Milk Bread Tangzhong 湯種牛奶麵包

I love making bread, there's nothing in this world as wonderful as the heavenly smell of baking bread emanating from your very own oven!  

But the thing about making bread is, after all that toil and trouble, homemade bread is amazing when still warm, great when cooled, still yummy on the second day, but downhill from then on.  It just gets stale so fast!  I've tried different methods of keeping the bread, which help only a bit.  

What I really want is to be able to make a bread and enjoy it for a good while, make sandwiches, have some toast, you know...just have a bit of bread about the house.  Now, finally, I have found this amazing Milk Bread Tangzhong 湯種牛奶麵包 that not only lasts a good long while but is soft, fluffy and tender yet strong enough to use as a sandwich bread.  Plus it's so easy to make and bake, it's become my favorite bread to make!

Tofu Skin Gingko Nuts Sweet Soup 白果腐竹糖水

We previously wrote about the traditional Chinese way to way "YES!" to love, with food of course, specifically with a wonderfully yummilicious plate of Sticky Rice Balls with Sesame and Crushed Peanuts 糖不甩, so stickily delicious that no one can resist your love.  

This time we are going to flip it over and talk about how to say a gentle "NO" to love, with food again of course, this time with a bowl of Tofu Skin Gingko Nuts Sweet Soup 白果腐竹糖水, a delicate, warm and comforting way to let a lover down.

Homemade Chinese Fermented Rice 自製甜酒釀

One of the special traditional foods that my grandma knew how to make was Homemade Chinese Fermented Rice, also known as Jiu Niang or 甜酒釀, a fresh, sweet and slighty winey fermented rice with a porridge like texture.  She would make tons of the stuff and pass it out to all the family but no one liked to eat it as much as me.  I loooved the stuff and would eat it slowly, one delicious creamy spoonful at a time, from a huge jar in the fridge.

Now I know that my childhood fondness for Chinese fermented rice was probably due in a large part to my predilection for the tastes and flavors of alcoholic beverages as this fermented rice is slightly boozy.  (Ummm...mom, dad, what the hey?!)  But I digress from the topic at hand.  

The point here is that I still love this stuff and I finally got up the gumption to try to make Chinese Fermented Rice at home.  Guess what?  It was easy peasy and it is so d*mn good when freshly fermented!  I'm over the moon...I can have all the Jiu Niang I want forever!