Thursday, February 24, 2011

Planet VeGMeL week (Part 4) - Vegan About Town Char Kueh Teow



My eye has been on Steph's Char Kueh Teow from Vegan About Town for quite some time after having success with her Mee Goreng recipe ages ago. For several years, our household take-away favourite has been Malaysian food and noodles normally make up at least one of the meals ordered. The man has always preferred Mee Goreng and the son Char Kueh Teow, I quite like both of them in different ways and Singapore Noodles can be pretty tasty too.

Tonight was an exciting night of firsts for me. I mentioned cutting down our orange tree to make way for our house extension 
in this post which turned out to be an extremely drawn out painful project. I could write a lengthy essay about this but this is a food blog not a renovation nightmare blog! Only yesterday we were given the green light to use our rangehood for cooking after a final inspection from an electrician. This was very exciting news for me! 

Last weekend, the man and I went wok shopping. He had surprised me by taking it upon himself to do some research into the best types of woks to buy and how to season them properly. Prior to breaking it in with food, I had been instructed to go through the seasoning process of applying a thin coating of oil to the wok, heating it on a low flame until the oil started to smoke, waiting for it to cool and wiping it down with paper towels. This process had to be repeated several times.

Then it was time to cook some noodles. I went against Steph's advice a little and changed a few of the ingredients around but I did take on board not to overload the dish with veggies and let the noodles be the star. Beanshoots don't really do it for me so these were omitted instead I added in some shiitake mushrooms, and pak choy instead of kai lan as that's what needed to be used up in the fridge.

My plan was to either fry up some tofu cubes or crumble the tofu in like Steph, however I remembered that there were a few Vegan Brunch mini tofu omlettes in the fridge so these were sliced up and added to the noodles towards the end of the cooking time. The omlettes were a great vegan stand-in for eggs in this dish and would also work well in a Nasi Goreng, so if you are interested in the recipe I have previously posted it here.  

I am very pleased to say that I loved this recipe as did the others, the chillies used were quite spicy which didn't bother me at all but I may have to use one instead of two in the future. My new wok worked extremely well, this is the first real wok I have owned and it will be treasured and used very often.

Planet VeGMeL week is over the half way mark now and there are only 3 days remaining...

2 comments:

  1. Yay! I'm really enjoying your planet veg mel week, and I'm glad you liked the recipe that you picked. :o)

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  2. Thanks so much Steph! So nice to hear you are enjoying the week and your char kueh teow has been one of my favs so far. Still have half a packet of fresh noodles in the fridge so I'll be making it again really soon...

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