u m a m i

Ways with purple potatoes

I am still in KL, recovering from a severe viral attack- full works of headache, fever, coughs, sore throat and nasal congestin. There is only about a week left to enjoy the food here, so posting will continue to be sporadic. Here we have some dishes made from purple potatoes I cooked way back in February.

Googling for recipes for purple potatoes will inevitably throw up salads which in our household is never a popular thing during winter. What I did was to stir-fry them with some chicken cubes, as one would potatoes, but finishing with a scatter of dried shrimps and rice vinegar to add some interesting contrast, making a dish that would go well with a bowl of steamed white rice.

4-5 little purple potatoes, scrubbed and cut into chunks

1 Chicken breast or thigh- cut into cubes, seasoned with salt & pepper, a little soy sauce & sesame oil

2 cloves garlic- finely minced

Handful dried shrimp- washed and patted dry

Stock or water

1. Boil the potatoes until 90% cooked. Drain. 

2. Heat up the wok and then 2 tbsp cooking oil to gently fry the dried shrimps until golden and crisp. Scoop out and set aside on some kitchen paper.

3. Clean the wok. Heat it up again and add some oil to stir-fry the garlic before adding the chicken. Return the potatoes to the mixture and toss everything up. Add a cup of stock or water to the wok and bring everything up to a boil and let simmer on medium heat for 5-10 minutes or until potatoes are tender. Stir in a teaspoon of rice vinegar at the end.

4. Garnish with fried dried shrimps and chopped scallion greens if available.

These potatoes were quite amenable to roasting as well, so I cut them as finely as I could, parboil them and toss them with some salt, pepper and olive oil before roasting in a hot oven. Not as crispy as the bagged chips one buys in a supermarket, but still delicious and very popular with husband and the child.

Grilled Sole à la Canton

One day I bought a piece of sole. I had intended to steam it whole but found myself asking the fishmonger to descale and fillet the fish. I could still steam them as they were but my daughter has developed a liking for crispy fish skin so an idea came into my head to please both the traditionalist in my husband and feed V's new habit. The fillets were grilled quickly, one piece was set aside for V to enjoy, while the other three pieces were covered with a traditional Cantonese style-soy sauce of aromatic seasonings that was absolutely delicious with steamed rice.

1 Sole- cleaned, descaled

2 tbsp premium soy sauce

2 tsp sesame oil

2 tsp sugar

white pepper

2 spring onions- greens chopped in small rings, whites in 1 inch stalks and bulbs cut into 4 longitudinal sections

2 cloves garlic- sliced thinly

1 cm ginger- sliced thinly

2-3 small red chillis- sliced through from stalk to tip, shake to release seeds

1. Just before cooking, pat fish dry and sprinkle some salt on both sides. Lay them on an oiled grill pan and grill for 7 minutes. If the fillets are very long, score the skin before cooking.

2. While fish is cooking, heat a wok or saute pan till hot and pour 1.5 tbsp neutral cooking oil. When oil is hot, add the garlic, ginger, chilli and the bulb and white stems of the spring onion  to let them sizzle and take on some colour but not cook through. The oil will be infused with the flavours of the aromatics. Turn heat off.

3. Mix the soya sauce, sugar, white pepper and sesame oil in a bowl until sugar is dissolved.

4. When fish is done, remove from the grill pan and place on serving dish. Drizzle with the soya sauce mixture and pour the aromatic oil containing all the onions, ginger, chilli and garlic on top. Sprinkle the top with the green parts of the spring onion. 

Variations: Coriander on the top is lovely. Some shavings of lemon on top would not be sniffed at either. Enjoy!

Roast pork belly twice over

I made roast belly of pork and told Sui Mai about it. She asked for the recipe and she was delighted with the results, saying I should blog it, so here we are.

You should start with fresh pork if possible. I missed this crucial fact when I read Yan Kit So's recipe, from her Classic Chinese Cookbook, the first time round. Still, as the pictures show, it is possible to get halfway decent crackling from frozen meat, if we use all the tips and tricks at our disposal, or, in this case, gleaned from my maternal grandmother and the Internet. I bought from my butcher a piece of pork belly without bones, about 1.5 kgs in weight.

Other ingredients:

Salt- at least 1/2 tsp, I used about 2.5 tsp.
More salt= more crispiness, also more saltiness. You choose.

Update: Reader Lee Yuen has a great tip: Use lots of salt, then scrape excess away before roasting

Marinade: 

1 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
1 tbsp miso (Yan Kit's recipe specified yellow bean paste which I didn't have)
1 tbsp hoisin sauce
1/2 tsp soy sauce
1 tsp five-spice powder.

1. Rinse and pat pork dry with paper towels. Pierce all over with a piercer if you have one (it's like a metal brush with spikes) otherwise I used a cake pick.

2. Turn meat over so meat is facing up, make cuts to the meat 1 inch apart and 1/2 inch deep. This step is very useful when you want to cut the meat later. 

3. Turn meat over again, this time skin is facing up. Bring over to the sink and pour boiling water over the skin only. I held the meat by its top edge with my free hand while pouring over the dangling lower half, alternating sides to make sure all the skin got scalded. (If you have meat hooks it will come in handy for this step). Don't worry if a bit of hot water scalds the sides. 

4. Place meat skin down on some kitchen paper. Prepare the marinade.  Rub all over the meat side only, use fingers to massage right into the cut grooves. 

5. Turn meat over and rub salt over the skin.  Place on a roasting rack to airdry-for at least 3 hours or even overnight. Again, if you have meat hooks it'll be cool for this job. .

I remember my grandmother used to do steps 3 and 5 at least twice. I did it only once, which probably accounted for my distinctly less impressive results. I'll probably repeat this step in future attempts. 

Alternatively, use reader Lee Yuen's tip to rub lots of salt and  remove excess before roasting. If the weather is humid, she also recommends drying it, skin side up, uncovered, in the fridge.

6. Roast on a rack placed over a pan or tray of hot water to catch the drippings. 200C for 15 minutes then 190C for 1 hour. As mine is a convection oven I did it at 10 degrees lower. Don't open the oven to check (Yan Kit So was very insistent on this point). At the end of cooking time, test with a pick, if juices run clear it's done. 

7. If crackling looks dull, crank oven to 230C and watch it closely. It'll bloom and flower. I went off to do something else and some parts turned black, these bits can be scrapped off with a serrated knife.

8. Rest the meat on a chopping board for 15 minutes before cutting it up with a meat cleaver. 

It was gratifyingly easy and oh-so-delicious. I cooked down some chopped leeks to go with all that meat and fats, and served two dipping sauces alongside- one of fermented baby shrimps with lemon juice and another of dark soya sauce with cut fresh chillis.

1.5 kg of meat was a big amount, there were plenty for husband's lunch the following day. I also saved half the roast for another home-cooked favourite, Garlicky Roast Pork, which I learnt from watching my mother. As usual in these kind of guess-timate cooking, I eyeballed the quantities. What is important is the amount of chopped garlic: one should use as much as possible, it gives character to the dish.

Here I used about 8 cloves, I should have thrown the whole head in. Have on standby your cooking alcohol (I used Stone's ginger wine), dark soya sauce and sugar.

1. Heat about 1/2 cup oil in a wok to medium heat, and fry the garlic gently and slowly until they turn crispy and brown. It'll take about 6 minutes, be very careful not to burn it.

2. Add the roast pork and stir to mix well. Splash some cooking alcohol on the side of the wok. There will be sizzling and spluttering, turn down the heat if it gets overwhelming. Add dark soya sauce and sugar, start with ratio of 1 tbsp: 2 tsp and adjust to your preference. It should be garlicky, smokey from the garlic and wok-tossing, and dark soy sauce-y with fleeting caramel notes, the sugar rounds up the flavour spectrum but this dish is not meant to be sweet. Scoop out when sauces and garlic are well integrated into the pork.

If you use a well-seasoned cast-iron wok, it will not stick so there is no need to add water which will cause the garlic pieces to swell and bloat unappetisingly. However, I was using an inox wok on the induction top in our rented kitchen, and it got sticky and almost charred on the bottom rather quickly, necessitating the addition of a little water to deglaze the pan.

The garlicky pork goes really well with steamed white rice, and maybe some cold beer or sake. Our family loves this dish so much my mother frequently set aside some meat just for this purpose. This recipe also works well for other cuts of roasted pork, especially from a suckling pig.

Of course, as my mother reminded me when I called to tell her I made roast pork, the siu yuk will be great sauteed with vegetables like kai lan or brocolli. By then, we had eaten up every last bit of the pork, so we'll just have to wait for the next occasion.

Fragrant noodles recipe

In case anyone wanted the recipe for this simple noodle dish, voila! I put it together to use up quickly the spring onions and coriander sitting in the fridge drawer, and was also in the mood for lots and lots of sweet-bitter and crisp-crunchy fried garlic and shallots. It's delicious and I love the idea of flavours coming mainly from members of the garlic and onion family. Of course meat and vegetables can be added but this is the minimalist version to allow better appreciation of the aromatic ingredients. 

2 cakes dried shrimp noodles

3-5 cloves garlic minced finely

5-6 shallots sliced finely

2 spring onions sliced in 2 inch stalks, reserve the bulb for other purposes.

Bunch of coriander, washed & torn roughly

Flavourings: soy sauce, black vinegar, sesame oil, cantonese style chilli oil (optional)

1. Cook the noodles as you would pasta, with lots of water and a few drops of oil. Salt is not necessary, the taste of dried shrimps is already incorporated for flavour. 
2. In a wok, heat up 2-3 tbsp oil (6-7 on my induction cooker, small flame if you are using gas) and fry the shallots slowly and gently. When shallots are 40% done, add the garlic. Gently does it, we want them to turn golden brown, not stay pale or worse, go black and bitter.
3. Put cooked pasta into wok. Add spring onion and coriander. Drizzle flavourings according to taste and toss everything until well-mixed.

Kid's variation: V ate the noodles happily- in her portion I omitted the spring onion, coriander, vinegar and chilli oil. 

Coming up next- roast belly pork!

Fragrant noodles

Shrimp noodles tossed with fried shallots & garlic, wilted scallions & coriander. Delicious. Taking my time away to cook. Cheers!

Steamed Pork Patty

I like minced pork, it is easy to use and is a very versatile ingredient. I would advise grinding the meat yourself so you can be sure it was hygienically handled but if you trust your source then why not buy it ready-minced? As we know how much I value convenience it is hardly surprising that I get mine from my butcher. He uses the grinding machine normally reserved for churning out 'steak haché' or what we would call a hamburger. As long as I buy some steak haché (which I do anyway, for the dogs) after he grinds the pork he will put the meat through the machine. He uses the part dangling from the end of the ribs, it is soft and juicy without being too fatty.

Here we have a super-quick dish which goes well with steamed rice or plain rice porridge. Minimal handling of meat means actual preparation time is less than 5 minutes. Make sure you use a dish with sloped sides. As it cooks the pork will release its juices, that mingled with the steam that condenses will form a delicious broth. You can vary the seasoning but I usually use miso paste simply because I have a tub that never seem to get used up. The egg is optional but I like to use the whites to give the meat a velvety texture and the yolk is a cheerful finish anyway. Certainly it can be further bulked up with preserved vegetables or chopped fresh vegetables but here I offer the basic recipe. Quantity can also be adjusted, I have doubled and even tripled the amounts depending on the number of people dining.

Minced pork, ~1 cup,

Marinate:

salt & pepper

1.5 tsp soy sauce

few drops sesame oil

1.5 tsp miso paste

a splash of cooking wine (currently I use Stone's ginger wine)

1 raw egg, separate the yolk.

1. Marinate the pork for at least 20 minutes in a heatproof dish. 

2. Stir egg white into meat. Make a well in the middle and plop the eggyolk in. If you feel brave you can break egg directly into meat and manouvre the white around carefully, trying not to break the yolk.

3. Steam at medium heat for 10 minutes.

I usually cook the minced pork the day I buy it, as it is so finely cut up the flavour deteriorates with storage. Sometimes I might portion out small golf-ball sized batches for freezing, making sure I use it up as quickly as possible. They come in handy for adding to instant ramen or for perking up a vegetable side dish.

Time for Fondue

I woke up two Sundays ago with a strong desire to eat fondue. This would be the second time in my life that I actually let myself think about eating copious amounts of cheese, bread and processed meat- the first was almost nine years ago. This time around I think it was the weather that turned my head. Paris is cold, on most days we experience highs of up to 5C and lows as bad as -6 or -7C.

So, Sunday morning. In France. Where should we go eat some fondue? Most restaurants are closed, about 90%, and of the 10% left, most are only open in the evenings. Which left the string of restaurants along rue Mouffetard which someone described as using "low-grade cheese". Well if I am going to be ingesting fatty substances the least I could do is to make sure it is the good stuff. Since I preferred to eat badly for lunch rather than dinner, there was no other way but to make it ourselves. 

I have saved in my hard disk a New York Times recipe from a few years back. Looking at it again, the instructions seemed easy enough, so we piled into the car to find some fondue fixings.

Rue Cler was open. Husband likes the cheeses at La Fermetta, their Comté is dreamy, anyway, he bought some gruyere and emmenthal. Then hopped across to Nicolas for a bottle of Chablis and one of Kirsch. I went to Franprix to get some corn starch, along with tortilla chips and festive pack of Ferrero Rocher put out along the cash register line to make people like me buy on impulse.

The proportions are roughly 225g of two types each of cheese to 1.5 tbsp cornstarch to 1 cup dry white wine. The cheese gets grated and mixed with the cornstarch. The quantity shown here is not exact, give or take 10 or 20g.

We also needed some other vehicular food to transport the cheesey sauce. I looked at what we had in the pantry. Pink Lady apples,  sweet clementines, frankfurters, sliced bone-in-ham, colourful vegetables (sprinkled with water and microwaved on high for 1.5 + 1.5 minutes), cubes of 4 day old pain levain. All to be skewered on brand-new fondue forks.

I did not buy a fondue pot because who knows when the next time will be. I used the cast iron sukiyaki pot which turned out to be too wide and deep for the amount we made. Next time I'll probably use my cocotte.

Husband cooked the sauce. He cut a clove of garlic into two and rubbed them all over the halfway up the sides. The wine was added and brought to a simmer before stirring in the cheeses a handful at a time. At the end, he poured a glug of kirsch.

Keep the pot at a low simmer so the cheese stays melty and creamy not bubbling like lava. One cup of wine was too little, I would double that with confidence, in any case the cheese kind of seized up halfway through the meal, so we poured the Chablis we were drinking into the pot and stirred briskly which smoothened it out again. 

The instructions also said to season with salt, pepper and nutmeg but we forgot and it was still fine. The sauce was delicious, boozy and cheesy and made everything taste good. We probably will do this all over again as it is quite uncomplicated and rather fun.

Cheater's Prawn noodles

After living here for nearly two years I finally found out that yes, besides the all-ubiquitous cooked prawns, fresh prawns are actually available at the Wilson market but they run out fast i.e. by 9 am there would be none left. The official market hours are 9-12 so this sold-out-even-before-opening hours phenomenon I attribute as yet another joke the French play on hapless outsiders, along with their inscrutable queuing system. I mean, come on, it's only raw prawns or shrimps not some rare deep sea specimen, why can't they sell more of it since the demand is already there?

Anyway, back home, Husband was only too happy to peel the entire bunch, so fresh the creatures were still wiggling about, and remove the black vein along the back. He left the heads on at my request, the roe and the stuff inside adds tonnes of flavour and are delicious to suck on. The prawns were steamed with a small piece of smashed ginger & a splash of cooking wine. 10 minutes. While the prawns were cooking we rehydrated some beehoon (dried rice noodles).

The prawns and cooking liquid were tossed with the beehoon, along with a few drops of sesame oil and good soy sauce. A portion was doled out for V and the rest we zinged up with dried chilli shrimps (current favourite is Tean's which is a Malaysian product that Sui Mai brought over when she visited, it's terrific) and voila, we had ourselves a terribly tasty dish of prawn noodles.

We could have added some chopped scallions or blanched vegetables, but it was a Saturday evening and I wanted to watch DVD so we ate the noodles as it was and then munched on some very sweet red seedless grapes from Portugal.

Baked Beans with Pork

In our household we consider Heinz Baked Beans as a staple. When we get visitors from UK they are usually surprised at our request for baked beans. It's not that it's not available here, Bon Marché has them at an exorbitant price and Carrefour occasionally has stocks, so our supplies are usually quite precarious.

Next, the curious visitors will ask of me, how do you eat it? Well, what we don't do is to put it on toast. I might microwave a small tin and eat it as a snack, but with a regular sized tin I make a dish with cubed pork in a Chinese style. It is a common enough dish in Singapore and Malaysia but not elsewhere which accounts for the surprise when they first hear of the recipe. The sweet, sour and savoury flavours make it an appetising accompaniment to rice, and it is very easy to cook, children in particular will love it. One more thing, don't bother with other brands, only Heinz will do in this instance.

1 tin Heinz Baked Beans.
1 fist-sized chunk of pork, cubed (cut smaller than the ones here) and seasoned with salt & pepper
1 clove garlic, chopped finely
On standby: sugar, white vinegar & tomato ketchup

1. Sautée chopped garlic until fragrant but not brown.
2. Add pork and stir 3-5 minutes until the inside is cooked
3. Pour contents of tin of baked beans in. Stir lightly and let it simmer at medium heat for ~2 minutes. In the meantime add a generous dollop of ketchup, a few drops of vinegar plus a pinch of sugar to amp up the ketchup flavours.
4. Let the mixture dry out a little and become a darker colour, caramelized sauce at the edge of the pan is yummy. Dish out.

Braised pork with dried squid

The combination of pork with dried squid and chilli is fantastic. If I am pressed for time I might also do a quick stir fry with semi-lean pork but since the weather is colder now husband prefers a stew form with ribs which I have been making since my student days.

Recipe below is the basic version. The dried chillies are very hot if you cut it up but left whole will impart a gentler heat. It is a flexible formula. Last week I added dried mushrooms and made it more watery so I could submerge some hard-boiled eggs. Just remember to make a big pot of rice because the soupy gravy is perfect for it.

2/3 of a rack of ribs, cut up and marinated with salt, pepper & cooking alcohol

2 medium pieces of dried squid, soaked in cold water for ~4 hours, back cartilage stripped away and body plus tentacles cut into thin strips

2 cloves garlic, finely chopped

4 dried chillies, rinsed and cut into half

1 1/2 tbsp dark soya sauce

1 tbsp Mushroom soya sauce (optional)

1. In a heavy bottom pot, sautée the garlic till fragrant but not burnt. Toss chillies, then the squid, into the pot and stir them all around.

2. Add the pork ribs and sauces, stir briefly. Add 2 cups water and slowly bring to boil.

3. Simmer at least one hour to let the squid take on the flavours of the other ingredients.

Another recipe that harks back to my student days is courgette stir fried with pork. This was made with beef because it was what I had in the freezer. It was a good way to cook the courgettes which were plentiful and sweet last month, and it is not spicy so V can eat it while husband enjoys his rice with the spicy stew.

1 clove garlic, finely chopped

3 courgettes, sliced into semi-circle discs

1/2 cup of pork or beef, sliced thinly and marinaded with salt, pepper and cooking alcohol of choice.

1/2 tbsp oyster sauce

1. Sautée garlic till light brown, add meat and cook till colour lightens from its pink or red form.

2. Add courgettes, stir around for 2 minutes. Add oyster sauce and 2 tbsp water. Bring to brisk boil, continue to stir and take off heat when courgettes are tender but still cruncy.