from back home. This is a popular street food in Singapore and Malaysia, and we used a recipe from Little Teochew guest blogging for Rasa Malaysia. Aka Chai Tow Kueh, it is like a fried noodle, except that instead of noodles made of wheat flour, we use little chunks of cakes made of steamed Chinese radish and rice flour. If the chunks were made of wheat they would have been kinda tough and chewy, but with the radish and rice flour they were nice and soft (but not gooey), and the radish gives a nice subtle fresh taste to the chunks too. Further they were first fried til crispy on the outside, so the contrast in textures is great.
This is a pretty simple dish with about 6 ingredients, but the preparation time was quite time consuming as the radish cake has to be steamed (best overnight). Simplicity does come with considerable efforts!
For our first attempt, we tried two versions, a white one (fish sauce) and a black one (dark soy sauce). It turned out a bit dry, so for our second attempt we used mushroom stock and added sliced mushroom and cabbage. Pretty good, M2 dare say. S2 however feels that its still a far cry from the breakfast ta-pau(take away) she gets back home, but ok for a home made first attempt.
If you talk to any Malaysian or Singaporean living overseas, the topic of food will come up sooner or later, and almost always s/he will be missing the street or hawker food back home. There really is a wide variety of great hawker food, though nowadays they can just as commonly be found in coffee shops, food courts, and shopping malls.
Though we wonder/worry sometimes about the future of street food. Although many people love these food, almost nobody who have the means will want to be in this line of work: it is backbreaking work, having to work very long hours, and the pay is not great---people are still expecting that street food should be cheap, and won't pay restaurant prices for them, though the food might be tastier than at the restaurants!
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