My mom bought this Sarawak Laksa paste from the famous laksa shop in Bormill. I rate his laksa second to the laksa stall near Grand Continental Hotel in Ban Hock Road (next to the Indian temple if I'm not mistaken). I make it a point to visit either one of them whenever I'm back in Kuching.

The secret to making a good laksa soup lies within the chicken stock. Most hawkers resort to using chicken stock cubes as it's faster. But if you want to give your Sarawak laksa a little bit of oomph, then you should make your own chicken stock.

Now, don't ask me how it's done. All I see is McChef boiling the chicken and putting all sorts of things in it. But I know this process takes quite a while (up to 2 hours).

Making your own chicken stock

Somewhere during this point of time, I started harassing McChef to give me something to do. Don't mistaken this behavior as me being helpful. I'm just being the busybody that I am. Plus, it's also one way for me to make sure he doesn't mess up my kitchen too much.

So he gave me my first task, which is to soak the bihun (vermicelli noodle) into a basin of water.

I couldn't find a basin and this was the biggest plastic bowl that I have...

This was a no-brainer task for me. I was so excited to help out that I kept going on,"So what's next? What's next?"

So he gave me my second task: Peel off the prawn shell.

Easy-peasy right? Hmmph, that's when he started to pull his Kitchen Diva attitude on me. "Take off the head and peel the shell off like this...", "Then put the prawn into this bowl...", "Oiks! Don't throw away the shell. I need that...", "Put the shell and the head here...", "rinse the prawns so they're not so slimy..."


Aiyaiyai yai yai... so many instructions!


The thing about helping a chef out in the kitchen is that you need to keep up with his tempo. Obviously I wasn't working fast enough for him, so he shooed me out of the kitchen. My kitchen btw.

So I decided to make myself useful around the house. I gave my two cats a bath instead.

Then when I was done with that chore, I went to the kitchen and saw this on my kitchen stove:

The prawn shell and head is being cooked together with the laksa paste. He would then add water and some more thingy into this to make the laksa soup.


By then I had already lost interest in helping out in the kitchen, so it was my turn to take a shower instead.

And by the time I was all cleaned up, the food was already prepared.

Now that's an almost perfect Sunday morning to me.

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