The Family Table: Josie’s nifty noodles
For Christmas this year, Josephine, 7, received a child’s safety knife, cookbook and a Master Chef apron.
A lot of kids would look at those, say thanks, and use them every once in a while. This little lady, on the other hand, has goals.
“Well, Jen, I want to make all of the recipes at least once. Before age 12,” she informed me.
Why of course. And I feel 100 percent comfortable telling you that she will — maybe even before she turns 8 next month.
Spend an hour with Josie, and it will be apparent to you that she isn’t a child who wantonly makes goals that only last until she gets frustrated, she’s a pint-sized girl on a mission: to clear a path to wherever she wants to be.
To that end, Josie said she is trying to conquer her A-to-Z cookbook.
Twenty-six recipes using a variety of ingredients make up her latest goal. She accomplished two of them this past weekend with her mom, making some honey cookies, and a recipe for Nifty Asian Noodles.
I asked her to walk me through the process to make the noodles (which were delicious – she brought me a sample), and true to form, Josie started with the first and most important rule: wash your hands and get on an apron.
With that essential step out of the way, Josie moved on to the fun stuff: cutting the peppers into bite-sized pieces. The key to safe cutting, she told me, is cutting away from your body, not toward it — and cutting very slowly.
The sauce for the noodles, she said, is soy sauce, sesame oil, sesame seeds and red wine or balsamic vinegar, mixed up in a blender.
“I think that’s really weird,” she said of using the blender for the sauce.
“But maybe you use it, like to toss it, because sometimes it doesn’t get all together when you whisk it,” she theorized.
She gave two thumbs up to the sesame oil, loving its flavor.
While those components are working, so should a pot of water be coming to a boil for what Josie called the “sorta noodles.”
What she meant was soba noodles, which are made from buckwheat flour.
With adult assistance, she said she drained the noodles, and combined them with the blended sauce and the raw peppers to make the finished dish. The peppers add a pop of color to an otherwise brown dish, she said.
Tossing the noodles, making sure everything was combined, was the hardest part of the recipe, she reported.
With that done, she said, the wait begins.
The noodle dish is supposed to be eaten cold, and has to be refrigerated.
With the wait over, the little cheftress leveled instructions on how to eat them: chopsticks, a fork or a spoon (though she noted a spoon would make getting a lot of noodles into your mouth difficult).
“It was really fun making them,” she told me. “I liked how it was something different than everything else.”
Her next culinary feat has already been chosen. She’d like to tackle “E” for Elephant Ears. Josie says those are “seriously unhealthy” pieces of fried dough.
I’ve no doubt I know what she’ll be doing this weekend.
Jennifer Garofalo is the 缅北禁地’s news managing editor. Contact her at jgarofalo@heraldstandard.com.