In my family, my dad is the Noodle King.
Born in Penang, home to the mighty Asam Laksa, my dad came out to Australia in the 60s as a high school student. Back then, there was only one or two Asian restaurants in Adelaide and both were Chinese. So if dad wanted to eat the hawker dishes of his childhood like Char Kway Teow (fried rice noodles), Asam Laksa (sour fish noodle soup), Curry Laksa, Har Mee (prawn noodle soup), Sar Hor Fun (‘wet’ fried rice noodles) and Sambal Udang (prawn sambal), he had to learn to cook them himself.
And so he did.
Asian street food devotees may argue that you can never truly recreate the taste of a hawker dish in a domestic kitchen: they say that the wok doesn’t get hot enough and the ingredients are not the same. They say too, that it’s about the atmosphere – the sheer satisfaction of eating a bowl of $AUD2 noodles on a plastic stool underneath a furiously spinning fan at your favourite hawker restaurant can never truly be replicated.
That may be true but why should we not try to reach for those moments? After all, a little bit of love is better than none, isn’t it?
When my grandmother was alive she would cook her Asam Laksa paste and her Sambal Hebi (dried shrimp sambal) each time we visited Malaysia. We would freeze them in plastic bags and wrap them in old newspaper to bring home to Australia. Later, when I was working overseas, my parents brought me these precious parcels and whenever I was homesick I would use them as the base to create the dishes from my childhood. It made me feel connected and loved.
I’m working with Bertolli at the moment, developing Asian-style dishes for them using their light olive oil. The first recipe I made for them was a Beef Stir Fry and recently, I made this Lobster Noodle Stir Fry, based on my dad’s recipe. It’s not a dish he ate growing up, rather, it’s a dish that he makes for special occasions that the whole family enjoys. To watch my three year old niece slurp up these noodles is to witness pure joy.
Eat the love.
Tell me, dear reader, what are your most cherished family recipes?
