The Basa Bocourti fish as the name suggests is really a Basa Fish aka the Mekong River catfish commonly found in Vietnam’s boutique street wet markets. They are very fleshy and are commonly found in their rivers. The fish when cooked has a nice sweet flavour unlike the cheaper Toman fish
This fish is also nicely filleted and packed at NTUC. Good for me because now I can just pick it up from the supermarket without having to haggle with the street side vendor, although I would gladly do the latter. There is something whimsical about market place values that the supermarket just can’t emulate.
Boil a very nice pot of porridge and lightly salt the Basa Fish and you will have a very nice fish porridge. The flesh when cooked is paper white and also flaky although not as firm as theRed Garoupa. There is virtually no bones with the fikkets which is strange but I am not complaining. So it is very safe for toddlers to have them for meals.
Recipe
Ingredients
1 Basa Bocourti Fillet (about $2.50 for a rather large fillet, portion enough for 3 pax)
Another comfort food for those that are in dire need of much comfort. Yes, fish porridge is definitely on my list of comfort foods. I dont usually do fish porridge the way my mum likes to cook it, but since I haven’t been feeling all that fantastic, I thought I should do it like how mum cooks it.
She loves to use bay-kah fish which I don’t really have at ntuc, so I guess I just have to make do with batang fish. Same same but slightly different. The texture of the meat is kind of like tuna in a way. Maybe one of these days I might experiment with tuna to make fish porridge.
Mum would skin off the fish, chop the meat into a paste and season it with light soya sauce and sesame seed oil. All the ingredients that makes it great. I don’t know what else or maybe I wasn’t really paying attention. So this is my version of my mum’s fish porridge.
Recipe
Ingredients
A cut of Batang Fish (usually the lower part is best)
Some Tong Chai (this is some kind of pickled vegetable that is for flavouring soups) Light Soya Sauce Sesame Seed Oil
Half a cup of Rice (this is for cooking porridge)
Method
1. De-skin the Batang Fish or remove as much meat as possible. The meat is then chopped aggressively as if to mince it.
2. Once it is suitably minced, add light soya sauce and sesame seed oil to marinate the fish paste.
3. Once the fish paste is ready, you can spoon dollops into the plain porridge and stir until it is cooked.
4. Cooking plain porridge is easy. Add rice to a pot and boil with water until the rice breaks down.
5. Add tong chai to flavour the porridge and you can eat.
I found a bottle of black sweet vinegar in my cupboard and thought – better quickly use or else spoy. So I decided to make Pork Trotters in Black Sweet Vinegar. Nice bo? Well nice or not, we will know after I cook it.
Incidentally if you are a mother-to-be without a confinement nanny, you may wish to follow this recipe and cook for yourself. If you can’t cook, ask your husband to cook. If he can’t cook, then too bad. But this recipe is so easy, anyone can cook. So no excuse if your husband cannot cook. Just follow only.
If you are a traditional mother-in-law-to-be and you don’t know this Cantonese delicacy, dont be ashamed. I also not Cantonese. I just see what works and if it works, then we all learn together. Sure nice one. However, if you want to be strict about it, then maybe this recipe might not work the magic for you. But if you wanna make it for dinner (like what I am doing) then can try-and-see.
Ready? Let’s try it.
Recipe
Ingredients
1 Kg Pork Trotters (pork hand)
4 large Eggs (hard boil)
100 grams Ginger
100 grams Rock Sugar
5 tbsp Sesame Seed Oil
1 bottle of Chan Kong Thye Black Sweet Rice Vinegar
Method
1. Blanch the pork trotters to remove scum. Then discard water. Pour sesame seed oil in wok and fry ginger (rough sliced) until fragrant. Add blanched pork trotters to fry until seared.
2. Boil the eggs until they become hard boiled eggs. Once everybody is ready, dump them all into a large pot and add the entire bottle of black sweet rice vinegar and 1 bottle of water (use the same bottle). Add rock sugar. Do a basic taste test. If nice then sure nice one.
3. Boil at high heat until bubbling, then reduce heat to allow it to simmer. You generally want to reduce the amount of liquid by about half. This will thicken the sauce and at the same time allow the fatty parts to gelatinized (is that a word?!) and your pork trotters will be absolutely fabulous.
Bon Appetit!
Blanched Pork Trotters
Rough Sliced Ginger
Stir Fry Pork Trotters and Ginger in Sesame Seed Oil
The item on the extreme right is frozen pork ribs just in case you are wondering. This is one of my favourite no-brainer soup for those days when you don’t want to plan or worry too much about what to cook for dinner. Some families call it the A-B-C Soup in Singapore, a hearty nutritious soup that every family with a young kid would love.
The ingredients when cooked together will truly produce one of the best flavours ever. Guaranteed that you and your family will love it. All natural and wholesome ingredients – what’s not to love? The sweet corn that I used is the covered one that when you unveil, is a sweet crunchy vegetable. I was surprised how sweet it was and even sweeter if they are from the farms in Cameron Highlands, Malaysia. For the tomatoes, some like the soup to be sourish, so if you’re one of those that like it like that, then add more tomatoes. So after adding all the ingredients, the soup would be already be very tasty. Just a tablespoon of salt and 12 hours of thermal cooking, it would be ready to be served.
I also loved Shiitake Mushrooms in my soups. Normally I use the dried ones as they tend to keep longer. However, my wife and son are not fans, and so I decided to leave it out.
Some of you may ask, why use a Thermal Cooker instead of a regular pot over fire? Well the thermal cooker will help tenderise the meats – kind of like a slow cooker, and everything is just more flavourful if you cooked your meals that way. It works for busy families, where you would cook the soup in the mornings before heading off to the office, and then come back to re-heat it when you’re home at night.
A pot of A-B-C Soup is just perfect with steamed rice or Maggi noodles.
Anyway, I said all that to say that this recipe is so easy to prepare. Anyone can do it. Easy until I wanna cry.
* please note that I have included amazon affiliate links to the products I use, so check them out if you wish to support me, and if I can get these items from NTUC Supermarket, I would just indicate.
Recipe
Ingredients
200 grams Pork Ribs (Indonesian pork is the best) 1 ear (haha) of Sweet Corn(better still if they are from Cameron Highlands, Malaysia, those are white in colour and very juicy and sweet) 2 medium Carrots 1 medium Tomato or up to three Tomatoes (for that slightly sour taste) 1 Tablespoon of Salt
Method
1. Boil a kettle of water. Place frozen pork ribs in thermal pot. The thermal cooker that I use for this is the Zojirushi SN-XAE60 Thermal Pot, just in case you’re interested to mimic the same cooking conditions.
2. Chop the corn into 8 parts. Slice the carrots into bite sized chunks. Quart the tomatoes. Dump everything into the pot. Drop in 1 tablespoon of salt. Pour in the hot water until it covers all the ingredients.
3. Turn on high heat for 15 minutes. Make sure the lid is on, and the water is bubbling. Then turn off the fire, and place the pot into the thermal cooker itself and close the outer lid. You can serve it 12 hours later or when you’re back from work, it would be perfect for dinner.
They have become the unlikeliest of friends, meeting once a week every Saturday morning as they get jostled together and acquainted in the dirty and grimy vegetable stall baskets reserved only for customers. It’s always a bumpy and bruise-full meeting at first, as they are slotted into plastic bags and then heap together with other vegetables.
Then somewhere throughout the week, they are reacquainted again, this time washed and chopped, and all ready to be boiled in a pot with chicken bones and a slice of dried cuttlefish. The end result is often a thick beautiful broth of nutritious goodness.
The lotus root and the radish, uniquely different in their taste, but when brought together in a soup, just makes so much sense. It’s a great confinement soup as well for new mummies, if you wish, you can leave out the cuttlefish and even the sea salt. Just have it plain and it would still be full of flavour.
* please note that I have included amazon affiliate links to the products I use in my recipes, so check them out if you wish to support me, but don’t feel obligated though.
Recipe
Ingredients
1 large or 2 medium tubes of Lotus Root*try getting short rounded cylinders* 1 pc Radish *medium size* 1 pc Chicken carcass *bones* 1 half dried Cuttlefish Sea salt
Method
1. Wash then peel off the outer layers of the lotus root and radish. Then chop into smallish bite-sized pieces for the radish, and for the lotus root, just thin half a centimeter slices will do. This will ensure that the flavour is maximized.
2. Put the chicken carcass (whole) into the steel pot of the thermal cooker and a piece of cuttlefish *optional for newbie mummies* and sea salt to taste. We usually don’t take so much salt in our soups so maybe a teaspoon or less is sufficient. Also, if your chicken bones are frozen, you can either place it frozen in the pot or defrost it. I usually don’t bother defrosting if I am gonna boil it anyway.
3. After all the dry ingredients, vegetables and bones are placed in the pot, add about 1 litre of boiling water and turn on high heat for about 15-20 minutes and when that is done, place the pot into the thermal cooker. The soup should be delicious and ready by the time you get home from work. Just right for dinner.
“僵尸肉” as my mobile phone’s Chinese hanyupinyin text input tells me, and then my friends on Facebook tells me that the Chinese words were all wrong (Ok, so my Chinese give back my primary school teacher already).
I tried searching for the right words in Chinese, but I guess after a while, that was immaterial. What’s most important is how to make it awesome, and I think I have the perfect recipe.
The ginger must be shredded into really thin strips. You generally want them sliced thin because you would want to make sure they are crispy when you eat it later. The ginger is fried in a combination of sesame seed and olive oil. It just tastes better when you eat the dish with lots of ginger. I cooked the ginger strips in a small clay-pot because the heat is more evenly distributed than if it were cooked in a regular metal pot. Furthermore doesn’t burn so easily either. Pork with shredded ginger is also a very good confinement food for new mothers.
Recipe
Ingredients
250 grams lean pork
4-5 inches young ginger
4-5 tbsp sesame seed oil
4-5 tbsp olive oil
4-5 tbsp light soy sauce
1 tbsp dark soy sauce
White pepper
Method
1. Shred the ginger into thin strips. Meanwhile, heat the sesame and olive oil in a mini clay-pot and make sure the oil is hot before putting the ginger in to cook.
2. While the ginger is frying, slice the lean pork and allow it to marinate in the light soy sauce and white pepper. You can powder the pepper as much as you wish. Mix the pork well. You can opt to slice the pork first before frying the ginger, the choice is yours. The pork should be sliced as thinly as possible to allow for quick cooking.
3. Once the ginger turns slightly crispy, add the marinated pork into the mini clay-pot to fry. Make sure the pork changes colour to a whitish colour before adding the dark soy sauce. This is to ensure that the pork is well cooked prior to the adding of the dark soy sauce.
4. Best to cook over medium or low heat so that the pork doesn’t become too tough. Once ready serve with steam rice.
Bon Appetit!
Fry ginger first.
Fry pork till whitish colour.
Add dark soy sauce only when pork is nicely cooked.
