Spring Noodles
Some of my favorite recipes come from vegetable growers. Farm cooks know how to feed a bunch of people efficiently, with simple recipes made from basic ingredients that quickly produce mountains of delicious nourishment to energize the farm hands without weighing them down.
I am friends with some farmers who can really cook, and are generous with their recipes. Luci Brieger of Lifeline Farms in Victor, Montana has this carrot pasta dish that she’s perfected over many years. It’s sweet, earthy and comforting, and makes you ravenous. Josh Slotnick of Clark Fork Organics in Missoula, meanwhile, recently came up with a noodle recipe, based loosely on Pad Thai, as a way of burning through mountains of excess parsley. He makes a tangy chimichurri — a steak sauce from Argentina — and tosses it into fried noodles.
It’s nice to have brilliant friends whose shoulders you can stand on while you steal their recipes and mix them together like a kid at a self-serve soda fountain. If only it were that simple. Truth is, combining these recipes entails some tough choices. Which type of noodle, for example, should we use? If we go with a semolina-based pasta, a la carrot pasta, then we’ll add grated hard cheese and perhaps anchovy for extra umami. If we use rice noodles, a la chimichurri Pad Thai, we’ll get our umami from fish sauce and soy sauce.
After some very enjoyable head-to-head taste tests, rice noodles were clearly the best choice for this carrot and parsley sauce. They have a pleasing elasticity, can be pan-fried crispy, and hold the sauce admirably. I prefer the extra-wide rice noodles, which have a supple quality that makes chewing extra fun.
Rice noodles are also less finicky than pasta, and easier to prepare perfectly. You don’t even have to boil them. Simply dunk dried noodles in a pot of room temperature water, and turn your attention to other matters. By the time you are ready to fry, your perfect noodles will be waiting.