Mackerel fish paste

Get up early this morning, with the help of my maid, we started to work out the 2 kg of Spanish mackerel to turn them into fish paste.
First, I had to separate the flesh from the bone by splitting both sides of all the fish. I did the splitting while the maid will scrape off the fresh that stick both on the bones and the skin of the fish by spoon.

The Spanish mackerel before cutting

The flash separated from the bone of the fish

The head and the bone of the fish with some flesh attached on.

ingredients for the fish paste

2 kg fresh Spanish mackerel

300g shrimps or pork(optional)

2 tsp salt

4 tbs corn flour

1/2 bowl of water

1 tsp pepper

 In a bowl, put in the salt, corn flour, pepper and the water, mix well and leave aside.  I use my food processor to grind the fish flesh by adding the corn flour mixture slowly. (traditional way will use the knife to chop the fish flesh until fine).  Pour the well blended fish mixture onto the chopping board.  Using both hand to roll up the fish mixture into round ball, then smash hard on the board.,continue doing this until the mixture become sticky and have a bouncing effect. This take about ten times of smashing and rolling.

The smashing of the fish flesh on the chopping board

The final stage of the fish paste

I can have many ways of cooking from my home made fish paste.  First of all, the bones and heads can make a very good fish stock, I will share the recipe in the next blog. I cook porridge by the fish stock and add some of the fish paste for my father-in-law.

I keep the rest of the fish paste in food containers for future cooking. I will make some (yong tau foo) ,stuff fish paste in tofu, chili,lady fingers and other vegetables, I will cook fish ball noodle, make fish cake and so on.

Pantai Remis

Cecilia, Celine and a Japanese couple and me started our journey to Pantai Remis at 11.15am from Ipoh.  We had my durian cake in the car on the way to our destination. It took us 1 hour and half to reach the fishing village, we reached there at about 12.45pm.  Cecilia took us to her usual station but we were disappointed because the fishermen did not go out to the sea as they were celebrating the Ghost Festival.  So turn to other stations but most of them also doing the same thing.  Finally we spotted a smaller station and saw the fishermen were busy unloading plastic boxes from a fishing boat, we stop our car and went down to what we can get..

The workers are sorting out the catch of the day.  When we went near we got disappointed again, only kembong fish(slimy mackerel) ,a few Spanish mackerel and prawns.  Finally I decided to buy 2 kg of slimy mackerel and the only 6 medium sized Spanish mackerel.  Cecilia bought 3 kg of Slimy mackerel . We agreed to buy 1 kg of slimy mackerel and 1 kg of prawn for our lunch later in the restaurant.

1 kg of slimy mackerel

1 kg of fresh big prawns

The lady boss of this station saw our disappointment, she was so kind that she advice us to go further in to another few station, we might be lucky that we can get what we wanted. We followed her instruction and direction we finally came to quite a big station, we saw 2 Malay lady sitting at a table, after chatting with them and one of the worker, we were advised to wait for 1/2 an hour for the fishing boat to come back. All of us were alright for the suggestion but all were hungry.  We lucky that we had some of my durian cake then.

Finally, the fishing boat has arrived, we were so excited, we got to wait for the workers to unload the catch then to sort them out from the prawns and the fishes ,next they have to separate the bigger fishes from the smaller fishes. All of us including the 2 Malay ladies and other customers were waiting eagerly and excitedly to get the limited catch.

A catch load of fresh fishes and prawns from a fishing boat just arrive from the sea. Finally I bought 1 kg of big prawns, some more Spanish mackerel.

The Spanish mackerel

 My friends also bought happily whatever they can get from this boat.  Satisfied with our shopping then adjourned to Cecilia's popular village restaurant.We wanted them to deep fry our slimy mackerel and steam the prawns. 

deep fried slimy mackerel

Simple steamed prawns

This is the most popular dish of this restaurant, the (fan sa wu) yam with sugar. Really good, the yam ,yummy.....

The second most popular dish is the fry prawn cake, you can see the numbers of shrimp in the cake, deep in chili sauce, soooo good.. All of us were so hungry that we snatched up all in just seconds, don't even have time to snap the picture of it.  Anyway I bought some half -cook (none fry) prawn cakes back home.

                                                                                                   

None-cook or none fry prawn cakes

When these are deep fried, they will be very crispy and crunchy with the shrimps on them, deep in chili sauce and go into the mouth, oh...so nice, never have these type of food for so long since our childhood days.

The fried crispy shrimp cake

We also ordered some sea crabs, steamed , but the  way of steaming was not so good, anyway the crabs was fresh and sweet.

Simple steamed sea crabs.

We had an enjoyable trip to the fishing village and came home with full loads of fishes and prawns though not of our expectations.  It was 7pm when I reached home.  My maid and I took almost 1 and half hour to clean up all the fishes and prawns.  I will make the Spanish mackerel into fish paste on the next day.

Durian Chiffon cake

I found a pack of frozen durian while cleaning and clearing the refrigerator this morning because friends and I are going to Pantai Remis, a fishing village to purchase fish and prawns from the fishing boats. I defrost the durian and decided to bake a durian chiffon cake for our travel to Pantai Remis.

the ingredients
6 egg yolks
110 g mashed durian
150 g milk
30 g pumpkin seed
50 g sugar
140 g self raising flour
60 ml corn oil
6 egg whites
1/2 tsp cream of tartar
100 g sugar

Preheat oven at 160 degree C.  In a food processor beat the cream of tartar , the egg whites and 100g sugar until stiff.
In another bowl, mix the egg yolks and 50 g sugar well.  Add in the mashed durian then the corn oil.  Mix in the flour and the milk alternately until all are well mix. Blend in the beaten egg whites into the egg yolks mixture,finally stir in the pumpkin seeds. Pour the batter into a 8 " round tin and bake for 45 minutes or until is done.

This took me 45 minutes with a little smiling face

When the cake is cool, I manged to slice into 14slices. My husband came back just in time to taste my durian cake.  He really love it.  I packed some into a food container for our trip on the next day.

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.