Odong with sardines

Odong ingredients

Odong is a kind of short flour and egg noodle, yellowish in color, somewhat resembling spaghetti noodles. The most common way of preparing odong is a rich noodle soup or stew made with sardines in tomato and chili sauce. Sounds disgusting, tastes great! I plan to cook this for dinner tonight.

The key is to use Asian-style sardines. Americans, please don't try substituting cheap Beachcliff brand sardines in those flat cans: it will taste horrible. Try to find an Asian market and look for sardines in a small (around 150 grams), upright can (see photo above.) Favorite brand names include Ligo, Toyo, Family's, 555 and Mega. Make sure you get sardines in tomato sauce with chili added, unless you absolutely can't stand any spiciness at all in your food (they're not hot, by the way: just tasty), in which case get sardines in plain tomato sauce. Well, you'll need to go to an Asian or Filipino market anyway, to get your odong noodles, so you may as well just get your sardines there too.

Odong is sold in a plastic bag which contains several (around ten) small packets of noodles. You'll need six of these packets for this recipe, which sadly only leaves four for the next batch. I wish they'd give us 12.