Sesame Noodz

Today...sesame noodles! Super quick, super easy, super tasty!
Sesame seeds are one of my favorite things in the whole wide world of cooking. The seeds themselves, sesame oil, sesame paste. They are all delicious and work well in sweet or savory applications.

THAT BEING SAID, I must warn you, sesame oil should not be used as cooking oil. This is not because it will catch fire or release poison gas or anything. It just loses its flavor, and you end up using too much to get a good sesame flavor and your food goes to the table way too greasy.

My sesame noodles have mainly Japanese flavors, which means the sauce contains sweetener. I use honey because it really imparts a nice flavor and yields a thicker sauce. You can easily use sugar or splenda or stevia or whatever other junk you have lying around the house, though. And my cooking pretty much revolves around using what I have. This sauce is rather sweet, so if you think you may want to cut back, add half the honey and taste.

A few other things you may notice are the following:

• I've used dry sherry in this recipe. You can use mirin (rice wine) if you want, but it is just too hard to find mirin that doesn't have a gazillion additives. You can also use any other dry wine, or nothing, but sherry is my favorite.

• I've used basil in place of going out looking for shiso and ground ginger instead of fresh (it was snowing in VA this weekend, and we are straight up plowless in our town).

Step 1: Ingredients

2 tbsp honey or other sweetener
1/4 tsp ground ginger or 1 tsp fresh ginger
1/8 tsp black pepper
1/8 tsp dried basil
1 tsp sesame paste
1 tbsp tamari
1 tbsp roasted sesame oil
3 scallions
1/2 small head of cabbage or bok choy
1/3 to 1/2 cup of onion
2 tbsp butter
1/4 cup dry sherry
1 lb pasta

Step 2: Sauce

Whisk together honey, sesame paste, sesame oil, tamari, 1 tsp of the sherry, and the spices. Chop the scallions and add to the sauce. Set aside to marry.

Step 3: Cabbage

Roughly chop the onion and saute over medium heat in the butter. Chop the cabbage while the onion sautes.

After it cooks down, add the remaining sherry. Because you love sherry. Turn this to low and let it hang out and soften some more. Typically I cook everything al dente, but undercooked cabbage is just a bellyache waiting to happen.

Step 4: Pasta

Cook the pasta al dente in well salted water, according to the package's instructions. You can use any noodle, udon, bean threads, soba, yam noodles...but again, it was snowing, and I didn't feel like heading down to the specialty store for the good noodles.

Step 5: Finish up

Add the sauce to the noodles and stir well. The add the cabbage and serve!