experimented with chashumen & curry chicken noodles recently with some success. 🙂

chashu is Japanese braised pork belly in mirin, sake, soy sauce & sugar. it is commonly served with ramen as chashumen & can come with tonkotsu, soyu or miso tonkotsu soupbase. 🙂

for curry chicken noodle, the aim was to recreate or model the famous Ah Heng or Heng Kee curry chicken noodle stalls at Hong Lim Park hawker centre. The curry for curry chicken noodle is somewhat different from the usual curry, and there is no internet recipe to be found. so I had to improvise. The chicken is not curry chicken but more like Hainanese chicken rice chicken. anyhow, I cooked quite a good nonya curry chicken so I varied the curry by adding dried prawns (虾米), lemongrass (香茅) but I did not have the special chilli they had.

so I invited my usual gang of friends & this time including the few of us who went together for the Hong Kong Trip 10-13May2013. I designed a menu which included braised duck, curry chicken, spicy bean sauce pork prime ribs, wok fried prawns & HK kailan to go with the 2 carbo dishes, namely the chasumen & curry chicken noodles. 🙂

the top photo was the braised duck. I did a very good one for a 22pax homegourmet buffet dinner on 5May2013. For this one I made some small mistakes but managed to rectify it & the end product was quite flavourful duck & nice colour & presentation too. 🙂

nonya curry chicken

the curry chicken was also very tasty & flavourful. I took off 1/2 the curry though to make the curry for the curry chicken noodles.

we also had a very good spicy bean sauce pork prime ribs dish made by my domestic helper. she had mostly perfected the wonderful dish. 🙂

dry wok medium prawn

poached HK kailan with shitake

I cooked the high heat dry wok prawns (kind of my very own speciality recipe) which never fails to please. 🙂 & my helper did the poached HK kailan with shitake mushrooms. 🙂

the braised duck, curry chicken & spicy pork ribs were pre-cooked & only needed warming up. The prawn & poached kailan were whipped up when all the guests arrived, and so we were able to start a relax evening dining with 5 piping hot dishes & plain rice. 🙂

chashu (Japanese braised pork belly)

perfect 6mins runny yoke egg

the Jap chashu was also done beforehand. So was the perfect runny yoke egg – direct from fridge into boiling water & simmered for exactly 6mins. 🙂 instead of heavy ramen, I used small pinch of thin Japanese light noodles that was cooked just al dante & dropped into ice water to stop after-cooking to ensure the “qq” effect. 🙂

chicken – hainanese chicken rice method

for the curry chicken noodles, I had a really nice, tender & sweet chicken done the Hainanese chicken rice style with smooth, taut skin, again courtesy of the ice-water bath. 🙂

& we had taupok, potatoes & fishcake added to the yellow noodle & thick beehoon.

my friends brought durian puff (unfortunately it was frozen though I took out of the freezer for 1/2hr but it was not enough), ice cream & very sweet strawberries & rambutans. 🙂

what a fun evening, company, conversation & food! 🙂

c.h.e.f andy