Macau Almond Cookie 澳門杏仁餅

Chinese Mid Autumn Festival 中秋節 is just around the corner and my little girl is beside herself with anticipation!  (It's her favorite holiday of the year plus she gets to stay up late!)  

The yearly celebration of the biggest moon of the year, the harvest moon, Mid Autumn Festival so much fun here in Hong Kong! There are moon cakes to make, shopping expeditions to make, lanterns to light and little children to dress up in festive Chinese attire , moon gazing outings to plan!  

After an early preparation of our traditional double yolk lotus seed paste mooncakes and our five nut mooncakes, I thought why not make an extra traditional treat to have on hand in case of the extra munchies?  I ended up making some of these delectably light and flavorsome Macau Almond Cookies  澳門杏仁餅, quite easy to make and delightfully easy on the eyes.

Easy Homemade Strawberry Jam

Recently I've happily discovered an important fact.  It turns out that you can make your own homemade fruit jam pretty easily and quickly!  Wow, oh wow!  

I've always hankered after making my own fruit jams, dreaming of the fresh, sweet sticky goodness that I could feed my family (and myself, of course!) if only I could make my own jam.  But I was intimidated by all the talk of canning jars and sterilization and super large pots of boiling fruit.  It all sounded so serious and ultra time consuming!  

And then I found out (by finally watching the amazing Great British Bake Off, OMG I'm totally obssessed with that show!) that if you only wanted one jar of jam to eat, why, that was easy peasy to make!  And so I tried it out and made my first jar of Easy Homemade Strawberry Jam.  Just like that I was in jammy heaven, sunshine and happiness in a jar! 

Asian Chili Hot Oil Sauces 辣椒醬

We reviewed the cookbook The Asian Kitchen - Fabulous Recipes from Every Corner of Asia by Kong Foong Ling (see our cookbook review here) and here we present the recipes that we used in our review.  

As you can probably see we decided to make a smorgasbord of Asian Chili Hot Sauces, one from each of three different countries.  What a fun idea it turned out to be!  Easy to make, gorgeous to look at.  And best of all, you can travel around the world with the tip of your tongue, all while eating a home cooked meal!

Cookbook Review - The Asian Kitchen - Fabulous Recipes from Every Corner of Asia

We recently got an opportunity to review The Asian Kitchen - Fabulous Recipes from Every Corner of Asia by Kong Foong Ling, a cookbook packed with recipes from the many fabulous cuisines of Asia.  Not only recipes from Burma, China, India, Indonesia, Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam, but also packed with interesting introductions into the food culture of each country, suggestions for planning meals and a handy pictionary of the more exotic food items and kitchen utensils required for the recipes.

I have to admit that at first I was not sure how to go about this review, there was so many recipes to look at!  But then once I had settled into my comfy chair with the cookbook I found myself quickly lost in the delights of the specialities of each cuisine.  As I'm sure many of you have, my family and I have traveled here and there in Asia and we have delighted in good food wherever we found it.  Fond memories of yummilicious foods that we had eaten in distant lands danced through my mind as I turned the pages.

But what recipe to review?  I wanted to make everything at first but finally decided on a smorgasbord of Asian Hot Chili Oil Sauces.  What could better showcase the similar yet unique variations that are celebrated by The Asian Kitchen?

(We have a special treat for our dear readers, a giveaway of two copies of The Asian Kitchen - Fabulous Recipes from Every Corner of Asia.  See the end of this post for details on how to enter. )