If you had told me a week ago that I would willingly add cold chicken to cold noodles and call it a meal I would have thought you were crazy. The various crosses of cold chicken and cold pasta are full of foods I would rather forget like those macaroni salads with shredded overcooked chicken suspiciously tossed with mayonnaise in a clear plastic takeout container with a questionable expiration date from the nearest corner deli. Hey who’s hungry? Probably not you anymore!
| Channel | Publish Date | Thumbnail & View Count | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|
 Food Network Canada | 2023-08-07 14:00:22 |  2,412 Views |
Cold rice noodle salad 🥗 #coldnoodles
But in David Tanis’s kitchen (and I hope you follow his weekly City Kitchen column as avidly as I do) chicken is marinated in a potent blend of ginger garlic lime juice and fish sauce quickly grilled or broiled then cooled and coarsely chopped. It’s then added to rice noodles as long and twisty as strands of yarn topped with lots of crunchy vegetables a mix of two sauces (one loud with chiles lime and fish sauce the other nutty and perfect with ginger peanut butter and toasted sesame seeds) salty roasted peanuts slivers of cooling herbs (mint basil and cilantro) and something that’s about as close to a one-bowl summer meal dream as we’re going to get just in time for our first inferno of a New York City heat wave this year.
The thing is the dish as written is fantastic. It’s complex and nuanced; it’s the adult-spiced version of my old staple peanut-sesame noodles in a format that just begs you to pile it all onto one central platter at dinner and let everyone assemble their own mix. But it also used what I estimate to be about 92 dishes. OK I’m exaggerating: 84. Okay maybe I didn’t count exactly but I know it took me two hours to make and required the preparation of three separate sauces and the dishwasher to be loaded twice before we put the little guy to bed. And that Tanis didn’t call it particularly labor-intensive which made my washing-up hands weep.
But there was too much goodness in the bowl not to share so I trimmed and trimmed it. What’s left is everything you need to survive the rest of this heatwave and any heatwaves July and August have in store for us — minimal cooking time and lots of loud flavors all mixed together in a pretty colorful bowl. Because that definitely counts too.
