Char Kway Teow (Malaysian Rice Noodles)

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.

Beef Chow Fun (Beef with Rice Noodles)

So I spent a hectic few days in New York, and learned this recipe from Mom.  I wanted to take her out someplace for a belated birthday dinner, but she didn't feel like going out.  She really wanted to cook with me.  I decided not to push for a restaurant if she wouldn't enjoy it, plus I took away a lesson for one of my favorite dishes.

And it was way better than a restaurant meal I'd had earlier in the week.  My sister and I agreed Bellini on Manhattan's Upper West Side was awfully underwhelming for Italian food.  Dessert was another disappointment, at the famed Magnolia bakery.  My devil's food cupcake was all right but nothing exciting, and the frosting was just too sweet.  The Crack Pie at Momofuku's Milk Bar was good, if a bit on the too-sweet side, but it wasn't as addictive as its name would have you believe and I was disappointed after all the hype.  Ippudo with my friend Bao, who writes some dining pieces for The New York Times, was a real winner -- delicious pork buns and ramen noodles that are nothing like what you get in the cheap plastic packets.  I also had some mooncakes (yue bing) with the Mid-Autumn Festival not far away, and this pandan version was not only flavorful but very pretty.

But back to the important stuff.  This dish is often called Beef Chow Fun on restaurant menus, and the wide, flat rice noodles are called sha he fen.  They're only sold fresh, not dried, and sometimes they're already sliced and other times sold in a sheet.  Look for them and the bean sprouts, which lend a nice crunch, at your Asian market or Chinatown. 

And Mom says the Chinese restaurant secret to getting that beef so tender is a pinch of baking soda.  Sounds weird, I know, but it works!