Chinese Crab Sauce Noodles 蟹肉醬麵

This Chinese Crab Sauce Noodle is a dish to impress, no doubt about it, and it's perfect both to amaze with its gorgeous sexy looks as well as its sublime knock it out of the ball park taste explosion of ultimate crabbiness.  Luckily for us the ones we most like to impress with good food is ourselves...meaning me... because we're making this for my birthday!  (I'm a summer baby.)  

It's the Chinese custom, for those of you who don't know, to have a bowl of noodles to celebrate a birthday and what better celebration of my wonderful self (hehe) and our love of pure foody goodness than this bowl of sinfully decadent Crab Sauce Noodles 蟹肉醬麵, slippery chewy noodles smothered with a generous golden dollop of rich umami packed crab meat and roe sauce.

Homemade Egg Pasta

We had this really cool pasta noodle making machine in our house when we were growing up.  You've probably seen it before, it's the type you have to clamp on the table and then insert a crank handle in and you were off making all kinds of noodles.  

The only thing my grandma ever used our pasta machine for was for making her own wonton skins.  I would always volunteer to help her, gathering the long floury sheets of dough as they came out of the shiny silver machine.  It was so fascinating to witness a dull lump of dough become something else entirely: smooth, sleek, uniformly thin, almost translucent sheets that got cut into perfect squares of wonton skins.  

I recently became obsessed with the idea of making my own noodles and kept bugging my 媽媽 to ship over our old (and heavy!) pasta machine to me in Hong Kong.  Which she, of course, as any sane person would do, completely refused to do.  

Then I realized (duh!) that they still sell these pasta machines, pretty much unchanged in design and function, and for a wonderfully reasonable price.  So here is the first product from our shiny new pasta machine, this wonderful Homemade Egg Pasta, or 自製雞蛋麵.

Wonton Noodles Mobile Hawker Stall 雲吞麵小販攤檔

One side for making the wonton and storing food supplies and eating implements,
the other side for the broth filled cooking pot and the charcoal brazier beneath

It often fascinates me how much the world has changed in the last, say, six to seven decades.  That sounds like a long time but it really isn't, it encompasses the lives that my parents grew up living (which doesn't really exist anymore.)  Thru the advent of modern technology and science, etc., the world has really changed so much that many of the older generation, like my dear 爸爸, are often times at a loss to cope.  

For myself it's a different kind of problem, I often find a hopeless grey fog in front of me when I try to imagine or reconstruct the way that things used to be done in the past.  I mean how the hell did things get done before the invention of machines that churn out endlessly to meet our every need nowadays?

How, for example, did people make ice cream before ice cream machines?  Or even before electricity for heck sake?!  With such thoughts often in the back of my mind, I was pleasantly surprised the other day when we stumbled upon a display of an old time 1940's Wonton Noodles Mobile Hawker Stall, or  雲吞麵小販攤檔.