Tokyo Yakiniku Yazawa Grilled Wagyu Beef

Dear readers, a Wandering Eats post!  We took our little girl to Tokyo this summer, her first time.  What a city, a city amongst cities, a queen bee for sure!  The Blade Runner energy of it all was something to feel and see!

And the eats. Omgosh, we ate and ate and then ate some more.  Everything was so frick'in-liciously good.  One of the highlights was the grilled wagyu beef restaurant that we found one late night.  Oh my, oh my, seriously AMAZING just melt in the mouth beef-y feast of the ages!

Dubai Chocolate Mooncake 杜拜朱克力月餅

Yeah, yeah, I know.  It's Dubai Chocolate again.  Obssessed much, lol?!  But, seriously, how could I resist?  After successfully making homemade kadayif noodles, pistachio cream and then the gorgeous Dubai Chocolate Mousse Cake, we were pretty much over the moon with how well our efforts came out.  And with our favorite festival, the Mid-Autumn Festival 中秋節, just around the corner, well, isn't Dubai Chocolate just the perfect match for a mooncake filling?!  

Our Dubai Chocolate Mooncakes 杜拜朱克力月餅 are filled with nutty, crunchy pistachio kadayif cream at the heart of a chocolate flavored bean paste, all encased in delicate traditional patterned mooncake skins.  So pretty and oh so delicious!  My little girl ate all my first batch already, hehe!

Dried Krill Seaweed Soup 銀蝦紫菜湯

Chinese soups are wonderfully healthy and yummy.  Did you know that there are all different sorts of Chinese soups?  There are the long cook kinds of soup where a lot of ingredients are slowly simmered over many hours to a rich, health enhancing and savoury perfection.  So good!  There are also the nourishing soups that are specific to tweaking the balance of your body.  And then there are the soups that you can make quick and easy, on a daily basis, to augment your daily meal and comfort your soul.

This soup one is one of the latter.  Fast, super healthy and yummilicious.  And so satisfying!  My hubby's crazy easy to make but oh so super delicious Dried Krill Seaweed Soup 銀蝦紫菜湯.  Total soup-iliciously nom nom territory!

Dubai Chocolate Mousse Cake

We took the elements of the trendy Dubai Chocolate Bar and transformed them into a most fabulous Dubai Chocolate Mousse Cake!  Two special fillings, a layer of crunchy, nutty vibrant pistachio kadayif cream and a layer of airy, rich chocolate mousse are encased inside layers of a moist chocolatey chocolate cake, all of which are lovingly frosted with a chocolate ganache frosting.  OMgoshdarnit...can you tell that we love, love, love our chocolate, lol?!

Homemade Kadayif Noodles

Round and round and round we go...  These are the delicate paths we follow to the making our own Homemade Kadayif Noodles!  And just what are these kadayif noodles, you may be asking?  

Well, have you ever heard of 'Dubai Chocolate'?   Ever tasted the creamy, crunchy pistachio filling in a Dubai Chocolate?  Well, you need these fine kadayif noodles if you're going to get that exquisite crunch!  My little girl introduced me to Dubai Chocolate and we quickly became hooked onto that incredibly nutty, creamy, crunchy pistachio filling inside the chocolate.  We wanted to try making it at home!

We soon realized that, while pistachio is fairly easy to obtain, pre-made kadayif noodles are 1) hard to obtain and 2) kinda expensive.  Luckily, after some research, we realized that these delicate kadayif noodles can be made at home with a wee bit of effort and time!

Pistachio Kadayif Cream Filling

Can you guess what this is?  It's something that you've definitely heard of before, if not seen, if not tasted!  This is a part, the most important part IMHO, of the latest, greatest food wave that's been going, well, around the world really.  I was hesitant at first to try it, thinking it was just a fad that would fade before two blinks of the eye.  But it didn't, of course, and my darling little girl finally persuaded me to spend a pretty penny to buy a bar of the famous "Dubai Chocolate."  This pistachio filled chocolate bar was, to my surprise, really quite unique and OMgosh totally delious!

And what is the most important part of the Dubai Chocolate Bar?  Well, it's the utterly unctuous Pistachio Kadayif Cream, of course, as shown in the photo above.  This gorgeously green creamy filling combines the buttery, nutty, slightly sweet lusciousness of ground pistachio nuts in a delightful contrast with the crisp crunch of the fine kadayik dough strands.  This nutty and creamy filling is the heavenly contrast to chocolate that makes the Dubai Chocolate so irresistible!

Nom, nom, nom, and just like that we were hooked!  But, woozer, the 'Dubai Chocolate' anythings sure are expensive!  So we found out, with a bit of research, that you can make Pistachio Kadayif Cream at home with just a wee bit of time and effort.  (And with that creamy filling we went on to make a Dubai Chocolate Pistachio Cake, omgoshdarnitall, to die for, check it out!) 

Shallot Infused Oil 红葱油

This simple flavor infused oil is something that we happened upon accidentally as a consequence of making my favorite cold Chinese noodle dish, the deceptively simple yet delicious Shanghai Spring Onion Scallion Noodles 葱油拌面.  Omgosh, how I love, love, love these noodles!

Anyhoo, after making these noodles we were left with the oil used for frying the spring onions and shallots.  And discovered to our delight how utterly fragrant and yummilicious this infused oil was! 

Ever since then we've kept a jar of either spring onion or shallot infused oil in our kitchen at all times!  Today we're making Shallot Infused Oil 红葱油, a subtly sweet, garlicky and oniony fragrant oil that we use to drizzle over finished dishes to add that final extra flavor layer or simply to make the most delicious stir fry with.  Oh man, oh man what a game changer this shallot infused oil is!

Homemade Green Plum Wine 自制青梅酒

As a result of our recent food shenanigans into the making of homemade Huamei Preserved Plums 話梅, we were left with an extra mound of the little green plums 青梅 that inspired it all.  These are immature plums, plucked from the Chinese Plum Tree, also known as the Prunus Mume Tree, in their green and seriously sour stage.  

With this extra mound of green plums we decided to make our first ever plum wine!  Well, not really a wine, more like a fruit liqueur of sorts.  Based loosely on both the Chinese and Japanese style of making plum wine, this fruity concoction is super easy to make, requires a rather long waiting time, and results in a lusciously fruity and smooth wine/liqueur that captures the essence of spring and summer all in one!

Chinese Huamei Preserved Plums 話梅

Every Chinese kid has eaten these preserved fruit treats when they're little, I think, and puckered up with glee at the deliciously sweet, salty and sour taste.  These Chinese Huamei Preserved Plums 話梅 or 酸梅, and also known as Li Hing Mui 旅行梅, are usually found in a dried state but, since we made these fruit candies at home, we have left them swimming in their delectable syrup .  Same taste, with delicious syrup to boot! 

Chinese Ginger Milk Pudding 薑汁撞奶布丁

Recently we made the smooth and creamy Double Skin Milk Pudding 雙皮奶 and were so delighted with the lusciously milky results that we determined to further explore the "Milk-y Way"!  To that end we decided to make this traditional oh so easy to make treat that originates from Panyu 番禺, Guangzhou 廣州: the Chinese Ginger Milk Pudding 薑汁撞奶布丁, also known as Ginger Milk Curd.

This pudding is really magical because its puddingness is set thru the interaction of fresh ginger enzyme and hot milk!  And that's it!  Milk with a touch of sugar is heated in a pot and then poured, bang!, into the freshly squeezed ginger juice.  Then a wait and, tada, the pudding is made!  

Delicate, milky, ginger-ly spicy, smooth and oh so comforting is this super duper easy to make Chinese Ginger Milk Pudding.  Try it, you'll see!

Vegetarian Mushroom Ramen Soup Noodles 素食蘑菇湯拉麵

Savory, rich, filled to the brim with lip-smacking, noodle slurping, umami yummy-liciousness!  Dearest noodle lovers, we're making a bowl of veggie ramen noodles today for all those plant lovers out there!  A bowl of chewy but firm ramen noodles topped with meaty aromatic shrooms and just cooked tender veggies, nestled in a hot and savory umami packed veggie soup.  M oh man, we love us our noodles!

Homemade Ramen Noodles 自製拉麵

Going noodle-crazy here at The Hong Kong Cookery!  After making homemade udon, and having so much fun, we decided to march right on and try making ramen at home!  Turns out that it's not hard to make at all and homemade ramen is sooo good!!  

Darn it, wish that someone had let me know about making ramen years ago...

Flounder Fish Soup Noodles 甫魚麵

Sometimes you just want to appreciate a little bit of something exquisite, a slurp of delirious deliciousness in a bowl, ya know what I mean?  Well, here's the perfect thing to satisfy that desire: Flounder Fish Soup Noodles 甫魚麵, a bowl of the most yummilicious noodles soaked up with stock and sprinkled with umami packed roasted flounder fish powder.  Ready to slurp down in a quarter of an hour!  Sounds simple, dear readers, but don't be deceived.  This seeming humble bowl of noodles packs a powerful punch of flavor and satisfaction!

Double Skin Milk Pudding 雙皮奶

This special treat is from my hubby's ancestral home town, Shunde 順德, a city located in Guangdong province.  Shunde is very famous for its food culture, known as the birthplace of Cantonese cuisine and now a Unesco designated City of Gastronomy.  One of the most famous of the dishes that originate from Shunde might be this traditional Chinese milk pudding!

Known as Double Skin Milk Pudding 雙皮奶 this pudding is distinctive for its lovely double layer of wrinkled milk skin on top, hiding a soft and oh! so lusciously creamy, milky pudding below.  Man oh man, when we go to Shunde we totally pig out on this amazing puddding!  Nom, nom, nom...  

Sometimes back home far away in HK, we do long for it so. Turns out this luscious pud is pretty straightforward to make at home!

Seafood Udon Soup Noodles

A simply scrumpious bowl of seafood noodles to slurp and gobble down!  What could be better than a few select treasures from the sea afloat a comforting bed of thick and chewy noodles all tucked into a hot savory soup?  Hummm...not much that I can think of!

Noodles for dinner is always lots of fun cuz it's easy to put together a pretty well rounded and spectacular looking bowl of noodles fast.  Minimal effort for maximum yummiliciousness, amirite?  Plus noodles are so scrummy to gobble down!  Try our easy Seafood Udon Soup Noodles and see if it doesn't make you happy!

Waygu Fat Soft Chewy Caramels

This is a tale of a special caramel.  Caramels, as you must know, are those creamy, buttery, chewy, melt in your mouth and oh so darn delicious candies.  It’s amazing how simple they are to make, magic up some sugar and ta-da you have these lovely soft and chewy candies.

So back to our special caramel.  We’ve made caramels before but this time we tried something totally different.  Different how?  Well, what happened is that we got our greedy little hands on some wagyu fat.  Wagyu, yum, amiright, that totally luscious and ever so expensive marbled beef.  With this wee bit of waygu fat on our hands we were like, what should we do?  And, as it turns out, the answer was to make the most amazing caramels ever:  Waygu Fat Soft Chewy Caramels to die for!!

Cookie Butter Truffles

Oh the serendipitous luck of it all!  Leftover cookies, of all the things, as inspiration.  What started as a 'hummm...what should we do with these leftover cookies' train of thought turned into a fabulous new idea for Easter treats!  Leftovers cookies magically turned into ginger spiced cookie flavored centers delectably coated with creamy, buttery white chocolate, otherwise known as the fabulous Cookie Butter Truffles!

So, in addition to making our usual amazing Easter decorated sugar cookies, we also spun out these wonderfully elegant and easy to make Cookie Butter Truffles.   Something for the kids and something for the kidults, amiright?  OMgosh, these little truffles are totally gonna appear every Easter from now on, they are so scrummy!

Homemade Udon Noodles 自製烏龍麵

Every time we go to the library I always end up with a pile of food books to take home and devour.  Recently I picked up a Japanese cookbook about simple Japanese home cooking and, while idly flipping through it, discovered a recipe for homemade udon.  YUMMY...we love udon noodles!  Hummm...but wouldn't making udon noodles be the opposite of 'simple'?

Turns out that it is really simple to make homemade udon!  Who knew, amiright?  And not only is it easy to make, but this homemade udon tastes SO GOOD: thick, firm and chewy, so slurp-able and freshly noodle-licious!!

Truth: I'm a wee bit addicted to these fabulous and fresh noodles...