I recently made the SF-style Vietnamese garlic noodles from the Wok. I think perhaps I didn’t cook the garlic quite enough because it had a small amount of that raw garlic acridness left, but otherwise we really enjoyed it. I did add a little more cheese than it called for to try to balance out that acridness from the garlic a little. Even our finicky toddler ate some. We ended up eating only about half the batch, but just because it yields a huge amount of food.
The following night, I was trying to figure out something I could put together for dinner that I had ingredients for. I meant to make it to the grocery store and didn’t have time. One of our favorites is the Turmeric Shrimp recipe from the Immigrant’s Cookbook, and I almost always have everything I need on-hand for that. (The LA Times has [reprinted this recipe](https://www.latimes.com/recipe/turmeric-shrimp-curry-leaves), but it appears they left out the final step of adding the brown sugar.). While the shrimp recipe calls for shell on shrimp, we usually use shrimp that have both the shell and the head. We avoid peeled shrimp because it just doesn’t hold the flavor as well.
I figured I would reheat the noodles by tossing them in the wok after cooking the shrimp and wiping out the wok, but then it occured to me to mix the two recipes together a bit. I thought a little bit of heat might complement the garlic noodles nicely.
I doubled the recipe for the shrimp, except did not double the shrimp nor the garlic. For those I just used the amount as specified in the recipe. When the shrimp recipe was just shy of being finished, I added the noodles and tossed them together until the noodles were warm, and then finished with the brown sugar.
The addition of the heat and the flavor of the curry leaves really went well with the garlic noodles. I will definitely repeat and tweak this again. I think one thing I might try next time is adding a little cilantro as well to bring a bit of freshness to the party.
I know Kenji really loves the garlic noodles, so I hope he won’t murder me for this….but for my own taste preferences, this was a really phenomenal combination, and it gave me a little boost of confidence in trusting my instincts that the flavors would pair nicely.
Random tip: We tend not to use curry leaves a ton, but we’ve noticed that when left to open air in the fridge in our cheese drawer, they dry out nicely without going off and can still be used weeks or months later.
by Quick-Object-9037