both with good reasons to be there. Fat is a very important ingredient in grounding and soothing our bodies, and consuming helps ensure that our brains and bodies are lubricated to do all the high-powered thinking and doing. Having spent all day in a high-paced, high-adrenaline situation, getting them to ground down — with practices, rest, and food — was really important. This sauce served that purpose beautifully.
• All Six Flavors: you’ve likely heard me rant a bit before about the importance of getting all 6 flavors we perceive onto our plates, unless you’re quite new here in which case HI! And Welcome! : ) As a reminder, the 6 flavors are: sweet, salty, astringent, bitter, sour, and pungent. Each of them signal to our digestive systems that specific nutrients are coming on board and to ready our digestive enzymes. Once those flavors are on board, they’re each digested a bit differently, and serve specific purposes — all-important for our bodies. Sweet flavors help to detoxify and ground us, salty flavors hydrate, sour flavors reduce inflammation, astringent and bitter flavors cleanse our systems of unnecessary products (ie: stress, fecal matter, cellular waste,) and pungent flavors keep our bodies warm and stimulated to that the whole train runs smoothly. This bowl contained all six flavors so I was certain that the ladies were getting everything they needed — not a big bowl of pasta that was too heavy, or a salad that was too light and not grounding enough.
• In-season greens: In principle, you could use any greens in this salad, yes. But in practice, I would insist that you only use greens that are in season, where you live, and that in this particular season (spring,) that you’re using greens and sprouts that are on the more tender side because they’re easier to digest. Hearty greens like kale are actually very difficult to digest, and while their extra green power is lovely, it’s not true that more is better in this case. Choosing in-season greens, in this case, meant that the ladies were dining on greens just picked from up the road, and noshing on perky sprouts with maximum nutrition because they hadn’t traveled across the country. The same with the herbs – everything was ridiculously fresh and full of flavor. And we can’t say the same for a box of spinach that was flown across the country. We just can’t.
• Coconut, YES: I added shredded coconut as a garnish for these bowls because I wanted a little extra assurance that the fat and sweet flavor of the coconut would ground the girls, even if they went light on the noodles and heavy on the greens (greens aren’t grounding, though they are delicious.) Coconut is also very cooling, which was important to ensure that the ladies got their core body temperatures down after a day in the sun. Doing so locked in a restful deep sleep for each of them.
• A little spice (just a little): the ladies had very healthy appetites – as you would expect after massive days of digging in the dirt, hiking up the mesa, and flying down it at top speed. Sometimes their eyes were bigger than their bellies. When we eat too much, we can dampen our digestive fire which – in turn – can make our digestion sluggish. But these gals needed calories. So, to make sure that digestion stayed stoked, even when there was the temptation to eat a larger meal, I offered a few pungent spice options. Spices stoke the digestive fire, helping us to process nutrients and eliminate waste.
• Protein as you like it: I always offered two different protein options at meals – one suitable for vegetarians and for meat-eaters alike. The ladies chose what they liked best. For this dish, I recommend enjoying meat if you’ve had a very big, high energy or emotionally charged day, or if you’re feeling a little flighty. If your body is feeling balanced and strong, not depleted, this baked tofu is a great option.