There were some noodles left in the house the other day – probably half a kg of it. Usually, they will sell the noodles in 1-kg packs but my missus had already cooked half of it several days earlier and stuffed the rest in the fridge. Now, I don’t know if it’s a woman thing or what but she does seem to take a very long time to cook something for breakfast in the morning, be it fried rice or noodles – fried or in whichever way she fancies.
I would hear her in the kitchen, cutting this and that, taking this and that…and even the cooking process seems awfully long. Maybe she cooks with a passion, cutting everything slowly and carefully, adding all kinds of ingredients and sauces and taking care of every minute detail. Well, I’m certainly not like that – when I cook, I would opt for the easy peasy way out. If you ask me to do all that, cooking would seem to me to be such a chore…and nobody likes chores, I’m sure.
Now, how did I fry the noodles that day?
The ingredients I used included the following:
Half a kg yellow noodles
3 tablespoons dark soy sauce
Half a tablespoon sugar
2 cloves garlic, peeled and sliced thinly or chopped
1 shallot, peeled and sliced
2 red chilies, seeds removed and sliced thinly
12 prawns, shelled
2 eggs
A handful of taugeh (bean sprouts)
3 tablespoons cooking oil
First, I added the soy sauce and the sugar to the noodles and tossed them together thoroughly until the noodles became an evenly dark colour. Then, I heated the oil in the wok and threw in the garlic, shallot and fried till they turned brown. Next, I added chilies and the prawns and once they were cooked, I added the noodles and kept stirring for a few minutes. After that, I pushed the noodles aside and added the eggs, breaking the yolks and mixing them with the whites and when they were more or less cooked, I blended them in together with the noodles. Finally, I put in the taugeh (bean sprouts) and after stirring it for a while, I turned off the heat and scooped the noodles out to be served…
As you can see, I do not like my taugeh overcooked – I prefer them a little bit raw and still very crunchy. I did sprinkle a bit of chopped spring onions over the noodles prior to serving but that is optional and you may want to add some sliced fresh chillies too so as to give the dish a bit of colour and make it look more attractive.
How did it taste? VERY nice, I must say…and it’s not that I want to sing my own praises. My missus loves to add soy sauce, Kikkoman sauce, red wine and so on and so forth and even though it maybe nice, sometimes, it may taste kind of peculiar. I honestly believe that simplicity is best…and I would be spared the torture of having to wait so very long just to eat something that is not necessarily nicer than this.
...STILL CRAZY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS! 