A favourite takeaway dish, with plenty of onions to give it zing (sorry about the picture, I took it with my phone camera. I swear it tastes *way* better than it looks!).
Ingredients
300g beef, sliced very thin
2-3 yellow onions
2 fat garlic cloves, crushed or sliced
nước chấm, to taste
3 spring onions, sliced
2 nests egg noodles (or enough for two people)
toasted sesame oil (optional)
Instructions
Put the meat into a bowl, and mix it with 1 clove crushed garlic. Put just enough nước chấm to cover the beef slices). Wait for a bit (I usually leave it half an hour. If you're really patient, you can wait until the marinade turns the beef brown by dint of lime acidity. Haven't worked out a reliable formula for that yet).
Meanwhile, cook the noodles. The best primer I've found on dealing with egg noodles is over here; I never could follow the instructions, though. Mine always get tangled. So my standard strategy goes something like this: untangle noodles, throw into boiling water, stir around until the water starts to boil again, take casserole off the heat, rinse noodles under cold water, and put noodles back into the pan filled with cold water. So far, so good. Mine still get hopelessly tangled, which is why I cut them into pieces after they've gone cold. Yeah, I know, cheating. But you know, it works.
Set the noodles aside, and let's tackle the onions. Chop them into small pieces. Fry them in an oiled wok, along with the remaining chopped garlic clove on low-medium heat, until they're suitably soft (basically, until the bad sharp taste goes away). Then turn the heat up, and add the beef and its marinade. Cook for a few minutes, until the beef is cooked through and through. You probably need to add a bit of water at this stage, to keep everything moist in a sort of gravy.
Drain noodles, add them to the stir-fry, mixing vigorously. When they're cooked to your taste, remove the wok from the heat. Fold in the spring onions, and add a dash of sesame oil if you feel like it (just a small amount, as you don't want the taste of that to overwhelm the marinade).
Notes
If you do decide to go for rice vermicelli rather than egg noodles, the procedure is the same, except you'll probably want to skip the sesame oil (it doesn't go well with rice vermicelli, in my limited experience).
Recipe by Aliette de Bodard at https://www.aliettedebodard.com/recipes/thit-bo-xao-hanh-tay-stir-fried-beef-onions/