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Showing posts with the label Asian recipe

Ants Climbing A Tree (蚂蚁上树)

This dish is really interesting– Ants Climbing Trees! The name sounds like a small animal, but it is actually made with vermicelli or glass noodles and minces meat. This dish may seem simple, but it is actually rich in content. It is mainly made of glass noodles paired with fresh minced meat, and carefully seasoned with ginger, garlic, shallots, spicy bean paste, soy sauce, sugar and other condiments. Sometimes I cook it and serve it alone as breakfast, lunch, and even dinner. Sometimes I serve it with white rice. Either way, it is a very satisfying dish on my dinner table. The glass noodles were smooth, the minced meat was fragrant, and it tasted a little spicy due to the spicy bean paste.   It was delicious. The reason why this dish name as “ants climbing trees” is because the fried minced meat looks like little ants climbing on the “branch” of glass noodles. When preparing Ants Climbing a Tree, keep in mind that the glass noodles will absorb the sauce quickly.   Incre...

Fried Taro Puff Dumplings (Woo KOK 芋角)

Taro puff dumplings or Woo Kok ( 芋角 ) are another must-eat snack when you go to a restaurant. The outside is honeycomb-shaped, and the inside is soft and smooth. Even if you go to a restaurant to eat, not every restaurant makes them crispy. And for that reason, I decided to learn how to make this snack. Someone once told me, because of the complicated workmanship, it is difficult to make at home. She advised me not to spend effort on it. If you know me well, I always like to challenge my limits. Today, I will show you how to make them! The fillings of taro dumplings must contain pork, dried shrimps, and mushrooms! The filling can be prepared one day ahead. The dumpling skin is made of taro paste. I am using Areca taro ( 槟榔芋 ). It has a tough, brown exterior with an interior that is white/beige in color with purple flecks. The ideal taro for this recipe will be more mature and starchier. The hardest and most tiresome step of the entire process is frying Woo Kok. A crispy crust w...

Steamed Spareribs With Sand Ginger (沙姜蒸排骨)

Steamed spareribs with sand ginger is a delicious Cantonese dish. The main ingredients are spareribs and sand ginger. Sand ginger, also known as galangal, is a spicy spice that adds a unique flavor to this dish. It is one of four types of galangals, a rhizome in the ginger family. Fresh sand ginger is paler in color on the inside and woodier and coarser in texture than standard ginger. As a result, it is more difficult to peel and grate.  So, I just cleaned it with a tiny brush and chopped it with the skin. Fresh sand ginger might not be available at other places, so they will powder form instead. When dried, the flavor becomes a little less intense. I love how the fresh sand ginger tastes when combined with other spices or ingredients to create the sauce for meat. Apart from the ribs, I also add glass noodles and yuba or dried tofu skin. The ribs, glass noodles and dried tofu skin absorb all the sauce, enhanced by the flavor of sand ginger and oyster sauce. You can use san...

Crispy Fried Noodles Meatballs With Sweet Chili Sauce

I don’t want to blow my own horn, but I’m determined to do everything I can to make you want to try these meatballs. These meatballs are coated with SWEET CHILLI LIME SAUCE. The sweet chili paste is the major component of making the sauce. Apart from using this paste to make the sauce for the meatballs. You can also use it for other dishes like stir-fries with French beans, spread over cucumber or bread, or sometimes use it to pair with fried noodles. The paste itself is sweet with some spiciness. I am using two types of dried chilies to make the paste, one type is mild, and the type is extremely hot dried chilies. Bear in mind that the smaller they are, the hotter they are. My meatballs contain glass noodles inside and outside of them. If you're not familiar with the idea of adding noodles to meatballs, let me convince you as to why it's a great idea. The noodles get crispy outside after frying.   So, you don’t need to mess up with panko or any other breading. Glass nood...

Salted Egg Yolks Fried Wings

  There are some leftover salted egg yolks after the Dragon Boat Festival. Salted egg yolk fried wings straight pop into my mind. Egg yolk chicken wings are really flavoring explosions, highly praised for its unique flavor, crispy on the outside, tender on the inside, and tempting with their salty and fragrant taste. Other than the flavor that driving everyone’s insane. The key to this dish is to double fry the chicken wings until they are golden and crispy before coating them with a rich sauce of salted egg yolk and season them to make every bite full of rich taste and irresistible flavor. Since the fried chicken is mixed with salted egg yolks and melted butter, I must admit that this is a really greasy dish.   Eat this sparingly, then. I cut and divide my wings into mid wings and drummets. And I am going to give a shallow cut on them for better penetration during the marinating. Just oyster sauce, soy sauce and white pepper make up the basic marinade for the chicke...

Nyonya Sticky Rice Dumplings

This is my version of Nyonya Zongzi. The taste is very different from salty meat Zongzi. When the first time I taste it, it is incredibly tasty, it’s slightly spicy but not too sweet. It has a strong spice flavor due to the fact that of using whole coriander and white peppercorns which were toasted and grinded into powder form. The biggest difference between the regular Zongzi and Nyonya Zongzi is in the filling -- one’s savory while the other's sweet. The regular salty Zongzi normally includes pork belly in a big piece, mushrooms, dried shrimp, chestnuts and salted duck eggs. And include a lit bit of five spice powder for some fragrance. The Nyonya Zongzi includes braised minced pork, dried shrimps, candied winter melon, and the strong spice from the whole grinded coriander seeds and white peppercorns is the key to the greatest flavor. And it comes with a blend of sweet and savory, with aromatic spice notes and a hint of sweetness. The blue and off-white appearance with a ...

Fried Turnip Cake ( Chinese Lo Bak Gou)

These crispy crust with inside QQ chewy but not sticky. When you break it apart, it's  full of white radish stripes within, salty flavor of shrimp, it’s so delicious. Traditional savory turnip cakes or Lo Bak Gao slightly from place to region, radish and rice flour are the two main components. When making turnip cake in the old days, folks would typically grind rice pulp in a stone mill. But now it is very convenient to use store-bought rice flour to prepare it.   It is frequently steamed along with Chinese sausages (Lap Cheong), dried shrimp, mushrooms, scallops, and other ingredients. However, some people might say that turnip cake cannot be considered exquisite because the ingredients are so common, some people believe that turnip cake cannot be regarded as exquisite.   Although the recipe is straightforward. Making a delicious carrot cake, meanwhile, is not always simple if you do not grasp it properly. It will either be too soft or too hard or perhaps sticky to e...

Mango Pomelo Sago Dessert (杨枝甘露)

The weather is getting hot, there is nothing that can’t be solved with a glass or a bowl of this Yang Zhi Gan Lu ( 杨枝甘露 ) 。 It’s a kind of mango pomelo sago dessert. It has a strong mango aroma, chewy sago peals and coconut milk. It’s unique with its sweet taste and great to beat the heat. The name itself seems complicated; it is actually easy to make at home. The recipe, the ingredients are straight forward. There is no fixed method of making this dessert. You can add other fruits you like to increase the flavor.   If you don’t have coconut milk, you can replace it with milk, evaporated milk, or fresh cream to make the dessert with rich flavor. I think the key point of making this dessert is the method of cooking sago. There are a few tips that I would like to share about cooking sago. First, the sago cannot be soaked or washed in advance, because sago is made of powder, soaking or washing in advance will make sago completely dissolved in water. Second, sago is not coo...