Soy Sauce Chicken with Liquorice Roots

This is a modified recipe from the original recipe that I posted last month on Soy Sauce Chicken. I wanted a chicken dish with vegetables that doesn't require long time of preparation and cooking. I also wanted to have a grilled chicken meat without using the toaster or oven. If you are residing in Singapore, Happy Call Pan is a no stranger term of cookware to you. I was cooking this dish with this magical pan.

I threw in lots of carrot to this dish which added the natural sweetness to it. It is tasty and best to have it together with a bowl of white rice. The flavour and taste is completely different from the Soy Sauce Chicken I posted a while ago.

Soy Sauce Chicken with Liquorice Roots

Ingredients
3 drumsticks with thighs
salt to wash chicken

10 shallots, skin peeled
10 cloves of garlic, skin peeled
1 cup of water
4 - 6 medium-sized carrots, cut into thick slices
2 pieces of 3 inches long Liquorice Roots
1 piece 0.5 cm thick ginger
6 cubes small rock sugar

To Marinate the Meat:
2 tablespoon of mushroom sauce
2 tablespoon of light soy sauce
1 tablespoon of dark soy sauce
generous amount of salt
1 tablespoon of oil

Method

1. Wash chicken with salt and remove all fat.

2. Marinate the chicken with the seasonings and set aside at least for 15 minutes

3. Heat one tablespoon of oil in a Happy Call Pan using medium fire. Fry shallots, garlics and ginger until light brown and fragrant.

4. Push onions etc to the side of the pan and place chicken flat touching the pan. Keep the balance of the sauce for later use. Fry it for about 1 minutes both side or until colour changed and the chicken slightly grilled on both surfaces.

5.  Add in balance of the seasoning sauce, water, liquorice roots, carrots. Let it come to a boil then close the pan and lock it for 15 minutes.

6. Open the pan, stir the ingredients and flip the chicken. Close and lock for another 15 minutes. If it is too dry add a bit of water.

7. Throw in the rock sugar, close and lock the pan for another 5 minutes. Stir well, let it rest for at least 10 minutes and serve hot.

Notes :

1. If you are cooking this as a confinement food, do add generous amount of small onions, ginger slices and liquorice roots into the dish.

Asian Fried Rice

 

A plate of fragrant, grainy and non-oily fried rice is not too hard to cook I supposed, but yet this is a simple dish that will put your Chinese cooking skills up for challenge! Like how my little brother put it, "Taste the fried rice of a Chinese chef and if he/she could cook it right, he/she is good!". He could be generalising his thoughts but to me it makes sense.

I remembered frying a plate of fried rice using leftover rice in the middle of the night for my supper when I was in primary school using simple ingredients like garlics, eggs and black sauce and light soy sauce. Those were the good old days where we had no junk food in the house and if you want to snack, do it or get it yourself! I think the fragrant smell of the black sauce fried with garlics and rice left a profound memory in me as some of my childhood memories somehow flashed back most of the time when I savoured this dish cooked this way.

I am cooking fried rice more often as my kids love it and it is easy to prepare. My version of homecook fried rice uses less oil, less salt and only fresh ingredients... so why not?!

To me, eggs, garlics and light soy sauce are the three key basic ingredients for fried rice and of course not to mention you must have a bowl of non-sticky, non-lumpy but grainy cooked rice. The rest of the ingredients are good or healthy to have.

Cooking rice overnight just to use it for fried rice the next day is not practical for me as i am quite fickle-minded and I always change my menu last minute. If you have a bowl of left over rice then you should consider to fry it the next day.

I used to cook it on the day when I wanted to fry it. What I did is to use the right measurement of water. Gently stir the rice ten minutes after it's cooked and then covered it in the rice cooker for next 15 minutes. Then scoop out the rice, spread it over a flat plate and cool it off completely with fan.

Ingredients

1.5 cup of rice, rinsed and cooked
3 eggs
1 stick big carrots cut into small cubes
1 bowl of green peas
1 cob of fresh corn, remove the corn kernels from the cob
6 cloves of garlic, crashed n chopped coarsely
1/2 cup minced meat (pork/chicken/luncheon meat/coarsely chopped prawn or Chinese sausage etc )
Chicken or Anchovies bouillon granules to taste
Salt and pepper
2 tablespoons light soy sauce
3 tablespoons of oil

Meat marinate
1 teaspoon of soy sauce
1 teaspoon of mushroom/oyster sauce
Dash of sesame oil
Dash of pepper
1/4 teaspoon of cornflour

Method

1. Marinate the meat with the sauce and put one side for 15 minutes.

2. Beat the eggs. Put one tablespoon of oil in the frying pan. Pour in the egg and roughly scramble them after 40 seconds. Scoop and put one side.

3. Put 2 tbsp of oil in the pan. Fry garlic for about 20 seconds and add in carrots. After about a minute add in the marinated meat. Stir fry until meat about to change colour. Add in corn and peas. Fry until corn change colour. Add in light soy sauce and chicken bouillon.

4. Add in cooked and cooled rice and continue to stir gently. Once the rice is well coated with the gravy and mixed well with the rest of ingredients, add in eggs and stir well.

5. Add salt and pepper to taste.



Fried Rice with Luncheon Meat and lots of chopped small onions


Fried Rice with Black Soy Sauce


Fried Rice with Chinese Sausage and Long Beans


Fried Rice with Prawns


Notes:
1. You can used a combination of chopped small shallots and a small portion of garlic.

2. You may add 4 pieces of soaked and chopped finely dried oysters. I bet you if you can acquire the taste of Chinese dried oyster, you will like this version especially when you cook it with Chinese sausage.

3. You may add super finely chopped petai with dried shrimp chillies. For the spicy version, do omit Chinese sausage as the taste doesn't gel.

4. For the eggs, I have cooked the version keeping the ingredients to the basic with no vegetables added but just prawns, eggs and garlic. For this version, stir fry the garlic and prawn until fragrant, add in rice and continue to stir gently. Stir in the beaten eggs to the rice and mix it well so that all grain of rice will be well coated with the yellow golden egg. Otherwise you may just fry the beaten eggs and put aside. Mix when rice is fried with prawn. Frying rice with prawn is really aromatic and nice!

5. For vegetables, you can add edamane / french beans / chopped asparagus/ chopped kailan stalks and other types of crunchy vegetables. Chopped spring onions can be added towards the end.

6. For the meat, you can replace with finely chopped crab sticks, vegetarian shrimp, barbecued pork (char siew), roasted pork etc.

7. It tastes best to just use white rice but for health reason I sometimes will just used the mixture of white, red unpolished and brown rice.

 

Steamed Cakes

I have never seen my eldest brother bakes. All along I knew he doesn't mind to spend some time in the kitchen to whip up a meal or two for us. He prefers to handle everything on his own whenever he is in the kitchen. He is a man of few words but a nice guy. I love him for the way he is but I wish if he could open up a little more to me and his siblings so that we could know him better.

 

I was in awe when he asked me how to operate the oven in our mum's place as he wanted to try out some recipes. Without second thoughts I grab the chance to communicate with him my favourite subject. I showed him how to operate the oven, took out some of the baking stuff in the drawers and taught him how to use them. I copied the recipe and explain to him in detailed. I like his spirit of learning and wanted to know-how in areas that interest him though he isn't highly educated.

 

He is experimenting a lot nowadays in chinese pastry which using steaming method.  The pictures are the products of some of his experiments. He made 'Prosperity Cake' or 'Fa Gao' in Chinese and 'Red Tortoise Cake' or 'Ang Gu Kueh' in Hokkien. Both were made with no written recipes, no reference to books, websites or videos but based on his observations of taste and some small talks he had with the cakes seller in the market. It is so amazing and I am very proud of him!! If given guidance and opportunity I am sure he can go far in baking. 

 

Soy Sauce Chicken

I could still remember the taste of the succulent soy sauce chicken that my confinement lady cooked for me. The ingredients used are so simple and the method is easy. The trick to make a yummy and fragrant soy sauce chicken is to use a very good quality light soy sauce. I grew up in a Chinese village in Kuala Lumpur. Our family never used any store-bought light and dark soy sauces right up to now. We are so blessed that we are able to get the supplies for both sauces fresh from a self-brewed vendor who will come to our place to sell the sauces in a small lorry. So far I could not get a brand of soy sauce that is closed to that standard. Recently I am pleased that I found this brand of light soy sauce that produced by Kwong Cheong Thye which is light, fragrant and not salty.

If you want to serve this food as confinement dish, do double the amount of small onions and add some ginger slices in but still the one that I had for confinement was without ginger. I served this with Koka fat free noodle which has no preservative. Though it was healthy but I didn't quite like the texture of the noodle.

Ingredients

3 drumsticks

Salt to wash chicken
 

1/2 cup soy sauce

1.5 cup water

10 shallots, skin peeled

1 cinnamon stick

1 star of anise

1 tbsp oyster sauce

1 tbsp black sauce

Dash of sesame oil
2 medium sized rock sugar
1 - 2 tablespoons of oil

Method

1. Wash and rub chicken thighs with salt. Remove fat under skin, pat dry and set aside.

2. Wash cinnamon stick and star of anise and set aside.

3. Put 1 tablespoon of oil and add cinnamon stick and star of anise when the oil is heated up.

4. Add in the shallots and stir fry for a minute. Then add in the rest of the ingredients except balance of oil.

5. Cook in slow fire for about half an hour. Switch off fire let the chicken rest in the sauce for at least 15 minutes before serving the dish.

Notes
1. You can use a thermal pot to cook this dish. Simply transfer the chicken with the rest of the ingredients in step 5 to a thermal pot and let it cook in the pot itself for one hour. For this method do reduce the amount of water to 1 cup.

2. You may replace the cinnamon stick and star of anise with a few sticks of liquorice root and a handful of tiny red rose buds for another new recipe. I tried this before and it tasted yummy and fragrant with mild rose aroma.

3. If you want a stronger herbal flavour and twist this further for a real confinement food, you may omit the shallots, cinnamon sticks, star of anise and all the sauces but add in Dong Kwai (Angelica sinensis), red dates, Goji (wolfberries) and condiment like chicken essence or Huiji Waist Tonic.

4. This dish goes well with rice or noodle and it is all up to you!

Indian Curry Chicken

This is my family's favourite curry chicken. I longed to eat it as i have not been cooking this for a long time. I used to cook this dish preparing all ingredients from scratch. The original recipe was taken from an Indian cookbook called 'Taste of India'. Suggested by the name, you should able to guess that all recipes found in the book are authentic Indian cuisine. Freshness of ingredients and uses of variety of Indian spices are not compromised. However, as much as I prefer and like the authenticity of Indian cuisine or any other cuisines, I don't think I have more energy to prepare this after a hard day of child caring.

This recipe that I came out with has almost all the essential ingredients needed to cook up an authentic Indian curry chicken. The trick is to use the ready-mixed wet curry paste that I could get in any local supermarkets in Singapore. The brand that I used is Hai's Chicken Curry Paste. It came with two types of paste; chilli paste and wet curry paste.  As they separate the chilli and curry paste, you could adjust how spicy you want your curry to be. I used one packet of chilli paste and two packets of wet curry paste. The wet curry paste has all ingredients that I needed like galangal, lemon grass, garlic, turmeric, candlenuts, salt and spices.

If you could not get this brand of wet paste curry that I used you could still make the paste yourself. Blend together one thumb-sized galangal, two thumb-sized turmeric, 5 candlenuts, 3 stalks of lemongrass, 5 fresh chillies (de-seed) and 10 dried chillies (soak and de-seed). 

Ingredients

1 bird 700g Chicken, chopped into big pieces 

6 medium-sized potatoes, peeled

2 packets of Hai's curry chicken paste (Use 1 packet of chilli paste and 2 packets of wet curry paste)

4 ripe tomatoes

3 cups of water

2 cinnamon sticks (about 3 - 4 inches)

8 cardamons

2 star of anise

10 cloves

6 stalks of curry leaves, stem removed

5 big onions, coarsely chopped

1.5 bulbs garlic, coarsely chopped

2inches of thumb sized ginger, sliced

4  - 6 tbsp of Baba's meat curry powder
3 - 6 tbsp cooking oil

Method

1. Remove fat from chicken, wash clean and marinate with two tablespoon of curry powder. Set aside for 15 minutes.

2. Meanwhile wash all the dried spices like cinnamon sticks, cardamons, star of anise, cloves, curry leaves and set aside.

3. Chop tomatoes and potatoes into wedges. Steam potatoes for 15 minutes and set aside.

4. Heat up 2 tbsp of oil and shallow fry all the dried spices for about a minute or until the cinnamon sticks opened up. Then put in the curry leave and fry for another 30 seconds.

5. Throw in ginger and fry for another 30 seconds then put in the chopped onions and garlic to stir fry for another 1 - 2 minutes or until fragrant but not burnt.

6. Add chilli and wet curry paste and cook for another 1 minute then add 2 tablespoons of curry powder and cook for another 30 seconds. Do add oil at this step if the paste stick to the pot.

7. Put in the chicken and continue to stir until chicken pieces are coated with the cooked spices and paste.

8. Slowly add in 2 cups of water when the chicken pieces started to change colour. At this point you could adjust the amount of water you want to add. If you prefer wet curry with thin gravy you may add up to 3 cups and reduce it to about 1.5 to 1 cup if you want it thick and dry.

9. Add in the potatoes and cook together with chicken for next 20 minutes with lid covered.

10. Add tomatoes in and continue to cook for 10 minutes. Add salt and a little sugar, switch of fire and cover for at least 20 minutes before you  serve the dish.

Notes:

1. Do look out and try other brands of instant wet curry paste that may have the essentials ingredients for curry chicken. I don't believe that there isn't substitute to the one that I am currently using.

2. You can twist this recipe easily if you want to cook Chinese curry chicken. Just omit dried spices and tomatoes. Add in more lemon grass and coconut milk.

3. If you want to have dried Indian curry chicken, simply add less water and cook with lid open. Vice verse if you enjoy curry with plenty of gravy yet thick do not sting on the curry paste and add in a little more water. Do take note that tomatoes will draw out its juices at the end so do not add in too much water otherwise the curry will turn watery and the flavour will be diluted.

4. I like this recipe as I do not have to grind any spices or ingredients but just simply wash and chop. Furthermore, it didn't call for coconut milk so you could really cook this in advance and keep them frozen for a week in the fridge.

Steamed Red Snapper with 3 Sauces

Today we had a simple 3-dish meal with miso soup for dinner. We had fried vegetable with pork shabu shabu, fried prawn tempura and steamed red snapper with three sauces. 

The key ingredient for the sauce mixture is this special Taiwanese sauce called bull head toona bean paste that i bought a while ago during the Taiwan fair held in my neighbourhood supermarket.

This sauce goes well with rice noodles and thick 'mee suah'. You can find more details about the sauce and other taiwanese sauces in this website http://www.hawdii.com.tw

Ingredients :

 

200g -  300g red snapper fillet

2 tsp of chinese cooking oil

One thumb size ginger - half sliced for steaming with the fish and another half shredded for frying with garlic

6 cloves of garlic -chopped

Spring Onions - chopped

Sauce
1 tbsp of bull head toona bean paste 
1 tsp of fermented bean paste sauce
1 tsp of hoisin sauce

2-4 tbsp of water

Sesame oil
Sugar 

Method :

1. Fry shredded ginger and minced garlic and set aside.

2. Chop spring onions and set aside

3. Wash red snapper and put sliced ginger on top and steam with 2 tsp of wine for about 10 minutes in slow fire. Set aside the juice from the steamed fish and mix this with the sauce later.

4. Put a little oil in the medium heated wok and pour all the sauces into the pan and cook for a while until fragrant. Add about 2-4tbsp of water and the fish juice that we had set aside. Add sugar to taste. Add a dash of sesame oil and switch off fire.

5. Pour the sauce mixture on top of the steamed fish.

6. Garnish with fried garlic, ginger and chopped spring onions.

Note :

1. I think this dish will taste better if we were to cook the sauce with one piece of crushed sour plum and some chopped chilli paddy.

2. The bull head toona bean paste is a little oily itself. 

Minced Mutton in Mild Sauce

Have you ever experienced a day that you thought you have planned what you wanted to cook for lunch and got all the ingredients ready but changed your mind totally when you saw some other interesting ingredients you have in the fridge or pantry? I had that crazy day yesterday. I planned to cook pasta with fish and chick peas but I was inspired to cook something else when I saw a packet of minced mutton in the freezer. I guess it is that impromptu curiosity, excitement and inspiration to tweak, to experiment and of course to eat and taste that spur me to cook different stuff and continue cooking....

Something spicy would be nice for minced mutton I thought, but on second thought the lunch I was going to prepare was more to fill the hungry stomachs of my kids upon their return home from school. I decided to cook something mild yet flavourful and delicious minced mutton for them.

If you could not accept the strong flavour of the cumin and turmeric, you may reduce the amount and increase the tomato paste. I was taking a chance to cook this and true enough my boy was reluctant to open his mouth to eat it when he first smelled the dish. He said it was curry dish and that it would be spicy. Fortunately, I was able to convince him to try and that the dish wasn't spicy at all. He took the first spoon and he liked it with white rice!!  My daughter and I had it with tomato bread with herbs. My girl is a mild curry lover and she told me this today, "Mum I liked my lunch yesterday"... I was beaming in return.

Minced Mutton in Mild Sauce
250g mutton
1 big onions coarsely chopped
5 cloves of garlic coarsely chopped
4 medium size potatoes, cut into cubes
4 sticks of carrots, cut into small cubes
1 big bowl of peas
1 bay leaf
5 tablespoon of tomato paste
3/4 tsp of turmeric powder
1 tsp of cumin powder
500ml beef stock

Method

1. Heat up a non-stick pan with one tablespoonful of cooking oil in slow fire. Fry onions and garlic until slight soft. Add bay leaf, carrots and potatoes. Continue to stir fry for about a minute.

2. Add in the mutton, tomato paste, turmeric powder and cumin powder. Continue to stir and let it simmer in slow fire for a minute.

3. Transfer it into a pot, add in beef stock. With lid covered, let it simmer in slow fire for about 25 minutes.

4. Add  in peas and continue to let it simmer with lid opened for 5 minutes.

Notes :
1. I was thinking perhaps adding cinnamon stick, cardamon seeds, star of anise, clove, cut tomatoes and garam masala would be a good blend for a more pungent mutton curry flavour.

2. I didn't add salt to this dish in view of the sodium level in the the store-bought beef stock but a little dash of the mineral was able to bring out the taste of the dish.

3. You may add natural yogurt to thicken the sauce. I was thinking whether the same recipe with a tweak towards western flavours would be suitable to use as filling for shepherd's pie?