I am staying with my SO and her family. I cannot conquer the kitchen as I do at home. This necessitates a creative mind to cook minimalistic. I am digging deep back into my undergraduate days when money was little. But sometimes these dishes are the best and tastiest.
One such dish is a quick and easy peanut-soy sauce stir fry or noodle dish.
This is seriously one of the tastiest dishes I have made in ages. I have made this numerous times in the last couple of weeks. It is cheap and easy to make, plus you can change the ingredients to suit your palate. Broccoli and cauliflower are dirt cheap where I stay. I eat three to four days on one head. But let me stop and continue below with the method and ingredients. Please follow along to make this poor university student recipe/dish.
Recipe/Ingredients
As I stated, this is a cheap dish for the poor students, but it is in fact one of the tastiest dishes. You will need:
- garlic,
- onions,
- bacon/meat,
- noodles,
- broccoli/cauliflower,
- peanuts.
For the quick peanut-soy sauce, you will need:
- 1 tsp peanut butter,
- 1 tsp soy sauce,
- 1/2 tsp white vinegar, and
- 1 tsp sugar.
Method
I normally begin the bacon on a very low setting, as this gives me time to prep all the other ingredients.
Now you can cut up all of the other ingredients.
When the bacon has sufficiently rendered out enough fat, you can add all of the other ingredients to get some "color". Do not cook the cauliflower/broccoli soft.
Whilst this is going on, mix the peanut sauce. Add the vinegar and sugar to a bowl and mix until the sugar has dissolved. Add the soy sauce and the peanut butter. Mix. At first, you will see that it looks like the sauce is separated. But just keep on mixing, it will become homogenous again.
After mixing the sauce, begin the noodles. As I am a student and time is crucial, I bought two-minute noodles. The beef flavor was the closest to the pork flavor. Cook this according to the instruction.
Then add the peanut-soy sauce.
By now the veggies and bacon will be done. It is as easy as throwing everything together.
And mix again, so that all the veggies and bacon and nuts get covered in the peanut sauce.
How healthy this dish is, I do not know. But on the positive side, your mental health will get a boost as this dish is delicious and so simple and easy to make. It really takes less than 15 minutes and it is dirt cheap. I think everything I used totaled less than $2 for a single portion. I obviously bought more so there are more portions left for me!
Anyways, I really hope you make this and that it also tastes so good to you. Do you make a similar type of dish? Please tell me in the comments if you have made this!
All of the photographs are my own. The recipe also just came to me opening the cupboard to see what ingredients I could use. Although I scoured Reddit for some sauce recipes, these are the stock ingredients of my SO's family kitchen cupboard. I really hope you try this. Stay safe!
