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!

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. )

Rose Apple 蓮霧

A delicious fruit that is a cross between an apple, a pear, and cotton candy?!  What the hey?!  What sort of fruit-strosity could that be?  Why the Rose Apple, or 蓮霧, of course, that little lady of the exotic tropical fruits, beloved and cultivated in Taiwan for hundreds of years.