Noodle Gourmet

I thought I would pay homage to my favourite noodle takeout place in Melbourne. I live in Box Hill, so there are at least a dozen places that do noodles, but I've found the BEST place for noodle takeout is Noodle Gourmet, along Blackburn Road, next to Safeway.

I first discovered this place when I was starving. After dilly-dallying in Safeway doing our grocery shopping, I was too hungry to do any actual cooking that night. I ordered my usual 'safe' choice, Seafood Noodle Soup. This was delicious - fresh egg noodles and generous helpings of seafood (prawns, calamari, crab stick) and LOTS of veggies in a homemade chicken broth.

The next time, I ordered their Tom Yum noodle soup. YUM! It's still one of my favourites. The same generous serving of seafood, fried bean curd and veggies with thin rice noodles (bee hoon) in a sweet, sour and spicy broth. I love the way the fried bean curd soaks up the broth and it squirts into your mouth like a little flavour bomb.

Another favourite of mine is the Seafood Mee Goreng (do you sense a common theme here?). This has the same huge serving of seafood and veggies, with hokkien noodles and a deliciously spicy sauce. Unlike most other places that do fried noodles, ND's are always cooked with more spices and seasonings than oil.

They also do a pretty good Char Kway Teow, with lots of prawns, egg, bbqed pork and bean shoots. Very nice, but not enough sweet black sauce for my liking. Still, this has the same 60% ingredients-40% noodle ratio that I love.

My latest addiction is their ginger and spring onion noodles. They had this on the menu with chicken, but I asked if they could cook it with (guess??) seafood and bee hoon. The results were sensational. It tasted a bit like the crab bee hoon that is so popular in Singapore. Lots of fresh ginger (no bottled stuff here), spring onion and soy sauce, with a hint of sesame oil, and tasty, tasty bee hoon soaking up all the flavour. My absolute favourite, 10 out of 10 choice!

Now, if only I had some pictures to back this up. Unfortunately, it always smells so good that I don't make it in time to take a picture. I'll try to remember next time! ND always puts the noodles in those cute little white noodle boxes, so it feels like you're getting takeout in America.

Ok, that's enough of my ode to Noodle Gourmet. Today, Chris and I have made a tentative step towards gardening. We bought some seeds and plant food while doing our grocery shopping and decided to plant them in the little flower bed we have on our front steps. I don't think they'll grow... Chris took the little packet and shook out ALL the seeds into one little corner of the flower bed. I pointed out to him that the seeds were meant to be planted 7-10 cms apart, so we tried tossing the dirt around to spread the seeds out a bit. Then we drowned the flower bed with a litre of water and plant food.

I have a black thumb, and I don't think Chris has grown anything before. so it will be interesting to see if these things grow! I don't even remember the name of the flowers, just that they're multi-colour and supposedly grow in three months. THREE months!! And this was the fastest growing seeds I could find! Some of them take up to 5 months to grow. I don't know who has the patience for this gardening business :/