Thai Stir-Fried Noodles with Beef (Phad si-iew)

While thinking of something to cook for lunch one day, I vaguely remembered a recipe for crispy beef and so prepared the beef in thin slices as I recalled how it was done. But... I couldn't track down the recipe in time *cry* and had to look for another dish to make. I found this in one of my cookbooks and Ibu coincidentally had (baby) kailan in the fridge, so I already had most of the ingredients. Which is good. :) So... here we go!

What you need:
500g fresh rice sheet noodles, cut lenghtways into 2cm strips - I just used kway teow
2 tablespoons oil, for frying
2 eggs, lightly beaten and seasoned to taste
500g lean beef fillet, thinly sliced across the grain
1/4 cup kecap manis (sweet soy sauce)
1 1/2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 1/2 tablespoons fish sauce
300g kai lan/gai larn (Chinese broccoli), cut into 5 cm lengths
1/2 teaspoon ground white pepper

What you do:

1. Cover the noodles with boiling water and gently separate the strips. Drain.
2. Heat a wok over very high heat, add 1 tablespoon of oil and swirl to coat. Add the egg and swirl to coat and cook over medium heat for 1-2 minutes or until set. Remove and slice.
3. Reheat the wok over very high heat, add the remaining oil and cook the beef in batches for 3 minutes, or until browned. Remove.
4. Reduce the heat to medium, add the noodles and cook for 2 minutes. Combine the kecap manis, soy and fish sauces. Add to the wok with the kai lan and white pepper, then stir fry for 2 minutes. Return the egg and beef to the wok and cook for 3 minutes. Adjust seasonings to taste and serve immediately.
   

Normally, we have noodles for breakfast and very rarely for lunch (or even dinner) but nobody really minded much. And to tell you the truth... this was nothing special. :P Fancy name aside, this is just a normal fried noodle dish. And its not even that good.

For one thing, I thought the beef was a bit bland. It might have been nicer if you had fried it with the seasonings, before adding the noodles in. As it is, it just taste like beef. That might be a plus for some people, but I thought I would mention it anyhow.

Also.... I don't cook with kailan much (in fact, at all) and as a result, the veggies in this dish were very very ... crunchy, shall we say? Ahem. Again, you might prefer to cook the kailan separately, especially if you had a large amount of noodles as I did, to make sure everything is properly cooked.

I also found it a bit hard to mix everything together, because the noodles became really really sticky a couple of minutes after adding them to the pot. Yes, I did wash them before adding them in. It might be easier if you cut them into shorter lengths beforehand, but I'm not sure... some people like really long noodles. I prefer shorter ones myself, haha.

Apart from that, everything was fine and dandy. :) Sorry for the short post, a much better one coming up next, I hope! And I hope all of you are enjoying the new features being introduced (slowly) here. I shall have to stop soon or the page loading time is going to be really badly affected!

Quote of the day: Chinese people say Marco Polo brought noodles from China back to Italy and Italians say they had noodles before that. All this has been based on documentary material, on personal accounts and menus.