Fakeaway Soft Noodles with Beansprouts

Use up lots of ends from the fridge and make a dish more delicious than the local Chinese Takeaway at a fraction of the cost? Yes please!

Our local takeaway charges £4.80 for a small portion of soft noodles with beansprouts. It comes to about a quarter of the amount I've made here, and also doesn't come with the trimmings and garnishes that turn it from a side dish into a main meal on its own. Yet my version uses half a packet of noodles, two eggs and a handful of odds and ends from the fridge - bargain!

I had half a bag of beansprouts in the fridge - something that often happens as a bag is often much more than you need, yet they don't keep well so need to be used up quickly or thrown away. And I HATE throwing good food away. I also had a few spring onions and one shallot, but anything oniony or shallotty will do.

To serve 4, you will need (all quantities are approximate, feel free to just use what you have around)

½ pack dry fine egg noodles
½ bag beansprouts
4 spring onions
1 torpedo shallot
small knob of ginger
2 large eggs
sunflower or peanut oil
1 tsp oyster sauce
1 tbs light soy sauce
1 tbs Chinese cooking wine or dry sherry
few drops of sesame oil
a few leaves of crisp lettuce eg iceberg or romaine, finely shredded
1 red chilli, seeded and shredded
1 tbs crispy fried onion flakes - these can be bought from Chinese food stores and are sometimes in the "salad toppings" area of supermarkets, or you can briskly fry a few dried onion flakes (or just leave them out!)
Lime wedges to garnish

Beat the eggs together. Heat a drizzle of oil in a small frying pan and tip in the eggs to make a small omelette. When cooked, tip it on to a plate and shred into thin strips. Set aside with the lettuce, chilli, onion flakes and lime wedges for finishing the dish.
Cut the spring onions, shallot and ginger into long thin strips.
Cook the noodles as directed on the pack, drain and keep warm. Heat 1 tbs oil in a wok and stir the spring onions, shallot and ginger until softened, then stir in the beansprouts and fry for 1 minute. Add the wine or sherry to the hot pan and keep on stir frying - the evaporating alcohol creates steam that helps the veg to cook very quickly. Fry for another minute until all the veg are tender-crisp. Mix in the soy sauce, oyster sauce and sesame oil, then add the noodles, tossing well to mix. Remove from heat and tip into serving bowl, then scatter the omelette shreds, lettuce, chilli and onion flakes over the top and garnish with lime wedges - a lime wedge squeezed over the noodles while eating is delicious!

You can ring the changes by adding shredded cooked meat, poultry or seafood, or for a vegetarian meal, toasted cashew nuts or fried tofu. So it's a very handy dish for using up odds and ends.

I am sharing this with the No Waste Food Challenge at Elizabeth's Kitchen Diary


and with Kitchen Clearout at Madhouse Family Reviews


and also with Meat Free Recipe of the Week at The Flexitarian 

For a Man or Boy at Ooh La La Creations

It's my turn to choose the theme for the latest challenge at Ooh La La Creations. It's my very first time choosing the challenge there, so I hope you will join in, especially as it is one of my favourite themes - For a Man or Boy.

I absolutely had to choose that as my theme, because I'd fallen in love with this wonderful image from the Paula Oakley Collection CD, available here, since not only is my husband a keen gardener, but the bottle of beer on the shelf is Hog's Back beer - and the Hog's back brewery is our local independent brewery! I won't be able to put this card away for his birthday, as he saw me making it, but I'm sure he'll be sending it to one of his gardening friends, possibly with a bottle of the beer to go with it!

The image and papers are from the CD, the stamped elements are made using Sheena Douglass stamps, the twine came from the garden shed and the wooden tag and watering can are from the Dovecraft Curiosity Corner range. I was disappointed when I stamped the words onto the tag and the colour ran, and I wasn't going to use it at first, but then I thought that it actually had the sort of weatherbeaten look of a lot of the things you might find in a potting shed, so the tag stays!

Butterfly and bling

I recently unearthed this beautiful Stampington butterfly stamp that I bought many years ago and has probably only seen ink two or three times.

Today I used the darker end of a Kaleidacolour "Soft Greens" pad to stamp it twice onto glossy card, then fussy cut one whole image and one just the butterfly. I placed them on a background of a die cut Spellbinders medallion, and added gem borders and gems between the scallops of the medallion.

I am sharing this with
Butterfly Challenge - Jewels and/or Jade
Allsorts - Wings on things
Mod Squad - Bling!
Inkspirational - Flutter
   

This blooming weather!

It's such a dark, gloomy, wet, miserable day here, and I've tried to introduce a breath of spring with this card in fresh, spring pastels, but having to take the photo in electric light has made all the colours look horribly garish!

The flowers are from Craftwork Cards, they have been hanging round for ages as I thought they looked rather flat and uninteresting, but by curving them with the scissor blades, layering them up and finishing them with Stickles, I've given them a bit mote character. The die cuts have used up lots of my snippets - pink swirly vellum for the butterfly and pink and white for the rest - the dragonfly panel and sentiment are Tattered Lace dies and the stitched oval dies are Gummiapan ones out of a gorgeous goody bag I won from Swedish House Crafts. I used  Hologram Stickles to fill in the wings of the large dragonfly in the die cut panel.

I am sharing this with
Shopping our stash - Stickle me Elmo
Pixie's Snippets Playground - weeks 263/264
Watercooler Wednesday - Colour challenge
  

Make it Male at CD Sundays

I'm still guesting at CD Sundays, and today our new challenge is Make it Male.

I know a lot of crafters struggle with masculine cards, but I love making them and I had lots of fun putting this one together.

The three papers are all printed from the old Funky Hands CD "Funky Daze", and matted onto black card. I used a fine liner to create faux stitching on the edges of the papers, and a V-tool to distress the card edges. The penny-farthing bicycle is cut with a Marianne die, then heat-embossed by covering with black ink and embossing powder to give a really glossy finish which sadly doesn't show up properly on the photo.

The cog wheels are cut with a Dies R us set, the button is from a bargain bundle I picked up on Amazon and the sentiment is created using a hand held Dymo label maker.

I am sharing this with
Crafty Gals Corner - Use Patterned paper
The Male Room - Anything Goes

For a new baby boy

At this time of year there seem to be so many "something new" challenges around, and for most of them I've been using new stash, but I thought for the current challenge at Naughty or Nice I would have a change and make a new baby card. And I'm heading down the naughty route!

When a baby is born, the parents get lots of cards with messages about "your little bundle of joy"
at a time when really the only thing that would bring them joy is a good night's sleep. Don't get me wrong, a new baby is the most wonderful thing in the world, but new parents end up too tired to appreciate them. Maybe that's one of the reasons being a grandparent is such a magical thing! I'm sure any new parent would give a wry smile at this sentiment, a Studio G mini stamp set, and appreciate the thought behind it.

The papers are from a Perfect Prints pad and the embellishments are random bits from my stash.

Added 17 Jan - Oh dear, why did nobody tell me???? As I was popping this into an envelope to post just now, I spotted that the white-with-blue-pattern paper I used for the background is lying SIDEWAYS. I'd thought it was a random all over pattern but it's actually a regular one with directions and everything. Oh well, since you lot are experienced crafters and either didn't notice the booboo or were too polite to tell me, I will just have to hope that the recipients are the same way inclined. And I'll also have to hope that Darnell repeats last year's April 1st booboo linky since I have my entry all ready to link up.

As white as snow

Here in the south of the UK we've not had any snow yet this winter, although some may be heading our way this weekend. But of course we still associate snow with winter and Christmas, and today's Christmas card is a snow scene.

The die I used for the row of houses is called Colchester Houses (no, I don't know why - my daughter used to live in Colchester and her house didn't look like that!) and the snowflake die was a magazine freebie a few years ago. The large triangle is embossed with the Cuttlebug Swiss Dots folder.

I am sharing this with
Christmas Card Throwdown - January Sketch

Cuttlebugmania - Winter Wonderland
House of Cards - Add a building and/or colour challenge
Time Out - Winter/White on White