A Belated Happy New Year: Stir-Fried Tofu with Vegetables and Noodles

Happy Year of the Pig. I’m a bit late cooking for Chinese New Year. Life got in the way.

Here is a wonderful stir fry served with noodles that I’m pretty sure you will enjoy. No pigs here, though, just a great melange of vegetables.

Stir fry, by the way, is a cooking technique that is believed to have originated a couple thousand years ago during the Han dynasty in China, perhaps first used in roasting tea leaves. It was a pricey way to cook, though, in that it required the use of expensive oil and fuel. As a result, the technique was not widely used until later.

The term “stir fry” was first introduced in the West by  a physician/cook named Buwei Yang Chao in a 1945 cookbook, How to Cook and Eat in Chinese. Her book was an important early book of authentic Chinese recipes published in English. Chao’s Harvard linguist husband, Yuen Ren, and her daughter Rulan assisted in the translation and coined the terms stir fry and pot sticker.  Author Pearl Buck wrote the preface to the book and did a lot of the proofreading.  Buck reportedly was so intrigued by the recipes that she interrupted her proofreading mid-task to start cooking in her kitchen. Buck later remarked that she would like to nominate Chao for a Nobel Peace Prize, saying “What better road to universal peace is there than to gather around the table where new and delicious dishes are set forth, dishes which, though untasted by us, we are destined to enjoy and love.”

This recipe is adapted from one that appeared in the New York Times. Here is the link: Stir-Fried Tofu and Peppers.

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