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.




Ingredients:

Six packets of odong noodles, broken in half

Three cans of sardines in tomato sauce, chili added

One onion, peeled and coarsely chopped

On head of garlic, peeled and slightly crushed

Two tablespoons cooking oil

Water

Salt and pepper to taste

(Optional): Chopped green onion as a garnish

(Optional): A pinch of brown sugar


Instructions:

In a large skillet, cook the onion and garlic in the oil over medium heat until the onions are tender and the pieces separate: about two minutes.

Add the sardines, then fill each can with water, stirring to mix in the sauce that's still in the cans. Add the water.

Break up the sardines into very small pieces using a spatula or large spoon.

Heat until quite bubbly then add the odong noodles. Stir, cover and cook, stirring often to prevent sticking, until the noodles are cooked: about ten to 15 minutes. Add more water during cooking if it looks too dry: it should have quite a soupy consistency. (Some people like to add a pinch of brown sugar during cooking. I don't.)

Season with rather a lot of black pepper: 2 or 3 teaspoons. Taste and add salt if necessary.

Serve over hot cooked rice. Serves four.


Note: We cook for two so we usually have enough leftovers to get two meals out of each recipe. This also allows "lazy days" where I just have to reheat rather than cook from scratch. This often isn't the case with odong as I tend to succumb to temptation and eat the leftovers cold, without rice, as a late-night snack. :)

Lousy photo of finished odong, ready to be spooned over rice and eaten