Fried Dory Fish Fingers

Christmas is coming! If you are cracking your head over what to prepare for the kids and adult party, this is a simple party dish to try out..

Ingredients:

3 pieces of dory fish fillet (Available from frozen food store)
Sprigs of coriander leaves - chopped
1 piece of 2-inches size young ginger
6 shallots
2 cloves of garlic
Shredded lemon rinds from one lemon
1 egg-beaten lightly
1 packet of bread crumbs
Some flour for coating
Salt and pepper according to taste
Oil for frying

Methods:
1. Wash the dory fish and cut into finger size.
2. Pat dry the fish with kitchen paper.
3. Blend ginger, garlic and shallots into paste.
4. Season the fish with salt and pepper. Add in the blended ingredients as in (3), chopped coriander leaves and lemon rinds and marinade for at least 1 hour before frying.
5. Beat the egg and season with some salt and pepper. Contain it with a plate instead of a bowl for easy coating.
6. Dab the fish finger with some flour before dipping it into the egg.
7. Next, coat the fish finger with bread crumbs.
8. Heat some oil in the pan and fry the fish finger until golden in colour and very crispy.
9. Serve with salad and tartar sauce/lime sauce.

Season the the fish with salt, pepper (black or white), chopped coriander, shredded lemon rinds, ginger, garlic and shallot paste. Do not discard the marinated ingredients as these are added fiber to a meat dish.





Dab in flour, follow by egg and then coat it again with bread crumbs before frying.







Serve with salad greens.

Tang Yuen Festival

This is another festival associated with food- Tang Yuen or glutinous rice ball. I saw Christina mentioned in her blog and learnt about another name for this festival as Dong Zhi or commonly known as "Winter Solstice Festival".

I don't really know the reason for this particular celebration. Literally translated, it is the arrival of winter festival. Definitely it cannot be appreciated by anyone born in this tropical country. Anyway, just like Christmas, we still enjoy eat, drink and be merry. Who cares whether there is any changing season! This festival for most of the years will uniquely fall on 22th of December. I don't know why this year is the exception. Perhaps the person designing the calendar trying to facilitate the working class by making it happen on a Sunday...I wonder..that's very thoughtful of him/her..hahaha! As far as I can remember, this festival has got something to do with one's age. My mom used to tell us children that upon eaten the tang yuen, we will grow one year older. My mom also like to tell me to eat the number of tang yuen in accordance to my age. If I eat too many at one go, I will grow old faster. When I was five year old, I was quite upset by such a rule. Being a gluttonous little eater, five mini size tang yuen is definitely not enough for me. Anyway, when I grew to 12 year-old, I suddenly realised that a dozen of tang yuen is just too much for me to swallow. So I began to asked my mom every time during the Tang Yuen Festival, "mom, can I not eat the tang yuen so that I won't, er....grow old?"

Some Chinese Festivals can be quite ritualistic. My mom is someone who will follow tradition. She will prepare all sort of food according to ritual. However, this year she's unable to roll the tang yuen as my dad has passed away few months' ago. According to the aunties, it is against the principle for one to roll the tang yuen or inaugurate the festival when one of the elder family members passed away in the same year.The reason being that tang yuen is round in shape and signify reunion and this is one thing that our family members are going to miss when my dad is no longer with us this year. I am a little sad when think of this as my mom in law told me that usually as a daughter, it ought to be my duty to make the tang yuen for my mom. However, I have failed to perform this duty today. Anyway, I told myself to replace in another time when I visit my mom.

Traditionally, the tang yuen is made of plain glutinous flour and cooked in sweet syrup made of rock sugar. Some people like to add flavour to the syrup by adding with ginger or osmanthus flower (Taiwanese/Shanghainese Style). Later it developed into variation such as blending in the yam, sweet potatoes or pumpkins. There are some tang yuen with fillings too such as peanut paste, sesame paste, lotus paste or red bean paste. These are the sweet variation. The savoury variation is made popular by the Hakka clan, the fillings are some minced meat with vegetables. As for the Malaysianised version, we have the gula melaka filling just like the onde-onde and the skin is usually flavoured with pandan juice. The syrup is also sweetened with gula melaka instead of rock sugar.

Below is a tang yuen recipe which I experimented. As my family members like the kick from ginger, I have extracted a lot of ginger juice. This soup is very spicy indeed. After drinking it, you will perspire profusely to get rid of any "evil wind" in the body. I believe it will improve metabolic rate and good for one who is about o suffer from a cold. Anyway, the soup that I made was too spicy hot that the kids may not like it. My nephews just eat the glutinous ball and left the soup behind...














Ingredients to make the tang yuen skin:

1. 300g glutinous rice flour (tepung pulut)
2. 2 tbsp rice flour (tepung beras)
3. Some cold and hot water for kneading(you can also add some pandan/screwpine leave juice)

Methods:

1. Take about a quarter of the glutinous rice flour and mix with hot water. This is to make a dough that is half-cooked so it gets stickier a bit and for easy blending.
2. Mix all the flour together including the cooked dough.
3. Mix in enough water and knead to form a smooth soft ball.
4. Make sure the dough in moist enough to roll into a ball (Pic as above).

Ingredients to make the fillings:

1. 250 g of groundnuts
2. 50g of sesame seeds
3. Fine Sugar & salt according to taste
4. Some water to form into balls

Methods:

1. Fry the ground nuts and sesame seed till brownish in colour without use of any oil in the pan. Make sure you keep stirring and tossing in order not to char the surface of the beans.
2. Remove the ground nut skin with the help of a sift.
3. Blend groundnuts and sesame together.
4. Blend sugar into the peanut and sesame paste. I usually blend in sugar gradually as to get the correct sweetness
5. Blend in one tsp of salt.
6. Add in water bit by bit to the consistency which the paste can be formed into a ball (pic as above).

How to make the tang yuen:

1. Take a portion of the dough, about the same size with the ground nut & sesame paste ball.
   
2. Press it into a thin sheet on your palm.
3. Put the paste in the middle.
4. Ensure that the skin covers the whole paste.
5. Roll into balls.
6. You can moist your hand with some water to ensure that there is no crack on the ball.
7. Simmer a pot of water.
8. Throw in the balls.
9. When the balls start to float, it shows that it is cooked.
10. Immerse the ball immediately into a bowl of cooked water at room temperature until it is ready for serving.
    
11. You need to prepare the syrup to be eaten together with the balls.
12. All you need to do is to put in the ball back again into the syrup and let it boil a bit before serving.
    
13. The syrup recipe is simple. Just boil another pot of water, sweeten with rock sugar or gula melaka.
    
14. If you like the extra hot version just like mine, blend the ginger, extract the juice and pour into the syrup.
    

Because of ginger juice is used instead of ginger slices, this soup will look slightly "murky", not as clear as the normal rock sugar syrup or one which slice gingers are used. Anyway, you are guaranteed to sweat it out with this hot soup!

Hong Kong Trip

I was lucky enough to attend yet another incentive trip within the year. Despite the fact that the trip was arranged in the last minute, the itinerary was awesome! Great credit goes to my colleagues Sri and Jynna for making it happened!

This was really a luxurious trip. A vacation that I could never forget. We put up in the 5-star Shangri-la Hotel at Kowloon and had a sumptious poolside buffet dinner at Hong Kong Football club on the first night. The below is the slide shows for pics taken on day-one. For info, juz hold on to the pic to read the captions.

Sea Coconut & Snow Fungus Dessert

This is also another simple dessert which do not require many ingredients. I have omitted "loh hon go" as I do not have another key ingredient -Winter Melon (Dong Gua) to make it like the popular tong shui in Petaling Street-Dong Gua Lo Hon Go. Anyway, this simple tong shui (sweet soup) is equally soothing...

Ingredients:
10 pieces of sea coconuts
10 red dates
Knots of pandan leaves (screw-pine leaves)
Half a pack of candied winter melon (about 5 to 6 sticks)
Some white fungus/cloud fungus/snow fungus
Rock sugar to taste

Methods:

1. Cut the sea coconut into thin slices, discard the old ones which the flesh has solidified as the taste will be enhanced if you solely use the tender sea coconuts to prepare for this soup. You can reserve the old ones to stir fry with other vegetable dishes.
2. Boil the red dates (preferably discard the seed first) with pandan leaves and white fungus until the latter is soften
3. Dump in sea coconuts slices, candied winter melon and cook for another 10 minutes.
4. Lastly add in rock sugar.

Learnings:

1. This soup is supposed to provide the cooling effect if the sea coconuts and winter melon are not boiled for too long.
2. It is encouraged to discard the seed of red dates which is believed will get rid of the heatiness effect (pls don't ask me to prove it scientifically but it has been a practice by our grandmothers)
3. Snow fungus is highly recommended food for consumptions by the vain pots who yearn for good complexions. Snow fungus is a type of low calories food and contains the goodness of the most natural form of collagen and is popularly known as vegetarian bird nest. So basically you only need to consume a lot of snow fungus to maintain a fair and supple complexion. This is the poor men's tonic since it can substitute bird nest therefore it has become my favourite food. There are 2 "species" of snow fungus. One is crunchy in texture and another type is jelly-like. The latter will turn gelatine when it is boiled for long and therefore is most suitably used for sweet dessert like the one required in this recipe whereas the crunchy texture type is suitable for preparation of savoury soup.
   
4. This dessert will produce a clear soup and you can only taste the mild sweetness and fragrance from the red dates and pandan leaves since snow fungus and the sea coconuts are quite bland in taste.
   
5. You can turn it into a cold dessert by shaving some ice and mix it into the soup. Just add some honey if it is not sweet enough.

Summer Sponge Cake

This is a light butter cake which is moist and not too oily.

Ingredients:
250g butter
120g castor sugar
4 eggs
250 g plain flour sifted with 3 tsp of baking powder(or can be substituted with self-raising flour)
1 tsp vanilla essence
Half a cup/4 tbsp hot water

Methods:

1. Sift the flour to incorporate more air so that the cake will be light and fluffy.
2. Cream butter and sugar until turning pale in colour.
3. Gradually beat in egg, one at a time.
4. Beat in the flour using low speed
5. Lastly, add in vanilla essence and stir in the hot boiling water to make a soft dropping consistency.
6. Preheat oven to 180C. Bake for 30 minutes to 40 minutes.
7. Dredge with icing sugar (optional).
   

Hong Kong Style Curry Chicken

This is my mother-in-law's specialty. She learned up this recipe from one of her buddies. This recipe is popularly known amongst all the aunties as "Hong Kong Curry Chicken". But after tasting it, I notice the taste is similar to the Macao's famous Portugal Curry Chicken except that it doesn't have too much gravy. By virtue of it's name, you will not find any tropical ingredients such as coconut milk, galangal or even lemon grass which are commonly found in the local curry dishes. The ingredients used are easily available in most of the supermarket all over the world. Of course it is perhaps made popular by the Hongkie as such the name was given. It is more like a curry cooked in Chinese style as the taste is "amplified" by the "tau chu"(Chinese fermented soya bean paste)

Anyway, this is an easy to prepare recipe and it is suitable for anyone who can't tolerate the fieriness of chillies since you can''t find any chilies in this recipe. I will recommend this recipe for any confinement lady as it helps to rid the wind in the body as well as providing the warming effect which is vital for the new mother.

Ingredients:

1 chicken, cut into small pieces
20 shallots
5 pips of garlics
4 pieces of ginger (about 3 inches per stem-if you like it to be spicier, use the old ginger)
1 tbs of tau chu(fermented bean paste)
1 tsp of turmeric powder

Methods:

1. Blend shallots and garlic together, put aside
2. Blend ginger with 1 cup of water, sift it or press it with a piece of cloth to extract the juice only
3. Heat up 1 tbsp of oil in the pan, fry the blended ingredients, turmeric powder and tauchu together till fragrant.
4. Add in chicken pieces to mix well with the spices.
5. Pour in ginger juice.
   
6. Simmer till the gravy thicken.
7. Serve with plain rice.

Scribbling As Fine Art?

My six-year-old Elgin cannot withstand boredom. I won't consider him a hyperactive child but he sleeps very little as compared to children of the same age. He has never had the habit of taking afternoon nap since year 1. He just love to stay awake and indulge in a lot of stimulation. So he spent most of the time in a day watching TV and start playing computer games since year 3. At age 4, he can remember my mobile number and called me when i was at work. At age 5, started to yahoo messaging with his dad. At age 6 he picked up sms messaging. But his handwriting and drawing remains poor. He also can hardly play a full song eventhough I sent him for musical classes & keyboard lesson since he was 2 years old.

I have the same problems with most of the parents. Being a woman at work, I could hardly spent a good two hour with my son on any working weekday. Sometimes, driven by guilty conscious, I tend to buy my son lots of expensive toys and sign him up with many kinds of child development activities. Hoping that he could spend his time with quality activities and grow up in a quality envorionment. After awhile, I noticed he begin to get sick of everything. When playing computer game and PS game, he always asked me to play with him. At the end, I realised what a child needed the most is the attention of their own parents as the game alone does not provide the interaction they get from human touch.

Elgin, like most of the children too, loves to do scribbling here and there. I am glad to have good parents in law as they managed to train him to be an obedient child since he was a baby. Though he's like many other children with itchy hands, he has never scribbled on the wall. Perhaps, once if I may recalled, when he was four plus. He did an abstract art on my light colored sofa and was given immediate punishment and stern warning. Ever since then he has learnt the lesson that scribbling on things other than paper and drawing board are strictly forbidden in this house.

Some said children who loves to scribble tend to developed to become a less emotional adult as they learnt to vent their feelings. Nevertheless, parents of a child who loves scribbling will tend to become emotional. Especially when the child does it all over the place. Describing scribbling as a fine art is easier said than done for most parents. So to prevent him from scribbling at the forbidden places, we have bought him stacks of plain drawing papers and colour markers.

After seeing what he left on the drawing papers. I begin to believe that scribbling is in fact a fine art for the parents. The art of letting our children indulge in their own imagination. A child does not lie, so does their work..








Sponge Bob Square Pants, one of his favourite cartoon shows.

What he learnt from Mandarin class :han yi pin yin









He loves to play pretend- to be the teacher marking his own homework





and he always made me his student

Chilled Out On The Highlands

In November 2007, our family escaped to Cameron Highlands for a chill-out vacation. We departed about 6am in the morning. Reached Ipoh around 8am to have the famous dim sum at Foh Sun Restaurant and arrived at Cameron Highland around noon.

Whoever is planning for a holiday in CH, I will always recommend the following 3 activities. I don't know about you, but our family always enjoys these activities:

1) Visitation to Tea Plantations
This is one of my most favourite outings. I get addicted to the smell of raw tea leaves. We visited Boh Tea Centre at Sungai Palas on our first day of visit. The next day morning we went to Lipton and the last day before departure, we dropped by the Cameron Valley.
At the tea centre, you will be invited for a free tour to watch how the workers pick and segregate the tea according to the respective grades and quality. You also get to watch how the raw leaves are processed into tasty tea. The last thing that shouldn't be missed is to sip a cup of tea and help yourself with light snacks such as sandwiches and scones. The Sg Palas tea house has gone through a facelift. That reminds that I haven't set my feet on this highlands for almost a decade. The tea house was built with modern architecture, supported with glass and steel structures and is set on a balcony-like platform on the hilltop. If you choose to sit at the far end, you will command a 270 degree view of the tea plantation. You really get to relax and unwind at the tea garden. Psychologically, the cool air couple with the fragrance of the tea leaves make the brains more alert. That was real cool...

2) Visitation to flowers and fruits farms
Basically, you get to feast your eyes with many colourful nameless flowers. You get to drink freshly pressed strawberry juice and pick up one or two bottles of honey.

3) Visitation to the vegetable markets
You get to see different types of uncommon vegetables. The vegetables are not really cheap but the freshness is what you intend to get for a steamboat dinner. I love the sweet potatoes and sweetcorn. Best eaten when steaming hot...in cool weather.

At Cameron Highland, I won't recommend you to go to any of the open-door restaurant, stalls or coffee shops. The flies just pissed me off. However, T-Cafe is an exception. This small eatery is located at Tanah Rata, a few doors away from HSBC. It is above a fast food restaurant (can't remember the name). This is a family run business and they have a variety of local and western cuisine. Their scones are superb and apple pies are very famous. The ambiance is not posh but it makes you feel like home!

Elgin's Art & Craft

Ever since Elgin went to Art & Craft class, he has made this home his own gallery...



He did exhibited the artistic way of sticking up his artwork with cellophane tapes.
Look at the big lump at the right bottom of the pic.

An owl staring at a pair of
Japanese sandal in awe..

A scary faced moth or butterfly?






A sultry faced octopus








Hey! Mom! A cheeky face mouse!

A Smiley Faced Moon

I was half way into my dinner on the first night of Dec08 when I received a call from a friend who asked me to take a look of the moon then as it looked extraordinary. As the saying goes, curiosity could kill a cat.. I walked out from the house instantly gazing at the west and east of the sky but then there was no sight of this extraordinary moon at all. Flushed in anxiety and excitements, I decided to drive out to the nearby field hunting for the moon like a treasure to unveil the mystery.


Smile..and the world will smile back at you





Hey! There you are.. a smiley faced moon. It was such a quirky phenomenon as it has never occurred to me that the moon actually smiling at the world.

Coincidentally two stars were hanging above the moon made the face looked even more comical-it looked exactly like the emotioncon-Smiley. Yet, the gentle and soft glows emitted by the moon and stars filled the air with auspicious mood and blissful energy. It was such a wondrous experience having had a chance to witness this heart-warming scene. It was indeed a celestial sign in a time of gloom and doom and when there's a lot of fear and strife in the world.

Immediately I feel like telling the whole world to catch a glimpse of this smiley faced moon. I rushed home in lightning speed to fetch my family members. However, when I returned to the field in less than 10 minutes, sadly, there was no sign of the smiley face anymore. Thick cloud has covered the moon and stars. This reminds me of the Chipsmore commercial-"now you see it, now you are not!"

That was indeed a manifestation on the theory of impermanence. Somehow we couldn't deny the fact that everything comes into beings through causes and conditions and it illusorily exists. Nothing stays forever and there is nothing that we could hold on to perpetually. Be it an object or feeling and no matter how precious it is towards us. I immediately realised that it was this feeling of disappointment that I must learn to let go of.

Impermanence is taken place every moment. It is always arising, growing and dying. The whole episode of searching for the moon, seeing the moon and seeing the moon disappeared is the manifestations on the process of impermanence. Same goes with the feelings. It was invoked and it is dying off. There was actually nothing to hold on to, be it excitement, joy, sadness or disappointment. Our ordinary eyes can't notice the process of arising and dying. But it is happening every moment. Just like our body cells, it grows, multiplies and turns into dead cells every now and then. So there is really no past or future. The most important moment is always now. Live now and be mindful to watch our speech, action and mind in order not create any unfavorable causes that warrant the unfavorable consequences.

I am so grateful to the smiley faced moon coz it was there to remind me to continue with the path of cultivation.

Metta to all...

Mini Party Pizza

This is a quickie recipe for party-planning.

Ingredients:
Slices of bread, cut into flour. Arrange on pan, moist with some milk, spread with butter.

Suggested topping:-
Some ready-made tomato paste/pasta sauce (you may try out my Multi-Purpose Tomato Sauce recipe)
Some cut fruits (eg pineapple, apple, pear etc)
Some onion rinds
Some sliced vegetable such as capsicum, tomato or mushrooms
Some cubed chicken, sausages, ham, canned tuna fish
Some mixed herbs (optional)
Some slices of cheese (eg mozzarella cheese, feta cheese, Emmanuel cheese, parmesan etc)

It will look like this:











Lastly, bake for 15 minutes in a 180 degree C oven.

Apple Walnut Cake

This cake is a variation which I reinvent from the "Summer Sponge Cake" recipe. This cake is light in fat, low in sugar, high in fiber, rich in nutrition and nutty in texture.

This cake is excellent for the young and old, due to one of the main ingredients used-walnut. This nut becomes popular for it's effect in nourishing the brain & nervous system. If you scrutinize properly, this exotic nut in fact looks remarkably like a mini human brain. No wonder the Chinese always believes that if we take a type of food that resembles a certain organ of our body, it will nourish that particular organ.
Walnut is rich in Omega 3 & 6 which are good fats that help in lifting up your mood and helpful to balance up hormones and the growth of nervous system. I have heard that eating 2 walnuts a day is the beauty tip shared by the most beautiful Indian beauty queen- Aishwarya Rai. So, whoever desires for a beautiful complexion, youthful brain and body, you may indulge yourself with this tiny brain food by trying this recipe out for a start!

Ingredients:
250g butter
120g castor sugar/brown sugar
4 eggs
125 g plain flour
125 g wholemeal flour
3 tsp of baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 apple, chopped into small pieces
1/2 pear, chopped into small pieces
1 cup chopped walnuts
1 tsp cinnamon powder
1 tsp vanilla essence
Half a cup/4 tbsp hot water

Methods:

1. Sift both the flour with baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and cinnamon powder for it to mix well and make the flour more airy.
2. Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
3. Gradually beat in egg, one at a time.
4. Beat in the flour using low speed.
5. Mix in chopped walnuts and fruits.
   
6. Lastly, stir in the hot boiling water to make a soft dropping consistency.
7. Preheat oven to 180C. Bake for 30 minutes.

Learnings:

1. I have substituted part of the flour to wholemeal flour to provide the fiber that are essential to enhance our bowel movement.
   
2. The fat contained in walnut is also an excellent natural laxative. Combining the apple and pear, this cake is in fact designed for anyone who wish to detox their system.
   
3. Do not discard the brans from the wholemeal flour. Sifting the flours is to incorporate more air to the flour so that the cake texture will not become lumpy.
4. While the fruits are rather acidic, half a tsp of soda powder is to neutralize the acidic effect. Do not put too much baking soda as it will make the cake bitter.
5. If you wish to omit the wholemeal flour, you may substitute all the flour and baking powder with self-raising flour.
6. Make sure all the eggs are in room temperature for better result. Anyway, if time does not permit you to leave the eggs in room temperature, you just need to warm them with a bowl of luke warm water before using.
7. I have experimented with 2 types of fruits. The pear gives a softer texture. As only half a pear is used, therefore suggested to call it an apple walnut cake.
   

Do not fold in all the nuts. Left some to sprinkle on top of the cake. Do not ground the nuts. Only chop it coarsely as not to lose the chewy effect.








This cake is crumbly because of the brans from the wholemeal flour as well as the coarsely chopped walnuts. Anyway, the pear and apple cubes which have been soften by the heat while baking provide enough moisture to the cake. The aroma from cinnamon make it best to serve warm with tea or coffee. Yummy!