Chinese Recipes | Cooking Tips | Good Eats

Rendang is a traditional Nonya cuisine. I have always been intimidated by Nonya cooking because there are just so many ingredients required.

“Nonya cooking is not only about the blending of pungent roots but also the long marinating of meats and seafood before it is cooked. Fresh herbs such as lemongrass, lengkuas [galangal or wild ginger] and kunyit [turmeric root] are pounded, more often than not, by hand using a granite mortar & pestle. Chilies, candlenuts, shallots and belacan are a must in most Nyonya dishes. Aromatic leaves such as kaffir lime leaves, pandan or pandanus [screwpine leaves], daun salam [fresh bay leaves] and daun kunyit [turmeric leaves] add ‘Nyonya zest’ to it’s wonderful cookery.”
(Source: malaysianfood.net/Nyonyafood.html)

How not to be not intimidated?!? Coupled with the fact that I may not be able to get all the ingredients in the Bay Area, is it really worth the trouble?

But I tell you… nonya food is really delicious! Lots of flavor, texture, aroma for that gastronomic experience that satisfies all your senses.

I have taken the first step. I have purchased my very first Mortar and Pestle. *Applause! Applause!* I am ready to pound my heart out and give my best effort to making Beef Rendang.

The above picture shows the Beef Rendang dish from Penang Village. The beef is tender and moist, coated in a dense fabric of spice and herbs.

My opinion is that Beef Rendang is best eaten with plain white rice and Sambal Kang Kong. We had ordered Seafood Fried Rice and I found that there was just too much going on. Eating Beef Rendang with plain white rice will ensure that you get the most out of the Beef Rendang’s rich flavor of beef, dried chillies, shallots, garlic, galangal, lemon grass, ginger, cinnamon bark, cardamom, curry powder and tamarind.

Sad news: Penang Village (1290 Coleman Ave, Santa Clara, CA 95050) is closed. Notice on their website:
“Dear Valued Customers,

Penang Village is closed due to expired lease. Thank you for your long-time support. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact info@penangvillage.com, we’ll try our best to answer you.

Thank you
Penang Village
January 15, 2007″

How not to not make my own Beef Rendang now?

Back in Singapore when I was working 16-hour days, eating was more of a “need” than a “want”, and cooking was almost a “never”.

During lunch time, I would go to the food court and choose the stall with the shortest queue, never mind that that is not my favorite stall. I just need to eat and get back to work.

One of the stalls in China Square Food Court sells mixed vegetables and meat dishes with rice or porridge. In Teochew/Hokkien dialect, we say that the stall sells “Chap Chai Png”. (”Chap Chai” means mixed vegetables and “Png” refers to rice.)

Stir Fried Pork and Szechuan Vegetable was one of the items that I would choose.

For those of you who do not know what is Szechuan Vegetable, it’s found in the refrigerated section of the Asian Supermarket and it looks like a dirty green brain. When cooked, it takes on a light tinge of orange.

Szechuan Vegetable is a type of pickled mustard stem, salted, pressed, and dried before being rubbed with hot chile paste and allowed to ferment in an earthenware jar. The taste is a combination of spicy, sour, and salty.

Easy Chinese Recipe for Stir Fried Pork and Szechuan Vegetable:

Ingredients (Serves 1-2):

- 1/4 lb pork, preferably with a little fat, cut into thin strips or slices
- 1 pc of szechuan vegetable, about size of a medium egg, washed thoroughly and cut into thin strips
- 1/2 tsp minced garlic
- 1/2 tsp dark soy sauce (for coloring purposes)
- 2 tbsp water

Seasoning for pork:

- 1/4 tsp salt
- 1/4 tsp white pepper
- 1/2 tsp corn starch

Cooking Method:

1. Season pork with salt, pepper and corn starch.

2. Heat up 1-2 tbsp vegetable oil in pan. Medium heat. When oil is hot enough, add garlic and stir fry until fragrant.

3. Add Pork and Szechuan Vegetable and stir fry until pork is lightly browned. Add dark soy sauce and mix well. Add water if you find the dish a bit dry.

4. Serve with plain white rice or porridge (rice congee).

Stir Fried Pork and Szechuan Vegetable - easy enough for you?

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.

Weekend Herb Blogging this week is kindly hosted by RealEpicurean. This is my first time participating and I know I can learn a lot from these WHB food bloggers, especially since we are talking about the international scene here!

I’d like to start off with a brief introduction to what is “Yin” and “Yang” in Chinese cooking.

“Yin” and “Yang” describe two primal opposing but complementary forces found in all things in the universe. This philosophy is also used in the realm of Chinese food and cooking.

Yang foods are believed to increase the body’s heat (eg. raise the metabolism), while Yin foods are believed to decrease the body’s heat (eg. lower the metabolism).

In general, Yang foods (e.g. chili pepper, deep fried food, dried meat and lychee) tend to be dense in food energy, especially energy from fat, while Yin foods (e.g. watermelon, cantelope, honeydew and green tea) tend to have high water content.

Ideally, the Chinese recommend that you eat both types of food to keep the body in balance. A person eating too much Yang food might suffer from acne and bad breath while a person lacking Yang food might be lethargic or anemic.

Red Dates (紅棗), also known as Jujube or Chinese Dates are classified as a Yang food and can be used for replenishing blood and boosting energy (補血益氣).

In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) cooking, ginseng in chicken soup is a classic, while bird’s nest is traditionally served sweetened with rock sugar, and sometimes with Red Dates as well.

I use Red Dates as an ingredient in Chinese Soups. These red fellas sweeten up my soup and balance the savory taste of pork, which I often use as my soup base.

Examples of soups in which I have used Red Dates are Lotus Root Soup and Radish, Dried Cuttlefish and Spareribs Soup.

Lotus Root Soup

Radish Dried Cuttlefish and Spareribs Soup

Red Dates Longan Drink

Red Dates can also be brewed with dried longans and sweetened with rock sugar to produce a sweet tea, believed to calm the mind, add a glow to the skin, and bring radiance to the eyes.

With all these benefits of Red Dates, isn’t it time to let this be one of the ingredients in your pantry?

The morning that Melting Wok posted her Hainan Chicken Rice recipe, I showed it to J and asked him if he likes to eat Chicken Rice - with roasted chicken instead of white-skinned chicken. I got a VERY enthusiastic nod and I think I caught a bit of drool from the side of his mouth.

It is a breeze to cook Hainanese Chicken rice with Prima Taste Premix, but making it from scratch is new to me so I told him “I can follow this recipe… but no guarantee ok?” When I say “no guarantee” to him, it means I may or have screwed up the recipe and the hidden connotation is “please still finish up everything.”

Since I was only cooking for two, I bought two big chicken leg quarters and halved all of Melting Wok’s recipe ingredients. The only dubious ingredient I had was thick sweet soy sauce. I knew what Melting Wok was referring to, but I just couldn’t find it in Ranch 99. I even resorted to shaking a few bottles of soy sauce to see if they had a thicker consistency than the regular dark (savory) soy sauce. In the end I went to another Asian supermarket and got a dodgy brand - I had no choice - it was the only brand sold there.

I also have a problem visualizing the ingredient measurements in ounces. What is one ounce of garlic? So I guesstimated the ingredient measurements and equated one ounce to one tablespoonful. Ha! No wonder I had to tell J “no guarantee”.

Because the chicken leg quarters were quite thick (it was from a fat lazy chicken) I made a few deep incisions on the non-skin side of each chicken leg quarter so that the marinate can seep through. The secondary purpose is that the inside of this big fat chicken leg quarter can cook faster and I won’t risk the skin burning but the inside not cooked.

Oh! I had trimmed off the fats from the chicken leg quarter, but threw them into the pan when pan-frying the chicken. I wanted to get as much oil out as possible (so sinful right?) so that I can use that to stir fry the rice with the flavoring ingredients (ginger, shallots, garlic) later. Chicken Rice is supposed to have some oil so that it’s Fragrant Chicken Rice. There isn’t such a thing as Healthy Chicken Rice. You might as well eat plain white rice.

I was very happy that the chicken skin browned very nicely. I drizzled a bit of the sauce mix (that has ginger, shallots, garlic) onto the chicken for photography purposes.

I had to add a little bit more light soy sauce to the chicken during the meal. The chicken tasted a little different from what I was used to, but on the whole it turned out fine. I didn’t make the chili sauce as I was tired after pan-frying the chicken and preparing the rice. I still said “no guarantee” to J and he still finished everything. :)

For the full Hainanese Chicken Rice Malaysian Style recipe, please refer to Melting Wok.