This has been on my to-make list for a long time, and I'm happy to have tackled it. Plus, I wanted to highlight a savory dish since I've covered nothing but sweets lately. Char Kway Teow, a Malaysian dish of slightly spicy stir-fried rice noodles, is a favorite of mine. My mother, who is from Malaysia, would often order the dish for me in restaurants when I was a kid. This version has shrimp, Chinese sausage, Chinese chives, and bean sprouts. In restaurants in New York or Boston, there is no sausage but there are usually dozens of tiny squids that I ask them to leave out. Other versions on the Internet call for cockles (no, thanks) or fish cakes (I like those). But I like everything in this version, and the minimum level of fussiness appealed to me.
The dried shrimp paste, also known as Belacan, gives it great depth of flavor. I was unfamiliar with it, and it was not in the Asian market aisle labeled "shrimp paste" but in the Malaysian aisle. The one fussy-looking step I skipped was roasting it in foil -- I just sauteed until fragrant, and proceeded with the recipe. And if you've never cooked with the fresh rice noodles before, don't refrigerate them, and use them the day you buy them or they will dry out and harden. I also doubled the amount of bean sprouts, because what else am I going to do with the rest of the bag?
In the end, making the dish was easier than I anticipated, making me wonder why I waited all these years to try. And it's pretty darned good.
