Chronicles of Noodlemaking, Week 4: Lhasa Egg Noodle Shells

After the gnocchi interlude, it was back to Tibet and the third in the small-Tibetan-wheat-noodles category from Beyond the Great Wall. The last of these similar recipes is also handshaped, and has an egg in the dough like the Earlobe Noodles, but no oil. I made the dough, let it rest, then cut it in pieces, rolled it into logs, and divided those into smaller pieces, just like shaping the gnocchi last week. From here, you take each little piece and use your thumb to flatten it against your palm, so that you end up with a pretty little shell, thicker at the edges and quite thin in the middle (actually I thought these ones looked a lot like earlobes).

I don't know whether I made these larger than I was supposed to, but they seemed to take awhile to cook. Tasting the half-cooked ones made me a bit worried as they seemed bland and tough, so I decided to pan fry them to give them a bit more flavour. Butter, the rest of the caramelised onions, and more fresh herbs, plus a bit of crisping from the heat, and they turned out to be pretty yummy after all.

It was family Sunday dinner again, this time with my uncle, aunt, and two boy-cousins, as well as the home group of Mom, Grandma, and both my sisters. We had a huge meal that came together casually with everyone making a few things - the best kind. My uncle, the chef, had brought an enormous halibut, and after making its giant eye wobble at people for a bit, he oven-roasted it with lemon, and served it with an artichoke-tomato sauce. We ate it over a mix of brown rices and wild rice, and with the noodles of course. There was a soup to start, a beautiful deep red puree of roasted tomato and peppers, rich with ginger flavour. Then there were salads, a roasted beet, orange, and fresh fennel salad, and a crisp green one with tomatoes and avocado. For dessert, baked apples with vanilla ice cream; and for apres-dessert - three generations of women having an Abba dance party in the kitchen while doing the dishes.

These noodles were nice, but I was expecting them to have a bit more flavour, I think. The egg definitely gives them resilience in the mouth, but it's amazing how different they were from the first recipe, the Earlobe noodles. The addition of just a few drops of oil created a totally different texture and flavour. I liked all these noodles, and I would definitely make them all again, but everyone's clear favourite was the Earlobes.

The day after the dinner, I had the noodles for lunch, with leftover halibut and artichoke-tomato sauce. Homemade noodles. Mmm.

I'm looking forward to being a bit more ambitious in the following weeks. I want to experiment more with different kinds of gnocchi, and I think it's time to try rice noodles for the first time. I'd also like to try noodle sheets and rolled-out-and-cut long noodles sometime soon. I don't know what it'll be next week, but this project is only just beginning.