Cuisine & Culture the Chinese Family Way
Of all varieties of dumplings, wontons are the easiest to make. There is not much folding or pleating required. You simply fold them in half and seal it with just water. It is also very easy to cook in minutes as you don’t need to stuff too much filling in it. There are many ways to cook and garnish the dumplings. You can boil them and add sweet soya sauce, or deep fry them and dip with mayonnaise, or steam and mix with chilli. Either way, they taste great!
Drinking chrysanthemum tea has been a part of my life since young, especially whenever we are ill or eating at dim sum restaurants in Singapore. Drinking chrysanthemum tea in the UK is not common practice at all and not even in Chinatown Chinese restaurants. It is one of my favourite teas that I missed when I moved to the UK.
This is a Chinese style Red Bean Paste Pancake that normally serves in Chinese Dim Sum restaurants. However, over the years, I have found them harder to find. Most of the ingredients are very easy to get from supermarkets and the ready-made red bean paste can be bought from most Chinese supermarkets. Of course, if you don’t like red bean paste, you could get black sesame paste instead. Or try using Nutella!
This Chinese Glazed Salmon recipe is found in Katie Chin’s Everyday Chinese Cookbook: 101 Delicious Recipes from My Mother’s Kitchen, which will be available to buy on 26th April 2016 on Amazon. This book pays homage to Katie’s late mother, the legendary chef and restaurateur, Leeann Chin. Sharing a collection of beloved family recipes, Katie weaves a compelling tale of Leeann’s life and her pioneering role in popularizing Chinese cuisine in America. From Chinese classics like Kung Pao Chicken and Shu Mai, to Chin’s signature Firecracker Shrimp, recipes defy the intimidation factor often linked to Asian cuisine.
Earlier last month, we received a Chinese New Year pack from Wing Yip to help us to cook some nice Chinese meals. We are no strangers to Wing Yip as we pop by our local Birmingham store every few months to stock up on all our favourite Asian ingredients and foods. We often buy a 20 kg bag of rice, frozen dim sum, instant noodles and not forgetting all my favourite snacks! I love to buy prawn crackers, dried fish slices and various drinks many more!
Anyway, I have received these four different type of sauces: Chinese Fried Rice Sauce, Curry Sauce, Sweet and Sour sauce and Yellow Bean sauce.
Last year when I went back to Singapore to visit, I bought a few mooncake moulds and now it is the time of the year to make it! As I don’t have the main ingredients to make mooncake, I decided to make piglets instead. For my previous mooncake bakes, do check out my swiss roll snow skin mooncake and colourful snow skin mooncake.
Piglet or 豬仔餅 has always been my favourite snack to eat during the mooncake festival. But my mum always refused to buy them for me as they are not particularly healthy and they are made from leftover pastry for the mooncake. Now I can totally understand what she meant!
As many of you may know, the brand new Minions movie hits cinemas on 26th June 2015! We can’t wait to watch it now! To celebrate, Green Giant is challenging bloggers to create the ultimate Minion-inspired summer snack.
So I created these Minions sweet corn steamed cakes! I can understand that it might sound weird for some people but in fact, in Asian countries, sweet corn is used in many recipes. We even have sweet corn ice cream, sweet corn jelly and not forgetting the popular chicken with sweet corn soup as found in many Chinese takeaways and restaurants.
Most children love cake! But not all children love vegetables! By combining these two together, we made sweet corn cakes! Sweet corn is naturally sweet, healthy and nutritious!
Apam Balik, also called Min Chiang Kueh (面煎粿) is one of the local snacks from my childhood that I used to eat for breakfast or dessert. Nowadays, it is a very common kueh/snack you can find at shopping malls or at hawker centres. They can come in many different fillings like ground peanut, red bean paste, cheese, salted green bean paste, chocolate, black sesame seed and many more. It is more common/traditional to have ground peanuts as the filling. If you have a nut allergy, you might want to avoid some of the Asian desserts!
My preferred filling for Min Chiang Kueh is ground peanut. I had already bought a few packets of ready-made ground peanut with sugar while in Singapore last year so now was an opportunity to use it.
Many Chinese sweet desserts are quite light and refreshing. They are not very often found in the UK Chinese restaurants with plates of fresh fruits or fried banana fritters the more common options. I love eating sweet desserts after a heavy meal in Singapore especially like ice kachang, grass jelly and many more yummy delicious desserts.
I am really pleased to come across this Sago Pearls with Melon recipe from the Chinese Feasts & Festivals published by Tuttle Publishing. This is a cookbook that is divided into two sections, covering feasts and festivals. It also explains the significance of each dish and a delicious recipe for its preparation. There are 57 delicious recipes in this book and is very unique. Normally you will find food gourmet photos in cookbook but in this book, all the dishes are illustrated by watercolour. The contents are beautifully laid out and it also explains the most important festivals, including the Dragon Boat Festival, the Mooncake Festival and Chinese New Year in detail. I enjoyed just reading the book.
I chose to make this simple sweet dessert as I have all the ingredients at home! I have been wanting to make this sweet dessert for ages! I had bought a 500g packet of white sago beads in a Chinese supermarket. They do come in coloured sago beads too and can be kept for a long time.
Peanut cookies are one of my favourite snacks to eat during Chinese New Year. Normally we will buy them from shops in Singapore but now living in the UK, it is impossible unless I buy them from Chinatown. So I decided to make it myself using the recipe book given to me by my aunty.
The first obstacle I found to making this recipe was trying to buy roasted peanuts without added salt. In the end I bought raw peanuts and made everything from scratch. You can usually find packets of raw peanuts in the health food aisle of a supermarket. To make roasted peanuts, I chopped the raw peanuts in a blender and roasted them in the oven at 160°C for 15 minutes. I stirred the peanuts every 5 minutes of baking.
Kikkoman have kindly shared one of their favourite recipes for my readers: Classic Sweet and Sour Chicken. This is also one of my favourite childhood dishes. It’s a dish that my mum always cooks for me whenever I visit.
Caramel Almond Crisp is a cookie recipe from The Secret of Cookies by Gu Huixue. I absolutely love this book my friend bought for me in Singapore and have been trying out many of her recipes!
Steamed rice cakes are one of my favourite childhood snacks when I was in Singapore. I grew up eating them for breakfast. They come in various bright colours and you simply dip the cake into orange sugar (brown sugar coloured orange) to eat. The cake is very plain by design, so dipping sugar makes it more delicious to eat. I bought a packet of orange sugar when I was in Singapore in August and have wanted to bake this cake for a while. Now I have finally got around to do it. It requires minimal ingredients but it takes a long time to prepare. So if you want to have it for breakfast, remember you need at least 2 hours.
In addition to the ingredients, it’s also useful to have these small aluminium cups which I bought from Singapore too.
This recipe is to make with coconut milk but I have replaced it with fresh milk which is a good substitute.
Egg tarts are one of my husbands favourite Chinese desserts. We always buy it from the Chinese supermarket. So I decided to bake some. This is my second attempt. The first bake didn’t turn out great. I used ready-made mini tarts from Tesco instead of making my own.
This week I decided to adapt a recipe from The Secret of Cookies by Gu Huixue and bake White Lotus Sandwich Cookies. Instead of using black dates, I am using the leftover white lotus paste I had from the Swiss Roll Snow Skin mooncake and Colourful Snow Skin mooncake. Also one of the ingredients is cake flour which I replaced with plain flour and a few other alterations.
