February 16th, 2005
Ok, so b/c Kelly's birthday fell on the first day of the Chinese Lunar New Year (Feb 9th), we made plans to be eating in since many places would be closed. We have determined that you can eat out for much cheaper, and with no clean up if you go to the Hawker Centers for all of your meals, however, we also feel that it's not quite as healthy as what we can do at home, so while it may be hot cooking over the gas flame, since we use Olive Oil and can buy lots of fresh veggies, we decided to give it a shot. I have also had some folks ask for recipes of the food we're cooking. This is a very simple recipe that we learned from Yati, Rafi's wife. She called it "Fried Noodles".



You'll need a pot for cooking noodles, the wok for throwing it all together and lots of prep time, or have everyone help as it goes faster!

Ingredients:
1 # fresh prawns (we got these for dirt cheap as you'll see in a previous blog post) but they are the whole prawn. You have to remove the heads, but leave the legs on as they make it taste sweeter and remove the shells. Be careful as prawn shells are very sharp and will cut you. Rinse and drain as the prawn poo is in the head area! Yeah, it's gross!

You can use whatever fresh veggies you like.
We used, fresh red onion, scallions, cabbage, a leek like green (chopped), a cilantro like fresh herb chopped, fresh mushrooms, (they were kinda beefy in texture) maybe a shitake?, and several cloves of fresh garlic (chopped).

We scrambled about 3 eggs in the wok and set aside. Cut them up into smaller bits.

Boil the noodles, these were a flat oriental style noodle, like you would use for Pad Thai. (But not Rice noodles, although you could probably use them too) Drain and set aside. You can also use the green noodles that we used in our previous Fried Noodle dinner at Rafi's house, they add nice color. Or a mixture of both.

We stir fried, in the wok, all our fresh stuff, starting with the garlic and onion and added the scallions, cabbage, leek, and mushrooms. We stirred in a few Tbs. of Chili Garlic Sauce, which is thick and red and chunky. Then, we added the noodles, chopping them up a bit and stirring all the fried stuff, including the eggs together. Then we added about 1 tbs of Sin Sin which is a Sweet Sauce (made of sugar, molasses, water, carmel and preservatives) It's very dark in color and thick! Then we added the fresh prawns and cooked them stirring them into the noodles, etc...until they were pink. Yes, they will cook this way! Then, when we were just about to serve it, we sprinkled Fried Dried Shallots on top with the cilantro and voila! The picture above! Eat with chopsticks or just your fingers for the full effect! And a nice cold beer to wash it down! Marvelous!

(You can add many more veggies, and shredded carrot would also go very well in this...but Jeremy took the carrots to work, and so we had none!)

This was just a dinner we cooked on our own, not for Kelly's birthday, but wanted to share a recipe. What we have found though, is that the Chili Garlic Sauce and Sin Sin sauces work great in most dishes, and you can change up your flavors by adding fresh ginger, green beans and snow peas! We have also used chicken as our 'meat'. And have learned how to make Sweet Potato french fries in a wok! Awesome! We also have been using quite a bit of sticky rice as it makes all of our dishes go a lot farther in terms of leftovers!



Now, for my birthday, I started the day by receiving a gift from Jeremy, a small box, that I had transported to Singapore with the help of Wendy (thanks Wendy!) and it's hard to see them here, but they are Dichronic Glass earrings of which ever since I saw Julie Dana's, Jennie Evan's and Wendy's, I have really wanted a pair of my own. They are different from Julie and Jenni's but are very cool none the less! They pick up even the smallest amts of light and sparkle and glow! Super cool!


Then, for dinner, Jeremy (in Torben's voice--"Woman, get out of the kitchen!"), cooked for me a birthday feast. It's hard to see here but noodles, and in the wok, were green beans, mushrooms, garlic, onions, leeks, scallions, you get the pix!


And because we are trying to be more health concious, we also had salad, and Ling donated nice cold grapes (and of course some of our prawn leftover fried noodles with rice) It was delish! Of course we needed to eat with chopsticks.


This was one of the Chinese Drumming Trucks that would drive around the streets, clanking and drumming. They are all a bit different with different color flags and each of the guys in the truck also has an outfit on too so they all match.


And this is the hawker center that we would go to near our condo, at Ginza Plaza. You can see, with Chinese New Year underway, it is EMPTY!

What Jeremy had also decided to do, was to take me out for my birthday to an Indian Restaurant in Little India, so I could have my Chicken Korma. But since things were closed on the 9th and 10th, he took me on Friday. The restaurant was very bustling, and there was a line to get in, but we got in with no problems even without a reservation. It was set up so you could see along a buffet style table all the food choices from the menu. We were seated near one of the ovens where they make piece after piece of Naan and shiskabobs! We didn't take pix in the restaurant of our meals, but we did have a big bowl of that fish head curry soup (shown in another blog post) and it was really delicious! And the closest thing to chicken korma I could get wasn't called "Chicken Korma" but it was pretty close to what I had at India Pavillion in State College....but I think I like IP's better! Much to Kelly's surpirse and as well Jeremy's, when dinner was over, he had no money, nor his credit card. Neither did Kelly b/c when we went to Chinatown, we emptied our wallets of important stuff in case we were pickpocketed. Luckily however, he did have his ATM card, they call them SAM's here, but he had to run (in this hot humid weather) for about 4 miles round trip to get money and come back to the restaurant to pay. You should've seen the look on the waiter's face. He actually said, "you're kidding right?" And for those of you who know Jeremy, you can just see the look on his face as he really was not kidding. : )

After our dinner was over, and we had paid for our bill, we decided to head home via the MRT. On the way home Kelly thought it would be cool to stop and see Clark Quay. I've heard others talk about it, and it was advertising pretty heavily Valentines Day dinner specials along the waterfront. So we took a short detour to Clark Quay.

Want to see more about Chinese New Year?

© December 6, 2008