Seaweed Mee Sua (Chinese Wheat Vermicelli) Soup

When we invited Tania Tan to participate in our $10 gift voucher program with her Seaweed Mee Sua (Chinese Wheat Vermicelli) Soup, she asked, 'Are you sure?  This is a very simple dish.' Yes, we are 100% sure.  It is simple but super delicious!

Seaweed Mee Sua (Chinese Wheat Vermicelli) soup by Tania Tan:

Mee sua never fails to remind me of birthdays and of my parents' love! Growing up, we never had big parties with tall cakes on our birthdays.....but instead, my parents would make mee sua and red eggs for us. I remember there was one time when I was having a cold war with my parents and we didn't speak for weeks. On the day of my birthday when I woke up at 6am to get ready for work......there was already a bowl of mee sua waiting for me on the breakfast table accompanied by 2 red eggs. I was so touched! Hence the reason why I like to add a hardboiled egg to my mee sua just so to remind me of home and my parents. And the idea to add seaweed to mee sua….well, the credit must go to my mom for the ingenious idea. She taught me to cook it this way and I just love how the two food items taste so good together. Who would have thought!

Ingredients (Serve 2):

• 2-3 bundles of Mee Sua (Chinese Wheat Vermicelli)
• 1 big round piece of dried seaweed (cut into smaller strips)
• 4-5 leaves of lettuce (cut/torn into smaller pieces)
• 200-300gm pork (cut into thin slices) If you don’t eat pork, you can always use fish slices, beef or chicken instead.
• 8 large shrimps (shelled and deveined)
• 6 cups of low sodium soup stock (I make my own chicken stock but you can use ready ones)
• 1-2 hardboiled eggs
• Seasonings (i.e. salt, pepper, garlic powder, sesame oil to taste)
• Chinese celery for garnishing

Method:

Put the soup stock in a pot and bring to a boil.

Add in the pork slices and shrimps into the boiling stock. The pork slices and prawns won’t take very long to cook.

Then add in the lettuce and seaweed and stir to break up the seaweed.

Add in the mee sua and keep stirring so that the noodles don’t end up in a clump.

Taste and add your seasonings accordingly.

Finally, serve your mee-sua with a hardboiled egg and garnish with some chopped Chinese celery.

Notes:
Please feel free to alter the quantities of the ingredients or substitute some of the ingredients with what you’d like to eat or have on hand. For example, if you don’t eat pork, you can always use fish slices, beef or chicken instead. Same for the vegetables…you can also use cabbage, bok choy, carrots, yam etc. If you are a vegetarian, just omit the meat/egg and use vegetable stock instead. It is very flexible.

I’d strongly recommend to use a low sodium soup stock as mee sua is inherently salty. If you don’t have any stock on hand, you can just use tap water too and add more seasonings to improve the taste.