Spicy Cumin Mushroom Noodles
It's shredded mushrooms in lamb drag!
Hey, welcome to School Night Vegan - so glad you’re here!
There’s a bunch of fun free stuff in this week’s newsletter, but the recipe is for paid subscribers, to say a huge thanks for supporting School Night Vegan!
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If you’ve been here a while, you’ll know I love a good pairing of unusual ingredients.
Chocolate in chilli, sweetcorn in blueberry muffins, miso in porridge (woah nelly)! But I’m telling you, there’s a solid foundation for why mushrooms and cumin are a match made in heaven. When I teased this recipe in my notes earlier this week, a bunch of you expressed intrigue about this combo of ingredients - and I get it! For mushroom dishes, we usually veer towards earthy, herbal flavours - think rich ragus, sweet with red wine and mellow sage, or creamy, buttery risottos. And I don’t know about you, but for me, cumin is a flavour I’ve always associated with spicy curries, hearty tagines and smoky enchiladas. But like Miley Cyrus and Hannah Montana, you almost never find mushrooms and cumin in the same room!
But when I explain the inspiration behind these noodles, you’ll understand my thought process. I was scrolling Substack recently (if you haven’t downloaded the app yet and you’re trying to spend less time in the Zuckosphere, you should seriously give it a go) when a post caught my eye. Something about shredded cumin lamb noodles. Before I’d even processed the word “lamb,” I said out loud “oh wow, those mushrooms look incredible”. Mushrooms that didn’t yet exist. I was hallucinating fungi. A normal Tuesday for me, honestly.
So before I knew it, I was already subconsciously writing this recipe and that mushroom/cumin combo just seemed to… make sense. I’ve never encountered cumin lamb noodles before (I’ve never even eaten lamb, for obvious reasons) but it turns out they’re most certainly a thing. They’re traditionally from the northwest of China and tend to be made with big, wide, hand-stretched biang biang noodles. The Substack recipe I spotted used leftover shredded lamb, which was something I knew I could approximate texturally with pulled, seared mushrooms. So I embarked on a few rounds of recipe tests, and the results were really exciting.
I found the best way to combine the flavours was to firstly make an infused chilli oil, tempered with cumin, Szechuan peppercorns and coriander seeds. The mushrooms (namely oyster mushrooms) are then shredded (and by this I just mean pulled apart by hand, while still fresh) and tossed with some of the infused, spicy oil and a couple other ingredients as a quick marinade.
I wanted a bit of freshness in there too, so although it’s not traditional, I also added some tender stem broccoli (I think you call this broccolini in the US?) and plenty of fresh aromatic coriander (aka cilantro).
The resulting noodles are chewy, spicy, tingly and packed full of drama. All that, inspired by a recipe for left-over lamb 😆. The recipe (along with a downloadable/printable PDF version) is at the bottom of this newsletter. I really hope you love this one. It feels special, without being insanely time consuming or complicated to make - so it’s most definitely week-night friendly.
Ooh, super quick update for you, before you get to the recipe.
Weekly Wrap
I Went Up North For Easter
And oh my god I ate so much chocolate. You can tell how much fun (and chocolate) I was having because look at how much food is left on my plate. That’s my niece Audrina and in this picture we’re laughing about the idea of someone farting so hard that they take off like a rocket ship. I’m thirty seven years old, folks.
Oh, and if anyone was wondering, the fridge magnets I made for the Easter egg hunt prizes went down really well. They’re holding up a bunch of school awards and drawings on my sister’s fridge as we speak!
We’ve Still Got Room For You on My Bali Trip!
There are still a handful of tickets left for my vegan vacation to Bali this September! They’re selling fast though, so if you fancy joining me on the adventure of a lifetime, be sure to reserve your spot.
I’ve been to something like eight different destinations with The Getaway Co now and I genuinely have never known a travel company that pays more attention to detail. Every element of the trip is planned out for you, so you won’t have to spend a minute scouting for vegan friendly hotels or scouring menus for plant-based options.
Anyway, head over here for full details about our trip and to reserve your spot. I hope you can make it!
This Week’s Recipe: Spicy Cumin Shredded Mushroom Noodles
(With Downloadable PDF Version)
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