Healthy and colorful stir-fried vegetables and sweet potato noodles

Thao Uyen

Today let’s do a vegetable dish, shall we? For the new year’s resolution list, I did remind myself to eat more vegetables as I often forget to do a vegetable side-dish to go with my meaty main course. Sometimes I do remember but am too lazy to prepare them. Well, no more excuses. This year will be all about healthy dishes.

To incorporate more vegetables, I think stir-fry is the best approach. Firstly, it doesn’t take much time to prepare and to cook which is a must for busy folks and secondly it preserves most of the vegetables’ flavor and nutrition to make the dish so tasty. I prefer leafy greens soup too but to savor the natural sweetness of vegetables, I’d opt for stir-fry dish any day. 

It's so refreshing and light

This stir-fry dish is inspired by Vietnamese vegetarian stir-fried rice noodles dish which is a street food of Hochiminh city. It is sold mostly in the morning to serve as breakfast for students as it isn’t costly yet keeps the stomach full for hours. And since Hochiminh city’s weather is warm throughout the year, there’s no need for heavy hearty breakfasts but a refreshing, delicately flavored dish like this one is optimal. And that’s what we’re aiming for with this dish. I make some twerks with the ingredients by adding more healthy ingredients and ditching the deep-fried tofu. We also will replace the rice noodles with sweet potato noodles. If you read my stir-fried beef noodles recipe, you’d know I’m obsessed with sweet potato noodles. They’re so easy to cook, so healthy to eat that I choose these noodles to begin the new year with. Alright, enough with the rambling, let’s get to the recipe then.

Ingredients (2 light dinner servings):
For the main dish
- 150 gr sweet potato noodles (soaked in cold water for 10 minutes or not)
- 3 dried shiitake mushrooms (soaked in warm water for 15 minutes or more until softened, dried off excess water and sliced thinly)
- 80 gr carrot or 2/3 of a medium carrot (cut into long stripes of 5 cm)
- 100 gr mung bean sprouts
- 150 gr choi sum or bok choy or any leafy green of your choice (cut into long stripes of 5 cm)
- 2 eggs (egg yolk and egg white separated)
- 3 spring onion’s heads (diced) OR ¼ of an onion (sliced thinly)
- 1 handful of roasted peanuts or cashew nuts, slightly grounded
- 50 gr mushrooms of your choice, I use straw mushrooms this time (cut in half)
- 1 handful of coriander (roughly chopped / optional)
- Extra virgin olive oil
- Soy sauce
- Salt
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For the sauce (to serve with the dish if needed)
- Soy sauce
- Sugar
- Lime juice or apple cider vinegar
- Half of a red chili (optional)
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Cooking directions:

1. Batter the egg yolks and egg whites.
2. Put a pan on medium-high heat, use olive oil to fry egg yolk and egg white separately. What you should aim for is thin sheets of white and yellow fried eggs so that we can cut them into stripes later. This step doesn’t need any special direction, each layer takes approximately 1 minute to be cooked. Afterward, take out the fried eggs and cut each egg sheet in half then into stripes of 1 cm wide and set aside.
3.  Boil the noodles for 5 minutes then rinse with cold water. Drain them then cut them into short strands of 10 – 15 cm long. Mix the noodles with 2 tblspoons of soy sauce and set aside.
4. Put a pan on high heat, use 1 tblspoon of olive oil to stir fry the onion (or spring onion) until slightly smoked. By then throw in the mushrooms (shiitake and straw mushrooms) and salt to taste. Since you build the dish in layers by adding the vegetables one by one, the salt should be added in layers too. Stir constantly for 3 minutes. The high heat should prevent the mushrooms to release too much water.
5. Next add the leafy greens and a sprinkle of salt and stir fry for 3 minutes.
6. After that it’s carrot’s turn. Add salt if needed and keep stir frying for 2 minutes.
7. Lastly add mung bean sprouts (and coriander but it’s optional) and mix on high heat until you can see the sprouts are partially translucent. Turn off the heat.
8. In the same pan, add the seasoned noodles and fried egg stripes to mix with vegetables. Our dish is done. To strive for interesting textures, sprinkle roasted nuts on top. The dish can be eaten alone or with mixing sauce.

To make the sauce, combine 3 tblspoons of soy sauce, 3 tblspoons of water, 1 tblspoon of sugar and 1 tblspoon of lime juice or 1 and 1/2 tblspoons of apple cider vinegar. Add thin slices of chili for a pop of spiciness.

You can find my notes for stir-fried dish with my beef stir-fried noodles here.

The purpose of my stir-fried vegetables dish is to be creative. So you can experiment with different vegetables to discover which texture, flavor and color speak to you. And above all, stay healthy and eat lots of veggies! 
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