Red Braised Pork Belly 红烧肉 (Hong Shao Rou) Recipe

Hello folks, Happy Winter Solstice to everyone! Tonight is supposed to be the shortest day of the year (so obviously night time is going to be longer). For the Chinese, today we celebrate 冬至 which literally means winter solstice festival in English. We will prepare glutinous rice ball (tong yuen) in the morning and offer some for prayers before eating them ourselves later in the day. They used to say every year you eat tong yuen and that signifies that you're getting one year older. Every year, Winter Solstice is an important day as my extended family will all gather together and have a great feast for dinner! With a great feast, comes a long day of slaving away in the kitchen preparing dish after dish of food for the dinner. Today I am going to share the recipe of a dish which I just made for the first time ever: 红烧肉! The source of inspiration for this dish is due to all the mainland chinese dramas that I've been watching previously where they keep bringing up this dish! Hehe...

Ingredients:

600g of pork belly

40g of rock sugar (crushed - about one small rice bowl)

4 cloves of garlic

10 g of ginger (approx. 1 inch block)

10 g of the white parts of green onions

2 tbsp of soy sauce

1 tbsp of cooking wine

1 1/2 tsp of salt

4-5 tbsp of cooking oil

Water

Click to read more!

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Chicken Quesadillas

Hello everyone, it's been 5 months since my last blog update. How are all of you? Hope all of you are doing well.

I guess the long hiatus in my food blog was simply due to lack of inspiration and motivation in the last 5 months. I could not bring myself to check out interesting new recipes nor did I have the mood to cook anything a little more than simple. It was a dull period where I cooked only to eat... and I ate almost the same few things every day. Come to think of it now, I really have no idea what was going on during that time. I just felt so unmotivated. About 2 weeks ago, I made Chicken Quesadilla (inspired by a recipe I saw in one of my cookbooks) because I figured I had left over tortilla wraps anyway. Personally, I simplified the whole recipe into a really easy one because I do not have some of the ingredients as stated in the book. So today, I am going to share my version of this easy Chicken Quesadilla which is quite a good comfort food when you really need some TLC.

Ingredients: (Serves 1)

Tortilla wrap (any flavour) 1 piece

2 slices of Cheddar cheese

1 chicken breast about 120g, sliced

3 shitake mushrooms, sliced

1/4 of a big onion, sliced

10-15 spinach leaves

3 cloves of garlic, minced

Red pepper flakes 1 tsp

Chilli powder 1 tsp

Dried basil leaves 1 tsp

Salt

Coarse black pepper

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Waroeng Penyet (Langkawi branch)

Somewhere around mid-March, boyfie and I went on our first trip to Langkawi together. The main purpose of the trip was to attend LIMA 2015 which is an aero-exhibition and they have very beautiful airshows. After a whole day of standing under the sun, the both of us were so sunburned that our skin were dark red. Long story cut short, we had dinner at this small little restaurant called Waroeng Penyet that night. It is located inside Langkawi Parade Megamall, also known as Teow Soon Huat Mall by the locals. 

The little restaurant is located right next to the side entrance of Hotel
Langkasuka. It is also quite near the main entrance of the mall.

This is the restaurant's dining which is kind of built out of the main restaurant itself.
As you can see, there quite many locals having their dinner so it must be good!

We were given a menu and order forms to write down whatever we wanted to order from the menu. Then, we have to walk to the cashier counter to pay for our order first before they serve our food. We waited for about 10-15 minutes and our food and drinks arrived. At first look, they all look very dry and unappetizing. Fortunately, the moment you bite on it... it is really soft on the inside while remaining crunchy and fragrant on the outside.

Ayam Penyet ♥

Daging Empal Penyet (Beef) ♥

I guess this is the main bomb of the restaurant. The chilli sauces are what makes
these penyet dishes so wonderful. Makes your rice and chicken so yummy!
You can self-serve these chilli sauces by yourself at the sauce counter
near the entrance of the restaurant. I chose two of my favourite!

As I remember, each dish that we ordered came with one plate of white rice and you can refill your chilli sauce as much as you want. Each dish cost about RM 7-9 so I think it is still quite affordable. Besides these meat dishes, there are one or two vegetable dish such as sambal kangkung. All in all, it was a good dining experience for the two of us ☺

You can check their menu here at their website: Waroeng Penyet Menu

LANGKAWI PARADE MALL

hop 19 level one
Langkawi Parade Mall
A14-15 Pokok Asam
Kuah Langkawi, 070000

Tel Phone: +60 11 2335 1951

 Happy eatin' ☺

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Easy Kimchi recipe

Few weeks ago, I decided to make my own kimchi. I did it mostly because many Korean recipes that I wanted to try require the use of kimchi and store-bought kimchi are so rare here in SP. Many years ago, when I was still a secondary school student, I used to make bottles of kimchi and store them at home because I really liked them a lot. Even my grandmother likes it, so we are like two big fans of these pickled vegetables. Experimenting with it again now, I was half expecting it to fail. But thank God, it turned out to taste exactly how I would like it to be. I got this recipe for kimchi from Maangchi.com, a website owned by a cute Korean food blogger who generously shares all her recipes too. Of course, I did some alterations in the recipe as some ingredients cannot be found here in Malaysia. Still, thanks to her recipe, my bottle of kimchi turned out be quite pleasing and useful for many other Korean dishes. 

Ingredients:

500g of napa cabbage (or also known as chinese long cabbage)

1/4 cups of salt

For the porridge

1 cup of water

1/8 cup of glutinous rice flour

1 tbsp of sugar

For the kimchi paste

1 1/2 tbsp of fish sauce

3/4 cups of hot pepper flakes

4 cloves of garlic

1 tbsp of minced ginger

1 small onion

3-4 stalks of green onion

1/2 cup of radish (julienned)

1/4 cup of carrots (julienned)

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Wonton Soup recipe

Yesterday, I suggested that we have wontons for dinner as I bought a packet of wonton skins about two weeks back and I still haven't used it yet. Since both he and I had a nearly empty fridge except for the wonton skins and also meat, he agreed to have only wontons and rice for dinner. Hehe :D 

I suggested that we make wonton soup as we have been eating mostly fried stuff for two days straight. But, after wrapping all the wontons, he decided that there are too many wontons and putting all of them into the soup would spoil the dish. Hence, he fried half of them. We ended up having both wonton soup and also fried wonton, with rice! Still, since this post is about wonton soup, I'll only focus on wonton soup. 

Click 'read more' to find out how to cook this dish!

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How to cook instant Japanese Curry!

I love Japanese curry. To me, it tastes a bit like Maggi kari soup with a thick texture. Imagine that, with tonnes of soft carrot and potatoes over a plate of hot rice. One word: YUMS. Two words would make it: SUPER YUMS. The best part is, Japanese curry is usually sold as an instant paste in Malaysia so anyone would have the skills to cook them. It is just like cooking instant noodles with a little additional chopping skills. I usually make a big batch of curry at once and then freeze the leftovers so that I can have them at some other time by just reheating it. Perfect for those lazy days when I don't feel like chopping and cooking and then washing a chunk-loads of pots, pans and dishes.

Ingredients: (Serves about 5 people)

1/2 a packet of Japanese curry paste (about 100g)

2 medium sized onions

2 medium sized carrots

2 medium sized potatoes

1 tbsp of oil

Water

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Simple Paratha Wrap

Saturday morning and I woke up hell'a early just because I couldn't sleep in any later. Damn... I think I am aging. Since I woke up so early in the morning, I figured I probably should fix a good breakfast for myself. I probably hadn't make a nice breakfast for myself in months just because weekday mornings are too much of a rush and I like to have noodles from the hawker stalls on weekend mornings. Few weeks back, I bought frozen paratha's from Tesco because they were finally on promotion! Still, they cost RM 5 per package and that's equivalent to RM 1 just for a plain piece of paratha. Hence, I still think they are pricey despite being on sale. (heh! me trying to be frugal :P) Initially, I wanted to make it into a paratha roll and slice it up so that I get two pretty rolls for breakfast. Unfortunately, as always, I overestimated my ingredients and I was not able to roll it up. Well, that's okay since I decided to just fold it into two and call it a wrap ☺☺☺

Ingredients:

1 plain paratha

1 small tomato (sliced)

2-3 leaves from butterhead lettuce

1 frankfurter sausage

1 egg (beaten and seasoned with salt and pepper)

Sriracha sauce

Click 'read more' to check out the recipe!

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