Vegetable porridge

My father -in-law is not filling well, no appetite to eat rice. I decided to look into my recipe book to cook something different from the usual teo chew porridge.  Finally settled to cook vegetable porridge.  Checked the refrigerator and found these green veges and some dried prawns.

the ingredients
1 cup of rice
4 stalks of veges(any type of veges)
4 tbs of dried prawns
8 cups of water
salt and pepper to taste

Wash the rice, add in the water to soak for 20 minutes.  Cook the rice and bring to boil, turn the fire to low to cook for half an hour.
Wash the vegetables and cut into 3 cm in length. Wash the dried prawns, soak and  cook with the porridge. Add in the vegetables when the porridge is ready. Add salt to taste.  Serve hot with dash of pepper.

Mm.... look so appetizing and taste good too.  I will and have to cook many other porridge for the next few days.

Birthday cake

Tomorrow will be Mei Wan's birthday. I promised to bake her chocolate cake but I changed my mind. I bake her a butter cake with butter cream and fondant decoration that I learnt recently.  I made some flowers and leaves from the fondant icing in advance.

These are the pink and yellow roses and the green leaves made from the fondant.

I bake a butter cake this morning. Cool it and decorated with the butter cream and the fondant flowers.

This is the first time I do cake decoration.  I am not very satisfied because the stars that squeezed out were not even in sizes, but proud of my fondant flowers. I will improve in my technique of cake decoration in the future, practice make perfect.

Completed with the decorations, put in a box and sent it to Mei Wan in her office.  She was so happy to receive the cake. I am glad that she like it.

Emperor Chicken

Two weeks ago, a friend gave me prepacked herbal soup and emperor chicken ready mixed each to try on and saying is very easy to prepare.

By following the instructions from the back of the package, I bought a free range chicken weighing about 1.5 kg. Wash the whole chicken with salt inside and outside of the chicken. Pat dry with kitchen towel.  Rub the herbal mix in and outside of the chicken..Wrap up the chicken with the plastic wrapper and followed by the aluminium foil, place on a deep plate and steam in low fire for 2 hours.

To make sure the chicken is well done, I used a chopstick to poke at the thigh part as this is the though est part. The meat is done when there is no blood oops out from the place i poke. Once i open up the wrapping, the smell was so good herbal,the taste should be too.

I did not chop into pieces, we like to tear by hand while we eat.  The liquid that came out from the chicken was really sweet and very tasty.  You should try it and it is very easy to prepare as well.

The Emperor Chicken

Cup cakes decoration

Made appointment with Nurainie 3 days ago on the Internet to learn cake decoration from her. I found her in Malaysian cake decorators' club(MCDC). Found her house then introduced ourselves.  Without wasting much time, we started by baking butter cup cakes.  While waiting for the cake to be bake, we started mixing our butter cream for decoration. Next, we came to the interesting part. the fondant . We started by making small and big flowers like roses, ribbon roses, small and bigger leaves, making colours; making lady buds and teddy bears too.  After making whatever we wanted, put aside and let dry.

The teddy bears and lady buds look real cute and the flowers are really sweet and lovely

and all the green leaves

Before we put on the decoration, we have to lever up the surface of each cup cakes by the butter cream.

We used piping begs with different tips to pipe out different colours and also different patterns. I loved that.

After finishing the piping, we moved to fondant decorating. The teddy bears, my first love.

See the lady bear and the boy bear, so adorable.

The mother and baby lady buds

The garden

The final result of fondant decoration, so lovely.

The mixture of butter cream and fondant decoration

I really learnt a lot for just a few hours. Thank you to Nurainie and it was really fun and I appreciated the time given to me.

White carrot soup

Ingredients for my carrot soup
300 g white carrots
300 g pork ribs
5  medium dried scallops
7  red dates
1 slice of dried squid
1 tsp of peppercorn
7 bowls of water
salt to taste

Peel the carrots and cut into triangle in shapes. Scald the pork in hot water for about 5 minutes,wash and rinse. Wash the red dates.dried scallops and dried squid.  Lightly crash the peppercorn. Boil the water in a soup pot, put in all the ingredients except the salt. Let it boil for 1 and half hour in slow fire. Add salt to taste. Garnish with parsley and serve hot.

My clear and sweet carrot soup

Steamed ginger chicken

Ask myself what to cook for lunch today?  Got half of free range chicken  and some pork ribs from the freezer, young gingers, white carrot and a bunch of spinach. So decided to steam chicken, white carrot for soup and oyster sauce spinach.

ingredients for steam chicken

400 g chicken, chopped into bite pieces
200 g young gingers, grated
1 tbs sesame oil
1 tbs chopped garlic
salt to taste
marinate
1tsp soy sauce and pepper
1tbs wine
garnish
chopped spring onion and
chopped red chili

Marinate the chicken for half an hour. Leave aside.
Heat up the sesame oil in a wok, fry the garlic till fragrant.  Add in the grated ginger and fry till fragrant. Dish all  out and place on top of the seasoned chicken and steam on boiling water for 20 minutes or until the meat is tender.  Garnish with chopped spring onion and chopped red chili . Serve hot with rice.

Yam cake

Last week,my friend miss Tee wanted me to buy a meal voucher that cost me only RM6.00. That voucher can buy me a 5 course dinner and some demonstrations. So I went along with her with some curiosity and to find out what kind of dinner we will be served.
Oh, it was a table served dinner with local tofu with egg sauce, curry chicken, salted egg fried lotus root,oyster sauce vegetable and steamed fish. The dinner was more then the value we paid. Worth it.

After the dinner being served, it was show time. Two young men started their work by explaining the important of fibre in our food and finally came to the main point, the multi function hi-fibre food processor called Shelina.  They demonstrated how fine the fibre we can get from the fruits and vegetables when we use this processor, we would not waste any of the fibre like other normal food processor. We were served fruit juices, beverages and even some steamed desserts within half an hour. Really convincing. Finally i bought 1 of the processor.

This is my new food processor

Today tried to make soy milk by my new processor.  I follow the method from the manual. I have to soak the soy beans for 3 hours, then steam for half an hour. Pour hot water, rock sugar or palm sugar ,pandan leaves and the beans and press the on button. Grind for 5 minutes, then the hot soy milk is ready to be served. So simple and drink with all the bean fibre, no wastage at all.

This is the soy milk made by my new processor

The next thing i tried today is to make yam cake by following the simple recipe.

the ingredients

300 g rice, washed

300 g yam (cut into small pieces)

4 tbs oil

8 shallots(sliced)

600ml water

100 g dried prawns(chopped)

1tsp sugar

1 tsp salt

pepper, 5 spice powder

garnishing

chopped spring and red chillies,fried onion

In a wok, heat up the oil, fry the onion until light brown, dish some out for later use. Put in the dried prawns and fry till fragrant.  Add in the yam, sugar, salt, pepper and five spice powder. Stir fry and mix well. Dish out.

In the food processor, pour in the water and the rice. Blend for 3 minutes until the rice is fine. Mix in the fried ingredients and steam for 30 minutes.

I can enjoyed my yam cake within an hour.

It is so fast and easy and I used my own grind rice but not the rice flour form the shop. I will make full  use of this processor so to share with you more.