Recipes - Grandmothers' Recipes

Good and healthy recipes are meant to be shared, and Rosaline remembers fondly the many happy gatherings in her big family of 14 brothers and sisters with countless nieces and nephews when they gathered for a happy occasion and one of her brothers, a great cook, would cook big pots of the family’s favourite dishes. They would eat in relays at the family’s ‘tok panjang’ table in the kitchen...Peranakan style!

The same 'tok panjang' table would be found at her in-laws' home in Kedah when she and family went up every year for the family’s Chinese New Year reunion dinners. Inevitably there would be feasts of Peranakan/Nonya food served over the days of Chinese New Year as relatives visited.

Featured here are two recipes from both sides of her families, found in her book and shared here. These recipes are chosen for their simplicity in method and easily available ingredients. All her recipes do not use msg.

She invites feed-back and contributions from like-minded food lovers of Singaporean/Peranakan food who believe that good recipes should be shared and tried and tweaked to suit one’s own personal tastebuds. Email: rosalinesh.soon@yahoo.co.uk

	Nonya Mee Siam (serves 12-14) A very healthy, spicy and tangy rice noodle ‘all-in-one dish from Singapore
Ingredients	• 250gm assam (tamarind) soaked in 3000 ml water • 700gm shallots • 2 big onions • 70-80gm blended dried chillies • ¾ rice bowl oil • 250gm sugar • 250gm tow cheo (salted brown soya bean) • 10 gm belacan (shrimp paste)
Method	1. Blend onions & shallots. Fry till dry. (It is important that this step is not hurried. If the onion is not fried well enough the dish will turn out ‘flat’.) 2. Squeeze assam and strain for juice. Set aside. 3. Fry chilli in oil (5 above) separately. Add in belacan (8 above) tow cheo (7 above) and fried onions (2 here) 4. Add assam water (1 here), sugar (6 above) and bring to boil. Leave to simmer.
Ingredients for Serving	• 700gm beehoon (thin rice noodles) • 500gm tow gey (bean sprouts) • 8 pieces tow pok (dried bean cake) • 14 eggs • 100gm koo chye (chives) • 500gm prawns • 1 tbsp chilli powder
Method	1. Scald beehoon, drain, sprinkle chillie powder and mix evenly (easy way) or fry with chilli powder and some blended dried prawns 2. Scald tow gey and set aside 3. Boil eggs until hard boiled and peel 4. Toast tow kua pok lightly, cut into desired size (either in small squares or strips) 5. Cut koo chye into ½ cm lengths 6. Boil prawns and peel
Serving and garnishing	1. Place desired amount of beehoon in a shallow bowl or pasta dish 2. Add scalded tow gey, tow pok, an egg sliced as desired, and prawns 3. Ladle hot, boiling gravy and top it with koo chue as garnish