Lime turmeric rice noodles salad with asparagus
Welcome to To Vegetables, With Love, a celebration of a vegetable life, less ordinary. Find archived recipes on my new recipe index.
My book Tenderheart is available from Books are Magic, Kitchen, Arts and Letters, Book Larder, Bold Fork Books and also here or here.
I dedicated this week to asparagus. I challenged myself to come up with a dish that oozes Spring, without being too light, and hence, unsatisfying. I think this is one of the common mistakes of ‘spring’ recipes. They are too delicate, too sparse. In reality, our bodies are not ready for this stark transition. We need more time to adapt. This is particularly true in New York - Spring in this city is unreliable - warm, then cold, and lots of rain. Yes, year after year, we forget about the rain. It continues to spit outside as I write this.
Though I am an advocate of eating your desired vegetables at any time of the year, even when not ‘in season’, you will not find me eating asparagus in winter. It is one of those vegetables that is sublime when ‘just right’ and forgettable when not. Like many of spring’s capricious crops, the really good asparagus is only around for a little while. Perhaps my love for permanence precludes me from adoring it too much, so as to lessen the pain of abandonment when it inevitably disappears.
In developing recipes, I am often very inspired by the colours I want to see on the plate. This is one of the reasons I find working with vegetables so satisfying. They come ready saturated with the earth hues, and we need to do little to bring out their innate natural beauty. For this recipe, I envisioned green and gold, the colours I associate with Australian sports. It would not be my first salad with that color scheme. In my book Neighborhood, I offered a green and gold salad of asparagus, gold beets and farro, dressed in a lemon brown butter sauce. That recipe captures the jaunty essence that I wanted to create this week - lively, bold, and deeply satisfying.
In this salad, the noodles are not passive - they are tasked with being a carrier of big flavour. The addition of ground turmeric to the cooking water imbues them with smokiness and a luminous sunny tint. Credit for this technique must go to the iconic Heidi Swanson, cookbook author and creator of one of the OG food blogs 101 Cookbooks – I borrowed the idea from her som tum noodle recipe in her most recent book Super Natural Simple.
The dressing is sweet, tangy, salty. It is designed to be bright and vivacious - up the lime if you want more pizzazz. The asparagus is seared until it becomes sweet and juicy, but it should retain a slight crispness. Its buttery nuttiness pairs really well with the earthy, smoky turmeric-laced noodles.
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Here are some hearty spring delights from around the internet:
Triple Pea and Asparagus salad with feta-mint dressing
Restorative ginger and turmeric noodle soup
Spring Pad Thai salad
Skillet vegetable pot pie
Tofu larb
Tom Yum Soup with Tofu and Vermicelli
Mushroom Scampi
Ginger fried rice
Lemon tofu
THIS WEEK’S RECIPE
Lime turmeric noodles with asparagus
© Hetty Lui McKinnon for To Vegetables, With Love
One lime is fine but I’ve given you the option to use two for ‘squeezing over’ just in case you want it more citrusy. Feel free to prep ahead and ‘freshen’ it up with a drizzle of olive oil to loosen up the noodles (rice noodles tend to stick and clump when left to sit).
Substitutions:
Asparagus: green beans, snow peas, sugar snap peas, broccoli
rice noodles: wheat noodles, egg noodles
baked tofu: extra firm tofu, Yuba
Serves 4
350g (12-ounces) thick rice noodles
3 teaspoons (1 US tablespoon) ground turmeric
450g (1 pound / 1 bunch) asparagus, woody ends removed and cut into 5cm (2-inch) pieces
extra virgin olive oil
225g (8-ounces) baked tofu (pre-baked tofu like this), sliced
2 scallions, thinly sliced
Big handful of Asian herbs such as coriander (cilantro), Thai basil, Vietnamese mint (rau răm), roughly chopped
1 - 2 limes, halved
50g (1/3 cup) toasted almonds or peanuts, roughly chopped
Lime-maple dressing
1 lime, juiced (2-3 tablespoons)
2 tablespoons maple syrup (or brown sugar)
2 tablespoons tamari or soy sauce
1 tablespoon sesame oil
1 clove garlic, finely grated
1/2 - 1 red or green chili (pepper), sliced (to your liking)
sea salt and black pepper
Bring a large pot of salted water to the boil. Add the rice noodles and turmeric and cook according to packet instructions until the noodles are al dente. Drain and run under cold water, tossing to cool them down. Drain again.
Meanwhile to make the dressing, place the lime juice, maple syrup, tamari or soy sauce, sesame oil, garlic and chilli (pepper) into a bowl and whisk to combine. Season with sea salt and black pepper. The dressing should be tangy sweet, salty, and spicy.
Heat a large fry pan (skillet) on medium high heat. When hot, add a drizzle of olive oil along with the asparagus. Season with salt and pepper and cook, tossing often, until the asparagus are crisp-tender, bright green and slightly charred, 3-4 minutes.
Place the noodles into a large bowl and add the tofu, asparagus and the dressing. Toss to combine. Add most of the herbs (keeping some aside for topping) and toss. Taste and season with salt and pepper.
To serve, top with remaining herbs and the nuts, and drizzle generously with lime.
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🥦 My cookbook, Tenderheart is for cooking vegetables, all year round. Pick up your copy here. It is also mostly vegan (or vegan-izable) and gluten-free adaptable.
Delicious!
Yummmmm 🫶