Fat Chefs or Skinny Gourmets? Stir Fried Pork and Noodles

Ivy of Kopiaste and Ben of What's Cooking? are hosting an event called Fat Chefs or Skinny Gourmets? For this event, you have to make a dish that you consider to be "diet food" for its nutritious value (high in vitamins and other nutrients and low in calories).

For this one, I dug out my trusty The Australian Womens Weekly 501 Low Fat Recipes. The hardest thing was deciding what to make, as so many of the options sound good. I chose a dish called Stir Fried Pork and Noodles, but my version steers away from the recipe because (a) I added carrots, which are not in the original; and (b) when I came to make it, I remembered that I had run out of soy sauce, and found that my oyster sauce has been abducted by aliens - it was nowhere to be found. I substituted hoisin sauce and fish sauce instead (yup, no relation to the originals, but they were in the cupboard).

The end result was really yummy and filling - it just goes to show that most dishes are fairly forgiving, and unless you choose "out there" flavours, you can get away with almost anything. Because of all the veges and the low fat content, and the fact that there are less than 2000kj per serve (according to the recipe), this dish falls within my definition of "diet food".

To make this dish, you will need:

250g fresh hokkien noodles
2 teaspoons canola oil
1 teaspoon crushed garlic
1 1/2 teaspoons Chinese 5-spice powder
500g pork fillets, thinly sliced
1 capsicum, sliced thinly
2 carrots, sliced thinly
2 tablespoons fish sauce
1 tablespoon hoisin sauce
2 teaspoons cornflour blended with just enough cold water to make a thick paste
1 1/3 cups chicken stock
6 shallots, sliced
1/2 a wombok (Chinese cabbage), thinly sliced

Heat half the oil in a large wok or frypan, and stir fry the garlic and 5-spice powder until just fragrant. Add the pork, and stir fry until browned. Remove from pan and set aside.

Add the remainder of the oil to the pan, and stir fry the capsicum and carrot until soft. Add the pork back to the pan with the sauces, cornflour and chicken stock and stir fry until the mixture starts to boil and thicken. Add the noodles, shallots and wombok, and stir fry until heated through. Enjoy while still hot.

Thanks to Ivy and Ben for hosting this event. You can check out the roundup of great diet dishes here.