Hey miki!

I got off on the wrong foot with miki. Also known as Shanghai noodles, they are made with wheat, enriched with egg, and are thicker than Canton. Because they are sold fresh, they tend to be salty — the better to preserve them — and so need to be rinsed and parboiled before further cooking, a step the cook might have missed on that occasion. Also, they reeked of piss (from food coloring, I assume; we used to run a bakery and I remember the smell quite well).

Since then I had regarded miki with passive dislike, and am intrigued when someone mentions it as a favorite. Like my friend Brenda. She cooks for a living, so I put stock in her opinion. Along with Jenny, we regularly do the rounds of local carinderias, the only conditions being that the place must be clean and serve dinuguan (blood stew), Jenny’s favorite.

So there we were at… I realize just now that I had never bothered to find out the store’s name, but it is in Mambajao, right next to the gas station. Anyway, Brenda just had to have the stir-fried miki. I decided to give the dish a try; it had been ages since I had some, after all — could I have been wrong? I was not. The miki was even saltier than I remembered, if absent the taint of piss. Which was why the next time we went back to that eatery, I shot my friend the evil eye when she pointed to the bam-i.

Bam-i features two kinds of noodles. This time it was bihon (rice noodles) and miki, and to my surprise, the latter was not at all salty. I liked the dish — a lot. Brenda mentioned Ormoc-made miki that was supposedly treated with much less salt, and promised to get me some.

And so the dish pictured here. The noodles were rinsed, parboiled (three minutes), then drained. Next, I sautéed onions, garlic, carrot, bell pepper, snap peas, and rehydrated hibe (dried small shrimps), poured in a cup of chicken stock mixed with a bit of soy sauce, oyster sauce, and sugar, and waited for that to boil before adding the noodles. The dish was finished with chopped spring onion greens and a drizzle of sesame oil. There was no need for more salt.

All’s well that ends well. Still, it turned out that my folks were not too keen on miki. If — and that’s one big if — if ever I should find myself yearning for some, I know just where to go, certainly who to go there with.