#9 - Oodles of noodles

Or the safari dinner gone wrong....

So the idea was for me and some friends to do a safari dinner one Saturday night.

The general gist of this is that you have a different course in each house scattered around Camden making an interesting night, bit like a restaurant pub crawl and pot luck mixed up.

First issue was lack of participants, despite J's best efforts it ended up being me and the 3 J's (who all share the same flat - so wasn't going to be much of a safari....)

Then the weather was miserable, so instead of even attempting the travel the 3 J's brought their dishes to mine...

We started with cava and canapes - blinis with cream cheese and smoked salmon & veggie vol au vents, very sucessful - went down a treat with X factor on the telly!

Then came my disasterous main course.... prawn noodles. This was a Sainsbury's recipe, for ginger marinated prawns with mange tout and baby corn and those thin rice noodles.

Now I have cooked rice noodles before, however it hasn't been for quite a long time... so cooking enough for 4 I followed the instructions on the pack, excepting one...

The pack said use a pyrex dish, but this wasn't big enough for all the noodles, so cleverly I used a ceramic oven dish.

You are supposed to soak the noodles for 5 minutes in the pyrex dish, before rinsing with cold water to stop them cooking and then adding to the stir frying rest of the ingredients...

The noodles were terrible, they stuck together, in one large lump, some were under cooked and al dente... some were worse than al dente, and then in desperation to make them work I over stir fried.

In short we ended up with one lump of noodles which was over cooked on the outside and crunchy in the middle - you couldn't have done this if you were trying!!

Everyone very politely tried the noodles and then gave up and just picked the veg and prawns out - so in short not a successful course.

J managed to save the meal with his cheese board and port, after the varied chocolate course from the other J..... and then some Jenga (to go with the J theme??)

So bruised from the bad experience I decided to test the cooking instructions for the noodles...

3 different set ups:

- a pan of water on the hob brought to the boil, noodles added and then removed from the heat
- pyrex jug with freshly boiled water poured over noodles and left for 5minutes (per pack instructions)
- plastic container with boiled water as above

The results?:

- Pyrex al dente noodles (but edible)
- Plastic cooked noodles, potentially overcooked and cooled to set in one lump (nice!)
- Pan al dente, but better than pyrex

Conclusion - do not follow pack instruction!! use a pan on the hob and treat noodles similar to pasta, but taking off the heat when brought to the boil...

The Camden Road Cook