Braised Pork Belly with 梅乾菜

This is another recipe that I learn from hubby's grandma. I still remember when the first time I ate it at hubby's grandparent house, Grandma said "you are Hakanese right? this is Haka people's food". In Indonesia, my family called this food "Babi Hong" in Chinese restaurant in Indonesia, usually they cut the pork belly very wide and thin. When hubby's grandparent cooked it, they cut it into cubed. The meat cut is really up to one's preference.
I still remember that Grandma was trying to telling me the recipe in Chinese, and I was't familiar with the Chinese term of the ingredients and she got frustrated and said "aiii...ni bu dong lah!" (ahh...you don't understand!). Later on, I learned that sheng jiang means ginger.
This dish is so delicious, you need to cook it for a long time to make the meat very tender. When you cook it long enough, the meat should just melt in your mouth...oh so good! Usually it required 3 hours to cook it to perfection. Constant checking on the pot is very important, we don't want it to get burn.
I burn a pot before when I leave at the apartment, and my apartment was filled with smoke...I still remember the noise of the smoke alarm!! sigh...that's why now I prefer to cook them in a slow cooker. It's the lazy way of cooking...hehe...I can put it on the slow cooker, and it would cook overnight. Then the next morning I'll wake up to the delicious tender meat.

Ps. This dish required to use fatty pork belly with skin attached.

Ingredients,
1 pack of pork belly, sliced. Because I'm using slow cooker, I sliced my meat thick, it's 2 fingers thick.
hard boiled eggs, peeled (optional)
mei gan chai / preserved Chinese vegetable (look at the picture above). Soaked in hot water for one hour, then rinse for 3 times.
Sesame oil

Sauce Ingredients,
1 handful of garlic, crushed
6 stalk of green onion, sliced medium length
4 thumb ginger, sliced medium thickness
3/4 cup Chinese cooking wine
1 cup light soy sauce
2/3 cup soy sauce paste / thick soy sauce
10 pinch of sugar

Cooking Method,

1. Heat a large pan, drizzle generous amount of sesame oil

2. When the oil is hot, add green onions, garlic and ginger. Using medium high heat, stir the ingredients until it fragrant.

3. Add the pork, stir fry until the pork half cooked and turn slightly brownish

4. Add the cooking rice wine, soy sauce, thick soy sauce and sugar

4. Mix the sauce and the meat well, then transfer them into a slow cooker and add 2 cups of water

 5. Put the hard boiled eggs and mei gan chai on top of the meat, then close the slow cooker lid. I put it to cook on 10 hours low heat

6. After 2 hours, I flipped the eggs so it would be nicely browned, then pour some of the sauce on top of the mei gan chai again. 

7. Let it cook overnight, then you will wake up to a delicious braised pork belly, ready to be enjoy with warm steam rice.

Masman Chicken Curry & Puff Paratha

I like to stock up on "emergency foods" on my freezer.
What is emergency foods? for me, emergency foods are those easy convenient foods that I can reach whenever I don't have much stuff left to cook. My emergency foods usually are dumplings...and now I'm start stocking on puff paratha too.
Yesterday, I didn't have much stuff left on my fridge, and I have to prepare some foods for the care group at my house...then I decided to make thick curry & puff paratha, using anything I can find in my kitchen :D
It turn out so well and everyone loved it too!! Gotta make this combo again next time, with different type of curry!
This recipe is super easy because we going to use a shortcut here...a.k.a using ready to use spice...lol...but I still like to add more spices into it to make the food more fragrant :)

Ps. I didn't follow the cooking instruction from the curry box, I made the curry very thick so it suitable for dipping the paratha.

Ingredients,
10 tbs masman curry paste ---> almost the entire small jar of the paste.
1 pack of chicken wings
1 sweet potato, cubed.
1 onion, sliced.
1 handful kaffir lime leaf
1 handful chopped lemongrass
4 bird eye chilli
1 tsp sugar
3 tsp tamarind paste
1 can of coconut milk
4 cups of water
Olive oil

Cooking Method,
1. Heat the pan, drizzle some olive oil.
2. Add chicken, half of the onions, lime leaf and lemongrass. Stir until the onion wilted and the chicken turn a little bit brown.

3. Then add the curry paste & water. (In this picture I only put 5 tbs curry paste, later on I added 5 more)

4. Using medium-high heat, let the sauce boil. Then add the rest of the onion, sweet potato & chili. Let it boil for another 15 minutes, then lower and simmer covered for another 30 minutes. If your pan lid does not have the vent holes, place the lid slightly open like the picture bellow.

5. When the chicken is cooked and tender, add the coconut milk, sugar and tamarind. Then simmer for another 15 minutes. If the curry became too thick, add some more water. 

6. It's ready to be served with the puff paratha.

Tips for crunchy paratha: flattened the edge of the paratha before put it on the frying pan. I'm using medium heat and some butter to cook the paratha. 

Steamed Ginger Chicken with Black Fungus & Salted Fish

I remember growing up eating my grandma's food on almost every weekend. When we were young, we would visit Popo (that's how we call her) after church and eat her delicious foods. Yesterday, I suddenly craving her food...I can's stop thinking about her delicious steam ribs. But since I don't have ribs at home, I alternate to chicken to cook the same dish, and it tasted equally great! :)
This dish is also one of the variation of the infamous ginger wine chicken, every household have their own style of ginger chicken. Ginger wine chicken is a type of "ciak po", that's how Indonesian Chinese referred to foods that have a lot of benefit to your health (usually will contain Chinese herb). People eat ciak po when they are sick, recovering from sickness, also for women in their confinement period -40 days after childbirth-  I will post my very own special ginger chicken recipe soon :)

Ingredients,

1 pack of chicken legs, chopped and washed

2 medium size salted fish

1 handful of black fungus

Sauce Ingredients,

1 handful of garlic, crushed

4 shallots, thinly sliced

2 thumbs of ginger, thinly sliced

1/3 cup Chinese cooking wine

1/8 cup rice vinegar

1/2 cup light soy sauce

sesame oil

sugar

Cooking Method,

1. Put the garlic, shallots and gingers into the bowl

2. Put the chicken pieces into the bowl, then put the rest of the sauce ingredients into the bowl, Mix well, then cover the bowl. I used aluminium foil to cover the bowl.

3. Let the chicken sit on the fridge for 30 minutes - 2 hours, the longer the better. Today I was cooking late, so I only marinade it for 30 minutes.

4. Meanwhile, soaked the black fungus in warm water and deep fried the salted fish, then shredded it. 

5. Take the chicken out of the fridge, sprinkle the sliced black fungus and the salted fish on top of the chicken. Ps. I change my bowl because it was too small.

6. Cover the bowl with aluminium foil, and poke some holes on the cover. Put the covered bowl into a steamer pan. Add 12 cups water into the steamer pan and steam it on high heat for 1 hour

7. To check if the chicken is cooked, sliced the chicken to the bone, when the chicken is cooked, there shouldn't be any blood. 

8. As other Chinese dish, this dish is best served with a bowl ow rice. Today, I ate it with a bowl of thick plain congee (rice porridge). 

Sai Krok / Fermented Thai Sausage with Rice & Vermicelli

Don't mind the funny shape of the sausage...my hubby is a comedian...lol.
I want to tell you a story about this special Thai sausage. On August 2009, hubby and I was on our honeymoon at Thailand. We ate a lot of Thai foods before, but we never ate the Thai's hawker foods, and off course we won't miss the opportunity to try all those authentic food while we were in Thailand.
One of the food we tried was this sausage, it was amazingly delicious, it was something new to me. The sausage was sour, and had this rice and glass noodle inside it. Oh so amazing!! We had to went to the night market close to our hotel every single day to eat that sausage, and those crazy hawker rise the price everyday! But we were so addicted that we didn't care anymore...haha

Looks amazing, right! :D

In Seattle, I went to a Thai church, and last time, one of my Church friend, Keng -he's a chef here- gave me his homemade Thai sausage, and it was delicious! the taste of the sausage totally remind me to those sausage I ate at Thailand. 

So I asked him if he willing to share me his secret recipe? Not only he shared me his recipe, he even came to my house to teach me to make the sausage, and alsooooooooo...let me share the recipe here, on my humble blog! 

ok, so here's what you need to make the sausage!...I forgot to mention that this is a huge batch of sausage :)

Ingredients,

5 lbs fatty ground pork

2 cups garlic, finely grind

2 cups cooked white rice

2 cups rice vermicelli, finely chopped

1/8 cup salt

1/4 cup chicken stock powder

1/4 cup MSG ---> I asked him WHY do we need to use msg? he said that all Thai sausage use msg...also, it will help preserved the flavor when we put it in the freezer. 

1 pack of sausage skin (pig intestines)

Method,

1. Mixed all the ingredients on a large bowl, then mix thoroughly. It will be a lot easier if you just put on gloves and mix it with your hands.

2. When you already mixed all the ingredients together, start proceeding with infusing the mixture into the sausage skin. There's a lot of way to do this, if you don't have the machine, you can use regular cone to infused the meat into the skin.

other option is, omit the skin and just make meatballs. Easy and fast! :)

3. This is the important step! after you finished wrapping the sausage, take a toothpick to poke some holes on the sausage's skin. 

4. And then, put the sausage inside the oven (not heated) for 2 days for it to be fermented and creating the slight sour taste. 

5. After 2 days, you can cook the sausage, or put it on the freezer.

We baked our sausage for 40 minutes today, 

The sausages was delicious! last time we also made omelet using this sausages :)

I ate the hawker Thai sausage on 2009, but I can still remember how it tasted. And If I have to compare it with the sausage we made last week, they tasted quite close, but the different is that the hawker one is more sour (probably they put more garlic?) and also more fatty and greasier (because it was deep fried???)