Chinese Recipes | Cooking Tips | Good Eats

Tag:Appetizers, sardine curry puff

I grew up with two kinds of curry puffs - the potato stuffed ones and the sardine ones. I prefer the sardine ones because I find them tastier. I also prefer the kind sold by the Malays or Indians, as opposed to the big fat Old Chang Kee curry puffs that Keropok Man stuffed himself silly with. :P

The Indian or Malay curry puffs have much less filling and crust, but they have a good balance, of both, in my opinion. I got mine from this guy (and sometimes it’s his wife) standing at the entrance of the MRT station near where I lived. I bought the sardine puffs twice from them. Three for S$1. How much cheaper can they get?

See the sardine filling with onions? They look so moist! Of course I ate all three each time, all by myself. Then … oops … the result was that I couldn’t eat much for dinner. But then, who cares? My tastebuds were happy. I can’t find this type of curry puffs in the Bay Area.

Bite This!

Tag:Appetizers, Chai Tow Kway, easy chinese recipe, radish cake, ranch 99, stir fried

Yay! I got this right! Now I can have my (radish) cake and eat it.

I stir-fried an experimental dark Chai Tow Kway dish sometime ago, but that didn’t quite work out as I did not have sweet soy sauce, so I just used light and dark (savory) soy sauce and it tasted weird, really weird. I don’t suggest you go that route! I will make dark Chai Tow Kway again another day with the appropriate sweet soy sauce.

With the experience from that previous experiment, I decided to have a go at the light Chai Tow Kway instead. As self-made Singaporean millionaire Adam Khoo says in his life coaching classes, “There is no failure, only feedback”, the previous experiment was feedback to me on what I shouldn’t have used and also what ingredients to add to make the Chai Tow Kway tasty.

Experiment gone wrong: Dark Chai Tow Kway with wrong soy sauce.

Success: Light Chai Tow Kuay with a host of savory ingredients!

So here goes… the successful Chai Tow Kway recipe:

Ingredients (Serves 1):

- 2 cups pre-made Radish Cake, cut into 1/2″ cubes
- 1 tsp garlic, minced
- 1 tsp shallots, minced
- 1/2 small Chinese sausage, cut into small pieces
- 1 tbsp Chai Poh (dried radish)
- 1 tbsp spring onion, chopped
- 1 egg
- chilli paste (optional)
- 2 dashes fish sauce

Cooking Method:

1. Heat up 2 tbsp vegetable oil. Medium heat. Stir fry garlic and shallots until fragrant. Then add Chinese sausage and Chai Poh (dried radish) and stir fry for a minute or so to cook the Chinese sausage.

2. Add Radish Cake cubes, mix well with stir fried ingredients and spread well on the pan to let it pan fry until you get golden brown bits on the Radish Cake cubes. Add fish sauce and add more oil if necessary. Stir fry occasionally.

3. When Radish Cake cubes are quite soft and have brown bits on it, make a well in the center of the pan and add egg. Mix well.

4. When egg is cooked and slightly browned, you are ready to serve. Garnish with chopped spring onions.

Cooking Notes:

1. The Chai Poh (dried radish) and fish sauce are salty, so no salt or light soy sauce is required. Do a taste test before serving to decide if you want to add another dash of fish sauce then mix well.

2. If you want to add chilli paste, you can add it during step one. Stir fry the chilli paste to exude its fragrance!

3. I bought my pre-made Radish Cake from Ranch 99. It came as a block about 6″ by 4″ by 3″. I just portioned two half inch slabs for one person’s serving and cut the slabs into small cubes.

Bite This!

Tag:Appetizers, easy asian recipe, fish cake, fish paste, otah, otak otak

I promised myself I will make Otak-Otak (also called Otah, both pronounced as “o-tar”) one day and before that day came, I sat around sulking surfed the internet for a recipe. I actually have an Otak-Otak recipe in my new recipe book: Singaporean, Malaysian And Indonesian Cuisine. However, that recipe was only for the non-spicy Otak-Otak. I wanted the orangey spicy one!

So I continued to sulk hoped and prayed and continued to browse the net and finally oh-so-wonderful Melting Wok made her Otak-Otak Asian Frittata and shared her recipe!

However, I met with obstacles. I couldn’t find all the ingredients she listed.

1. Tumeric powder - the spice section in Ranch 99 did not have this.

2. Kaffir lime leaves - Can I pluck these off a lime? She asked for 6 stems. The limes sold in supermarkets are leafless. Dang!

3. Lemongrass powder - I have lemongrass, but not the powder. Am I supposed to pound the grass into a powder?!?

4. Fish granules - If this is the same as fish sauce, then I have it. Since Melting Wok said “a dash of fish granules” I reckon this is the same as fish sauce, cos I can dash the fish sauce too!

5. Belacan powder and chili paste - I guess these can be substituted with belachan paste.

The tom yum paste already has kaffir lime leaves and lemongrass as its ingredients, so I bravely omitted those ingredients and hoped and prayed *again* that all would turn out well.

Below is the abridged version of my Otak Otak, which literally pales in (color) comparison to Melting Wok’s because I read “tbsp” as “tsp” and got the portion of tom yum paste and chili paste (which I substituted with belachan paste) wrong. LOL!

I have the corrected ingredient portions below (I estimate 2 teaspoonful is equivalent to 1 tablespoonful) and the portions are according to the 4 servings of Otak-Otak that I made. Each serving is about 6″ by 2″.

Ingredients (Serves 4):

- 1/2 lb fish paste (I bought dace fish paste)
- 60 ml coconut milk (about 1/5 cup)
- estimated 1/3 beaten egg
- 1 1/2 tsp tom yum paste
- 2 tsp belachan paste
- 2 pcs dried shrimp
- 1/2 small shallot
- 1 pc ginger (about 1/3″ thick)
- 1 pc fresh galangal (about 1/3″ thick)
- 1/3 tsp sugar
- dash of fish sauce

Wrapper:

- 4 pcs banana leaves, cut into 8″ by 5″
- wooden toothpicks, pre-soaked in water

Preparation and Cooking Method:

1. Put dried shrimp, shallot, ginger and galangal into a blender to mince them together.

2. Add all the ingredients to the fish paste. Mix thoroughly until it becomes a smooth and sticky mixture.

3. Place 2 heaped tbsp of mixture in the center of a banana leaf. Fold the banana leaf and flatten paste, then insert a toothpick at each end to create a small “packet”.

4. Preheat oven to 450 degF (230 degC) and bake the fish cakes for 15-20 minutes. Note: If you are using an open grill, bake each side of the fish cake for 15 minutes.

5. Serve with rice, nasi lemak (coconut rice) or as a sandwich filler.

Otak-Otak Conclusion:

Apart from the fact the my Otak-Otak fish cake looked paler than normal and taste-wise not as spicy as it should have been, the texture of this Otak-Otak fish cake was surprisingly quite good! I attribute this to the minced mixture of shallot, ginger and galangal.

It took me quite a bit of effort to get all these ingredients together and I was worried that I would not be able to finish using them. However, my fears were allayed when I found another recipe - Tom Yum Soup - which used similar ingredients like galangal, fish sauce, shallot and tom yum paste. *phew!*

Otak-Otak Otak-Otak! I’ll definitely make this again!

Bite This!

Tag:Appetizers, Pepperidge Farm, sardine puff

Was it the sardines’ fault or was it the Pepperidge Farm’s Puff Pastry’s fault? A bad carpenter blames his tools. A bad cook blames her ingredients? Ok ok it was MY fault.

I was overly enthusiastic in the preparation so much so that I did not poke the fork deeply enough into the puff pastry to create holes.

I only made indentations (see left picture). The result of this is that during the baking process, the steam from the sardine filling tried to escape and because there was no escape route (no holes), the steaming force was so strong that it forced through the sides of the puff pastry and made a big fat hole. The sardine also started oozing out of the hole! I had to stuff them back after I removed them from the oven.

Yes, I cheated… … BUT, for those sardine puffs that survived the harrowing experience of a steaming hot explosion, they turned out fine.

You can make nine sardine puffs from one sheet of Pepperidge Farm pastry. The sardine filling was the same mix as that from my sardine sandwich and the process of making the puff was the same as that of my chicken curry puff.

Bite This!

Tag:Appetizers, chinese pickled vegetables, easy chinese recipe

Call it a Chinese salad if you want to!

This appetizer reminds me of the Pickled Vegetables I eat in Chinese restaurants before a meal. Even before you order the dishes, the waiter places a small dish of Pickled Vegetables on the table. Sometimes they give you peanuts. And you know what.. the restaurant charges for these Pickled Vegetables, together with the Chinese tea and paper towels. So even before you place any orders, boom! you already incur a cost to the meal. These pickled vegetables stimulate your appetite so you may end up ordering more! Either way, the restaurant wins.

I should have done some research on how to make this Chinese Pickled Vegetables during my first trimester when I was having my all-day-sickness. The spiciness coupled with the sourness of the Pickled Vegetables would have made my day!

Here is the easy Chinese recipe from the recipe book: Singaporean, Malaysian & Indonesian cuisine.

Ingredients:

- 1 cup cucumber, seeded and julienned
- 3/4 cup carrot, julienned
- 6 shallots (diced) - I did not have shallots, so I used red onions instead
- 12 small red chili peppers - I had a mix of red and green ones
- 1 1/2 tbsp water
- 3 tbsp vinegar - I used rice vinegar
- 2 tbsp white sugar
- 1 1/4 tsp salt

Mix them all up and chill them in the refrigerator for a couple of hours. This is an appetizer you can definitely prepare ahead of time because it is best eaten chilled.

Note: This Chinese Pickled Vegetable recipe is different from the bottled Acar you see from the Singapore supermarkets. That is a Nonya (Straits Chinese) pickle called Acar Acar (pronounced as “ah-char”). The Nonya version is made by first preparing a spice paste called rempah, then mixing the rempah with the rest of the vegetables. The rempah comprises of shallots, garlic, red chilies, dried chilies, turmeric, lemon grass, galangal, candlenuts and shrimp paste. Too much work for me to make that!

This Chinese Pickled Vegetables dish is good enough for me.

Bite This!