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.
More Take-Out-Style Recipes to Try
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Easy Sesame Noodles for One
- Prep Time: 5 minutes
- Cook Time: 10 minutes
- Total Time: 15 minutes
- Yield: 1 serving 1x
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Pin RecipeDescription
This is one of my favorite easy take-out inspired dinners that I make on nights when I’m high-risk for ordering dinner instead of making it. It takes just 15 minutes and calls for mostly pantry ingredients all of which can be found at a regular grocery store.
Ingredients
- 3 ounces spaghetti
- 2 teaspoons sesame oil
- 2 teaspoons soy sauce
- 1 teaspoon rice wine vinegar
- 2 teaspoons oyster sauce
- 1 teaspoons smooth peanut butter
- 1 teaspoon ginger paste
- 1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes, or more or less to taste
- 2 green onions, sliced
- 1 teaspoons sesame seeds
Instructions
- Boil the spaghetti according to package directions. While the noodles cook, make the sauce.
- Stir the sesame oil, soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, oyster sauce, peanut butter, ginger paste, and red pepper flakes together in a small bowl. Once the noodles are ready, drain them and place them back in the same pot. Add the sauce to the hot noodles and stir to coat the noodles evenly. Transfer the noodles to a bowl and top them with the green onions and sprinkle the sesame seeds over the top.
- Category: Dinner
Nutrition
- Calories: 507
- Fat: 15g
- Carbohydrates: 77.5g
- Fiber: 3.9g
- Protein: 15.2g
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