Versatile…

Mee sua, which literally means string/thread noodles, is very versatile. You do not have to serve it with chicken or mushroom or egg drop soup cooked with ginger and traditional Foochow red wine…

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…all the time and there is, of course, the fried version…

…at some of the restaurants in town. I have had it with pek ting eyok (8-herb combination) duck soup…

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…as well and I often serve it dry…

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…tossed in Bovril and all the other ingredients used.

The other day, I had some in tom yam fish ball soup…

…and when I shared the photograph on Facebook, Rose was stunned…and she imagined it to be very salty. Yes, mee sua is very salty – the way many people would cook it. They would boil some water and throw the noodles in…and once, it has started to boil again and the noodles float up, they would drain it and serve. That is why they never add salt to the chicken soup to be used for serving mee sua – the noodles would make it salty enough. Other than the fact that it is rather salty, I also do not like how sticky it is and the strands would all stick together in a clump and when you pour the hot soup over it, you would have to go through the chore of loosening the strands to make them come apart…at times, not very successfully.

So what I would do would be to boil A LOT of water to cook the mee sua. Stir it well so much of the salt would dissolve and get lost in the water. Then, I would drain away the water and refill the pot with tap/filtered water to rinse the noodles so as to remove what is left of the salt and also the starchiness so as to loosen the strands. This way, they will not stick together. Of course the mee sua will be cold but if you are pouring hot soup over it, it does not really matter. For my Bovril mee sua, I would pour hot/boiling water over it to warm it up before draining it again to toss with the ingredients prepared  for the purpose.

Coming back to my mee sua in tom yam fish ball soup, that morning, I wanted to cook breakfast but there was only one packet of the instant noodles left in the pantry so I cooked the noodles and put that in a bowl for my missus. Then I cooked the mee sua and put it in another bowl for myself. There was some cabbage in the fridge so I blanched a bit of that in a pot of boiling water to serve by the side…and I also boiled some fish balls that we had in the freezer to go with our noodles. Lastly, I emptied the sachets of the oil and the seasoning into the water to make the broth for the noodles and the mee sua. It did not matter that it was for two servings instead of one – it was still sour and tasty enough with the added flavours of the fish balls and the cabbage that I had cooked in it earlier (and in fact, it did not taste as strong on the msg as usual). Then I garnished it with a sprinkling of chopped daun sup and served.

Moving on, another thing that is versatile is tofu or bean curd. There are so many ways of cooking it and that day, I decided to have it steamed. I placed the tofu on a plate and put a layer of minced meat, mixed thoroughly with chopped garlic, a few slices of ginger on top of it. On top of that, I placed some slices of salted fish (the long kiam hu variety, not the dry type) and garnished that with chopped spring onions and thinly sliced chili and daun sup. Finally, I put it into at the wok and steamed it for around half an hour and this was the end result…

I would say it was really very nice – the “soup” that had accumulated in the process of steaming was absolutely tasty.

Well, not everything works out all that well all the time, I’m afraid – this, I just cannot deny. For our vegetable dish, I decided to cook what was left of the aforementioned cabbage the same way I had cooked the long beans and cincaluk omelette a few days earlier…

…and at best, I would say it was all right, nice but it came nowhere near the latter, I’m afraid. Lesson learnt, I would most definitely stick to long beans from now on.