FAMILY AFFAIR

Chinese Tortellini in the making. As my mother gets on in age, she can no longer manage to cook wonton noodles (云吞面) at home without turning it into a family affair.  Especially today, when she was eager to get through dinner and washing up early enough to enjoy the National Day Parade on TV.

And no wonder she's busy! A lot of prep work goes into this simple dish.  Nothing short of the best ingredients would do.  It begins with my parents going hand in hand to the wet market to source for the right slab of 五花肉(which is the shoulder cut of the pig, otherwise known as picnic shoulder), shrimps, water chestnuts, Chinese dried mushrooms and dried flatfish (左口鱼).  The noodle soup base is superb because of the dried fish, dried scallops and Chinese cured air-dried ham( 金华火腿) in it.

Mum doesn't believe in buying ready-ground meat, preferring to chop it up in her own kitchen.  The shrimps deveined and split length wise, the water chestnuts and dried mushrooms chopped, the dried fish fried and finely grounded.

I was assigned to form the wontons, a task which I enjoy immensely.

Mum removed 13 shrimps from the freezer this morning, cleaned and split lengthwise each into two, and I got exactly 26 wontons from my 100 grams of wrappers! Talk about coincidence.

These are SO good!  Dad proposed that we set up shop.  "But," he jested, "we simply cannot sell them as large as these or it'd take ages for us to breakeven."

We had a great meal.

Happy National Day, Singapore!

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