Late Night Comfort Food

After a night out on the town, which means a full dinner and a number drinks in a bar, my Asian friends always look for a snack of noodles or soup before going home.  My very svelte Malaysian friend says "I always have to have my noodles before going home"--and they don't like noodles in some hip restaurant (we would have done the hip restaurant for dinner), it almost always has to be something on the street. When we were in Koh Samui, it was this street cart that caught our attention.

This Thai noodle cart had yellow noodles and white noodles. You could have it with or without soup. 

Waiting for our cooked-to-order noodles

The noodles were delicious and really hit the spot. I don't know how they all pig out and still stay so thin.

When we were in Singapore, our local friends there were eager to show us their comfort food. After a big night in a nice restaurant, and then drinks at the top of some fancy hotel, we headed off to a part of town where she said had the best Ba Kut Teh in town. There were two or three other shops beside it but no, she said this was the one she been coming to for years. We took a table on the sidewalk and were served in 3 minutes flat.

They all ate as if we didn't have dinner. I was still full, so I just tasted the soup and  it was really good! Yum! Ba Kut Teh is the Singaporean version of our local Bulalo, or bones (beef or pork) cooked forever in a soup.

Imagine cooking with Ba Kut Teh stock--the dishes would be so wonderfully flavored. I'm sorry to say, but those shortcut bouillon cubes, which are really just cubes of salt with a little bit of flavoring,  just can't compare with cooking with real stock. It just doesn't have that depth of flavor.

The shopowner put all these dishes on the table, but we returned the three dishes in the middle. We only wanted the Ba Kut Teh.

I never have a noodle/soup nightcap in Manila because after a big meal, I just want to go home and veg! I usually don't even do the drinks part of the night much to my friends' disappointment. I've become such a cornball.  Tsk tsk!  But I think I better look for a midnight Bulalo place in the city just in case--I know my Asian friends expect this type of nightcap.  My western friends just think we eat way too much.