Taiwanese Meat Sauce, with no meat

Vegetarian rou zao (肉燥), in danzai noodles

To call this a "recipe" is kind of crazy, because it's basically throwing a bunch to stuff in a pan, but I guess that just tells you how easy it is to cook something pretty crave-worthy in about 15 minutes.

I looked up how to make southern Taiwanese meat sauce*, rou zao (肉燥) when I was craving dan zai mian (擔仔麵), an old-school noodles classic usually with a prawny-porky broth, prawns, some egg and this meat sauce.

Accidental Cantonese Bak Chor Mee - In The Mood For Noodles

My Cantonese-ified bak chor mee - a vegetarian version with eggplant

So I received in the mail a hefty box of Kang Kang noodles (thanks, Catchon, and no, this is not a sponsored post) and to be honest, I'm not a natural noodle fan. I don't hate them, they're just not the kind of carb I can have all the time, I have to be in the "mood"*. I was going through the box - kway teow, silver needle noodles, Hokkien yellow noodles - nope, nope, nope, not feeling it - and then I saw Hokkien flat noodles and ding! ding! ding! I felt like having 濕炒 (sup chao, or wet-fry. Sounds yuck in English but basically a stir-fry with a heavier "wetter" gravy).

I found some pork mince in my fridge, and pictured a glossy coffee-hued gravy, so I dug out my dried shiitakes, some dried morel crumbs and Mrs. So's mushroom sauce, and oh, vegetarian oyster sauce, which tastes nothing like oyster sauce but more like hyper-concentrated mushrooms with the consistency of oyster sauce. As I was cooking, I found it all a little too savoury, so I added a couple of glugs of dark Chinkiang (Zhenjiang) vinegar and finished it off with palm sugar, Chiuchow chilli sauce and black & white pepper.

It was delicious - and I feel weird about saying this about my own cooking, because I'm not exactly a genius cook (which is why I like restaurants... maybe?) and almost immediately after eating it I realised that I was, in fact, subconsciously trying to recreate bak chor mee.

Christmas Cooking Questions - To Brine Or Not To Brine

Should I brine these? (image via South Park Studios)

Around Christmastime, home cooks find themselves cooking larger cuts of meat, whole animals and the like, because we're generally feeding larger groups of people. No-one likes dry meat, and one of the eternal questions about cooking meat is brining.

Harold McGee, everyone's favourite food scientist, says that brining takes away the meat's own juices and flavours (because osmosis), and/but the salt breaks down some of the proteins so the meat will end up more tender (or mushy, if it was already very tender, or it it's been brined too long).

Breaking it down, the pros of brining are:
- Super duper juiciness
- Tender meat
- Meat flavoured with salt (which I suppose can also be a con)

And the cons:
- Meat juices (and thus flavour) lost and replaced with salty plain water
- Potential meat mushiness
- No brown pan juices from roasting

McGee recommends rubbing meat with salt and leaving it for a day or two ("dry brining") instead. With this method, however, it appears that dryness in the meat is a given, as is suggested in his article for the New York Times (he talks about serving turkey like pulled pork, with a ladle of sauce over the top). Question is, is compensating with a good sauce good enough?

Given the horror stories of dry meats at parties (I've sure eaten my fair share), I'm personally still a fan of brining. Your timing has to be right - over-brining can lead to awfully tasteless results, and I've found that lean, white meat in particular do benefit from brining, and when its dry, meat can be horrible to eat, no matter how flavoursome it might be. With calculated, minimal brining time, I've found that a balance of flavour and moisture can be attained*. I guess like most things in life, brining is a delicate balancing act.

Basic brine recipe: 1 litre of water to 4 tablespoons salt.

*Although I did learn from Harold that adding aromatics into the brine (herbs, veggies) etc. is pretty useless as those flavour molecules are mostly too big to penetrate the meat (see point 6 here). I've been using salt, water, onions, leeks, bay leaves and black peppercorns for lean pork chops, and Pioneer Woman's turkey brine for poultry. I'll try just using salt next time to test that theory out.

Happy Holidays!

Banana Matcha Cake - One-pot baking

Banana matcha cupcakes, or tea cakes, I suppose, as there isn't any icing

Two things happened recently.

One, I came home to a shattered glass bottle and half-fermented ginger beer in my cupboard (thanks to G's experiment), and at the back of the cupboard, found a long-forgotten bag of different teas, one of which was matcha (green tea) powder. Two, I got a giant bunch of very ripe organic bananas from a farmer for free (it was the end of the day at the Markets).

Matcha and frozen bananas

I went online to see if I could freeze bananas (yes I could!) and found that the best way to freeze them was to peel, then freeze them whole. (Apparently freezing them in their peels makes them black, but still edible, although it means you always need to defrost them a little and peel them before you can use them). And then I went online again to see what I could do with bananas.

After a couple of days of banana smoothies (awesome, because since the bananas are frozen, you don't need to add ice, but it's a pretty heavy breakfast) I decided to bake with them and found a recipe for matcha banana cake - perfect.

If you're lazy and hate washing up, you could potentially make this in one saucepan. If you do, make sure your saucepan is a little bigger so that the batter won't overflow.

Cook For Family - Leftover Peking duck

It's no secret that I love to eat, and on the blog it appears that I love to eat out more than in. In real life though, I eat at home quite a bit and I do cook, albeit super simple things that can be done in a few minutes - such are the demands of modern life (or that's my excuse...).

When I got an email from Razlan about Daniel's #CookForFamily initiative, I jumped right in. Rather than paraphrase, here's what it's about in Daniel's own words:

The #CookForFamily is a bloggers-for-bloggers initiative. No competition, sponsors, or hidden agenda involved. It is created with a simple objective of getting more bloggers, and hopefully their fans and followers, to start cooking and bonding with their families.

You'll see that most participants are Singaporean food bloggers, but hey, food knows no boundaries, and certainly the internet doesn't.

Peking duck slices

But then came the challenge of what to cook. I was surprised by Daniel's blog post about bloggers telling him that they don't have time to cook or don't know how to. So instead of conjuring up a fancy menu, I thought I'd come clean and just tell you all how lazy I can be, and hopefully communicate that it really isn't hard to cook for your family, even if cooking means getting a little help from leftovers.

Cooking class with the lan in Bo.lan - Part 2: Chicken relish and Eggnets

Chicken relish (rear) with fried fish

After the panang curry, we moved on to the other two dishes on the agenda - chicken relish and egg net rolls. I didn't properly transcribe Dylan's recipe or ingredients list, but hopefully the pics will give you a fair idea of what was going on.

Cooking class with the lan in Bo.lan - Part 1: Panang curry

Thai Panang Curry

I joined the Amateur Gourmet group on Meetup less than a year ago - they're a great bunch of foodies in Hong Kong who meet to go out and try new restaurants, do potlucks, food-oriented holidays and basically anything food-related and fun. The organiser, V, is super on-the-ball with what's on in the food scene, and had the great vision of bringing over Dylan Jones from the highly acclaimed Bangkok restaurant Bo.lan to guest chef for us foodies in Hong Kong. (He's the "lan" in Bo.lan" - Bo is his partner (in life and the restaurant) Duangporn Songvisava, aka "Bo").

Spare ribs, a numbers game, a recipe

I didn't have a wok...

The closest I've come to writing a recipe on this blog is at Margaret Xu's Detour event back in 2010, where she made tofu. I didn't really think I'd ever write about cooking (I'm not a great cook - not being humble - trust me), but since mid-last year, when I moved out of home (again), I found myself in a situation that I hadn't been in for about 6 years - having my own kitchen. And suddenly I've been cooking a lot more - baking, even (which is kind of how this blog started - can you believe it, I was blogging about baking) despite a tiny oven, so I will be documenting more cooking-related bits from now on. Plus, 10 months after moving in, I finally bought a wok today. I've also been joining some cool cooking classes recently, and have had no real outlet to talk about them - but duh, I have a food blog, why can't I post about cooking here?

So that was my very long explanation as to why I'm moving this recipe from my Tumblr blog (that no-one seems to read) to, well, here. I wrote this back in September 2011, you'll know why/what it was for as you read on. It's my mom's recipe - one of the dishes she almost always makes for guests, and which returning guests always ask for. Throughout the Internet, you'll find lots of similar recipes for this dish, which we call "12345 spare ribs" but is also more commonly known as "sugar vinegar spare ribs" / tong cho pai gwut / 糖醋排骨, but for some reason you'll see most of those with a very watery, light sauce. Ours is thick and sticky, like a super-dark toffee, and goes great with rice.