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Bitter Gourd in Salted Egg

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Bitter Gourd in Salted Egg

This is a restaurant grade recipe. Haha. Okay, I wish it was. I love eating almost everything in a salted egg sauce and nothing beats eating my favourite Bitter Gourd in my favourite salted egg sauce.

It’s a quite simple dish to make really, just that to do it well, you need to know what you are doing. So if you are game for something different, you can try this. It will rock your dinners and also impress a few friends.

Recipe

Ingredients

1 whole Bitter Gourd
3 Salted Egg Yolks
Half a slab of Unsalted Butter
1 tbsp of Castor Sugar
Chicken Stock (not from stock cubes)

Method

1. Clean and gut the bitter gourd of the seeds. Cut into half. Then steam at high heat for about 5 minutes. Then slice then diagonally into bite size pieces.

2. In a wok, add half a slab of Butter, if you need directions, then half a slab of butter would be 125 grams.

3. Add the egg yolks. These eggs are cooked and hard boiled. Using the back of your frying ladle, mesh the egg yolks into the butter. Make sure the egg yolks are nicely mixed into the butter.  Ensure that it is at low heat.

4. Add chicken stock made from boiling chicken bones. Just about 3 tbsp would be sufficient. Add Sugar to taste, maybe about 1 tbsp.

5. Once that is done, ladle the sauce over the butter gourd and serve.

Bon Appetit!

Chicken Macaroni

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Chicken Macaroni

The foods of champions, the humble Chicken Macaroni has become the super-foods that parents love to give their kids. More so because it is so easy to prepare. Just boil the pasta, add boiled chicken and salt and you can eat.

Of course it is only true for the pure at heart. However in my less than perfect world, my Chicken Macaroni has to be done the hard way. It has to have all the necessary ingredients to make this dish truly special.

Why? You might ask. Well, why not? I am cooking for my family wat. So it has to be nothing short of special.

Recipe

Ingredients

250 grams of Dried Macaroni (for two servings, I use Barilla Elbows, they are kind of same same.)
2 pieces of de-boned Chicken Thighs
4 carcass of Chicken Bones (for making stock)
Handful of Dried Chinese Scallops
A few Dried Oysters
5-6 whole Garlic Cloves
Sea Salt
Black Pepper
Evaporated Milk

Method

1. Boil a kettle of water (about 1.7litres). Add to the pot with the carcasses of Chicken Bones to boil for stock. Skim the scum and excess oil off the surface of the broth.

2. After about 20 minutes boiling at high heat, remove and discard the chicken bones. Add the scallops and oysters to flavour the soup. Fry and sear the garlic cloves in a pan before also adding into the broth to cook. You may reduce the fire to a slow simmer. Now boil another kettle of water. This is for cooking the macaroni.

3. Cook the macaroni in another pot until soften (boil pass al dente). This is so that your kids can eat as well.

4. Marinate the boneless chicken thighs with salt and black pepper. Leave aside for at least ten minutes. Once it is ready, fry the chicken with a little oil in a frying pan, 3 minutes on each side. After searing the sides, remove and slice into thin pieces.

5. Then boil the sliced chicken pieces in the broth by using the slotted ladle technique to further cook the chicken pieces. Once cooked, place in individual serving bowls.

6. Check that the pasta is cooked beyond al dente by doing a taste test. It should be reasonably softened. Once ready ladle the cooked macaroni into the bowls with the boiled chicken pieces.

7. Add salt and a little evaporated milk to thicken the broth. Cook a while longer and you can ladle the chicken broth to the Macaroni. Serve hot.

Bon Appetit!

Lotus and Radish Soup

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Lotus and Radish Soup

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.

Recipe

Ingredients

1 large or 2 medium tunes 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.

Bon Appetit!

Boiled Pork Belly

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Boiled Pork Belly

This is my mother-in-law’s recipe. Which I tried to follow but failed miserably because I was busy doing some other things – like paying bills. So multitasking is just another word for distraction. Nuff said.

She cooked this lovely pork belly, boiled and it was just the simplest dish in the world. I dipped it in home-made chilli sauce and it was out of this world. I had to learn and do it.

I asked her in my mixture of pidgin Chinese and deciphered enough to know that it was really the easiest recipe in the world. The only criteria was that the pork belly had to be beautiful or 漂亮. I asked her how to know if it was 漂亮, she said that I would know it when I saw it.

And so, I met the butcher this morning and he offered me what he had left for the day. The slab of pork belly had two nipples on it, and I thought maybe this was what she (MIL) meant by 漂亮.

So I asked the uncle to give me pork belly that was 漂亮, and he proudly said “这个很漂亮!”

I guess since he was the butcher, he can’t be wrong, and so I paid the man $15 (SGD) and the rest was as they say, history.

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Recipe

Ingredients:

1 kg of 漂亮 Pork Belly
Sea salt

Method:

1. In a large pot, boil water till boiling. Place pork belly into pot with water covering the meat. With slow fire, boil for at least 45 minutes. After the meat is cooked, turn off the fire and allow it to sit in the pot for another 15 minutes.

2. Take the cooked pork belly and then rub it with sea salt. Allow the meat to cool and then wrap it up in a ziplock bag and throw it into the freezer.

3. You can keep the meat for all kinds of dishes, either sliced and eaten in its own. Or fried with vegetables. The stock can be preserved into plastic containers and used for flavoring for other dishes.

Bon Appetit!

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Baby Spinach Chicken Soup (Stock for Infants)

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Baby Spinach Chicken Soup (Stock for Infants)

We are always experimenting with different flavours to get baby to taste and get used to different types of foods. One way is via the soup method as a stock for the porridge that we cook.

So hopefully he will like his green vegetables next time when we cook it. We love vegetables so it would be tragic if baby doesn’t. So we really need to engineer his meals so that he will eventually join us in our meals.

This is a simple three ingredient soup stock. Again it is for infants, so there is no salt to be added. It is just pure flavour and all the goodness in the ingredients. I just went to the wet market early this morning to get the best produce before some aunty gets it.

I got a huge bunch of baby spinach and a chicken carcass (bones only). And just a little ikan bilis for flavour. This recipe should make about seven 120 ml cups of stock for baby’s porridge for the week.

I included a little before and after photo for comparison.

Recipe – serving for seven 120 ml cups

Ingredients

Baby spinach (a huge bunch)

Chicken carcass (bones only)

Ikan bilis (7-9 pieces)

Method

1. Wash the baby spinach first as these contain a lot of sand. Wash till the water in the pot is clear. Soak also the Ikan bilis in a small bowl of water.

2. Place the chicken in a pot. Then place the baby spinach together with the chicken. Sprinkle the Ikan bilis all over. Pour about 1 litre of water into the pot and boil on low heat.

3. The soup is done when the flavour escapes the covered pot and you can see the fat of the chicken on the surface of the broth. Allow the broth to cool before pouring into the containers for freezing. This should provide for seven servings of 120 ml of soup stock for porridge.

Bon appetit!

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