An interlude

I realise how boring my blog is lately. Food recipes food recipes food recipes. What else has been going on in my life???

I'll think about it and let you know eventually.

In the meantime, here is an interlude to help break the monotony, someone who has been...

...taking over the couch inch by inch,

...not allowing himself to be ignored,

...still somewhat suspicious of 'the mouse',

...and frequently having his private 'pee time' invaded by lewd people!

Anticipating a blissful weekend

It was a looooooong journey to get to Friday.... and the long weekend.

Finally I'm curled up in bed. Mishu is miaowing pathetically outside the bedroom door. After this I'm going to snuggle under the covers with a big fat book. Oh bliss.

It seems my blog has been pretty much a weekly update on stuff I've been cooking over the weekend. I confess that I'm already contemplating what to prepare for breakfast tomorrow. Stay tuned.

But apart from food related activities, tomorrow I plan to pick up 'Gone with the Wind' on DVD and spend a leisurely afternoon on the couch moisturising my feet, sip green tea and eat girlie snacks.

Hope your weekend is a nice one too! :)

Stewed pork belly: a sure winner

I can’t think what to say about this except you MUST try this. Not difficult to make and will guarantee make your husband/family/children fall down on their knees in ecstasy.
This is the recipe I used:

• About ½ kg skinless pork belly, about 2-3cm wide strips
• 2 tbsp light soy sauce
• 2 tbsp dark soy sauce
• 1 tbsp shaoxing wine
• 3 tbsp sugar
• 2-3 cups water

Arrange pork belly in a pot, pour in sauces, shaoxing wine (don’t put in the sugar) and add the water, just enough to cover most of the pork belly.

Bring the liquid to a boil then adjust heat to simmer gently. After half an hour, check the water level and flip the pork belly to cook the other side.



Check again after another half an hour. The pork fat should be very soft to an almost melt in your mouth texture. At this stage, be careful when pushing the pork around to make sure you do not squish the fat.

Add the sugar and turn up the heat to reduce the liquid to a thick gravy-like, syrupy consistency.

Allow the pork to cool before slicing.



Drizzle some sauce over and serve. The taste is absolutely orgasmic!

I served it with some mantou and the moment hubby took a bite, he gave me a look like I was the BEST wife in the world.



I’m telling you… this is like soooo wauwauwau until cannot take it. You HAVE to try it for yourselves and tell me all about it.

Steaming to keep warm

With that ‘wintery’ feeling starting to descend on us, we’re looking for ways to keep warm…



Apart from right next to the gas heater, the other warmest spot in the house is the kitchen.

Usually baking would be a good way to keep warm, but I decided to try something a bit different.

Freshly steamed mantou buns!

So simple to make… and I know I’ve probably overused this phrase, but it’s really amazing what you can whip up with just four ingredients.

All you need is:

• 3½ cups plain flour
• 3 tablespoons sugar
• 1 teaspoon yeast
• 1 plus ¼ cup water

My breadmaker came in handy here. All I needed to do was to combine the ingredients and set the machine to mix and knead the dough.

If you’re doing it by hand, first dissolve the yeast with ¼ cup water and set aside for a few minutes. Meanwhile, combine the flour and sugar. Add the yeast mixture with the remaining cup of water to the flour and sugar and mix together until a dough forms. Knead the dough for ten minutes then set aside to rise for 1½ to 2 hours. When the dough has doubled in bulk, punch down and knead for a few minutes.

Now you’re ready to shape the buns. Roll the dough into a long 30cm roll about 4cm in diameter, then slice them across into mini rolls. You should get about 12 pieces depending on the size. Cover and let the buns rise for about 45 minutes. The picture below shows the buns after the second rising.

Steam the buns over high heat for 15 minutes. Then turn off the heat and let is sit for 10 minutes. Don’t remove the cover until after the 10 minutes, otherwise the buns may dent slightly when the heat escapes.



We’ve been enjoying these for breakfast this week.

I also shaped the buns into these clam shapes to serve with stewed pork belly.



Try this recipe for the stewed pork belly.

As they say… health is more important than wealth

A family member of mine recently underwent a fairly major operation to correct an issue in his spine. There was a little bit of drama and anxiety throughout the affair… the issue was so serious to the point that he was unable to walk at all and was in constant pain. Thankfully the procedure was successful and he’s alright now although he’ll need to take it easy for a while.

The whole episode got me thinking again on the whole fragility of life. This family member was young, active and robustly healthy. It was the last thing on everyone’s mind that something like this could happen to him. The cost of the procedure caused a small dent in the pocket, but it was the least concern in the matter of one’s health.

I wondered how many young people in Singapore/Malaysia were walking around completely oblivious to such a possibility. I know for a fact that it was the least of my concerns when I was living in Singapore. Sure we had life insurance, and the company generally has some kind of health cover for its employees. But I never even bothered to find out the extent of the cover. If I was struck down with a serious illness, I might be have been left completely exposed. It’s pretty scary now that I think back on it.

Here in Australia, I feel that the question of health cover is something we are sort of forced to contemplate because of government policies. We are compelled to review private health insurance cover options, simply for tax reasons, even if not for real health reasons.

At the moment I’m having to go through paperwork to change our private healthcare cover…

(This next part probably makes more sense for my Australian readers: We really like Medibank… their extras cover is fantasic and our out-of-pocket expense for things like dental and optical is almost nil. But their hospital cover component is now so drastically changed that its bordering on unreasonable. So we are planning to switch to HBF… although their extras cover sucks, we thought we should get a more balanced cover across both hospital and extras… if you have a better solution or tips around this, I would gladly welcome it!)

… BUT although I sometimes whine and complain about the cost of private health cover and the government basically almost coercing us into getting private health cover…

…an episode like what my family member went through does help put some perspective back and serves as a reminder to be thankful for even for this.

(However I still think the rising cost of private health premiums is still a pain!)

More traditional toothsome treats

This weekend’s project is ‘ondeh-ondeh’

It’s one of those recipes I came across when browsing through the net and I bookmarked it to try it out.

It didn’t look to difficult, so I had in mind to prepare it for cell refreshments or some other occasion like that. However hubs said (with a cunning grin) "you’d better test it out first for practice".

So I bought/prepared the necessary ingredients:

• 1-2 tspn pandan essence (or blend 8-10 pandan leaves with some water and strain out the juice)
• 1½ cups glutinous rice flour + a pinch of salt
• ½ cup boiling water
• ½ cup grated coconut
• A few drops of green food colouring (optional)
• Filling: ½ cup gula melaka + 1 tbsp brown sugar

Similar to making tang yuan, just mix the flour, water, pandan juice/essence (plus optional green food colouring) until you get a soft dough. Transfer to a floured work surface and knead

Pinch of a bit of the dough, shape into a ball. Then use your thumb to create a cavity and fill with a little bit of the gula melaka + brown sugar mixture. Seal the cavity and shape back into a ball.

Drop the balls into a pot of boiling water to cook. The balls will rise to surface when done. After taking them out, let them dry a little bit before tossing in the grated coconut

My first attempt wasn’t the most fantastic. For one thing, it’s a bit tricky to make sure the dough is flattened out thin enough before adding the filling to make sure the dough layer isn’t too thick. That will take a bit of practice. Also, because the gula melaka will melt inside the ball when cooking, you can actually compact the sugar a lot more as you add the filling in so the ball doesn’t end up wobbly.

Apart from these imperfections, hubs said it was pretty good.

And for dessert…

Homemade muah chee which is surprisingly quite easy to make.

Using the four ingredients theme:

Dough = a cup of glutinous rice flour + 3-4 tablespoons of water

Add water bit by bit until a the mixture becomes doughy. You can add a bit of sesame oil to make it easier to handle. Form the dough into balls and drop them into a rapidly boiling put of water. The dough will rise to the surface when it is cooked. The other alternative is to steam it.

Peanut coating = half a cup of peanuts + a quarter cup of sugar

Toast peanuts for 10-15 minutes in the oven, the blitz it up if a food processor with the sugar.

Use scissors to snip the dough up into small pieces and coat with the peanut and sugar mixture. Hubby was totally enraptured with this.

I had quite a bit of peanut mixture left over, so for breakfast the next day, I tried my hand at making apam balik… those yummy peanut pancakes found at the pasar malam or snack stalls in Malaysia/Singapore.

I was debating whether to make the crispy version or the spongy version of the pancake. Hubby said he always preferred the latter, so spongy version it is.

Again, pretty simple to make. This is the recipe I used:

• Whisk one egg with two tablespoons of sugar. Add one cup of milk and a teaspoon of vanilla essence.
• Sift one cup of self raising flour with ¼ teaspoon baking soda and add to wet mixture.
• Cook batter in a non-stick pan on low heat. When pancake starts to bubble a little bit, add a few knobs of butter, then sprinkle peanut and sugar mixture on top.
• Fold over pancake and cool for a couple of minutes on a rack. Slice into quarters and serve.

I found other recipes which called for alkaline water to be included in the mix. I think this would have made the texture of the pancake more kueh like. But for a quick fix which still resembles the taste closely, I found this recipe alright.

If you’re wondering what Mishu was doing in the midst of all this culinary experimentation…

Here he is, waiting patiently for his meal.

Applying Chinese herbology in the kitchen

Since I had my bamboo steamer baskets out and to align the theme with the steamed tofu and mushroom dish, I decided to steam some chicken… Chinese herbal style.

I marinated the chicken in soy sauce, shaoxing wine, oyster sauce and sesame oil for a few hours.

I arranged the Chinese herbs around the chicken and wrapped it up in aluminium foil, then steamed it on high heat for about 30 minutes.

Here is the Chinese herb combination I used:

• Ginger
• Garlic
• Red dates
• Wolfberries
• Angelica root (dang gui)
• Astragalus (huang qi)

Some of the herbs were on the ‘heaty’ side, so I also prepared some chrysanthemum tea to counter any effects.

Yes I know.. I thought of everything.

Where can I find fresh enoki mushrooms?

Today is the last day of our Good Friday/Easter long weekend.

I’ve been very productive in the kitchen, and so I’m about to have one of my blogging ‘spurts’ where I post up a load of pics and updates in one go.

Incidentally, I decided weekends SHOULD ideally be four days long… Friday is to recover from the work week, Saturday is for housework, Sunday is to go out and catch up with friends and Monday is for finishing off everything you haven’t done over the weekend and to mentally prepare yourself for another work week.

I found this lovely sounding recipe online on Saturday: steamed silken tofu wih enoki and beech mushrooms. I just HAD to try it. So I added the necessary ingredients to my shopping list for later.

The tofu easy enough to find… but as for the enoki and beech mushrooms… not a single strand to be found for the love of money. The search continued until Sunday even at a different store. The lau pan niang at Kongs Supermart told me that the supplier in Perth was having issues with the supply of the mushrooms.

So I resorted to the alternative. Canned mushrooms.

It’s very simple to prepare. Just arrange cubes of the silken tofu in a deep dish, top with mushrooms and steam on high heat for about 10 minutes.

Then drizzle some light soy sauce and a touch of sesame oil and garnish with some spring onions and fried shallots.

Hubby gave the thumbs up and said he couldn’t tell the difference that these were canned mushrooms. Nevertheless I’ll be on the lookout for fresh enoki and beech mushrooms the next time round to try this again.