Chow noodles and Pepper Shrimp... Part 1

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I'll make my first post a double since I've been procrastinating somewhat. I'm making Chow Noodles and Pepper Shrimp. Fairly simple dishes that can be adapted and personalized easily. The methods and spices I use here are the basics of most Chinese stir fried cuisine... well local Chinese anyway. So i'll put the exact amounts so we can get familiar. a bad ounce could spoil your whole dish. On the upside, once you're comfortable with them, you could easily adapt them to similar dishes.

Chow noodles- Ingredients
pack of egg noodles

julienned christophene, cabbage and sweet pepper, or whatever you could get your hands on from the fridge at the time.

1 tsp of equal amounts of crushed ginger and garlic combined
1 tsp sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/4 tsp five spice powder
1/4 tsp white pepper
1/4 tsp vetsin. Same as the amount in a typical pack of corn curls FYI

Sesame oil
2 tbsp good quality rice wine. Try not to drink any until after.
2 tbsp dark soy sauce
hold on to some chopped chive to use as garnish

To get it started, add the egg noodles to boiling water flavoured with a teaspoon of 5-spice powder and salt to taste . Cook until al dente. (derived from the latin phrase "soft to the dentures")

Next, turn off your smoke alarm and heat a tablespoon of cooking oil in a wok until it begins to smoke. throw in the ginger and garlic and stir fry quickly until it turns just slightly brown.

Add the vegetables, salt, 1/4 teaspoon five-spice powder and rice wine and stir fry that mix for about 3-5 minutes over high heat.

Dump the cooked noodles into the stir fried vegetables, adding the white pepper, vetsin, sugar and soy sauce. Stir fry for a couple minutes over medium heat until the soy sauce is properly distributed.

Now it's time to turn off the stove, dramatically add a few dashes of sesame oil so that any onlooker thinks you're a big time chef, stir for a bit and remove your creation from the wok. Garnish with the chopped chive for the finishing touch.

Chow Noodles and Pepper Shrimp... Part 2

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Ingredients

1lb fresh shrimps, not frozen. Large, deveined, but with shells intact.
Hot pepper to your liking- avoid peppersauce

2 cups mixed vegetable of your choice, I used water chestnuts, onions and sweet pepper here. Pinapple works well.
tsp of equal amounts of crushed ginger and garlic combined
1/2 tsp salt
tsp sugar
1/4 tsp five spice powder
1/4 tsp white pepper

2 tbsp good quality rice wine
1/2 cup tomato paste - not ketchup
Sesame oil
1/4 tsp vetsin
chopped chive as garnish




Season shrimp with salt, 5-spice powder, hot pepper, white pepper and vetsin.
Marinate for an hour or 2.



Heat 1/2 cup cooking oil in your trusty wok until smoking. Throw in shrimp and the ginger and garlic into the wok. Cook shrimp over high heat for a couple minutes on each side.



Remove Cooked shrimp from the wok.



Remove most of the oil from the wok and add vegetables, salt, sugar, a dash of white pepper, and rice wine. Stir fry for 2- 3 minutes.



Add tomato paste and 1/2 cup water, bring to a simmer.



Place the shrimp back into the wok and simmer for a few minutes. Turn off heat and add a few dashes of sesame oil.


Remove from Wok, garnish with chopped chive. Done.


Serve over a bed of Chow noodles or next to it as the case may be.

my shanghi experience

since i've known her, the curious mouth introduced me to 2 new culinary experiences:

1. ramen noodles without the soup like liquid. i know i know... it's just common sense that you don't have to make the noodle soup. just strain the water out after you boil it, then you can use it just like any other noodle. but after growing up for years calling the product "ramen soup" as opposed to ramen noodles, it just seemed like that's exactly what it was.

2. the phenomena called dim sum.

this entry is about the latter.

sometimes, on a sunday morning at around 11, we go to shanghi experience in movie towne for dim sum. what is dim sum? doh frighten, i was just getting to that. basically, it's like a festival of steamed and fried bite sized chinese foods. dumplings, rolls, pieces of meat etc. oh... and there's green tea too.

dim sum actually means "to touch your heart" and it is said to have been a cantonese custom. farmers after workin hard in the fields will go to their favourite tea house and drink tea, eat and talk ole talk. on the menu you find things like pot stickers, dumplings, small pows, sticky rice and a host of other interesting things. if you don't eat shrimp or pork, forget it though. it's mostly pork, some shrimp and a liiiiiiittle bit of other stuff. to me, it's the damn thing self on a sunday. hit dat, head home and just relax. it puts you in that frame of mind. maybe it's the green tea.

we've been going to dim sum at shanghi for quite some time. even introduced a few people to it (kinda like what i'm doing now.) and the experience has been good. they walk around with trollies of differnet things, and you just select portions off of it. some of them even go on a hot surface for a little sizzle right in front of you on the table.

but today was more than disappointing. the curious mouth is in no way at all curious about pork. it gets her sick actually. so her dim sum experience is based on shrimp. considering the menu is made up of dishes like char siu bao, har gao, wu gok and such stuff that we can't even pronounce right now, we rely on seeing the dish and/or remembering the ingredients. the mouth ordered a shrimp dumpling. the girl serving took out the dish. the mouth questioned it. she assured us that it is the shrimp dumpling. on sampling, the mouth realized that it was in fact the very pork that she doesn't eat.

after bringing it to their attention, showing them the content of the dumpling to prove that she wasn't making it up and asking them if they happened to have any benadryl because she's alergic to the swine, we got nothing more than a sorry about that... no benadryl and the drug store here isn't open. not even from a manager. further to that, while i was thinking that it would have been appropriate to comp the entire meal to make up for the physically harmful inconvenience, a request to take the once bitten imposter of a shrimp dumpling off the bill was met with some resistance. but the seriousness and urgency conveyed by the mouths gradually escalating voice seemed to solve that.

all in all, as unacceptable as that entire scene was, it might be a little unfair to present a totally terrible review based on one bad experience that came after a series of good ones. everybody deserves a 2nd chance, so we'll see how it goes on a sunday soon to come.

leh we bubble.