Penang Prawn Mee

I've never tried making prawn mee before until very recently. Its so simple! The only problem really is saving up enough prawn heads. Hunky and I don't eat prawns all that often so it has taken us almost a year to save enough heads for the stock. What inspired me to make this dish was actually some lovely looking pork ribs I had bought. I suddenly remembered how delicious the prawn mee at Champs was (this was almost 10 years ago, I have no idea what its like now). It was a steaming hot bowl of pure gorgeousness topped with big and juicy pork ribs. With that in mind, it was full steam ahead. I had already made some chicken stock the week before so I used some of that and topped it up with more water and half a chicken that was in the freezer. I didn't add the chilli paste into the soup as I liked the pure unadulterated taste of the soup so much. This recipe fed 6 adults.

Ingredients

1.5L chicken broth

500ml water

1/2 chicken

1 grocery bag of prawn heads

sugar & salt to taste

to serve

blanched kangkong, 3 hard boiled eggs sliced, deep fried shallots, 30 small poached prawns, 18 pieces of pork rib, blanched mee hoon

chilli paste

Blend together 5-10 dried chillies, 5 cloves garlic and 10 shallots together. Heat oil in wok and fry ingredients together until aromatic

1. Bring ingredients to boil and then simmer for a few hours depending on flavour and how you want to reduce the soup. I used about a tablespoon of brown sugar and a teaspoon of salt.
2. Remove all the bones and prawns, then put in the ribs for 1.5 hours.
3. Shell prawns and clean thoroughly. Poach them in the soup and set aside.
4. To serve, assemble cooked ingredients in a bowl before ladling hot soup over. Garnish with chilli paste and fried shallots.

On the left, all the shell and bones. To the right, aromatic and delicious stock!