Chinese Recipes | Cooking Tips | Good Eats

I remember when I was in Primary school, during science class, the teacher asked us to put mung beans (also known as green beans) on a square piece of wet cotton wool and leave it in the room for a week. The mung beans later germinated into mung bean sprouts.

They taste really crunchy. No, don’t get the wrong idea. I didn’t say I ate the bean sprouts I grew. I just meant mung bean sprouts taste really crunchy… if you do not overcook them, that is!

Ingredients (Serves 2):

- 2 cups mung bean sprouts
- 1 tsp dried shrimp
- 1 stalk green onion, cut to approximately the same length as the bean sprouts
- 1/2 tsp garlic, minced
- 1/2 tsp ginger, minced
- 1 tsp light soy sauce
- 1 tsp oyster sauce
- white pepper

Method:

1. Heat up a frying pan with 1 tbsp of vegetable oil. Medium heat.

2. Stir fry the dried shrimp, garlic and ginger to flavour the oil.

3. Add the mung bean sprouts and stir fry.

4. Add light soy sauce, oyster sauce and pepper and stir-fry to taste. When the mung bean sprouts are almost cooked (they become slightly translucent), add in the green onions.

Cooking Tips:

You can choose to use 1 clove of crushed garlic instead of the minced garlic, and a few slices of ginger instead of the minced ginger. In this way, you can easily remove the garlic and ginger when you finish cooking the dish (so that people won’t accidentally bite into it and go eeeew!). This is purely optional. If you use minced ginger and garlic, just be careful to watch that your oil is not so hot that they burn.

The green onion is cut to approximately the same length as the bean sprouts for purposes of presentation only. Usually you want the ingredients to look similar - for example, in strips, pieces, cubes etc.