Chinese Black Sesame Dessert Soup 黑芝麻糊

At long last the chill winds of autumn are blowing through Hong Kong, blasting away the warm long lasting humidity of the sometimes seemingly unending Hong Kong summer.  In other words, it's finally getting cold!  

I'm sitting at my writing desk, snuggled contentedly into my soft and very warm and comfy Chinese silk padded jacket 棉襖.  Guarded against the autumn chills, my thoughts turn to warming myself and my family from the inside out.  Hum...  Ah ha, I've got it!  What better way to do that then to whip up some deliciously soul soothing and warming Chinese dessert soups?  Not only tasty but, according to Chinese beliefs, these soups are essential to supporting health and warming the body throughout the cool months.  

And to start with is my personal favorite, the rock star of Chinese dessert soups, the black and  gorgeous Chinese Black Sesame Dessert Soup 黑芝麻糊, a thick and sweetly nutty soup packed with intense aroma of freshly roasted and ground black sesame seed.  Warms the heart and sweetens the day, all in one yummilicious bowl!

Spanish Persimmons

 I adore fruit.  It's just so amazing that nature can gift us with such amazing little packets of deliciousness!  Here in Hong Kong we are so lucky that we can try fruits from all over the world.  So whenever we see new and exotic fruits, we like to try them out.  

This is our latest fruity discovery, the Spanish persimmon, known by the trademarked name 'Persimon® ' (one 'm'), or 'Ribera del Xuquer' or as 'Rojo Brillante', a fruit so delicately and refreshingly sweet that it brings to mind what I imagine the nectar of the gods would taste like.  The persimmon is after all the fruit of the Diospyros tree and tellingly, 'Diospyros' is a ancient Greek word that means 'divine fruit'.

The unique delicate flavor of this Spanish persimmon simply blew us out of the water!  Though pricier than the regular persimmon we took a chance and now would gladly pay the extra.  Having actually discovered it last year, we have been waiting eagerly all year for the Spanish persimmon season to start again!  (Which is now, oct-jan, so keep an eye out at the markets!).

How to Wrap a Wonton 餛飩包法

Today I'm going to show you how my dearest Grandma 奶奶 taught me to wrap a wonton.  On wonton making day my 奶奶 would always round up all us kids to help her.  First we would make homemade wonton wrappers.

The nifty pasta maker (I bought one recently and it's still unchanged after all this time!) would be clamped firmly to our dining table.  Us kids would fight for the chance to turn the crank on the pasta maker and watch the dough roll through again and again until at last it magically rolled out in thin shiny supple sheets.  Grams 奶奶 would then cut the dough sheets into squares with her big chopper knife and then she would have our extra (and small) hands to help wrap up plump snowy row after row of wontons.  It's easy once you done it once or twice.

There are other methods to wrap wonton but they all revolve around the most important rule of wonton wrapping: wrap it up snug and tight so that the wonton doesn't fall apart during boiling!  For myself, the wrapping I always use is the same one dearest grandma taught me all those years ago.