Stir-fried Gai Lan with Fish Cake & Lap Cheong
Chinese broccoli (aka, Gai lan) is widely used in Chinese cuisine, especially Cantonese dishes. Its name in Chinese, ( Gai lan) literally means "mustard orchid", and belongs to the same plant family as broccoli and kale. It's high in beta-carotene, and contains folate, vitamin E, iron and calcium.
The most popular way of cooking gai lan is stir-fried with ginger or garlic, or just boiled with water, then served with oyster sauce. Their thick stems are edible, but take longer time to be cooked as compared with their dark green leaves. Sometimes, you might find it’s got a bit bitter in taste. My mum used to add a hint of sugar to balance their mild bitterness and bring out the best of this lovely vegetable. If you’re fed up with the usual way of blanching gai lan or stir-fried it with garlic, here’s my mum’s favourite cooking way. She liked to stir fry it with fish cake or/and Lap Cheong ( Chinese sausage). This dish is tasty, full of flavours, that the gai lan turns out to be the most enjoyable part, as it absorbs the oil of lap cheong and natural sweetness of fish. My kid likes this vegetable the most when it’s cooked in this way.
Steamed Golden Fish Cakes with Oyster Sauce + Hong Kong Trip Snapshot
Lee Kum Kee held a cooking competition for bloggers in April. To my knowledge, it’s the first one ever run in Hong Kong before. I felt honoured to be invited and created a demo recipe for their official site. Healthy, creative and fusion were the requirements and themes for every entry. So here you go, I translated my demo recipe into English to share the joy of participating something significant in food blogging.
What else could be more healthier than a steamed fish dish? Believed that this dish had nailed the competition themes, off I went to submit my recipe and posted on my chinese food blog. By adding a bit of vietnamese condiment, fish sauce, into the fish paste, I planned to bring in a kind of cross-over-taste in Chinese traditional seasoning. Besides all the cooking, I was able to know and connect more Hong Kong food bloggers through this event, as well as expand my blogging horizon a bit.
As a side note, I was invited to visit the LKK headquarter during my trip back to Hong Kong last month.
Very impressed by their giant, modern kitchen. I could imagine how excited the contestants would have felt while cooking their invention dishes in this splendid kitchen.
Pandan Chiffon Cake
This pandan chiffon cake recipe has been sitting in my draft folder way long ago. Chiffon cakes are my family’s all time favourite dessert. I make this cake quite often. Having posted the Chinese version of the recipe, I’ve nearly forgotten to translate and publish here. Thanks to the tv productions. Watching this season’s Masterchef, surprisingly found that Dan Hong's pandan chiffon cake was set as a pressure test for their contestants. The episode, shown on 6 June 2011 (Elimination Day: The race to recreate Dan Hong's dish is on), reminded me of this silently awaiting recipe. Upon viewing the episode, my urge inside yielded for trying Dan Hong’s recipe as I wanted to give my family a surprise. Too bad, after a long haul searching, Dan Hong's pandan chiffon cake recipe was not found on the Masterchef’s official site, even up to the time of this writing. Will try if it’s up there later for sure. Looking back to my old photos taken by my point-and-shoot camera two years ago, feeling it’s better to reshoot some new ones when I made this cake again. If you can’t find Dan Hong's pandan chiffon cake recipe like me, give my recipe a go. This cottony soft cake, with its subtle fragrance of pandan leaves and coconut, won’t let you down either. The cake was gone quickly. And I might bake one again for bringing along to a tea party on this weekend.
Hong Kong and Malaysia Trip 2011: Three Special Mother’s Day Meals
Hi, miss you all, my dear readers. You might have wondered if I had retired or hibernated from blogging. I just came back from Hong Kong, my home town, where my mother and all my siblings are living there. Looking back, it seemed to be a long time that I haven't blogged here. During the stay in Hong Kong, I also took the opportunity and made a five-day trip in Malaysia, enjoying lots of sightseeing and good foods of course.
Steamed Chicken with Sand Ginger Powder
Simple is the best. You can’t imagine how nice the taste of this steamed chicken was. The chicken meat is so tender and silky smooth, steamed to just cooked. If you like the traditional, popular Chinese steamed chicken , you have to try this dish as well, if you haven’t. Simply rub the chicken with a handful of sand ginger powder, you’ll see that would do a magical makeover of your chicken, giving you a pungent aroma. Don’t mix up sand ginger powder with ginger powder . Although both of them are in the same ginger family, their smells and tastes are quite different. Many Asian grocers stock sand ginger powder. If you can't find any there, try some Chinese herbal shops. As this dish is very simple, try to use organic or free-range chicken if you can to ensure the best result. Having said that, I used corn-fed chicken this time. So, that’s why my steamed chicken was in bright, lovely yellow colour. The end result remained wonderfully good.
Recently on Christine's Recipes:
- Stir-fried Gai Lan with Fish Cake & Lap Cheong
- Steamed Golden Fish Cakes with Oyster Sauce + Hong Kong Trip Snapshot
- Pandan Chiffon Cake
- Hong Kong and Malaysia Trip 2011: Three Special Mother’s Day Meals
- Steamed Chicken with Sand Ginger Powder.
- Pork Cutlets with Creamy Mustard Sauce
- Hot Cross Buns (Tangzhong Method)
- Tomato Tofu Egg Drop Soup.
- Stir Fried Sugar Snap Peas with chicken
- Lasagna (Beef and Eggplant)
- Crab Meat with E-Fu Noodles in Oyster Sauce.
- Pumpkin Chiffon Cake (Light and healthy)
- Crispy Roast Pork Belly.
- Chocolate Pear Pudding (Nigella Lawson’s no-fuss recipe)
- How To Remove a Pear Core
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