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A healthy garlic vegetable stir fry noodles recipe packed with (garlic of course!) and green vegetables - the perfect quick dish any time of the week.
A nutritious garlic vegetable stir fry recipe
There is definitely a conundrum of what to eat when you have minimal time on your hands. Popular solutions vier towards microwave meals, opening a can of something and putting on toast or of course getting a takeaway, all of which give you the time to do other things. However, with many people striving for more healthy options, there is another route to take which is right in your kitchen already with some nutritional, tasty vegetables.
A great way to maximise your nutrition intake with vegetables with simplicity and ease, and with a takeaway in mind is to create a quick and flavoursome garlic vegetable stir fry with noodles. Slicing and dicing a few of your favourite seasonal vegetables and flash-frying them in a hot wok not only cooks your dish in double quick time but also helps retain much of the nutritional value otherwise lost in alternative cooking methods. The rest are blitzed together to create an intense sauce based on a fusion of Italian primavera sauce with Chinese flavours.
A quick and easy garlic vegetable stir fry
This is a quick and easy garlic vegetable stir fry recipe, but simplicity doesn't mean boring and it certainly doesn't mean bland. One could argue that there is a mis-association of vegetables, pulses and legumes with blandness or perhaps there is a lack of enterprise when creating plant-based meals using purely vegetables that then have to be flavoured with unhealthy store-bought pastes or sauces. You can make your own very intense sauce with just a handful of regular everyday vegetables with some choice additions of garlic, herbs and spices. So, If you are feeling lazy, you definitely don’t need to reach for a takeaway menu or microwave dinner.
Better than a Chinese takeaway noodles
Our recipe for a healthy garlic vegetable stir fry recreates a take-away Chinese stir fry that is often a choice favourite for an evening meal. However this garlic vegetable stir fry is different, this is loaded with nutrition, taste and vibrancy and omits a fair few unhealthy ingredients. It is something we’d love to see on our local takeaway menu, but as we can make one so quickly that is amazing, would we ever order it?
We absolutely love Chinese food, and many of our favourites use either meat or shellfish. Apart from the odd vegetable spring roll, recalling a favourite vegetable dish is quite difficult. This green garlic vegetable stir fry certainly does break the mould though.
We've chosen noodles for this stir fry too and they don’t usually get the plant-based treatment like their western counterpart pasta would generally get, but It is this thought process of seeing similarities with world foods that otherwise get completely different cooking techniques that leads us on to another factor we had in mind for the creation of this easy to prepare, flavoursome meal.
A Chinese Italian fusion
Noodles are essentially eastern ribbons of pasta and if you think about plant-based pasta dishes then there is a world of inspiration. Spicy tomato sauces, fresh pestos with whatever herbs and spice mixes you want, there are hundreds of smooth vegetable fillings inside tortellini or ravioli such as pumpkin or beetroot. For every meat or cheese sauce, there is a vegetable equivalent. A primavera sauce for example is just a wonderful fresh mix of seasonal vegetables. Eating seasonal food is also great for many reasons such as helping your local economy, helping you to consume fresher and more flavoursome vegetables and more likely to increase your food repertoire as differing vegetables will come into season throughout the year giving you more variety to choose from.
In the winter when hardy vegetables are grown you can pack your noodles full of greens such as crisp cabbages, broccolis, nutritious kales and leeks for example. In the spring, you have the choice of soft asparagus, crunchy carrots, chives, aromatic fennel and pulses. For summer, all those fresh, vibrant vegetables often associated with a Mediterranean diet are harvested such as plump tomatoes, sweet peppers, fresh cucumbers and sweet and peppery red onions. If you want you could add berries too. Then in the autumn, there are loads of squashes from turnips to butternut on offer and also plenty of cruciferous vegetables like cauliflowers.
So, making a simple primavera sauce for noodles or pasta at different times of the year not only gives an easy answer as to what to cook, as the supermarket shelves will be stacked with seasonal fresh vegetables, it will give a satisfying answer to what we instinctively yearn for throughout the year.
With this garlic vegetable stir fry dish, however, it isn’t just putting pasta sauce with noodles! This is taking inspiration from both cuisines and creating a subtle fusion with minimal effort. Both in Italian cuisine and Asian cuisines, many of the same ingredients are used spinach, green peppers, and asparagus for example and garlic is prevalent in both as are herbs and spices such as coriander (cilantro) and ginger. It is just the cooking techniques that differ. There are also many interchangeable ingredients that will give a dish its identity. In Italy, white wine or a marsala wine is often used so simply swapping this for Chinese Shaoxing wine is an easy change for a tasty fusion dish.
A garlic vegetable stir fry sauce without cornstarch
For our vibrant, healthy super green stir fry sauce (without cornstarch or potato starch) we start off with slicing 2-3 garlic cloves and frying them in olive oil until they firm up. This is the Chinese way.
We then reserve this in two halves so that we can garnish the final dish with some for a tasty and crunchy Asian flavour and also so we can blend half with the sauce for an added garlic hit too.
After about a minute of cooking the garlic and removing it, we add the spinach to the pan to wilt. At this point you may add herbs such as oregano, fennel, basil, sage or rosemary and perhaps a little chilli for an Italian slant, however, at this point we add the Asian flavours of fresh coriander/cilantro, Chinese 5 spice, a little ginger and Szechuan pepper and finally a splash of Shaoxing wine. Once combined, add the stock and blitz together in a blender or food processor. You do not need to create a totally smooth sauce as a pesto-like texture we think looks better.
That is the sauce taken care of. The only thing left to do is to slice your seasonal greens into long thin strands. We have used green pepper, asparagus and cabbage. A wok oil such as groundnut oil has a high smoking temperature which is good to fry with will only take about 5 minutes for the vegetables to cook to perfection. For the noodles, you only need to boil them in water for 3-4 minutes then drain them. It is almost as easy to wok the vegetables. Add the vegetables together with the noodles and finally stir through the sauce on the heat and you're ready to top with the remaining garlic and serve.
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Garlic vegetable stir fry noodles recipe
Ingredients
For the stir fry sauce
- 2-3 garlic cloves
- 200 g or roughly 4 cups of fresh spinach
- A handful or ½ a cup of loosely pack coriander/cilantro
- 2 teaspoon of Chinese 5 spice
- 1 teaspoon of Szechuan pepper
- 1 teaspoon of minced or ground ginger
- 1 tablespoon of Shaoxing wine
- 175 ml or ¾ of a cup of vegetable stock
- A dash of olive oil
For the vegetable stir fry noodles
- 125 g of medium noodles
- 1 green pepper, deseeded, cut into long thin strips
- 100 g or 10 stalks of asparagus
- 75 g of white or Chinese cabbage, thinly sliced
- 1 tablespoon of a wok or groundnut oil
- 1 tablespoon of sesame oil
Instructions
- Bring a pan of vegetable stock to a boil and simmer the noodles for 4 minutes. Drain through a sieve and reserve 175ml of the stock. Pour cold water through the noodles to stop the cooking process. Set aside.
- Using a wok or a pan, add a little olive oil on medium heat and add the sliced garlic. Fry for about a minute being careful not to burn them. They will be ready when they are firm and golden. Remove the garlic and place them on a piece of kitchen paper.
- Add the spinach to the wok/pan and stir-fry until the spinach has wilted. Add the coriander/cilantro, Chinese 5 spice, Szechuan pepper, ginger, Shaoxing wine and half the cooked garlic and stir through thoroughly. Pour in the stock and transfer to a blender or food processor. Process to a textured sauce. Set aside.
- To stir-fry the vegetables, add the wok or groundnut oil to a hot wok and add the asparagus, green pepper and cabbage and toss over the heat with a wooden spoon for 5 minutes.
- Pour the sauce in along with the noodles and stir to fully mix together. Drizzle over the sesame oil and serve in bowls and garnish with the rest of the garlic and some coriander/cilantro and optionally a little fresh chopped chilli.
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