Hawker Food Breakfast @ Happy Garden, Kuchai Lama #1

Its the eve Of the Chinese Lunar New Year and so begins the exodus of travellers back to their hometowns. Which also includes your local hawker stall food seller. Around Happy Garden there is alot of great eating places that speciallises in different things like Dim Sum in Sri Petaling, Fish Head Mee Hoon in Kuchai Entrepreneur and OUG has the most diverse concentration of Hawker food stalls some notable ones are the Pork Noodles shop which has a steady stream of customers til the food runs out.

Although all around Happy Garden there is great food. In Happy Garden itself you can be hard pressed to find great hawker food. Choices are limited from kopitiam to kopitiam. But over the last few 3 or 4 years. The hawker food sellers have upped their game in Happy Garden. Once there were many foreigners who cooked the food while their bosses raked in the profits without much quality control. But now the business owners are back at the helm cooking and some even manning the store by themselves. In turn this brought back all the customers to the koptiams in Happy Garden.

So everyday there is a makeshift market on top of the hill along Jalan Selesa (yes, it means comfortable road). Along these roads are also a very short row of shops with the older shops being on higher ground and the newer ones built on top of what was supposed to be the market built by Bandaraya but now its more of a parking complex with a row of shops and a few more kopitiams.

The shops on higher ground has only one kopitiam on the corner of  Jalan Selesa and Jalan Riang 7. If you are looking for Char Kuey Teow @ CKT ( Fried Flat Noodles )
there's this aunty that cooks it well. Don't mistake it for the Penang Fried version as that in itself is a whole different category of greatness. KL-lites like myself usually prefer to see more of something on a plate when we pay for something. That's not what you get when you eat in Penang. ( No Offense to Penangites as I Love Penang food very much as well ) So the focus of this Pint Sized aunty's CKT Is on the noodles itself. Most of the time the focus of the dish tends to be the size of the prawns or the freshness of the cockles. While I do agree it is important but there's alot of hawkers who do not do a good job in actually frying the noodles. Frying yellow mee is quite standard as I feel you can't really unintentionally over fry it. Flat rice noodles or Kuey Teow I feel is an art.

This aunty's recipe of ingredients includes one very different that I do not find in other CKTs. She uses a hint of chinese pickled or preserved vegetable ( Ham Choy? ) I am not really sure to cut the oil so that it doesn't feel so oily that I think really helps improve the flavour of the frying pan onto the noodles. I am a Kuew Teow fan so thats why I Love this aunty's CKT. However, there is another favourite of mine in this same shop.

Its the Kung Fu Ying Yong Noodles

The serving is huge even for me as I can barely finish it but I still do because its so damn nice. The uncle who cooks it is really generous with the ingredients of pork meat, pork liver, pork intestines and prawns... Ok maybe not so much with the prawns. But his pork is always cooked to perfection where it is soft and the intestines are smooth and almost slides down the back of your throat. His sauce also has less starch and more scrambled egg in it. Its strange to me because when you first dig into it the sauce seems thick but by the time u reach the end the sauce becomes diluted. Also, if you don't take a picture ( Like I did. )and you can take hot food the fried crispy mee hoon tastes awesome when eaten hot! He is also generous with the vegetables which is always fresh.

I guess being near the market is great because the hawkers can get their food fresh from the suppliers who also supply to the market. This in turns helps keep costs down and food quality high.

Since tomorrow is the 1st day of the Lunar New Year. I would like to wish you all a Happy Chinese New Year! Take care and drive safe and don't over eat!

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