Recipe: Hot Pepper Noodles

Update on Hot Pepper Noodles (original post was on 3/27/13 - see below).

Have you ever made a recipe, thinking that it was something you'd never made before until realizing it later?  We made Hot Pepper Noodles which I thought was a brand new recipe until I started writing this post and realized that we'd made it before over 2 months ago!  When eating dinner, I even mentioned that it was the best Asian dish we'd ever made (a la my comment below).

This time it was even better:

• Used flat rice noodles which fit the dish perfectly (and is what the recipe calls for).
• Added chicken AND tofu (firm)
• Used FRESH basil from our garden!
• Because of the amount of ingredients we added (3 chicken breasts, 1 whole block of tofu), we made 1.5x the amount of sauce, although next time I'd make twice the amount of sauce.

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This past weekend, we made the Hot Pepper Noodles recipe in Bon Appetit's March 2013 issue (p. 22).  This was a fabulous (and quick and easy) Asian dish -- it was a write-in request from a reader who wanted the recipe from Penny's Noodle Shop in Chicago.  It's one of the best Asian recipes we've made; we'll definitely make it again.  Just looking at this photo is making me hungry. . .

Here are a few tips and changes we made to the recipe:

• Used thin rice noodles.
• Added shrimp to the dish and next time will add tofu too.  (This will require making more of the sauce since tofu tends to absorb sauce easily.)
• Added red pepper flakes when cooking the chicken and shrimp to add heat to the dish.
• Added scallions but won't do this next time because the scallions got overpowered by the other ingredients.
• Will add double or even triple the amount of basil next time.