S. and I are big fans of Asian, Thai, Pan-Asian, Asian Fusion...and so on and so on and so forth...foods. Virtually any dish that has an Eastern "flair" to it is a good thing in my books. I had been craving something in that vein recently and just didn't want to use my recipe for Chinese Cabbage-Noodle Salad that I have made a few times in the past few months. Also, we definitely needed protein with our dinner and I had forgotten to take some chicken out of the freezer that morning....ah, the conundrum.

Thinking about that salad, I remembered the ingredients were basically
veggies, some Asian sauce-type ingredients and some noodles. Maybe something to garnish. So, I got my butt up off of the couch and wandered into the kitchen. I opened the cupboard above the stove the houses all of our sauces and picked through it. Sesame oil - check. Fish sauce - check. Spicy chili oil - check. Olive oil - check. Soy sauce - check. I pulled all of these from the shelves, grabbed the crushed, dried chilis from the spice rack and headed over to the counter with my arms brimming with the tastes of Asia.

Opening the fridge, the first thing that caught my eye was a nice,
pound-sized package of firm tofu...how perfect! I had forgotten it was even there, to be honest. A peek in the vegetable crisper afforded me the luxury of some green onions, a quarter of a Vidalia onion, some sugar-snap peas and a bunch of succulent little grape tomatoes. How good can it get? Oh! I even had sesame seeds in the kitchen cupboard. Yup...we certainly do have a well-stocked larder and a plentiful pantry.

A drop here, a tablespoonful there, a few shakes all around, and I had made a rather delicious dressing. Pop that in the fridge and onto the "meat" of the dish. Not much work and not too much time after that we were plopping ourselves back down on the couch to have a nice, light and quite Vegetarian Cold Noodle Salad. All made by me. Without the help of a recipe. Of course, the problem being that it is hard to write while you're mixing and cooking and concocting stuff, so I hope I got all the ingredients and measurements down correctly. I basically kept adding and tasting as I went, so it shouldn't be too hard if you're going to try to replicate it.