Spatula, Spoon and Saturday

I was reading some food blog (I can’t say it’s a very interesting one, it’s all about eating healthily and how much trans fat there is in food and how butter is something you should never touch) and they were talking about a comfort food has to be warm and gooey and saucy. Well I certainly think this is one of them.

The dish is a basically Thai version of the famous Chinese char hor fun. It is usually made with sliced marinated pork instead of minced pork and wouldn’t usually have onion or tomatoes. The tomatoes and onions seem to be something that’s specific to the minced pork raad nar.

We start with half a kilo of fresh rice noodles (hor fun – by the way they are actually called koey teow in Thailand so I didn’t know until today that in Singapore there is actually a difference between a hor fun and a koey teow – which is really like a difference between fettucine and linguine, the width of the noodle itself). The reason I had to buy half a kilo is because they don’t seem too willing to sell me less quantity than that. This will feed 3-4 people. Sprinkle some dark soy sauce on the fresh noodles and fry in a hot wok until they are nice and hot. If you use a non-stick wok, there is no need for oil because it usually has a lot of oil already. So that’s your noodles done.

Now for the sauce. Chop a medium brown onion, quarter 12 cherry tomatoes, crush 2 cloves of garlic, and chop a handful of kai lan.

In a heated wok, in goes a little bit of oil and fry off the onion and garlic. Add about 100 grams of minced pork (I was very impressed that when I asked for minced pork at the market, the butcher just grab a piece of pork and minced it. No premincing. No having mince sitting there. No leftover pieces of questionable meat getting passed as meat. Just a piece of nice pork minced for you!). Brown the mince and season with 1 tablespoon of soy sauce, 1/2 tablespoon of molass sugar, 1 tablespoons of oyster sauce and 1/2 tsp of chicken stock powder.

Add chopped tomatoes to the mince sauce. The juice in the tomatoes will make the sauce just a bit nicer.

Add your greens. Then add about half a litre of water. Bring to boil.

Add a tablespoon of yellow bean sauce. Don’t forget to taste. With lots of salty ingredients, it may end up being too salty.

Thicken the sauce with some corn flour. Take 4 tablespoons of corn flour and add a bit of water. Make sure the sauce is boiling before adding the corn flour. Stir quickly. The corn flour will cook and thicken the sauce. Add some pepper. Serve the sauce on top of the noodles.

It’s rather good. If I may say so myself…

This is bastardization at its best. It’s basically pasta with, um, tomato sauce. And when I say tomato sauce, I mean tomato ketchup. So I suppose a brilliant Thai person read about how the Italians eat pasta with tomato sauce and decided that ketchup should be used to flavour pasta! It’s one of those favourite childhood dishes simply because kids just love it. If you grew up in Thailand, you’ve had it. It featured in every school dinner.

We want to start off with some cooked pasta (macaroni, as the name suggests is generally the popular choice). As this being a bastardized Thai pasta dish, we want to overcook the pasta. No, I’m not kidding. I am suggesting you can forget all the al dente principle and just cook the hell out of the pasta the way the Thais generally do. This, after all, is a Thai dish. We also need half an onion, sliced. Half a carrot, sliced. A handful of sliced cabbage leaves and some chopped spring onions.

Just like my omuraisu, I used a hot dog (which is a very normal thing to do by the way) but you can used sliced chicken breast. Prawns are another popular choice.

So just like any other stir-fry, it’s a quick and easy thing. We start by frying off the hot dog in a bit of butter until it’s browned. Throw in the carrots, onion and cabbage. Toss around until the veggies are cooked (it might be a good idea to nuke the carrots for a minute or so in the microwave actually). Add the cooked pasta. three tablespoon of tomato sauce and a tablespoon of light soy sauce and stir around for a minute or so. Once it’s come together nicely, push the pasta to one side of the wok and crack an egg in. Scramble the egg around until it’s set slightly and toss the pasta over it (pretty much the way you would do to a fried rice). Fry until the egg is well cooked. Top with the chopped spring onions.

It may sound horrid but it’s really not bad. One has to wonder how one comes up with this. I have seen something similar at a Vietnamese restaurant but never got around to trying it (love the pho too much!)

And yes, I realise that I make a lot of pasta dishes.

This is just one of those really quick dishes that always hit the spot. Before getting onto how to make it, I would like to make a statement. Low-carb diets can go to hell. Seriously. How can you live with no/little bread or pasta or fruits!

I went to Holland Village today with a friend and bought two loaves of freshly baked Swiss Bake bread (I have always found Swiss Bake to be decent.) One of them happened to be the most fantastic loaf of rye bread I have ever had (really for $7, it’d better be.) The texture and flavour were just so wonderful that I thought wow I can’t believe I’m enjoying a piece of bread this much. Anyway! I’m definitely digressing this time.

You can make this in about 10 minutes. In go two handfuls of penne in a pot of salted boiling water. In goes some olive oil in a frying pan on medium heat. While waiting for the oil to warm up, clean and slice a bulb of baby fennel (or a quarter of a normal-sized fennler – you need about 1/2 a cup of sliced fennel), reserving the funky green top for garnish later. Toss the fennel slices to cook in the olive oil on medium heat until soften – this takes about 3-4 minutes.

Meanwhile open a small can of chunky tuna in brine (you can use tuna in oil or in spring water, up to you. I personally like oil but you know, I should attempt to be healthy sometimes. Unfortunately, not healthy enough to go for the spring water option). Make sure you buy chunky tuna (not sandwich tuna) so you get actualy tuna and not some leftover flakes.

Toss in a third of a jar of Leggo’s Stir Through pasta sauce (I think the sun-dried tomato one is best but any tomato-based one is good) into the cooking fennel with some tuna and a tablespoon of chopped semi-dried tomatoes and a tablespoon of chopped black Spanish olives (both of which I didn’t have when I made it this time but they make the whole thing much nicer) Stir through and let it simmer for about 2-3 minutes. Add plenty of freshly ground pepper. By now your pasta should be ready. So drain it, chuck it on a plate. Top with the tuna and fennel sauce. Top with the sauce with some more tuna chunks. Top the tuna chunks with the reserved fennel top. If you like to add a bit of a kick to it, scatter some rocket leaves on top. Totally ace.

Quick eh? A bit of a cheat but still really good.

30-Apr-2009:

I found some more photos of this dish that I did back in 2006.

I love the way the Chinese refer to certain food items as ‘delights’. Is that not the best way to talk about food? Delights. I love the way they name their food too – ‘ants climbing a tree’, ‘crossing the bridge noodle’. So poetic sounding. I’m not really digressing, I’m about to get to the point that Chinese roasted meat stalls in Singapore tend to call themselves something along the line of ‘Roast Delights.’ It’s such a good way of naming your food.I can’t get over it.

Anyway, generally in a roasted meat stall, we usually the roast duck, roast pork, char siu pork and sometimes soy sauce roast chicken. I only had the roast pork rice today, so I’ll only be talking about that. Basically, it’s a big piece of pork belly that has been seasoned and roasted in a vertical Chinese oven. I’m not too sure if they deep fried it as well but I don’t think so. What we then have is a really nice piece of pork with crispy crackling (which I love). So the roast pork rice is thus – steamed rice topped with roast pork and some sort of soy sauce based sauce to flavour the rice and some garnish of cucumber. It also comes with a disproportionate bowl of peanut soup i.e. broth with boiled peanuts in it. And of course some description of chilli sauce on the side (which seems to feature rather heavily with all Singaporean food. I have had roast pork rice at the cafeteria at work and I thought that was much nicer because of the sauce that comes with it. But all in all, I find the dish rather uninteresting.

Being on a low-protein diet sucks sometimes.

This is what I make when I feel like dessert at about 11pm at night (granted I can probably walk to the market and get some dessert but whatever). Basically it’s just custard using instant custard powder (which I imagine to be made of corn flour, egg colouring, sugar and some vanilla flavouring but I could be wrong) in the microwave and toss in chopped banana. Voila. Almost instant warm dessert that’s really yummy.

Put one cup of milk (I always use pasteurized milk because UHT long life milk just does not do) in a big bowl and place it in a microwave on high for two minutes. Meanwhile, mix two tablespoon of custard powder with about 3 tablespoons of milk. Whisk that up (you don’t really need a whisk, but it is much better to have one) to mix well to form a smooth mixture.

Once the milk is hot (after 2 minutes), remove the hot milk from the microwave, pour the custard mixture into the hot milk, add two teaspoons of sugar and whisk until it’s all combine. Depends on what custard powder you’re using (some have more sugar than others) and how sweet and ripe your banana is, you may need more or less sugar. Work as quickly as possible and put the custard mixture back into the microwave for two minutes. Every half a minute, remove the mixture from the microwave and whisk again.

After two minutes, you should end up with nice thick custard. If the mixture is too watery, add a little more custard/milk mixture, if it’s too thick, add milk. This is why you have to check it every thirty seconds or so. You can do this on the stove top, which means you constantly whisk it. But I find it much easier to just use the nuke machine – less washing up that way. Add a sliced banana into the custard mixture, and nuke it for another minute or so. Let it sit and let the banana cook in its own heat or 2-3 minutes.

That’s it! It’s so simple. I can’t believe this is what they used to feed us in boarding school. It was actually a gem.