Chronicles of Noodlemaking, Week 1: Earlobe Noodles

I don't like to be bereft of projects (though somehow this is rarely a problem for me); and I had just been through six months where I barely got to cook at all. So before I even got home I had made major culinary plans, the most ambitious of which is the Noodlemaking Project.

Actually it's not that complicated. I just decided that as a Homecoming Resolution, I wanted to make noodles from scratch once a week for a year. I got addicted to breadmaking a few years ago and baked at least three times a week, with the result that I can improvise all sorts of bread depending on my mood, flat or loaf, leavened or un-. The plan once I get cosy with noodles is to progress to cakes, since my recipeless experiments in pastry thus far have NOT been successful. Noodles seemed a lot more forgiving (and easier to eat en masse), and so a better way to ease back into cooking.

Jet lag couldn't keep me down, so my first full day back saw me tossing flour in a bowl with some salt, oil, and an egg. I'm focussing my explorations on the cookbook Beyond the Great Wall, by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, to begin with anyhow. I've ogled the photos and browsed the recipes but not really cooked from it yet, but there's a fairly broad noodle section, most of which are simple to make. I decided the Inaugural Noodle would be Earlobe Noodles, from western Tibet.

Making the dough is pretty much the same as making a bread dough - you just stir it all together, knead it a bit, and then let it rest awhile. The recipe calls for using a food processor, but I prefer to do things by hand when possible and this dough came together easily, though I may have ended up using a bit more water that way. While the dough was sleeping I made up a quick stew. Noodles are often eaten with lamb in Central Asia, but I figured a vegetarian chickpea-tomato-cabbage combination would work too.

By the time the water was boiling, my little sister had dropped by and my mother came up from her endless unpacking, so we got to shape the noodles together. This step is why I picked the earlobe noodles to start with. You just divide the dough into four pieces and roll them into long sausages. Then you stand over the bubbling pot and tear off little pieces, flinging them into the water. It got a bit crowded standing there together in the steam, but it seemed like the essence of being home, hungry but smelling the rich smells and working together for our meal.

And the noodles were delicious. Thick and soft but with a lovely springy bite; despite uneven size and shape none of them were soggy. They had enough flavour that we all sneaked a few extra noodles eaten plain while we were cleaning up. The stew coated them nicely and the vegetables were a fresh contrast to the slippery noodle rounds. If it's this easy every week, the year is going to fly by...