Meal: BBQ Pork and Tofu Noodle Bowl
Cost: about $3 per person
Time: an hour, starting from thawing the meat. This could have been quicker, if I’d pulled the meat out earlier and been working efficiently, but I was goofing off in the kitchen and listening to music and talking to Jeff and doing dishes.
Leftovers: enough for lunch for me today. I win. :)
Local ingredients: pork, cucumber, green pepper
Organic ingredients: tofu, carrots, sugar

I love big, slurpy bowls of noodles. With sauce, with whatever bits of meats and vegetables are handy, in whatever flavors, hot, cold, I don’t care. (Google tells me that there are actually two pho places near our house. I’m going to have to investigate. Or else just bite the bullet and finally try making my own; our beef farmer periodically has oxtails.) (My love of soup, particularly Asian-flavored noodle soups, is a cousin to this love of slurpy noodle dishes.) Also, it’s been getting hotter and hotter here, and big slurpy bowls of cold noodles are one of the best solutions to the heat.

So, last night’s dinner started with this, and morphed with what I had on hand. I doubled the marinade, and it proved to be enough for a half pound of pound tenderloin (sliced into quarter inch wide strips) and a half a pound of tofu (sliced into very thin squares). The sake was subbed out with the “sweet mirrin sauce” I got at our Asian grocer last time, the oil was half sesame oil and half canola, and the five spice powder was left out entirely (it would help if I consistently read new recipes before going to the store for the week.) For the nuoc mam, instead of whole chilis I used Thai chili sauce (be gentle with it; add a little, taste, and add a little more. It’s potent) and a glob of lime juice instead of a slice of lime. I didn’t really measure everything, but just eyeballed it, adjusting the ingredients until it tasted right for us. We didn’t have bun on hand, so I used udon noodles. The tofu and the pork went on the Foreman grill (the only thing I would change; I think slow cooking the pork in a shallow pan, as I did the teriyaki pork the other night, would have made it much more tender). We served it up in big bowls, piling the cold noodles and pork and tofu with raw carrots, green peppers, and cucumbers, and tossing everything liberally with nuoc mam. Authentic? No. Tasty as heck? Oh, yes. When I make something like this, taste comes first, authenticity… later. Don’t get me wrong; I love culturally authentic food made by someone who knows what they’re doing, but when I’m cooking, my first concern is making something that tastes good and that we’re going to enjoy. And we did, every slurpy bite.