Cooking The Books: Mie So and Mie Bakso

May 2011

June 18, 2009

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Mie So and Mie Bakso

Another day and another moped hire led to the discovery of two new, similar dishes.

The first was Mie So. This simple dish was just good chicken stock, rice vermicelli, crispy fried shallots and a small amount of shredded, fried chicken. The final addition was one I'd not seen before, a handful of small and colourful (only dye) prawn crackers sat on top and going soggy. They're something I shall add to noodle soups going forward. The chili sauce was interesting too, brown and watery with a fresh taste. A few hand minutes of hand signalling (the owner spoke no English and me no Bahasa) said the sauce was just whole fresh small red chillies liquidised in a little water, nothing more. This seemed to keep fine just sat in pots as refrigerators aren't big over here, the flavour probably develops over time really. I'll give it a go one day and see how it turns out.

The second dish was at another road side stall later in the day, this time staffed by a single young girl surrounded by her 6 even younger siblings all playing and finding us amusing.

Mie So was on the menu but as we'd had it a few hours before we went for Mie Bakso instead. This turned out to be a very similar to Mie So (with egg noodles as well as rice vermicelli) with the addition of bakso - small, springy meat balls. Some pointing at the resident goat and a bit of mooing confirmed the meat was beef. The soup was very tasty and the kids were fantastic fun, after figuring out the beef we worked our way through every animal we could imitate, them teaching us the malay for it and us teaching them the english.