Chinese Home cooking: my aunt's place: cucumber and cellophane vermicelli

In my house, most of the women, and men, are excellent cooks. While my mom makes absolutely stunning Chinese food, she doesn't have time to cook during the week. My aunt does most of the cooking, and she's is a great home-cook. While we do not have the same taste, she absolutely LOVES bitter-melon, which I find unpalatable. However, some of her dishes taste absolutely great.

This isn't what you could order in a Chinese restaurant, this is home-cooking at his best. Also, we know that the use of fish sauce isn't very traditional, and could be substituted with MSG if you want to, but it does give to the food a huge umami flavour. Use with caution.

Cucumber and cellophane vermicelli:

Ingredients: 
7 small cucumbers
1 pack of dried shrimps
1 bag of Cellophane Vermicelli
chicken stock
water if needed
Fish sauce and salt to taste

The cucumbers needs to be cleaned and cut in the following form before proceeding. To the rest of the recipe.

The first step of this recipe: you need to fry the dried shrimps. We use big dried shrimps, which was a mistake. It  packs too much flavour in a single bite. You want to disperse it through the dish. I recommend personally using medium sized dried shrimps for this recipe.

Fry them until they are crunchy, and remove the shrimp from the wok and set aside for further use. (Also, notice how she cooks without slippers, don't do this, its a good way to burn yourself if you are clumsy like I am.)

You want to keep the oil, it contains the flavour of the dried goods, then you want to stir fry the cucumbers. Keep them Al Dente, and do not overcook them. This is crucial, if you do, they will turn to mush.

When you are done, remove the cucumbers, and combine the fish sauce/MSG, with some chicken stock and some water to taste, you want to have just enough stock to cook the noodles without having any left in the pan. That's the hard part of this dish, it takes experience to master.

If needed, you can just add some water or some stock to soften the noodles.

To complete this dish, just combine the Fried shrimps, the cucumber and the noodle in the wok at the end for a delicious, simple, cheap dish.

Final result:

Eat it with rice, it is healthy and delicious.