Not the day…

My girl’s birthday was on Friday, the 17th of September but it was our no-meat day so we decided to put everything off till the next day, the 18th which, because the people at the registration office messed it up, is the actual date on her birth certificate and her MyKad.

No, we did not plan to hold a grand celebration, not when we are #stayingsafe #stayingwell #stayinghome but of course, our traditional Foochow longevity noodles, the mee sua…

…would be a must, no question about that!

I’ve blogged about cooking this before, once, at least…but never mind, let’s go through it all over again. I went out a day earlier to buy the special best quality chicken – they were out of the pua chai kay (half breed chicken) but they gave me a few choices, all just as nice, they said and I chose one.

As soon as I got home, I picked out the parts of the chicken with the meat that we would prefer and marinated it with our traditional Foochow red wine…

…and kept it in the fridge overnight.

When I got up early the next morning, I got the ingredients ready and started cooking the soup.

Firstly, I got some ginger…

…ready. This locally-grown ginger is a whole lot better than the very clean, dehydrated white ones, a lot more “hiam” and fragrant in comparison.

I soaked some dried shitake mushrooms to soften…

…and later, I had to cut away the stalks. Those are hard and not very palatable.

At the same time, I also soaked some dried wolfberries and red dates…

…and after a while, I was ready to start cooking.

I heated up some sesame oil in the wok and threw in the ginger, bruised…

…and let it fry till the fragrance came out.

After that, I put in the chicken…

…and yes, I poured in all the wine that was used to marinate the meat.

After frying till all the juices came out and the meat had absorbed the wine, I added the soaked ingredients…

Yes, I poured in all the water used in the soaking so as to retain the fragrances and tastes.

Finally, I added the water…

…and put in one chicken stock cube instead of salt and msg and after bringing the soup to boil, I let it simmer for some time. The longer you simmer, the sweeter and nicer the soup!

I cooked the mee sua for the three of us and poured the soup all over the noodles…

…and served them with the meat and also the egg…

…from those that I had cooked…

It is the traditional Foochow practice to have hardboiled eggs alongside the mee sua. Some would colour them red, following the age-old practice – in the old days, they would only colour them red for the birthdays of the sons/males in the family but these days, they do not bother to differentiate between the sexes.

Yes, we sure enjoyed what we had that morning and as you can see, Foochow cooking is generally very simple, easy to cook and very nice to eat.