macaroni

One of my female owner's goals is to cook something new every week. This week, she decided to do up a Stir-fried Macaroni (with chicken). She not only loves pasta, she has a thing for macaroni (particularly because of what it's called in Chinese - tong-xin fen). Here's what it's supposed to look like (the ones sold in Singapore, especially in Malay stalls also look something like that).

Here's how hers turned out. =(

For one, she couldn't find macaroni in the supermarket, so she bought large shells. At least it looks more similar than spirals or bow-ties! Then, she decided not to use chicken but crab-meat and scallops. The household meal criteria states that there needs to be a veggie dish as well. So she upped the proposed "2 tomatoes" of the original recipe to include other things like mushroom (are fungus veggie?), carrot and chye sim. She didn't have seasoning soy sauce so that probably accounted for the pale colour.

She was supposed to cook for 3 persons, but ended up with so much ingredients (she also used the entire packet of shells which apparently serves 5) that she didnt have a wok big enough to do her stir-fry. So she struggled to mix the ingredients into the pot of pasta and erm... ended up what you see above. She found her dish quite odd - the ingredients were highly flavoured (oyster sauce, soy sauce and sugar) while the shells were more bland (just ketchup). Would have been better if she could mix the two together properly.

Some lessons she learnt:

• When the packaging says "Serves 5", it really serves 5. So either estimate properly or get a bigger wok!
• Use more oil. She was so reluctant to use oil (think "fattening") while stir-frying the ingredients that she ended up having to add water to the ingredients and they started to look weird.. especially when the eggs went in as well.
• Get seasoning soy sauce.