Pork & Vegetables with Rice Noodles

I just grabbed the first foil-wrapped thing out of the freezer, and it turned out to be ground pork.  (Just a note, you should wrap your meats with aluminum foil for the freezer, and NOT plastic wrap.  Plastic wrap doesn't get as good of a seal and your stuff has a much, much, much higher potential of getting freezer burned.  Plus, foil can be labeled and dated on the outside with a sharpie marker for easy reference.)  At any rate, I wasn't sure how this would turn out (so what else is new?), but I got the basic idea of ground pork, mushroom, and spring onion with an oyster sauce from one of my other cookbooks, so I thought I'd give it a shot.  Mind you, I didn't do this from the cookbook.  I left the book in the other room and made it up as I went along.  It came out quite delicious, so I encourage you to try it.  If you don't have rice noodles, though, you can just use rice.  It tastes just about the same, it's just one's the grains and the other has been pounded into submission and extruded into noodle-ishness.

Pork & Vegetables with Rice Noodles

Ingredients:

2-3 oz. rice stick noodles (or just make some rice)
1/4 lb. ground pork
3 dried shiitake mushrooms
2 large handfuls of baby spinach
2 spring onions
4 tsp. oyster suace
1 tsp. fish sauce
1 tsp. soy sauce
sesame seeds (optional, to serve)

Place the mushrooms in a small bowl and cover with boiling water.  Let stand until reconstituted, then squeeze out the excess liquid and chop into roughly 1/4 in. pieces.  Set aside.

Boil water in a pot and add the rice noodles.  Cook according to package directions and drain, but don't rinse.  Set aside.

Heat a dry large skillet over medium-high heat and add the ground pork.  Using a spatula or wooden spoon, stir the pork with slicing motions to break the pork up into little pieces.  Continue to cook until the pork is all cooked and browned.

Mince the spring onions into little pieces.  Add the spring onions and mushroom to the pan and stir into the pork.  Cook an additional 1-2 minutes, or until the mushrooms are cooked.

Rinse the spinach and add to the pan.  Cook, stirring occasionally, until the spinach has wilted.  (I know it looks like a lot of spinach, but it won't be when it wilts down.)

Mix the oyster sauce, fish sauce, and soy sauce together.  Add to the pan.  Stir into the mixture and cook 1-2 more minutes until the mixture is well coated and the sauce is heated through. 

To serve, lay down a bed of the rice noodles on a serving plate and add the pork mixture over top.  Sprinkle with sesame seeds.