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I love the cold spicy noodles with peanut sauce at Brandy Ho's in North Beach (San Francisco). The peanut sauce is creamy, extra spicy, and just the right amount clings to your noodles.

My goal in trying this recipe is to not only end up with an amazing bowl full of spicy noodles combined with cooling cucumber sticks--but to do it on the cheap as well. There is nothing that pisses me off more than paying 3x the price for soy sauce at my local chain super-mega grocery store.

The version of the recipe I came across in the Cuisine of California cookbook is all about flavor. With a couple exceptions the ingredients are straight forward- substantial dose of garlic, red pepper oil, ginger, peanut butter, soy sauce, etc. If you have a well stocked Chinese grocer in your area, or live near a Chinatown, this is where you want to go to get your ingredients. You can get fresh noodles, light and dark soy sauce (I'm not talking about Kikkoman Lite)*, and a range of sesame oils- FOR CHEAP. I get generous bottles of soy sauce for less than a dollar, and rarely spend more than $2.50 on any single item including a stunning array of sauces, oils, condiments, springroll wraps, etc.

There was only one ingredient that threw me for a loop here. The recipe calls for dark sesame oil. Now I had toasted sesame oil, and regular colorless sesame oil, but I could not find a bottle of sesame oil that had the words "dark, sesame, and oil" on the label.....I did find one that said black sesame oil, and it smelled beautiful. It smelled like it would taste right and amazing. So I bought it. And I used it.

Now it has become very clear that I didn't know enough about the subtleties of sesame oil going into this recipe, but I am learning. Something did taste a bit bitter in the peanut sauce and after reading up on it, some say black sesame oil can empart a bitter taste to your recipes. Other than that the peanut sauce was wonderful, and I will now keep my eyes peeled for the hopefully non-bitter dark sesame oil I should have used in the first place. I bet it doesn't smell as good though.

What else can I say. The fresh noodles were great-I got the thick egg Shanghai noodles, drenched two pounds of them with the peanut sauce, and still had enough leftover sauce for another meal or two.

This would be great to serve at any sort of gathering-picnic, party, book club, baby shower, whatever. Throw it all in a giant bowl-toss in the slivered green onions, crushed peanuts et al on top-you don't have to worry about keeping it hot, or having it wilt.

*Light soy sauce is thinner, more salty, and doesn't change the color of a dish as much as its counterpart. Dark soy sauce is thicker and dark due to a longer brewing time and the addition of mollasses.

To feature an actual recipe taken from a cookbook, it is best to request permission from the publisher or author. In the early days on 101 Cookbooks, I would tell people where to find the recipe, but not feature the recipe itself. Eventually I began to request permission to run the actual recipes, but this wasn't one of them. The majority of entries on 101 Cookbooks will have the recipes attached, this just happens to be one of the ones that doesn't. My apologies!

From: The Cuisine of California

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