Braised/ Simmered Jap style Pork Belly

Ingredients

• 600 grams pork belly - skinless
• 45 grams ginger - fresh (~1 1/2-inch length) sliced into coins
• 12 grams garlic (~2 large cloves)
• 6 grams niboshi (~ 10 dried baby sardines)
• 1/3 cup sake
• 1 1/2 cups water
• 1 tablespoon sugar – granulated/ or rock sugar
• 1 tablespoon soy sauce
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon of dark soy
• 1 tablespoon of mirin

Cooking Steps

1. Cut the pork into cube size.
2. Put the pork belly, fat side down, in a non stick/ clay pot that's just large enough to hold the pork in a single layer. Put the pot over medium high heat and let the pork fry undisturbed until it's golden brown on the fat side.
3. Flip each piece over and brown the other side, then transfer to a plate. wipe off excess oil.
4. Add the ginger, garlic, and dried sardines and and fry until browned and fragrant.
5.  Add the sake and boil until you no longer smell alcohol.

6. Add the water, sugar, soy sauce, salt, mirin and return the pork to the pot. Bring to a simmer and then turn down the heat and cover with a tight fitting lid.
7. Simmer until the pork belly is tender and fall-apart (about 2 hours depending on your pot conduction).
8. Strain the braising liquid and if you are going to serve the kakuni right away, skim off the extra fat. It's best if you let this sit in the fridge overnight though as this gives the meat a chance to absorb more flavor, and it will make removing the excess fat a lot easier.
9. To serve, gently reheat the pork belly. Slice and serve with some of the braising liquid, hot mustard and steamed greens.

Fusion Style Pan fry Pork Chop, served with boiled Asparagus & Cherry Tomatoes

I love asparagus. I would always order them when i dine out because I had never cook them at home (till today). I havent tried to cook them again after my first not so tasty experience back in Singapore, when I was in college like over a decade ago. I had the small narrow ones and I had prob not bought the freshest of the lot and so it turned out chewy...

So today, after reading through this French cookbook that taught me how to prepare asparagus and cook them, I decided to give it a go and ....they turned out beautifully!!!! Apparently there are several ways to cook them but I reckon this simple French way is the best. Even without seasonings, the asparagus was naturally sweet and retains the crunch when bought fresh. I kid u not.

Unseasoned Boiled Asparagus & cherry tomatoes

Time to Cook both vege and meat concurrently: 15mins
Time to Prep: 10mins
Time to marinate pork: Minimal 2hours before hand.
Served 2 pax

Ingredients

- a pack of fresh asparagus that should be firm at the stalk, and no holes through the stalk.
- 1.5tbsp of salt.
- a pot big enough to lay the asparagus horizontally flat while cooking

Cooking Steps

- After purchase, fill a cup or container with cold water and stick asparagus upright until u are ready to cook them.

shaved asparagus upright in container

- Peel the asparagus from the stalk, use a small vege knife cut 1/16 into the layer to remove the woody chewy layer. As you move progressively up to the tip, the cut gets shallower. You should see the tender lighter green under surfacing as you slice away the top layer. Stick them back in the container.
Tip: Dont use peeler, it's not effective enough.

- Once peeled and ready,  Fill the uncovered pot with enough water to be able to cover the asparagus. that's prob abt 1/3 pot guide.

- Add the salt and bring to a boil.

- Add the rinsed peeled asparagus into the salted water pot. When the water starts to boil again, turn the heat down to low and simmer for about 10-12 mins, pot uncovered. (time depending on the thickness)

- To check if its ready, take one out. If your butter knife cuts into the bottom stalk, its cooked.

Remove from water and ready to serve.

Tip: If you like, u may pop the cherries into the hot water for a quick soak before serving. Read somewhere that cooked tomato skin delivers more antioxidants than uncooked ones. 

Tip: Asparagus can keep for another 20mins after cooking. If u are cooking ahead, you can dip the cooked asparagus in ice cold water to stop the ongoing cooking within the veg, and then quickly dip into hot water when ready to serve warm. 

Ingredients for the pan fried pork

- 2 pork chop with bone in (about 1 inch thick)
- half red onion
- a quarter cinnamon stick (optional)

Marinate sauce
- 1tbsp oyster sauce
- 1 tbsp of chinese rice wine
- 1 tsp of pepper
- dash of salt
- slightly under 1tbsp of light soy sauce (i used the kikoman less salt version)
- 1tbsp of sugar.
- 1 egg white

Cooking Steps

1. Mix all the sauces together. Taste for salty level and adjust to taste. Cut back the salt if too salty

2. Add the egg white and beat lightly together with the sauces.

3.  Pour the mixed sauce into the zip lock plastic bag and add pork in. Fully cover the meat with sauces to marinate.

4. Leave the marinated meat in fridge for at least 2 hours. Best 4 hours.

5. When ready to cook, add butter or olive oil or coconut oil to frying pan at medium heat

6. Add the pork. For me, I would cover the lid to ensure my pork is being cooked inside.
Note: Semi-cooked pork contains parasites that may host inside your brain...

7. Turn the flame down to low with lid covered so that you dont burnt your meat.

8. Flip over after about 5 mins, your skin would be nicely brown. Repeat for other side for another 5 mins.

9. Depending on your meat thickness, if yours is a thin slab, after 3-4mins on the other side, you could take it out and slice a little near the bone to check if its thoroughly cooked. if not, then give it the full 5 mins.

10. Remove from pan and rest the meat on the side.

11. Add the onion in the pan and quicky stir fry with a quarter of cinnamon stick till it is soft..

12. Add a little water to the marinate sauce left over and bring to boil with onion. Adjust taste as needed with salt or sugar. Because of the eggwhite, it will not be clear sauce, so filter and sieve off as preferred.

Dinner is served with rice.

Alternate mixture will be with sauteed mushrooms & brocoli as below.

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.

Taiwanese style Braised Pork with Carrots and Mushrooms

Made Taiwanese style soy braised pork tonight. This is one of my favorite because it is so easy to make, short time taken and yummy to eat with rice.

Serving: 2 Pax

Ingredients

1. 2 medium size Collar (neck) pork.
2. Pre soaked Fresh Chinese/Japanese Mushrooms - (amount subjective, at least 4 will be nice.)
3. Carrot strips (amount subjective - usually half a carrot will do)
4. 4 big Garlic cloves - coarsely chopped
5. Dark Soy Sauce (Using Taiwanese Kim Lan brand) （老抽／黑酱油）

6. （Kim Lan brand) Soy Paste (金阑酱油膏）

7. Rock Sugar & fine sugar

8. Wu Siang Fen - 1 tsp

9. Fried Onion Shallots - 2 tbsp.

10. Oil for frying (am using coconut or olive oil)

11. 8 Soaked Red dates, deseeded.

12: Pine nuts (optional)

Prepare sauce

1. Mix 1/2 cup of soy sauce with 1/3 cup Soy paste (you can lessen the portion. I dont even rem if its 1/2 cup coz I do a visual estimate)

2. Mix in the Wu Siang Fen

3. Put in 1 tsp of brown/white sugar and 5 small rock crystal cube sugar. 

4. Pour in 2 cup of water

Cooking Steps

1. Cut the pork into cube or slice bite size.

2. Heat 2 Tbsp of oil. Stir fry chopped garlic until just light brown, throw in the pork and fry together till pork is cooked in wok. About 5mins.

3. Pour in prepared sauce. Lower to medium flame. Cover lid for 5mins and stir.

Optional: (4. If you have earthen pot or those ceramic pot, it is best to use them over metal wok to gives tenderise the meat as it absorb the flavour. However if you have none, you can still use wok. Transfer from wok to earthen pot if you can. Cover lid.)

5. Mix in the fried Onion Shallots. Estimate 2 tbsp or more if you like.

6. Mix in mushroom strips & the 2 red dates.

7. taste the sauce, if too salty, add more water.

8. Cover and simmer over low flame for 15mins. 

9. Add carrot strips now. Taste the sauce. if it is still not sweet, add a few more cube rock sugar or you can wait till after you add carrot to decide. (carrots will also sweeten the sauce) .

Soy sauce gets saltier when cook over time, so add more water if necessary. it's subjective so I wont indicate how much to pour in.

10. Cover simmer till meat is tender. Generally another 10-15mins give or take.

11. Garnish with Pinenuts.

Cooking: Tangy Chinese Spare Ribs [糖醋排骨]

Finally after multi-levels of procrastination, I decided to try cooking the pork ribs that had been on my "to try" list for months now. 

I like tangy spare-ribs ［糖醋排骨］and been meaning to make them for ages now. One of the reason it took so long was because I was hoping to find a small bottle of Black vinegar as required ingredients. I think it turned out well:)

Sauce Ingredients:
1. Zhejiang Vinegar （浙江醋）- 2 tablespoon
2. Black Glutinous Vinegar （烏醋）- 2 tablespoon (required! It gives the dish the nice rounded sweet taste like 排骨王)
3. 2 teaspoon heaps of white sugar, or use cubes of icing sugar (冰糖）(personally I prefer the latter)
4. Tomato sauce - 1.5- 2 tablespoon (i just gauge when I cook)
5. Dash of cornflour - 1/2 - 1 teaspoon for those precision cookers.
6. Dark soysauce - 1 tablespoon
7. Plum sauce (梅漿）- 1 teaspoon

Marinade A:
1. Sugar - 1/2 tablespoon
2. Lemon Juice - 1 teaspoon
3. Salt - 1/2 teaspoon
4. water - 1 tablespoon (I kinda omit this because the ribs were already wet after rinsing)

Marinade B:
1. Plain Flour （面粉）- 1 tablespoon
2. Potato （太白粉）or Corn flour - 1 tablespoon
3. water - 1 tablespoon ( to combine the flour)

Cooking steps
1. Marinate the ribs prior to cooking. First marinate the ribs with Marinade A for at least an hour. Stick it in the fridge.

2. Combine the marinated ribs with Marinade B and set aside for at least 30mins.

3. Heat (peanut/coconut) oil over medium flame and deep fry the marinated ribs.
Remove ribs when it is golden brown. Cook longer if ur ribs are very cold or very thick. Hard to burn ribs if u are watching it as u deep fry. Note, do not over heat the oil too much at the start or u will burnt the meat rather than cook it through.

4. While your fried ribs are draining oil on the side, use a different pot, put in a tablespoon of the used oil and then pour in the Sauce mix into the pot and stir over low flame. This is the time you get to adjust the taste. If you think its too sour, add more (2-3) icing cubes (or sugar). Dont overdo it. moderate bit by bit. Do not make it too sweet as the flavor will change again when combined with the ribs. Note: Do not stir over heat too long or you will lose the vinegar aroma.

5. Add a little corn flour if the sauce is still too watery but not too thick else its hard to coat the ribs later. (optional step)

6. Reheat the pot of frying oil and do a quick refry 10-15seconds before serving. (optional if the time lag between sauce preparation and serving is not long)

7. Pour the sauce over the ribs and mix well. Let the fried layer of the ribs soaked in the flavor of the sauce before serving (that's about a min or two. The taste will differ slightly when ribs are very hot and when cooled)

PS: I didnt have plain flour so I had only used the corn flour. This wont affect the taste but will affect the layer of batter on your ribs.