Creamy Nonya Noodles

A spur of the moment purchase of fresh, thick noodles from the local Asian market left me with the task of how best to devour them. Lo mein? Eh...Aha! A nice heavy broth/sauce would be great in this cool weather. Though the noodles are not of the ramen type, I'm sure there's something out there suitable for this.

After scouring about, I found this Creamy Nonya Noodles recipe from Martin Yan. I modified it to suit my tastes and the availability of ingredients in the kitchen. For the most part, I didn't bother with the "accessories" he used such as chicken, cucumber, omelette strips and fried tofu. Instead, I used hard-boiled eggs, fish balls and soft tofu (not fried) which is somewhat ramen-like. The recipe also calls for using water, but that just seemed awfully boring so I used a Knorr vegetable boullion for the stock, but that might have been a mistake. Perhaps those pseudo-meaty broths would have been more suitable here? Considering what goes into those rich ramen broths that yield complex, deep flavours for ramen, a vegetable boullion cube utterly pales in comparison.

Regardless, the soup base turned out to be not creamy at all. I'm not sure what the creamy bit in the name refers to. However, I enjoyed the coconut and lemongrass flavours that permeated the soup. Other than that, the soup was just too heavy on me taste buds in a salty-oily manner. Ah, perhaps I shouldn't have used dark soy sauce and surely the boullion cube added a wee bit too much in the salt department? Another potential mistake in the preparation may have been the absence of the chilies. None were on hand and I forgot to add dried hot pepper as a substitue. I think their addition would have helped. Ah well.

Being a soup-based noodle dish, it's best to consume it all. Victims are useful in that sense. I had no willing victims (they are too smart for me) so I had refrigerate the leftover soup while I left the noodles in a separate bowl. After all, I wouldn't want the noodles to soak up all the soup to become a huge mushy mass. Yuck. The next day when I opened the fridge, I was greeted by a transformed soup. It had separated! Somehow, I found it rather amusing which is about all I can muster up for a decidely unpleasant dish. =P