641.744 Young: Stir-Frying to the Sky's Edge

I have an unnatural fondness for Westernized Asian food. It may have to do with working for four years in a "Pan-Asian" noodle shop that was owned by Midwestern Jewish dudes. When you work full-time in a restaurant, you eat pretty much all your meals on-site, straight off the menu. Even if I picked up an egg sandwich from the diner next door on my way in, I'd top it with Sriracha and soy-ginger sauce.

The food at Hi Ricky was pretty yummy, but I can't say with certainty that it was all that authentic. Most of the cooks were Mexican, and the clientele was far more "West" than "East." Of course, that didn't stop them from pointing out the "misspelling" of Pad See-Ew on the menu (it's a phonetic translation using a completely different alphabet, but whatever, buddy.)

I met The Husband at Hi Ricky. He was a server, like me, and one of the few of us who worked 7-8 shifts a week. In those days we shared many meals. Most of them rushed, just before our first tables or just after our last. We ate them standing up, in the cramped back room of the restaurant, complaining about bad tips and obnoxious customers. The stuff of many great love stories, I'm sure.

Because we can't always satisfy our highly specific, nostalgic cravings at the local Asian restaurants we find, we often try to make our favorite Hi Ricky dishes at home. We've found recipes for Pad Thai, Drunken Noodles, Vietnamese Spring Rolls, and Thai Green Curry quite easily, but a few have proved to be a bit more elusive. So when I checked the index of one of the library's newest cookbooks, Stir-Frying to the Sky's Edge and found a recipe for The Husband's favorite from the old days, "Singapore Noodles", I was thrilled.

The book, by award-winning author Grace Young, celebrates the wok, along with over 100 classic stir-fry recipes. It offers a great deal beyond the recipes, including essential equipment, wok maintenance, and advice on how to deal with garlic, ginger, and scallions -- three prominent wok ingredients. On page 65, we finally get to the recipes. The chapters are divided by main ingredient: meat, poultry and egg, fish and shellfish, vegetable and tofu, and rice and noodle.

The book actually offers two recipes for Singapore noodles, one traditional, and the other a Southeast Asia variation. They both include curry powder, but the traditional recipe called for ginger, which was definitely in the Hi Ricky version, so we went with that.

Prep is the key to wok cooking, and I can remember the prep area at Hi Ricky, a small nook tucked behind the dishwashing area of the basement kitchen, where 3-4 young prep cooks would slice, chop, soak, and roll all day, while the more seasoned cooks stirred, grilled, and plated the food in the loud, bustling open kitchen upstairs. The food at Hi Ricky came out of that kitchen lightning fast, which is partly due to the blazing hot woks and skilled line cooks, but just as much to the precision and hard work of the prep cooks downstairs.

As we soaked our noodles, sliced our veggies, and minced our garlic and ginger, The Husband and I reminisced about our noodle-slinging days.

Photo copyright © Andrew Stott

We laughed, remembering the crazy delivery driver, who rode a yellow bike with a large storage compartment he called "the hot tub" all over the city. We wistfully wondered what Sylvio, Maria, Dre, and Neng were up to these days. We shook our heads remembering the worst of the regulars, and smiled at thoughts of the best of them. But mostly, we wondered if the Singapore Noodles we were making would transport us back to those days like no memory ever could.


I was a little worried; I could have sworn the Hi Ricky version used egg noodles, but the recipe we had, like others we found online, called for thin rice noodles. We didn't see thin egg noodles at the store anyway, so we stuck to the recipe. They get stir fried with soy sauce, ginger, garlic, red pepper flakes, shrimp, and curry powder.


We made a few adjustments to the recipe; we used chicken instead of BBQ pork (not for any health or religious reasons, we were just too lazy to BBQ the pork first), and added sugar snap peas instead of bell peppers. It came together pretty fast, and the aroma permeating our kitchen was wonderfully familiar. We topped our noodles with a few bean sprouts, grabbed our chopsticks, and dug in.


The flavor was right-on, the heady curry and the spicy ginger were just like I remembered. The Husband confirmed this, not saying much, but devouring the delicious noodles. I didn't get a sense that we'd used the wrong type of noodles, either. I think the golden color in my memory registered as egg noodles, but now I think it was due to the curry powder rather than the noodles themselves. In any case, our rice noodles worked beautifully.

It was nice to sit down at our dining table, a wedding gift from dear friends, and enjoy the meal slowly, with some nice wine and conversation. But I would be lying if I didn't have a slight urge to eat it standing up, leaning against the counter in the kitchen, as long as a certain someone was sharing it with me.