Home Cooked Food

15 Minute Cheesy Leek Soup - Petra Cross

2012-01-01T16:25:00.000-08:00

My friend Petra posted this 15 minute cheesy leek soup recipe:

Check out her recipe blog too!

Israeli Street Food

2011-10-25T18:55:00.000-07:00

Israel is known in the bible as the land of milk and honey. Lots of produce are grown in the region including olives, figs and dates.

Pickled veggies, hummus, falafel, tahina and schwarma are typical street food fair.

You can choose to pair the meal with a nice fresh cup of pomegranate and orange juice.

Happy Chinese New Year 2010

2011-02-02T20:36:00.001-08:00

Dear friends and family-
Happy Chinese New Year! Its the year of the rabbit and to usher in the New Year my mom has prepared a feast for us. Here's a video greeting from her with the feast:

Feast components:
Roast pork (kong bak)
Lo Hei (the multi colored carrot dish in the middle)
Ngoh Hiam (fried rolls)
Chap Chai (veggies and bean curd)
Prawns
Glutenous rice and minced meat
Kueh Pai Tee (fried jicama in wheat cups)

Basic Rumpah, Hae Bee Hiam and Assam Fish

2010-05-27T00:04:00.000-07:00

Basic Rumpah
1 cup shallots
1 tablespoon belachan
a couple of chillies
6 cloves garlic
fry everything until fragrant, keep for other recipies

Hae Bee Hiam
2 tablespoons rumpah from above
soak hae bee in water until soft
drain and blend
fry hae bee in rumpah
add some sugar to taste

Assam Fish
Make some assam liquid by soaking tamarinds in water
Add in rumpah and fry the fish

This post is more a note to myself since I just got off the phone with my mom and its still fresh in my mind, rather than a proper recipe.

Chinese New Year - Yu Shen

2010-02-13T19:20:00.001-08:00

Yu Shen

Today is Chinese New Year and one of the Singaporean dishes we enjoy is Yu Shen, a raw fish dish mixed with vegetables. Its supposed to symbolize good luck, long life etc.

Ingredients:

White carrot/radish
Regular carrot
Green carrot
Raw Salmon
Lime juice
plum sauce
peanuts
sesame
white noodles

Side dish:
Hoi Kare (crab ball - minced meat, crab meat, bamboo shoots, flour, light soy sauce, pepper)

We just used a box of one of these for the dry stuff:
Earthern Pot Yee Sang Ingredients
Containing:
Green Gourd, Gourd, Red Ginger, White Ginger, Green Ginger, Yellow Yam, Orange Yam, Plum Sauce, Lime Sauce, Sliced Radish, Sesame Seed, Ground nuts and vegetarian biscuit.

Toss vigorously while saying random chinese sayings (usually quad-grams) like "good health", "long life", "prosperity" etc

Easy Nonya Achar

2009-06-22T20:55:00.001-07:00

Nonya Achar. Achar is a kind of South East Asian pickled vegetable that is different from Indian Achar. Nonya Achar is probably closer in taste to Korean Kimchee than Indian Achar. It is light and refreshing and a great summer dish. My mom makes it in large quantities for Chinese New Year to give as presents to friends.

Here I shall present an easy recipe for Nonya Achar using ingredients easily obtainable in the US (I got all my stuff from Safeway for example).

Ingredient list:

Veggies:
1 napa cabbage
1 purple cabbage (or cauliflower)
3 cucumbers (or yellow neck squashes)
A bunch of French beans
A bunch of Long beans
3 carrots
2-3 red chillies
2-3 green chilies

Liquids:
2 cups of rice vinegar
2 tbs salt
3 tbs sugar
enough water to blanch the veggies in

Sauce base:
a few cloves of garlic
2-3 onions
1-2 tbs tumeric
1 knob of ginger
1-2 tbs of oil
3 sticks of lemon grass, just the bottom 2 inches, blended
A few candle nuts or macadamia nuts
Some shrimp paste (belachan), I just used lobster stock instead
1-2 tbs Ground up dried chillies (I used some Indonesian Sambal thing I got in the spice rack at the grocer - dried chillies, cayenne pepper)

Sauce finisher:
3 lemons
2-3 cups of peanuts mashed by a rolling pin
1-2 tbs sesame seeds

Achar Ingredients ready for blanching. I'm a fan of efficiency so using the engineering principle of pipelining, I managed to get the Achar done in an hour or two just by doing things in parallel.

First of all, cut up the labor intensive ingredients first, such as peeling the beans. All veggies have to be cut up into bite sized pieces. The cucumber has to be drizzled in salt. In parallel you can heat up the liquids for blanching the veggies. As you finish chopping up each ingredients, you can blanch each veggie in the liquid for up to a minute. Then drain the veggie and leave it to dry on a cookie sheet.

Achar Ingredients left out to dry

Once all the veggies have been blanched, throw away the liquids. Blend the sauce base ingredients up in a food processor, then start frying the sauce base in oil.
I started with oil and garlic, browned the garlic then added the onions and the rest of the sauce base.

Sauce Base

Fry it till fragrant, then let it cool. Stir in the veggies and add the peanuts, sesame seeds and lemon juice. Salt some more or sugar to taste.

Once everything is cool, store it in glass jars and they can be kept in the fridge for up to a month.

Tangerine Cafe San Francisco

2009-04-13T22:26:00.000-07:00

Tangerine's Zucchini Latke with Smoked Salmon.

I had a delightful lunch over the weekend at Tangerine Cafe located at 3499 16th Street San Francisco, CA. Pictured is the low carb Zucchini Latke, which tasted absolutely wonderful. The chef even decorated the smoked salmon by folding it into a rose. I really loved the menu and decor and found the price to be reasonable.

Roti Prata @ Singapore Botanical Gardens

2009-03-24T05:54:00.000-07:00

Paper Thosai. I had breakfast at the food court in the Singapore Bontanical Gardens today. I ordered Paper Thosai (SGD $3) and the Murtabak meat combo (SGD $6). I didn't expect the paper thosai to be a meter long! It was so fantastic I had to take a picture of it. The paper thosai is like a south Indian crepe made from black dhal. It came with three kinds of sauces, a coconut sambal, chick peas and a tomato based sauce. It was just yummy and fantastic. The murtabak is pretty standard fare but still good. Overall I would recommend this place for a cheap breakfast.

Lark Creek Steak House - Market Street San Francisco

2008-12-14T21:35:00.000-08:00

This is a review of Lark Creek Steak at Westfield® San Francisco Centre, 845 Market Street, 4th Floor, Ste 402, San Francisco, CA 94103, from the perspective of the Singaporean palate.

I had eaten at several steak houses in preparation of my family's visit to San Francisco and one I particularly liked was Lark Creek steak in San Francisco's Westfield mall off of Market street. We had skipped lunch in preparation of having my birthday feast at this steak house after a long day of shopping.

The decor is very contemporary, with a bar in front and spacious dining. The high roof keeps the noise level down. The table we sat at was made of polished wood and gave the whole place a cabin in the woods feel. At the far end of the restaurant is an open kitchen where you may choose to sit to watch the chefs prepare your steak.

One thing I really like about the steaks here is the steak sauce. I recommend the blue cheese butter sauce with the petite filet mignon cooked medium rare. The blue cheese sauce is complex and smoky and not too heavy. It goes well with the filet mignon. I have also tried the pot roast prime rib but its too fatty for my taste.

I told them I was celebrating my birthday and they gave me a complimentary chocolate brownie ala mode with the nice touch of having a few sprinkles of raw cocoa nibs on the side.

The service was excellent and as we left the restaurant they recognized us and brought out all out coats and bags without us having to say anything. I'll definitely return to this steak house again.

Verdict: Shiok lah!
Food: Excellent, one of the best steak places in San Francisco
Ambience: Moderately quiet, feels like a cabin in the woods
Price: On the high side, about $45 per head

Asia Grand Chinese Banquet - Part 3

2008-09-20T04:40:00.001-07:00

This is part 3 of the Asia Grand Chinese banquet that we had for my mom's 74th birthday.
Courses 6-8 are as follows.

Roast Chicken. Chinese roast chicken has the characteristic crispy skin that is so delicious, almost like the skin of the Peking duck. Our table liked breast meat but the other table didn't so we ended up grabbing extra chicken breasts from the other table.

Pa-Ting fish (sultan fish). This is some kind of cat fish that wasn't very popular but I was told it became popular when the Sultan requested for it. So now it's a popular dish in high end Chinese restaurants in Singapore.

Pa-Ting fish head. Here's the Pa-Ting fish head, it clearly looks like a catfish. Yes they serve the head. The 'other' table ate the eyes out of the poor thing, our table of youngsters avoided it. But it makes for an amusing picture.

Longevity noodles. A popular dish for birthdays, its supposed to symbolize long life. Made with the meat from Peking Duck.

Asia Grand Chinese Banquet - Part 2

2008-09-19T06:50:00.001-07:00

This is part 2 of the Asia Grand Chinese Banquet feast that we had for my mom's 74th birthday.
Courses 3-5 of 10 were delicious:
Abalone. This is a kind of sea snail on vegetables together with sea cucumber (a sea slug). Yes, I know, we Chinese eat almost anything that swims, crawls, flies or walks.

A slightly less exotic dish is Peking duck wrapped in pancakes. The duck is roasted so the skin is super thin and crispy and it is served with Hoisin sauce.
Peking Duck. That looks like very little of the duck, which is true, because the chef saves the meat for a noodle dish later. Peking Duck is one of my favorite Chinese dishes.

To wash down the fatty duck we had Lingzhi soup with Phoenix claws (chicken claws). Lingzhi is a mushroom known in Traditional Chinese Medicine for its healthful properties.
Lingzhi and Phoenix Claw soup.

Asia Grand Chinese Banquet - Part 1

2008-09-14T04:23:00.001-07:00

Asia Grand at Odeon Towers, Singapore.

For my mom's 74th birthday party we decided to treat her to a Chinese Banquet at the Asia Grand restaurant at the Odeon Towers right across from Raffles Hotel in Singapore. Parking is easy, they provide a valet service and there is ample space in the underground parking garage.

As you enter the restaurant you immediately feel that its a nice place, the waitresses open the door for you and you a greeted by three statues of confucious dieties. On the right as you enter are these huge fish tanks with various seafood that you can purchase such as Geoduck clams, Alaskan King Crabs and various kind of fishes. Here's a picture of the fish tanks.

We decided to have a custom 10 course Chinese menu so the manager Andy Chau made one specially for my mom's birthday. Here she is holding the custom menu up to the camera.

The dining setup was rather nice with fancy table cloths and nicely folded napkins. The only problem I had was that the table was a bit flimsy, but the ambience was really great on the whole. They have a lot of nice touches such as a decorative plate below your eating plate. The service staff were also very nice and topped up our Tie Kuan Yin tea regularly. Asia Grand's table setup.

The appetizers (course 1 and 2 of the 10 course meal) were longevity buns and prawns. Longevity buns are steamed buns made with rice flour and filled with a sweet bean paste.

Longevity buns.
Waitress cooking the prawns in wine before serving.
Prawns on a dish.

Mid Autumn Festival Mooncakes

2008-09-05T09:01:00.001-07:00

Mid autumn festival lights at Clarke Quay, Singapore River, Singapore.
Its mid-autumn festival in Singapore, known in Mandarin as Zhong Qiu Jie. People celebrate it by eating moon cakes and carrying lanterns around. I remember as a kid walking around the neighborhood with sparklers and lanterns and bursting into tears as the lanterns inevitably burst into flames at the end of the night.

Anyway mooncakes is this sweet pastry filled with lotus seeds and egg yolks. There are some exotic varieties like snow skin mooncakes stuffed with mango and pomelo or even a durian ice cream mooncake. The one pictured here is the normal one that my friend Justin Zhang brought back from Hong Kong for me. Each mooncake is about 1000 calories so people tend to eat them sparingly, for some odd reason everyone is health conscious in my family.Hong Kong mooncakes

Another Typical Singaporean Dinner

2008-08-26T05:30:00.001-07:00

Typical Singaporean dinner. After a friendly game of mahjong, Singaporeans typically celebrate their wins by eating a mini feast. Clockwise from the top left:

Sayur Lodeh
. A vegetable curry made with coconut milk. My mom's version contains carrots, cabbage, jicama (mang kwang), eggs and fish balls.

Roast chicken. Typical roast chicken except cooked in a convection oven so the skin is crispy. In the picture my mom is pouring the chicken drippings back onto the roast.

Top right, brinjal (eggplant). We typically cook the eggplant until its mushy, almost like a brown paste.

Far left, deep fried fish. Not sure what fish it is, but its deep fried.

Center - ground chili peppers in soy sauce.

Traditional Chinese Medicine Chicken Soup

2008-04-05T21:45:00.000-07:00

A Tradition Chinese Medicine Chicken Soup
So I was shopping in the local Chinese supermarket and asked my friend who is a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) student whats a good soup for me? She picked out this packed of herbs and I brought it home. The ingredients listed are as follows:

Hericium, Fructus Lycii, Fructus Mori, Cordyceps Cicadae and Orange Peel.

Warning do not proceed if you are squeamish.

Sounds innocuous enough I thought. Well until I opened one of the packets and found a bunch of dried bugs! It turned out to be the Cordyceps Cicadae. Cordyceps seems to be some type of fungus. The Cicadae part seems to be the larval form of a Cicada. In the picture to the left its the ingredients on the bottom of the picture. Huh. I've been drinking all sorts of herbal teas in my home country and never thought they were made from bugs. Oh well. So I dumped it into the soup with some chicken and beef bones, boiled it for two hours and had this wonderful, fragrant herbal soup. The bug parts didn't bother me at all. The other ingredients in plain English are (or just use the handy search button on the right):

Hericium Bearded Tooth Fungus. Thats the huge fungus in the picture.

Fructus Lycii -- also known as Goji or Wolf berries, these are becoming pretty common at high end grocers like Whole Foods. They are the red/orange looking stuff in the picture.

Fructus Mori -- also known as Mulberry. Thats the brown dotty stuff in the middle

Orange Peel -- regular orange stuff without the white part

Chicken - I use chicken breast, my mom likes to use black young chicken

Water

Boil for two hours and drink hot. Enjoy!

I think this particular soup (according to web search) is for good functioning of the liver and eyes.

Ngoh Hiam/ Ngo Hiam - Chinese Waterchestnut Meat Roll

2008-02-20T23:20:00.000-08:00

The recipe for Ngo Hiam is at the bottom of the page.

Chinese New Year Feast Food. Chinese New Year, or the Lunar New Year is the Chinese equivalent of Thanksgiving. Families travel far to get home to enjoy a huge feast of home cooked food. In my case I took at 16 hour flight from the Bay Area to fly back to Singapore for food. In the picture to the left, you see on the top part a hot pot of boiling soup stock with raw meats and vegetables that people place in wire holders to cook in the stock and then transfer them to bowls to eat. On the left is some raw salmon for the Yu Sheng, a raw fish appetizer that is eaten for good luck and prosperity.

Ngoh Hiam is one of my favorite dishes for the season. Here's my mom's recipe. It's scaled for a huge feast so it makes 10 rolls:

Ingredients:

Minced Meat 0.5 kg
Minced Water Chestnut 1 kg
Prawns 1 kg
Coriander / Cilantro 1 bundle of stems (yes stems, not leaves)
Green onion stem 6 sticks (without the leaves)
Sesame oil 1 teaspoon
White pepper - to taste
Light soy sauce - to taste, 1 spoon
1 egg

Mix everything together

Wipe dry a piece of beancurd sheet
Roll the mixture in the midst of the beancurd sheet like a burrito
Steam the rolls for 15 minutes and cool them in the fridge
When you are ready, cut them up into 1 inch segments (or whole if you prefer, whichever is easier to fry)
Coat the roll in 1 teaspoon of corn flour
Then deep fry until the roll is dark brown.

Serve with sweet soy sauce or honey.

Tilapia

2008-01-23T09:16:00.000-08:00

Tilapia is a great source of protein for those on a diet looking for lean, clean food.

Picture of the galley (cooking area) on the sailboat Rya Jen taken by Piaw. While I was on my Virgin Islands sailing trip I had to improvise with the spices and tools on the ship. There is not much space on the boat so you have to keep the galley really neat and tidy.

Here's what I did with the Tilapia:

Grilled Tilapia

1. Wash Tilapia in white vinegar to get rid of the fishy smell
2. Season with lemon pepper
3. Barbecue on the grill until cooked.

While at home and I want a quick meal I modified this recipe from my personal trainer Ray, owner of Built Tuff Gym in Campbell

Tilapia Soup

1. Boil two cups of water
2. When water is boiling put in 16 oz of Tilapia
3. Add in a handful of chopped dill or chinese parsley/coriander/cilantro when the Tilapia is cooked and turn off the fire
4. Optional - if you want more soup start with extra water and add in Daikon Radish in the beginning and at the end add in extra spinach or rainbow kale. Toss in a couple of tablespoons of barley if you want some extra carbs.

My acupuncturist friend Lisa on the sailing trip told me that Daikon radish and barley are good for 'dampness' in Chinese medicine and help get rid of water from the system.

Instant Kaya - Coconut Jam

2007-10-08T21:57:00.000-07:00

This delicious jam from Southeast Asia can now be made the modern way without much toiling using the microwave. Here's my mom's instant recipe for kaya:

Kaya Ingredients

1 kg Sugar
10 Eggs
1 can of coconut milk
Pandan (Screwpine) Leaves (you can get these frozen at Ranch 99 in most metropolitan areas in the US)

Mix and Microwave, stir every 5 minutes until its the consistency of Jam.

Fitday - monitoring your food

2007-09-26T16:19:00.000-07:00

I once lost 50 pounds over a year by monitoring what I ate with a custom PC software named DietPower.

Now there's a new way to do it - on the web at Fitday

Here's what I am eating.

Using Google Translate for Exotic Food Recipes

2007-06-01T19:51:00.000-07:00

Here's a cool way to use the new Google Cross Language Search:

Searching for exotic ingredients. For example, "ang chow" or red yeast rice was originally from China, so intuitively we expect Chinese pages to have more of it:

Red Yeast Rice search in Chinese.

A lot of food ingredients used in Singapore have Chinese dialect names like hae bee (dried shrimp), mee sua (rice noodles), mang kuang (jicama), pandan leaf (no idea what the Western name is) that might be hard to find in the West. With services like Google Cross Language Search we might be able to find out more information about these ingredients.

More English to Chinese queries:

Pandan Leaf

Rice Noodles (beehoon or mi fen)

Hainanese Chicken Rice

Flowering Tea

2007-03-08T23:41:00.000-08:00

So I got into work today and went over to the micro-kitchen to get my usual cup of coffee. To my pleasant surprise, I found a few jars full of flowering tea in the micro-kitchen!

I have never tried flowering tea before. Its just your normal tea leaves but hand tied in such a way that when you put it in hot water it 'flowers' and looks like a sea anemone. Here are some pictures of flowering tea brought to you by Google Image Search (of course) ;).

I did a search on amazon for flowering tea and found some for sale below:

Tea, wonderful Tea

2007-02-12T01:11:00.000-08:00

I had the pleasure of stumbling across a nice Chinese Tea place in Palo Alto today.

Its called Neotte. I guess it means 'neo tea'. I had already tried some of the nice teas such as White Peony at the Slice Cafe at Google, so I ended buying some Silver Needle Chinese White Tea. I brought it home to brew and had a couple sips while watching Battlestar Galactica. I found the taste to be refreshing and not as strong as Oolong.

I will continue expanding my selection of teas at home which already include Oolong, Jasmine, Rooibos and now Silver Needle. I'm planning to go back and try the red teas and black teas to see if I like them.

Chinese Carrot Cake

2007-01-15T10:30:00.001-08:00

To contrast my earlier post on Jodi's Carrot Cake, here's the Chinese carrot cake recipe that my mom taught me:

Ingredients

Solids
1 onion, blended
1 clove garlic, blended
1 grated white carrot (Daikon Radish) or diced purple yam
1 handful of dried shrimp
1-2 pieces of preserved chinese sausage or bacon

Liquids
2 parts water
1 part rice flour

Method:

- Fry onion or garlic in oil, remove
- Fry carrots, shrimp and sausage/bacon
- add water and flour
- add onion
- pour into a bowl and microwave until solid

Also check out Jodi's carrot cake recipe

WoW Chili

2007-01-15T10:29:00.001-08:00

My friend Klementine & Butterfly from World Of Warcraft (actually an ex-coworker that plays World of Warcraft)'s mom has a recipe for some awesome chili, reproduced here with permission

Ingredients
1 lb. ground beef of your choice (I buy the 1.1 lb packages of ground sirloin or ground round for low fatness)
1/2 large onion - diced
3 cans Bush's chili beans (I use medium spicy)
2 cans diced tomatoes (I use a mix of garlic and spicy chili flavor)
~2 tablespoons chili powder
~1/2 tablespoon Chipotle chili powder

Procedure
Brown the ground beef with the diced onion in a skillet
Salt and Pepper liberally

In a large pot, mix the beans, tomatoes, and browned beef
Add about 2.5 cans of water (I rinse out all my cans for recycling, filling them half way and add that water)
Mix well
Add chili and chipotle chili powder - adjust to taste. (I sprinkle it on top until the top of the water is coated with mostly dry powder, since it floats)
Mix well

Let it get good and hot and then simmer for at least 30 minutes. The longer the better...I usually try for at least an hour.

Serving Suggestion
For a perfect recreation of Klem and Butterfly's childhood, serve with plenty of crackers and peanut-butter sandwiches. This is currently in the "Simmer" stage upstairs and I cannot wait for it to get done!

Jodi's Carrot Cake

2007-01-15T10:28:00.001-08:00

Here's a wonderful carrot cake recipe sent to me from my friends Eric & Jodi. If you like it you can leave a message on Eric's blog:

Carrot Cake

2 c. sugar
1 tsp. vanilla
4 eggs, beaten
1 1/3 c. oil
2 c. flour
2 tsp. soda
1 tsp. salt
2 tsp. baking powder
2 tsp. cinnamon
4 c. carrots, peeled and grated (I used about 9-10 carrots)
1 c. walnuts, chopped

In a large bowl: beat eggs, add sugar and mix. Mix in vanilla and oil. In a medium bowl sift together flour, soda, salt, baking powder and cinnamon. Add these dry ingredients to wet and mix just until combined. Add carrots and nuts.

Grease and flour 2 - 9 inch cake pans well. Divide batter evenly between the two pans.
Bake 45 minutes at 350 degrees or until a toothpick comes out clean
Let cool 15-20 minutes. Invert on cake rack to cool completely.
Stack the two cake rounds after frosting the interior. Frost the top and sides with the remainder. I press chopped walnuts around the side.

Optional: pumpkin spice in batter.

Note: you could also use 2 - 9 inch square pans or one 9 X 13 inch pan and adjust baking time.

Frosting

½ c. butter
1 - 8 oz package cream cheese
1 pkg. (16 ounces) powdered sugar
1 tsp vanilla
1 c. walnuts over frosting, chopped

Mix butter and cream cheese and vanilla. Add powdered sugar and mix well.