Wide rice noodles with pork, basil, and chinese broccoli

I've had a thing for wide rice noodle dishes since I was a kid. When my family went out to dinner, and it was almost always Chinese, we would order "chow fun," the wide rice noodle, beef, and broccoli dish, at my behest. Not knowing the Chinese name, I requested it by the name "fat noodles." In my mind, the name has stuck ever since, so much so that I often forget that my family and I are the only ones who actually call it that. I've never tried to replicate the Chinese version of the dish--too classic a dish from my childhood to mess with, I suppose--but when I started broadening my eating horizons and becoming more familiar with Thai food, I gravitated toward the Thai dishes that also use what seem to be the same wide rice noodles. No matter what the sauces and the dressing are, it is the texture of the noodles I find especially appealing--satisfyingly wide and thick, chewy but not too chewy, and sometimes even crispy on the outside and tender on the inside.

Browsing at Asian grocery stores in my early cooking days, I often saw packs of fresh wide rice noodles for sale--sold in broad sheets folded over to fit the little styrofoam tray, not even cut up yet into a more familiar noodle form. How could I resist? There's something exciting about cooking fresh noodles (especially if I didn't have to actually make them), not to mention the freedom to cut them in any width/shape I want (although I've always stuck with the classic wide noodle shape).

I've made this dish in a number of incarnations, but it always takes on a basic form--stir fried ingredients, one at a time--onions, vegetables, of course the noodles, some kind of protein, plus a sauce --usually soy sauce. In this dish I used Thai basil, something I always pick up when I see it because it's always so irresistibly fresh and fragrant, the fresh noodles, onions, Chinese broccoli, some sliced pork, and a mixture of soy sauce, fish sauce, and a little sugar.

It's hard to go very wrong with these noodles. This is a solid dish except that the noodles always get a bit soft on me. Someday I hope to figure out how restaurants manage to get the noodles crispy and sometimes browned on the outside. (I have a suspicion that they use a lot more oil than I do, but I'm also sure it's more than that.) Whenever I try to achieve that, the noodles get a crust--then the crust gets stuck on the bottom of my pan. Until the happy day of achieving crispness comes, I'm happy enough with my version.