This is one of my favourite home-cooked dishes. Apart from the great taste, there is also some sentimental value attached to this dish. My father made it quite often when I was a kid growing up in Queenstown. I shall call it Chan’s prata and it’s so easy to make that I can’t really call it my family’s secret recipe.

First, put some dried shrimp in a food processor and grind it down to a nice floss. Cut up some long beans. That’s it.

Next, you put in the flour, add water and mix it to a thick batter-like consistency. No seasoning is required as all the taste comes from the dried shrimp.

Heat up some oil in a pan, pour and flatten the mix. Fry till the mix is brown. Flip over and fry the other side. It normally takes a shorter time to fry the other side.

And here it is. A very tasty and fragrant pancake-like “prata” which is crispy on the outside and soft on the inside. Depending on how fast you can prepare the mix, it may take as little as 15 minutes to prepare this breakfast for the whole family.

Once our population hits 6.9 million and all our true blue Singaporean hawkers are gone, your cooking skills will come in extremely handy.

© Chan Joon Yee