Pumpkin stir-fry with soba noodles and sugar snap peas

I have been growing sugar snap peas in my veggie patch and the plants are finally starting to produce! Snow peas and sugar snap peas go really well with Japanese flavours and given that I had some left over pumpkin from the roast veggie dinner, I thought I'd celebrate my little sugar snaps by making a pumpkin stir-fry. I've never made a pumpkin stir-fry before, but I've seen it in magazines and thought it would be worth a try. I used to cram as many veggies as possible into my stir-fry's and sometimes still do, but most of the time I stick to a more simple combination of veggies, because it usually results in a better flavour/texture combination. I'm pretty stoked with my first try, you will probably notice over time, my "Japanese"  recipes are all a variation on the same theme... but they do tend to come out consistently good. 

Firstly make up the stir-fry sauce

1 tsp dried bonito (omit if you want to make it vego)

1 tsp miso paste

1 tbl mirin

2 tbl soy sauce

1 tsp finely grated ginger

dash of sesame oil

Toast 1 tbl sesame seeds in dry wok and cut up your vegetables...

Pumpkin cut into ~1 cm cubes

sugar snap peas

1/2 a red onion cut in thick chunks

¼ of a red capsicum sliced thinly

  

In a saucepan boil ~70gm of dried soba noodles for ~3 minutes (fully cooked takes 5 min)

 drain and rinse them with cold water to stop them cooking and sprinkle with a little sesame oil to stop them from sticking to each other

add onions to a hot wok and keep stirring for ~1 min, then add diced pumpkin, stir and cover, but keep checking it doesn't burn and keep frequently stirring it. The lid helps speed up the cooking time 

just after I added the pumpkin

I tried to cut the pumpkin into even sizes, but I'm never that precise... After frying the pumpkin for about 5 minutes it was starting to brown nicely so I took out one of the smallest and one of the largest pieces of pumpkin and tasted them to check how cooked they were... 

mushy pumpkin seems like the worst outcome in this recipe

the slightly bigger piece was just underdone and the smallest piece was cooked... but the exact timing will vary on your wok and cooking element - mine is a shitty electric stove.

At this point I added the sugar snaps, capsicum, stir-fry sauce and the par cooked soba noodles, stirring frequently for another 2-3 minutes to make sure the sauce doesn't burn

if your wok is really hot, you can add 1-2 tbl water to prevent it from burning

lastly sprinkle on the toasted sesame seeds... (if you have spring onions sprinkle some of them on too)

it was yum!