50 noodle recipes — every ingredient from your regular supermarket.
You want real Chinese noodles at home but you do not know which noodles to buy, which aisle they hide in, or what to do with them once you get them home. This book solves exactly that.
Kelvin Monk ran a Western-style restaurant in Shanghai for twenty years. The dish he made for himself at the end of every shift was noodles — a handful of dried wheat noodles, scallion oil from a jar, soy sauce, four minutes flat. Now he has written the noodle cookbook he wanted to exist when he was teaching his American line cooks: no Chinatown required, no specialty ingredients you will use once, no techniques that need a restaurant kitchen.
Inside you’ll find:
• Chapter 1: Fast & Furious (10-Minute Noodles) — Scallion oil noodles in four minutes. Tomato egg noodles. Fried egg noodles. Recipes for when you walk through the door hungry and the thought of chopping vegetables feels like a personal insult.
• Chapter 2: Takeout Noodles — Chicken lo mein. Beef chow mein. Mongolian beef noodles. The dishes you order from the Chinese takeout menu, made at home with better ingredients and half the sodium.
• Chapter 3: Broth Bowls — Braised beef noodle soup that takes two hours and is worth it. Dan dan noodles. Hot & sour noodles. The soups that Chinese grandmothers deploy when someone in the family is sick, cold, or having a bad week.
• Chapter 4: Stir & Toss — Beef chow fun. Shanghai fried noodles. Twice-cooked pork noodles. Dry-fried Singapore noodles. The high-heat, high-reward chapter where wok hei lives.
• Chapter 5: Cold Noodles — Sichuan cold noodles. Sesame cold noodles. Cold shrimp noodles. Hiyashi chuka. Everything you want to eat when it is too hot to cook.
• Appendix A: The Noodle Aisle — Every noodle type explained with photos, where to find it at a regular American supermarket, and what to grab as a backup if you strike out. Includes the famous baking-soda spaghetti method.
• Appendix B: Batch Prep — Scallion oil, chili oil, and soy-garlic base sauce. Make them once, eat noodles all week.
What makes this book different:
• Every recipe uses noodles you can find at a standard American supermarket. Three recipes ask you to visit an Asian market — and those are marked clearly.
• No metric, no grams, no Celsius. Everything in cups, tablespoons, pounds, and Fahrenheit — the way American home cooks actually measure.
• Every recipe written for 2 adult servings with a family multiplier table so you can scale up without breaking the dish.
• Electric stove settings on every recipe. Gas, induction, and glass-ceramic cooktop notes throughout. You do not need a wok.
• A “Noodle Handling 101” table that tells you exactly what to do after boiling — rinse for stir-fries, drain-only for soups, cold-rinse for cold noodles.
• FDA temperature guidance reviewed by the author and integrated into every recipe where it matters, with specific high-risk group notes on raw proteins, fermented ingredients, and scald hazards.
• Zero Chinese characters, zero pinyin, zero translation guesswork. This book was written in English for an English-speaking kitchen.
• 50 full-color recipe photographs. Every dish has a picture.
If you have ever stood in the Asian aisle of your supermarket holding a package of noodles and wondering what to do with it, this book is the answer.
