Easy Sesame Noodles for One

One of my favorite inauthentic but totally satisfying take-out inspired dinners. These sesame noodles are made with simple ingredients you can find at a regular grocery store and take all of 15 minutes to make, which means a tangle of saucy noodles topped with fresh green onion is only a few steps away.

Easy Sesame Noodles

To say these take-out inspired sesame noodles are easy to make is definitely an understatement because they are so easy (less than 15 minutes start to finish! Recipe calls for simple pantry ingredients! Only two simple steps!) I feel like I need a better word to describe them, like maybe effortless, or uncomplicated, or straightforward. This dinner is, in fact, all these things, but it’s Monday and if there’s anything we need on a Monday night for dinner it’s something “easy”. So I’m going with that.

My sesame noodles – an unabashed inauthentic version, yet a totally satisfying tangle of noodles and sauce, are adapted from a recipe I found almost two years ago on the New York Times Cooking website, which has since disappeared behind a paywall. I include the link because I think they allow users “free” access to a certain amount of recipes before they cut you off cold-turkey with their hands outstretched ready to accept your dollars so that you might keep accessing their site. So, if you haven’t already exhausted your temporary free access, I included the link in case you want to see for yourself where I started from.

Long story short, the recipe I’m sharing is scaled to serve one person because it’s one of those dishes that you might make if you happen to have a solo night with nothing planned except a good Netflix binge and you want to make something for dinner that minimizes the time in between the actual making of dinner and when you crash on the couch. In this case, that’s about a 15-minute window.

Another difference between this recipe and the inspiration are the ingredients. The ones I use are ones I can find at my regular grocery store, which means no field trips to far-flung specialty stores to hunt for ingredients you may or may not have ever heard of. The biggest switch-up in ingredients is my use of just regular spaghetti instead of Asian-style noodles. I’m okay with it.

And, with the exception of the noodles, all of the ingredients are for the sauce, which you mix up while the noodles are boiling. The inspiration recipe is for cold sesame noodles, but over time I’ve taken to just tossing the hot noodles with the sauce and digging in right away while they’re still warm because they taste as delicious without having to wait for the noodles to chill.

Some Ingredients You’ll Need

One of my kitchen pet peeves is buying a bunch of ingredients for a recipe that I never use again and end up buried in the dark recesses of my pantry only to be discovered years later. I don’t wish that for you either, so I’ve linked additional recipes at the end of this post that calls for most of the same ingredients I’m sharing here in case you’re interested in more recipes. Again, authenticity is not my goal. My goal is faking my favorite take-out dishes with accessible ingredients. So here are a few you’ll need…

• Sesame oil
• Soy sauce
• Rice wine vinegar
• Oyster sauce
• Peanut butter
• Ginger paste 
• Red pepper flakes
• Sesame seeds
• Fresh green onions
• Spaghetti

Easy sesame noodles for one. Monday is looking a whole lot better.

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More Take-Out-Style Recipes to Try

• 30-Minute Sesame Beef Bowls
• 30-Minute Ginger Beef Noodles
• 30-Minute Beef and Broccoli
• Beef and Veggie Noodle Bowls

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The nutrition information in this recipe is an estimate only and was calculated using Nutrifox, an online nutrition calculator.