It is Monday and that can only mean one thing. It’s time for another instalment of my weekly segment where we make a dish from start to finish in 30 minutes or less.

This week on 30 minutes or less we will be making the quickest dish to date; Spicy Noodles. From start to finish this dish took 20 minutes. There is one caveat however. I used left over, already cooked chicken which obviously sped up the cooking and prep time a little. Having said that, if you were to use raw chicken breast, slice it thin, and stir-fry it, it shouldn’t add more than 4-5 minutes onto the total time. This will still bring you well within the 30 minute mark.

Okay, let’s talk about the dish.

To start with this thing is loaded with vegetables. We will get into the specifics in a minute. Despite what vegetables I used you can easily add other vegetables like broccoli, cabbage, bean sprouts, snow pea, or really anything else you want.

The chicken could easily be subbed for beef, pork, mushroom, or tofu.

The noodles are rice noodle which are very quick to cook and hold up pretty well to being stir fried.

The sauce is homemade in under two minutes and uses a left over ingredient, miso paste, from last week’s 30 minutes or less. The miso paste adds a nice depth and saltiness to the sauce along with a creamy texture.

Ingredients:

Here is a full list of the ingredients I used.

• 1 cup, cooked, and picked chicken
• 1 carrot
• 1/2 a baseball sized onion
• 1 celery stalk
• 2 green onions
• 1/2 red bell pepper
• 2 cloves garlic
• 2 tsp grated ginger
• 2 tbsp miso paste
• 1 tbsp soy sauce
• 1 tbsp honey
• 1 tbsp sambal chili sauce
• 2 drops of fish sauce
• 1 tsp sesame oil
• 1 tbsp canola oil
• enough rice noodles for 4 people (1/2 a pkg)

Timing

I actually started this really late last night as you will see in a second. What I have found since doing these 30 minutes or less meals is that every single time, I am really glad I have something quick to cook. For whatever reason, whenever I do these I am either cooking late, it’s been a long day, I don’t really feel like cooking whatever it is. So, these come in very handy for me, and I hope they do for you as well.

Okay, let’s get into it.

8:25 pm

I started this at 8:25 and the first thing I had to do was fill up the kettle and get it going. You’ll see why in a few minutes. The next thing I did was quickly round up all of my ingredients and start prepping my vegetables.

8:31 pm

It took me until 8:31 to finish prepping my vegetables. Now it was time to make the sauce.

I combined the miso paste, honey, soy sauce, fish sauce, ginger, and sambal chili sauce, in a bowl and thinned it all out with about 1/2 cup of warm water. I stirred it until it was nice and smooth.

8:34 pm

At 8:34 the sauce was done and the kettle started to boil. I put my dry noodles in a large bowl and poured the boiling water over them. I gave them a few stirs with a fork and let them sit for four minutes. Once they were soft, I drained them, rinsed them with cold water, and set them aside.

Once the noodles were soaking I put the wok on the stove and started heating it over high heat.

8:37 pm

By 8:37 the wok was nice and hot. The sesame and canola oil were added to the wok, along with all of the vegetables excluding the garlic.

This was all stir-fried for about two minutes and then the garlic and the already cooked chicken were added.

I cooked all of this for two more minutes and then added the sauce. Once the sauce was boiling and everything was coated, I add the noodles and tossed them to heat them up and mix them with the other ingredients.

8:45 pm

By 8:45 the dish was done, plated, and pictures were taken.

Conclusion

This is one of my go to meals on busy nights, or when I don’t feel like doing much. It is so versatile, and quick what’s not to love? All of the vegetables can be subbed for other vegetables or just added to. The chicken can be subbed for pork, beef, tofu, mushroom, shrimp, even scallop. Even the sauce can easily be altered depending on what you have in the fridge and what you like. You could also sub rice wheat noodles for rice noodle if you want.

The real point here is that a stir-fried noodle dish can be made from scratch, sauce and all, very, very quickly. This portion will easily feed a family of four, but can also be scaled up or down.

So there you a very quick and delicious meal that is guaranteed to become one of your go to meals.