XO Sauce - I

We're off to Sicily for the week today - W for work, me, to eat. So for lunch, something quick and simple was in order. I had made up a batch of XO Sauce over the weekend from Grace Young's wonderful The Breath of a Wok. Brimming with recipes, lore and anecdotal incidence, it's a cookbook that's so much more than just a cookbook. I keep meaning to be the sort of fearsomely disciplined cook with an organised pantry full of homemade condiments and sauces at her disposal, ready to be called into service for any meal in the upcoming weeks. Instead, any forward-thinking on my part happens on a sporadic basis, as and when I have a moment.

W loves XO Sauce - so this is, hopefully, the first in a series of posts about cooking with it (there's plenty left from the large batch, which keeps for weeks, I made). For lunch, I tossed some Chinese egg noodles (mee pok) together with thinly sliced discs of fresh scallops, asparagus, and a helping of the spicy sauce thick with dried scallops, dried shrimp, and red chillies. The nicest thing is, seeing as you're not confined to a tiny (and exorbitantly-priced) jar of the shop-bought stuff (which, incidentally, is searingly hot and tastes as much of MSG as it does of dried scallops), there's no need to hold back on making it a healthy helping of sauce.