Vegan MoFo Day 15: Sweet and Spicy Noodles

This is a day late because I've had internet problems - the MoFo-ing carries on regardless though! Yesterday I thought I'd try a recipe from a new (new to me, that is) cookbook - The Everything Vegan Cookbook by Jolinda Hackett, which I bought weeks ago and have never got round to using. I had no particular recipe in mind and as I've been so impressed by Vegan.in.Brighton's way of choosing recipes, I thought I'd try something fairly random. Rather than selecting a recipe, I went with the one on the page where I had put the receipt before leaving the bookshop. This was Sweet and Spicy Peanut Noodles. This is not a recipe that I would usually be tempted to try. It called for pineapple juice, which I don't have but I did have a pineapple that had been languishing in my kitchen for somewhat longer than I would care to admit, so I ran three quarters of that through my juicer and diced the rest to go into the recipe. It also called for fresh chillies, which I didn't have so I used dried crushed red chillies instead. 

The finished meal was not a resounding success. The recipe called for "Asian-style noodles". I used rice noodles which were the only noodles I had available, but perhaps something a little more substantial might have been better. After soaking the rice noodles in boiling water as per the package instructions, then adding them to the fried chillies and pineapples and finally stirring in the peanut/pinapple sauce, with a minute's cooking and stirring at each stage, my noodles were losing their integrity and most of them had become a gloopy lump of rice and peanut. I was really glad that I had lightly steamed some vegetables to give the whole meal some bite. However, I did really like the idea of the sauce. I think it would go well with baked and breaded tofu, or perhaps it would have been better just poured on top of the noodles.