A Rookie Attempt at Ban Mian

what do you do when you have fried ikan billis? of course! you make ban mian (translated: board noodles) which essentially is handmade noodles with vegetables, pork mince, mushrooms and an egg in clear soup.

i've been searching the web for easy recipes for the noodles (one that would involve stuff that i actually had i.e. flour and eggs) and finally decided to improvise and agar agar (estimate?) the measurements.

what i did was mix 215g of plain flour with a teaspoon of salt and 3 eggs
and kneaded it into a dough (in the process adding more flour bit by bit)
since i dont have a rolling pin, we improvised with a glass! :) dust loads of flour onto the board when rolling out the dough.
slice the noodles to your desired thicknesswhich can be either rather thin, or fat and huge! (word of warning, the noodles DO expand quite a bit when cooking)
in the meantime, i made the stock for the soup and prepared the ingredients to be put into the pot when cooking the noodles.

Preparation Work:
1) marinade the pork mince with salt, pepper, soy sauce and a bit of sugar
2) soak some chinese mushrooms and woodear mushrooms
3) rinse a handful of ikan billis in hot water (to wash off some salt) then soak in hot water
4) chop up some garlic, spring onions and ginger (or use ginger paste)
5) slice up the mushrooms (save the mushroom water!) and put aside the stalks of the chinese mushrooms
6) remove the ikan billis from the water and save the water as well

To make the stock, fry the garlic, spring onions, ginger and ikan billis till fragrant. Add the water that was used to soak both the mushrooms and the ikan billis, and top it off with water and one cube of stock (chicken or ikan billis).Sprinkle salt and pepper to taste and let it boil for as long as possible, topping up with water every now and again.
In a separate pot, briefly cook the noodles in boiling water and quickly remove once most of the flour has been boiled off. In a fresh pot, add some stock and put the noodles in once the stock is boiling, together with some pork mince, mushrooms and vegetables. Drop in an egg towards the end and serve in a mega huge bowl!
Enjoy with fried shallots and ikan billis. Slice up some red chilli for a soy sauce dip.

The noodles didnt turn out fantastic - sure, they were smooth but there seemed to be something missing from it. It wasnt chewy and seemed a bit flat (in terms of taste). but nonetheless a good first-try. Back to more research on how to improve the noodles!