Ingredients 1 kg Hor Fun or kway teow 1 tbsp dark soy sauce 1 tbsp light soy sauce 3 tbsp cooking oil 300 g Cai Xin, washed and drained 4 leaves wong bok 1 box Unicurd tofu (for soup) cut into cubes 1 fish cake – slice thinly 300 g sliced chicken meat/pork 12 medium prawns – shelled and deveined 1/2 small carrot – sliced 2 medium squids – washed and cut into rings 3 eggs – lightly beaten 3 tbsp minced garlics 1.5 litre chicken broth/ikan billis 500 litre water 5 tbsp potato flour – mixed with 4 tbsp water (more if want a thicker gravy)
Seasoning sauce 2 tbsp light soy sauce 1 tbsp dark soy sauce (if want a darker version, add 1 tbsp more) 1 tbsp each – abalone and oyster sauce 1 tsp pepper 1/2 tsp each – sesame oil and sugar Salt to taste
Marinade for meat 1 tsp light soy sauce 1 tsp Shaoxing wine 1/2 tsp each – corn flour and sesame oil 1/4 tsp pepper
Method 1) Separate hor fun lightly, by tossing with hands. 2) In a heated wok, add 1 tbsp oil and 1 tbsp garlics, saute till fragrant, add hor fun, light and dark soy sauce, toss hor fun until well coated with the sauce on high heat till charred a bit. 3) In the separate wok, heat remaining oil and saute remaining garlics till fragrant. Add stock and water and bring to a boil. Add in the vegetables, seafoods and tofu. Once it boils, lower heat and slowly pour in the potato starch to thicken the gravy. Adjust seasoning with salt, pepper and sugar. 4) Turn off heat, add egg mixture in slow circular manner. Wait for a minute before stirring. 5) Assemble hor fun on serving plate, ladle hot gravy and serve with pickle green chilli.
For Mui Fun, Scoop rice on serving plate and ladle hot gravy on the side and serve hot with pickle green chilli.
Ingredients 500 g yellow noodles 2 small tau kua – deep fry and cut into cubes 2 small potatoes – cut into cubes and deep fry till golden 1 big onion – sliced thickly 1 tomato – cut into wedges 100 g chicken breast meat – cut into thin strips 100 g prawns – shelled an deveined 1 fish cake – sliced 150 g chye sim – cut into pieces 1 cup bean sprouts 100 g cabbage – sliced 2 eggs – lightly beaten 1 lime – cut into wedges 1 green and red chilli – sliced 3 tbsp fried crispy onions 1 piece banana leaf
Sauce ingredients 1 tbsp each – light soy sauce, dark soy sauce and sweet sauce 2 tbsp each – tomato and chilli sauce 1 tsp salt 2 tsps sugar
Method 1) Heat oil in a wok over medium heat and stir fry blended ingredients until cooked and oil separates. Transfer to a bowl. 2) Reheat oil and stir-fry the onion and garlics for 2 minutes until fragrant. Add chicken, prawns, fish cakes and stir-fry for 3 minutes. Then add tomato, cabbage, chye sim. Increase heat to high and stir-fry for 2 minutes more. Stir in chilli paste, tau kua, potatoes and stir-fry for 2 minutes more. Pour in sauce ingredients, bean sprouts and noodle, stir-fry over high heat for 3-4 minutes. 3) Spread the noodles evenly over the wok, make a well in the centre of the noodles and drizzle in 1 tsp oil. Add eggs, stirring to scramble. Stir-fry eggs and let eggs set and brown slightly. Combine all ingredients together and serve on banana leaf, garnished with fried shallots, red and green chillies. Squeeze lime juice over noodles before eating.
Ingredients
1 packet bee hoon – soaked in boiling water for 1/2 minutes, drained and set aside
1 cup bean sprouts – washed and drained
Pounded Ingredients (A)
8 shallots
3 garlics
30 dried chillies – soaked in water and drained
5 red chillies
2 tbsp shrimp paste
Ingredients (B)
400 ml water
1 tbsp salt
3 tbsp sugar
1 Maggi ikan billis
3 tbsp oil
4 tbsp dried prawns – soaked and pounded finely
Garnish
6 hard boiled eggs – cut into wedges or sliced
4 big tau pok – fried and diced
500 g medium prawns – poached, shelled and deveined
100 g ku chye – cut into 1 inch in length
10 small limes – cut into halves
Gravy ingredients
8 tbsp soy bean paste
6 tbsp orange sugar
2 onions, sliced thinly
2 litre water
6 pieces assam keping
3 tbsp tamarind paste (mixed with 200 ml water) (add more if want more tangy)
50 g roasted peanuts – pounded finely
Method
1) Heat oil in a wok and fry dried prawns for 1 minute. Add pounded paste (A) and fry till fragrant and oil comes through. Set aside 3 tbsp of fried paste and some oil for the gravy.
2) Add (B) in wok and simmer.
3) Add the bean sprouts and stir-fry for 1 minute. Push bean sprouts to one side of the wok. Add vermicelli and stir-fry over high heat, using a pair of chopsticks. Continue stirring till gravy is absorbed.
4) Mix bean sprouts and vermicelli thoroughly. Reduce heat, stir and cook till vermicelli is dry and fluffy. Remove to cool on a large tray.
5) Mix gravy in a deep pot. Stir and bring to a boil. Let simmer for 1/2 hour.
6) Add 3 tbsp fried paste and oil (Step 1). Boil for 5 minutes.
Method
1) Blend dried chillies and shrimp paste till very fine.
2) Heat oil in a saucepan and fry chopped onion till soft and slightly brown. Add chilli paste and fry over medium heat till fragrant and oil separates.
3) Add salt, sugar and tamarind water, stir fry for 2 minutes, stirring all the time. Remove to a bowl and serve with vermicelli.
To Serve
Place vermicelli in a large serving plate or individual plates. Garnish and serve with the gravy and the spicy paste.
Ingredients
Blended Ingredients
1/2 cup ikan billis/1 ikan billis cube
1/2 cup dried shrimp – soft in water till soft
15 dried chillies – soaked in hot water till soft
3 red chillies
8 shallots
3 cloves garlic
3 stalk lemongrass
1 inch galangal
4 candlenuts
1/2 inch turmeric
1/2 inch ginger
Vegetables
1/2 cabbage – shredded into large piece
1/2 carrot – cut into match stick size
2 small brinjal – cut into 3 sections and match stick size
8 long beans – match stick size
250 g prawns – shelled with tails intact
4 small tau kua – cut into 4 triangles (deep fried)
Bamboo shoots – optional
3 pieces tempe (deep fried)
1 bunch tang-hoon (soaked)
Salt and sugar to taste
1 fresh coconut – add water to make 1.5 litre stock
Method
1) Wash all cut vegetables and drained.
2) Heat oil in a wok and saute lemongrass and blended ingredients till aromatic and oil floats. Add santan water and shredded ingredients. Bring to a boil and simmer over low heat for 5 minutes.
3) Add vegetables, tang hoon, prawns, salt and sugar to taste. Simmer till vegetables are cooked through. If gravy is too thick add more water.
4) Add in fried tau kua and tempe ad taste accordingly. Simmer for 3 minutes (make sure the tempe is soft and cooked through).
*** You can add in other vegetables ie. cauliflower, french beans and vegetables of your choice.
Peanuts Sambal
1 handful of peanuts
3 tbsp chilli paste
Salt and sugar to taste
Method
1) Pound peanuts coarsely.
2) Heat saucepan with oil and saute chilli paste till cooked, season with salt and sugar. Add pounded peanuts and toss briefly for 3 minutes till mixtures are combined evenly.
To Serve
1) Place lontong on a deep bowl, ladle with gravy and vegetable. Top with peanut sambal and coconut floss (serunding kelapa).
The brain's capacity is unlimited, if only you use it correctly (Credit: Getty Images)
What is the easiest way to learn? David Robson meets a group of scientists and memory champions competing to find techniques that make facts stick... fast.
Face to face with the world’s leading memory experts, my mind is beginning to feel very humble. Ben Whately, for instance, tells me about the famous mnemonist Matteo Ricci, a 16th Century Jesuit priest who was the first westerner to take China’s highest civil service exams. The exam was an excruciating ordeal that involved memorising reams of classical poetry – a task that could take a lifetime. “Only 1% of people who took them passed them, yet Ricci passed them after 10 years, having not spoken any Chinese before.”
Think of learning like a buffet, rather than a set dinner — One of the tips for rapid memorisation
Can psychology give us all the same astonishing command of our minds? That’s Whately’s aim. With former memory champion Ed Cooke,he’s already designed a learning app, Memrise, that uses some of the mnemonist’s principles, as BBC Future has described in the past. Now they’ve teamed up with researchers from University College London to launch a competition to find the best possible way to enhance their techniques. Memory experts from across the world were asked to conduct experiments to find the easiest, and most effective, way to memorise new information.
I’m here to observe the first round of judging. It offers a fascinating exploration of the way our memories work. Whether you are a university student cramming for your finals, or have simply yearned to pick up some tourist French, their insights could take the pain out of digesting facts.
Can new tricks take the pain out of studying? (Credit: Getty Images)
The competition’s task is superficially simple, says Rosalind Potts at UCL. “We wanted to know if you had an hour to study a list of 80 words, what do you have to do in order to remember them a week later.” The task is made more difficult by the fact that those 80 words are all Lithuanian. The entrants had to test the strategy on participants and compare them to a group who were not using any particular technique.
Despite the fact that world-leading scientists entered the competition, some approaches failed to lead to any improvement in memory recall. “It shows how difficult it is to translate scientific principles into real-life learning,” says David Shanks, also of UCL.
Boredom, for instance, proved to be a hurdle: one team found a subject falling asleep during the hour-long word-memorising session – despite the fact they were being paid with cakes to take part in the study. “It happens,” says Yana Weinstein at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, who is also on the judging panel.
Notwithstanding those minor hiccups, many teams found some benefits – as much as doubling the amount their subjects recalled. Rather than focussing on one single technique, they tended to use combinations of the following strategies:
Fail once, and you'll remember better the next time (Credit: Thinkstock)
1) Embracing ignorance. Self-testing is one of the best ways to improve recall. For me, the most surprising, and potentially useful twist, on this technique was a strategy called “errorful generation”. Without any training, subjects were forced to guess the meaning of the Lithuanian words. “They will always be wrong the first time round,” says Shanks – yet psychological studies have shown that the initial mistakes subsequently make the words stick. “It’s remarkably better than if you had studied the word.”
Simply recognising your own ignorance, it seems, primes your mind into action – doubling the recall compared to a group who didn’t use the technique. This builds on the idea of “desirable difficulty” in psychology – by making a task a little bit harder, it can engage your attention and construct firmer foundations for later recall.
You need to ride the crest of your memory's natural rhythms (Credit: Thinkstock)
2) Surfing the memory’s waves. You can easily waste time over-studying. So many of the entrants had designed algorithms that cleverly work out how strong your memory for each of the 80 words is, so they could rekindle it once you had started to forget. Memrise’s app has one version of this approach that you can use for now – and the entrants may suggest ways to further refine it. Alternatively, you can rely on your intuition to help time your learning – leaving longer and longer periods before you retest and learn from your mistakes.
One entrant also experimented with giving short breaks to the participants during the word memorising task – allowing them to watch a video of a waterfall – potentially allowing the information to sink in. When you’re studying, it’s certainly worth taking short breaks to ensure that fatigue doesn’t overcome your natural abilities.
3) Buffet studying. It might seem tempting to chunk the material into themes and learn them one by one – so some of the entrants organised the words into categories and themes. But one team found that simply cycling through all 80 words was effective. Whately points out that memory champions memorising a pack of cards take a similar approach – rotating quickly through the whole pack rather than learning it block by block.
If that sounds confusing, research does at least suggest that you should add variety to a study session. It’s better to spend small blocks of time on a variety of subjects and skills – rather than concentrating on a single topic. Think of it as taking from a buffet, rather than eating a set dinner.
Take a pick-and-mix approach to studying. Switching topics makes your brain work harder, with surprising effects (Credit: Getty Images)
4) Story-telling. Any form of “elaboration” can help reactivate those synapses and seal the memory. One entrant asked the participants to build a story with the words they were learning, for instance. Cooke and Whately were also excited to see one team implement a “memory palace” – in which you try to link the words to objects in a room.
The program they designed might show a picture of a living room and give you the Lithuanian word “lova” – bed. You could then imagine your lover laying on a sofa bed. Once you have mapped out your learning in this way, you should be able to retrace your steps and recall the word with ease.
This was, in fact, the technique that allowed the Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci to learn Chinese to such an advanced level – and it also lies behind Cooke’s ability to remember 2265 binary digits in less than 30 minutes. The team’s computer program may simplify the process by making it more automatic. “If this does turn out to be the winner – that’s a serious discovery,” says Cooke.
Making surreal connections can boost recall - and now an app can help fire your imagination (Credit: Thinkstock)
The judges’ energy is infectious, but I can’t help wondering if all this is still removed from the kind of learning we need in everyday life. Indeed, for a previous assignment, I had tried to use mnemonic techniques to learn around 1000 words of Danish – and although it was useful to help me memorise the individual words, it didn’t translate to the spontaneous recall needed to hold a conversation, on the fly, in a bar or restaurant.
Cooke agrees it’s just the first step. “A lot of this stuff is what I call nurturing and scaffolding while you are getting the memory down,” he says. “It’s a brace – it’s there as long as you need it.” Importantly, he thinks the same methods could easily be used beyond language learning to all kinds of disciplines – history, maths, or trivia for a pub quiz. “Repetition testing, spacing – all these techniques work for almost everything.”
Having short-listed five entries, the team are now in the process of uploading them to Memrise’s website. This will allow them to pit the techniques head-to-head to find the ultimate winner for a prize of $10,000. The advantage for Memrise is to find ideas that might improve their app; for Potts and Shanks, it will help them see which combinations of techniques work best in the real world – while testing them on many more volunteers than would be possible in a typical lab study.
Learning game
The judges hope to run the competition every year as they further refine the art of memory. In the future, there may be many more inventive approaches to consider. Shanks, for instance, points to one project that failed to enter this year, but may still be a promising strategy for the future. “They were building a video game where you shoot the spaceships out of sky, and completely incidentally, the spaceships have Lithuanian and English words on them,” he says. “I thought it was a brilliant idea.”
The real challenge for these memory experts, however, isn’t just to make learning quick and effective. As every student knows – the biggest obstacle to learning is distraction, whether it’s the idea of sunbathing in the park or switching on the TV. We may need many more competitions before we can overcome that hurdle.
Mui Fun
Hor Fun
Mee Siam with Prawns
Spicy Mee Siam
Sayur Lodeh
With Lontong
