Kyrgyzstan

Today's dish comes from the central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan! Lagman is a vegetable and handmade noodle soup, usually made with beef. It's popular throughout central Asia, favored by particular ethnic groups rather than just one country.

I started by sautéing my onions with my veggie "beef" in a big pot. I used frozen beef crumbles for this recipe.

Then I added some sliced tomatoes and minced garlic.

Once the tomatoes break down they create more of a saucy consistency.

Then come the rest of the vegetables. I used carrots and bell pepper, but turnips are very traditional in this dish.

Once the veggies had cooked for a few minutes, I added boiling water and let that simmer while I made my noodles. I can't believe I had never thought of adding boiling water to a big pot of stew to speed up the process.

The noodle dough is simple, just flour, salt, water, and eggs. I don't know why I'm always surprised how easy it is to make your own egg noodles. It really doesn't require that much time or effort, and I feel I should do it more often.

For this recipe, I rolled the dough out into a couple big, thin sheets.

Then folded it over a few times into a narrow sheet.

And that makes it easier to cut long, thin strips to form the noodles.

With enough flour coating them, they don't stick together when you throw them in a bowl to roll out the other sheet.

The first sheet I cut pretty thin, but the second sheet I decided to make a little wider. A nice wide, flat noodle is pretty satisfying to eat in a bowl of soup.

Once the noodles were boiled, I rinsed them in cold water then placed them in some bowls and poured the prepared vegetable soup over them. I topped my lagman with chopped parsley and scallions, but traditional recipes call for djusai, which seems to be some kind of chive or wild onion as far as I can tell from some google searches. The end result is a fairly healthy but satisfying bowl of noodle soup that's good any time of year. It reminds me a bit of the hand-pulled noodle soup from our favorite Tibetan restaurant where we used to live in Connecticut. You just can't beat the texture of a freshly made egg noodle.

Recipes Used: Lagman