hello I'm Ken Homme and I'd like to show you today my vegetarian chow mein dish and it's a fantastic way to celebrate Chinese New Year what you need to do is get just dry noodles that you can find at any major supermarket and what you simply want to do is to blanch them just for a couple of minutes according to the package instructions and then drain them and then put them in sesame oil and then you're ready to go it's really important when you're actually stir frying is to have everything all ready now we start out with carrots and I'm using a Chinese cleaver and the method is to grip it like this with your index finger and your thumb here and you hold the food and you cut this down like this turn this over so it's nice and flat and then you can actually make slices very very easy this is a very very good way to shred the carrots and once they're in slices like this you just stack them up and make shreds it's important that all the vegetables are cut uniformly so they can cook evenly and because when we use the wok everything cooks really quickly so you wanted to look nice as well it's very important for us Chinese to have an aesthetic view of food as well in other words it's not only delicious but it's pleasing to the eye and these are March 2 which I'm doing the same thing just slicing it into shreds like this and what's nice about the cleavers you can gather the whole thing up as I'm doing here and just put that on your plate and here we have some spring onions and again we just cut them slightly at an angle like this and once that's done we're ready and let me show you how to do something like pepper hold the pepper like this cut this at the end turn this over cut this at the other end and you stand the pepper up open this up and then parallel with the board this is where the cleaver is very good you want to core the pepper out and this is all cored out and we have the pepper in one whole piece and cut that in half and then very easy shred this now we have garlic just take peel garlic crush it like this with the cleaver and then you can quickly chop this core see what's really important about a chopping garlic is not to chop it too fine because if you throw it in a wok and it's very hot the garlic will start to burn and you will have this sort of bitterness which is what you don't want now we're ready to stir-fry and this is the fun part you get your wok really hot how hot should it be well you put your hand over the top and you can feel the heat that means it's hot enough to start and how we start is we add a little bit of oil I like to use ground nut oil why because it it's really good for stir frying you don't want to use olive oil for this other boil has a bit of a flavor which it would be a shame to mix it with sort of Chinese flavors now you stir-fry that really quickly and as you can see how quickly that the garlic starts to brown you want to add the carrots when you stir frying always add the harder vegetables first then we add the marsh to and then finally the spring onions these are very very flavorful vegetables and then our lovely peppers we want to toss that really well I'll continue to stir-fry that until it acquires is sort of toastiness and you can smell it that this is doing very well got our vegetables and finally we're going to add our noodles so just add them in like this at this point we want to add not more oil to this dish but a little bit of seasoning and we're adding a bit of salt pepper and we're using white pepper that gives a little bit of nice heat to the dish and a pinch of sugar well what does sugar do well it gives a balance of flavor and that's really important in a lot of Chinese dishes it just brings out the full flavor of the veggies yes give that a good mix and we're going to add our other Chinese seasoning light soy sauce light soy sauce tends to be a bit salt here as the word implies it's lighter in color and dark soy sauce which has a richer more mellow taste and often light and dark are used together especially for something like noodles which can be quite bland by itself and we finish that with a little bit of rice wine you can use soy cherry if you talk about rice wine and make sure you toss that really really well and we want to finish that by adding a touch of toasted sesame oil just of just a few teaspoon or so and remember sesame oil is used for flavoring not for cooking because it's toasty and has a lovely lovely flavor and so we add it at the end just to give it a nice wonderful taste well I'm going to taste it mmm I taste really lovely and I'm ready to serve it we turn off our heat and look at that a really lovely family dish that is not only tasty but quick and easy to make and perfect for Chinese New Year as they say in Chinese gung hay fat choy wishing you a prosperous Happy New Year and a long life