Chinese Style Pan Fry Fish Fillet with Soy Sauce

I normally like my fish steamed but once in a while when I crave to have porridge
 (Not congee. Congee is the Cantonse style where rice is completely disintegrated but porridge is the type you still see the rice grain in full and you get the benefit of rice soup/water - which is good to stop tummy runs.)

Tried frying fish for the first time.
I think I overcooked mine, forgetting that mackeral is less fatty than salmon and thus 5 mins was excessive.... However, all in all, it was good and definitely something I would want to perfect to make it taste like mum's. Not quite there yet for mine. I will come back here after i refined the recipe.

Pan fry fish

Ingredients:

- Mackerel or any white fish fillet you like.
- Sliced 2 inch of ginger into thin slices for frying
- 1 stalk of spring onion for garnish
- Shaoxing wine - 1 capful
- 2 tbsp of dark soya sauce
- 2 tbsp of light soya sauce
- dash of sugar into the soya sauce combined
- dash of white pepper
- 1 tbsp of sesame oil

Cooking Steps:

1. Marinate fish fillet with shaoxing wine, salt (dash) for about 20mins.
(throw in thin slices of ginger if you have extra on the fish to marinate as well)
2. Heat oil in frying pan. When oil is ready, add in sliced ginger slices. Remove from pan once it starts to brown.
3. Add fish fillet to pan fry until it turns brown. Remove from pan.
4. The remaining combined soya sauces, throw to the pan and heat. Drizzle over the fish. Add garnish.

PS: From my experience, it prob takes about 2 mins on one side or less depending on your thickness.

Chinese Style Apple Pork Rib Soup

Tried a new pork soup recipe today. It's a super light refreshing soup that is a nice change from all the heavy flavour soup. I dont think I have "perfected" it the way I imagined yet but it's still ok.

Ingredients

- 300-400grams Soup pork bones (西施骨）and pork shank (the more you have, the sweeter the soup is and lesser time to boil)
- 2-3 red large ripe apples
- 6-8 deseeded red dates
- 1 white onion cut in slices
- 2 Honey dates
- 1-2 Carrots (optional)
- 2 inch ginger smashed (optional)

Cooking Steps

1. Rinse and deseed the apples. I left the skin on.
2. Rinse pork. You can choose to boil the raw bones until the scum is out and scope out, before starting your soup pork or you can rinse the pork with boiling water.
(If u bought the fresh pork from wet market or butcher, you can do the former but if you bought the meat from supermarket, I would just rinse with boiling water else I noticed my final soup is always very bland and less sweet if I cook the bones first time round)
3. Heat the water, 3/4 full and add the smashed ginger, pork bones and shank and honey dates.
4. High heat for half hour and turn to medium heat.
5. Cook for an hour and when the scum and "filth" appears, scoop and remove.
6. Add in the red apples and red dates. Cook for another 50mins on medium - medium low heat depending on the type of pot you use. I use the stainless WMF steel mid-size, so I stuck to just under medium heat.

Korean Style Beef Bulgogi with Green peppers and Enoki Mushroom

This is a classic Korean dish and it's so easy to make that a lazy person like me has file it under "Quick meal". Prep and cook time takes under 30mins.

Beef Bulgogi

Ingredients

-300-400gram of marbled shabu shabu beef. (I used the Australian sliced version)
- 1/2 stalk leek, sliced thinly at an angle
- 1/2 green pepper/ capsicum, sliced in long strips
- 1/2 onion, sliced lengthways
- 1 bunch of enoki
- 6 cloves garlic, chopped
- 1tsp grated ginger
- 1/4 cup soya sauce (adjust as u like according to the beef amount)
- 2tbsp sesame oil
- 2tbsp mirin
- 1tbsp fine sugar (the original recipe ask for 2tbsp but i cut it down)
+ seasame seeds, toasted for garnish at the end (optional)

Cooking steps

1. Marinate beef with sugar, soya sauce, sesame oil and mirin for about 15mins or so. Leave in fridge unless you have winter chill temp in your kitchen.

2. Add chopped garlic and grated ginger.

3. Heat frying pan with 1tbsp olive oil.

4. Stir fry capsicum, onions, enoki mushrooms with some minced garlic

5. When capsicum starts to soften (prob about after 5mins on high heat), add beef and leeks together into the vege mix. Important not to overcook your beef esp slice which only takes few mins to cook. Once it turn from red to brown, it's done.

Add marinated beef slice to the vege mix.

6. Once the beef is cooked, turn off flame and served with jasmine steamed rice.

Alternatively, you can make your own beef bulgogi sandwich by adding this to white bread.

Tip: if you are not using sliced beef, add some pureed fruit (apple/ pear), this will tenderise and add more sweetness to your meat.

Chinese Style Pork with Prawn Dumpling Soup

Had a go at making shrimp dumpling for the first time tonight. The wrapping of 60 dumplings took me about an hour to finish. Good thing for home video to entertain me while my hands were hard at work:)

For the soup based, instead of chicken stock, I went with pork bones and with carrots instead. Turned out relatively well in my humble opinion...except I got to rem to add black fungus and add more pepper next time round. 

Dumpling Ingredients

1. 100g minced pork

2. 250g of prawns

3. 4 stalk spring onion

4. diced 4 water chestnuts

5. 3 cloves minced garlic

6. 1tsp Sesame oil, 1tsp pepper, 1tsp salt, dash of sugar

7. 3 Tbsp light soy sauce 

8. 1tsp of ginger juice

9. (Black fungus/ bamboo shoots) optional

10. dumpling wraps

Soup

1. 400grams Pork bones and meat

2. 1-2 carrots

3. 2-3 whole water chestnuts

4. 4 stalk Spring onion (bottom white half) - upper green half for garnishing

5. coriander garnishing

Cooking Steps:

1. Marinate the minced pork with soy sauce, pepper, saly, sesame oil, ginger juice.

2. Cut the prawns into corse chucks if they are large prawns and wouldnt fit into the dumpling sheet. Add to the minced pork

3. Chopped the spring onions, minced and add to pork prawn mix.

4. Add the chopped chestnuts and black fungus into the meat mix.

5. Marinate for at least 2 hours. 

6. Boil 2L water and add rinse soup pork bones and cook at high heat for 30mins. Lower heat to low, add chestnuts, bottom half of spring onion and simmer for about 2 hours. Watch the flame. Add salt to taste as necessary. Add carrots and turn to medium heat, boil for another 20mins with lid closed.

7. Take the marinated meat and wrap one with the wanton skin.

8. In a separate boiled water, cook the wanton for couple of minutes and taste when cooked. (rem the time required to cook because it varies depending on the amount of meat you wrap with) Adjust the seasoning to add more soy or pepper or salt at this point to the meat lot. 

9. Wrap your meat and seal the sides of the skin with water. I am lazy, so I did it the rectangular wrap as u can see in the photo.

10. Cook the dumplings for the necessary time (at least 5 mins) and served with soup.

Garnish with corridander.

Vietnamese style Chicken Pho

I thought I would challenge myself into making something new for dinner tonight. So for a change but not straying too far off, I opted to try making Vietnamese Chicken Pho tonite!

I searched around abit for a more authentic recipe rather than those half fusion ones like those featured in Masterchef Australia. I have never heard of celery and thyme in any Asian broth so I cut all those stuff out. Interestingly, I chanced upon a "true-blue" recipe written by a Vietnamese targeted for her American audience.

Recipe: read here or below "copied" from original site for convenience. No copy right infringement intended.

I must say I am pretty proud of myself. Pulled it off nicely for my first attempt! Another recipe patted down good. It took way much longer than I expected for some unknown reason, but the soup was definitely good:) Amazing what simple ingredients pulled together make such a difference. I used all the ingredients in the link above except Cloves which I omitted because i forgotten about it in my shopping list.

What I did was to look through what ingredients she used and used the portions in estimate since I was too lazy to try to convert the weight measurement. Instinct took over for most part which may explain the longer than usual process.

My Chicken Pho Attempt