Chow main en trois photos

On Saturday morning, Walt went to the open-air market down in Saint-Aignan (just two miles from our house). He wanted to get some nems (Vietnamese fried eggrolls) from an Asian products stand there. When he got home after a successful shopping trip, he opened the packages he had been given and discovered that they contained not just nems and some samosas (another deep-fried Asian specialty) he had bought, but also a small container of cooked noodles with vegetables that he hadn't asked for. We assumed they were some kind of promotional sample that the vendors were giving out, and we enjoyed them as a light supper that evening.

We were inspired by that windfall to make Asian noodles, chow main, for our lunch on Sunday. We had some noodles in the pantry and we had all the other ingredients in the refrigerator: mushrooms, carrots, celery, shallots, garlic, baby corn, soy and other Asian sauces, and even some chicken meat that I had picked off a carcass I had boiled to make broth a couple of days earlier. Above is a photo of the mise en place, along with the nems Walt had bought.

And there, above, is a photo of the chow main as it looked after it was "wokked"; I use that term because one French recipe for chow main I found on the internet used the verb woker to describe the process of stir-frying the vegetables and noodles.

Here's the chow main as we served and ate it, with both sesame oil and toasted sesame seeds.