The family recipe

June 22, 2008 webmaster No comments

Location: My tiny kitchen

Okay, ready to hear my culinary story? Well, here it is! With no surprise, I come from a family in which everyone loves to eat. In particular, both my parents love to cook. However, as I was a kid, I was never interested in cooking. I enjoyed some dishes which my parents created, but I never bothered to find out how they were made.

All was changed when I went to university. It alsmost happened overnight for me. It was like I woke up one day and I started getting interested in cooking. Was it the greasy, tasteless and ever-the-same dorm food that pulled out my culinary instincts? I have no idea. But ever since then, I fell in love with cooking more and more everyday, and there is me right now.

So the point of this little story is to confess that I am no good at cooking Chinese food. When I started cooking in university, I was learning all the baking, roasting, chopping, deglazing from watching celebrity chefs such as Emeril Lagasse on the food network. Everything was fine until I tried cooking Chinese food. The dishes just loses its balance – it’s either too salty, or too sweet, or too bland, or worst of all, it turns into a plate of thick cornstarch slur.

Due to the high failure rate, I seldomly cook Chinese food. Sometimes though, I crave for dishes which my parents make. Needless to say, I wish I could have hung out at the kitchen longer when my parents made dinner.

This is a rice noodle dish which my parents created. Since this is their recipe, you will find this dish a little different than other fried rice noodles which you had from Chinese restaurants. I grew up eating this and I love it. Most importantly to me, this is one of the very few Chinese dishes that I am able to successfully cook. May God bless Christina in Chinese cooking.

Since I have many siblings and this is a family recipe, this recipe serves many, many people Okay seriously, this recipe serves about 5.

The most consuming part of this recipe is in making paper-thin egg crepes and then julienne them into egg noodles.

- Crack 4 large eggs and place them into a bowl.
- Put in freshly ground pepper.
- Put in 1 tsp of salt.

Beat the eggs.

To make the egg crepe, heat a small size non-stick pan with 1/2 tsb of oil.
- Put in 2 tbsp of egg. You want to put in just enough egg to cover the bottom of the pan completely.
- Turn the heat to medium.
- Cook the bottom side for 15 seconds, or until you see bubbles on top side.
- Flip the egg and cook the other side for 15 seconds.
- Take out the egg crepe, place it on a cutting board.
- Repeat untill all eggs have been cooked.
- This will give you 8 to 10 very thin egg crepes.

Although the picture doesn’t show, there are 8 egg crepes in this stack.

Julienne the stack of egg crepes as if you are trying to make “egg noodles”.

Set the “egg noodles” aside for later use.

I like using rice noodles made in Taiwan; they always give me good results. I guess it’s a faith thing.

- In a non-stick pan, bring water to boil.
- Put in 200g of rice noodles (I used 1 and 1/2 stack of noodles from the package shown).
- Boil the noodles until they are soft.
- Drain the noodles in a sieve.
- While the noodles are still hot, run them over iced water for 1 minute or until they turn cold.
- Leave the noodles in the sieve to drain off all excessive water.

- In a non-stick pan, put in 1 tbsp of oil.
- Put in 2 cups of sliced pork.
- Pan fried one side of the pork until they are brown.
- Turn the pork over and continue to pan fry the other side.
- Once the pork is cooked, put in:
- 1 tbsp of brown sugar
- 2 tsp of salt
- 1 tbsp of onion powder
- 2 tbsp of Japanese cooking wine
- Freshly ground pepper
- Stir fry the pork quickly until all seasoning are incorported into the meat.
- Take out the pork for later use.

- In the non-stick pan, put in 2 tsp of oil.
- Put in half of the rice noodles.
- Drizzle in a few drops of sesame oil.
- Put in 1 tsp of salt.
- Put in 1 tbsp of minced garlic.
- Under medium-high heat, stir fry the noodles until all of them have been coated with the oil and seasoning.
- When the noodles begin to dry out, pour in chicken stock. Like making pasta, it is also tricky in how much stock to use when frying rice noodles. Since the noodles should be dry in the end, put in a small amount of stock each time that is just enough to keep the noodles from sticking together. The chicken stock also adds good flavour to the noodles.

- After frying the noodles for about a minute, put in half the eggs and half the pork.
- Continue to stir fry the noodles until all ingredients are mixed together. Pour in chicken stock as needed. This process took me 3 minutes.
- Repeat with the remianing batch.
- Pour the noodles into a huge bowl when they are done.