I’ve been eating kuay teow (or flat rice noodles) soup with fishballs almost every other weekend. Of all the hawker food, I guess I could call this my all-time favorite.

Most weekends, my neighbor will very kindly help me buy from the coffee shop near the market that she goes to. It’s quite tasty and the soup is not too salty unlike some where the soup is like salt water with practically no flavor at all.

Of course, nothing beats the fishball soup I make at home. Just look at this - it’s got tons more ingredients than the hawker version so much so you can’t even see the rice noodles .

I brew the soup overnight and I add 2, sometimes 3 different types of fishball - the white comma-shaped ones, the round white ones and the large fried ones. I’ve also added some foopay, or flat beancurd sheets, and a generous helping of shredded chicken, chopped cilantro and Chinese lettuce (you can’t see it because it’s at the bottom of the bowl).

The hawker only gives you 3 or 4 fishballs, a few shreds of chicken meat and if you’re lucky, a few strands of Chinese lettuce and cilantro. That’s all you get and its taste is nothing compared to the homemade version. I prefer to homecook my own hawker food because the coffee shops and hawker stalls are generally quite dirty. I’m spoilt that way .

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This?

Or this

with its heaps of ginger flower buds, onions, cucumbers, lettuce and mint leaves?

Once in a while, I get a craving for Penang laksa, not very often but when I see someone eating it, I can’t resist.

Laksa is a thick round noodle served in a tamarind (assam) fish stock soup with a variety of fragrant herbs and veggies. The laksa we get from the hawker stalls, even the ones that claim to be Penang laksa, which is the best, is not the best.

Very diluted soup. In fact, all I can taste is the sourness, not the fragrance of the herbs. And very diluted ha ko, the shrimp paste that’s unique to laksa, and not nearly enough to add to the oomph.

No Chinese lettuce, hardly any shredded cucumbers or ginger flower buds (bunga kantan), and only a few random pieces of fish floating about if you’re lucky.

So once in a while, when our cravings get the better of us, we’re forced to roll up our sleeves and cook our own with plenty of fish, sliced onions, shredded cucumbers, ginger flower buds, Chinese lettuce, mint leaves and ha ko.

You can see in the second photo how robust the soup is. If you could just smell it … yep, it’s “just too good to be true, can’t take my nose off you” .

We usually cook a huge, big pot of it and stuff ourselves breakfast, lunch and dinner. Mmmm, truly nothing like homecooked Penang laksa.