Chicken Congee 生滾雞粥

Another classic congee dish: the comforting Chicken Congee 生滾雞粥, a creamy rice porridge infused through and through with yummilicious chickeny flavor and dotted with lusciously tender chicken pieces. 

Congee 粥 is a traditional Cantonese type of rice porridge, wherein the rice grains are cooked down until deliciously thick and creamy before being served with different meats and aromatics.  This congee is made with the 生滾 method, translated as "raw boiled" method.  Raw ingredients are cooked directly in the congee itself, allowing the flavors of the raw ingredients to permeate the congee.  

We've previously used this method with our fabulous Fish Congee 魚粥.  You'll find that it's an easy way to make a most yummilicious and comforting congee!

Gong Bao Chicken | Kung Pao Chicken 宮保雞丁

This easy Chinese stir fry, the Gong Bao Chicken 宮保雞丁, also known as the Kung Pao Chicken, is a dish of bold and striking flavor and textures, a voluptuous treat for the culinary senses.  It is a savory dish, touched with the umami of soy sauce, the tang of black vinegar, the pepperyness of ginger, the hot of chili pepper, a hint of numbness from the szechuan pepper,  and the fragrant aroma of sesame and spring onion.  

In texture the Gong Bao Chicken is tender and chewy (the chicken), crisp ( the water chestnut) and crunchy (the peanuts).  This easy to make yet spectacularly bold stir fry has a little bit of everything nice!

Note:  This dish has chili pepper in it!  Integral part of the dish.  As you've probably noted ours doesn't.  This is because our little girl can't tolerate spicy at all (working on training her!) so for the time being we cook without it :(

Spring Rolls 春捲

I love, love, love spring rolls!  There's just something about getting to bite through all that lovely golden crunchiness into a juicy and yummilicious meat and veg filling that is soooo divine.  Whenever we go to have dim sum I always have to get a plate or two of the spring rolls and indulge myself, oh yeah, it's spring roll heaven time baby!  

It's so hard to stop myself from being a pig and eating all the spring rolls...so, in the spirit of spring roll fever, I thought why not make spring rolls at home, lots of them, hot and delicious, so that all of us could pig out (instead of just me :).  

These shatteringly crispy crunchy on the outside, juicy and deliciously savory meat and veg stuffed on the inside Chinese Spring Rolls 春捲 are super easy to make at home.  That way everyone can crunch their way through as many yummilicious spring rolls as their heart desires!

Chinese Steamed Chicken Buns 雞包仔

Recently my 老公 decided that he doesn't want to eat 'red meat'.  Red meat like beef and pork.  Makes dinner kinda crazy sometimes cuz we have to cook his stuff and the regular stuff for us (he insists a growing girl, meaning my little girl not me LOL, needs her red meat.)  Teensie tiny eyeroll...I mean proteins are proteins, wherever they're from, amirite?  But I digress. 

Actually this limitation has challenged us in directions we probably wouldn't usually consider.  Like these Chinese Steamed Chicken Buns.  I myself grew up eating my grandma's Steamed Pork and Veggie Buns.  For quite a period of time it was my breakfast and after school meal.  This skinny little growing Chinese girl could gobble up 3 to 4 buns in one go!

I wanted my family to enjoy the same kind of bun fun so I decided to make these chicken buns so that everyone in our little family could enjoy them.  In the process I discovered that these Chinese Steamed Chicken Buns 雞包仔, with its juicily delicious, tenderly aromatic infused chicken pieces wrapped inside a soft pillowy bread is actually super yummilicious as well as quite easy to make!

Macanese African Chicken Galinha à Africana 非洲雞

More yummy stuff from Macau!  And we've found that a fun way to travel during this home bound time (I feel like I've been in my house for a year!) is thru the cooking of foods from other places.  This one is the famous Macanese African Chicken 非洲雞, also known as Galinha à Africana, a fragrant spice infused chicken dish that's baked in a deliciously spicy, slightly sweet, nutty sauce.

This dish, amusingly enough, has barely nary a thing to do with Africa.  The name, I believe, comes from the fact that from the 1400s until just recently Portugal has had colonies in countries all over the world and one of the main things they procured early on from these colonies was spices.  

Grandma's Chinese Steamed Brined Chicken 煎焗雞髀

I've been chatting to my mama 媽媽 a lot about food recently, as she's been both recovering from illness and stuck at home a lot ( and I mean A LOT! :) and thus doing quite a bit of cooking.  She reminded me of this special dish that my grandma 奶奶 (♥️!!) used to make and it's one of my childhood favorites!  

You know how there are certain foods eaten when you were young that you can clearly remember the taste, aroma, details of presentation and the eating of it, even all these long years later?  Well, this dish, for me, is one of those.  

A simple, humble home cooked dish is all Grandma's Chinese Steamed Brined Chicken 煎焗雞髀 is, just salt brined chicken panfried to crisp up the skin and then steamed with ginger and spring onion.  Simple, but boy oh boy, the moment my mama mentioned it, it all came crashing into my mind,  how ridiculously tenderly delicious it was...and how I always secretly hoped my gran would make it for dinner that day...and how I tried to sneakily eat as much of it as I could before my mama would slap my greedy chopsticks away from getting more.

Thai Satay Skewers

If you're one of those folks like me who think that restaurant servings of skewers are waaaay too small and few and never enough for your deep skewer hunger then you're in luck cuz skewers are actually pretty easy to make.  And if you make your own you can have as many, many mouth wateringly lusicous skewers as you can gobble down and hide under your shirt for nibbles later.  (Ouch, watch out for the sharp tips!)  

These Thai Satay Skewers of thoroughly marinated meat grilled to caramelized charred perfection are a showcase for those famously startlingly contrasts that work so well in Thai cuisine, the sweet, salty, sour, bitter and spicy present and somehow all perfectly balanced in one dish.

Salted Sake Chicken Wings 清酒鹽燒雞翅

If you love chicken wings you're going to food heaven when you taste these wings!  It's such a simple way to prepare the wings that it is incredible how good it tastes.  This is now officially the most requested chicken wing style in our house, which is saying mucho as we love our wings in many styles from soy sauce chicken wings to rosemary wings to soy braised potato wings.  

But this Salted Sake Chicken Wing 清酒鹽燒雞翅, so breathtakingly simple and easy, makes a plateful of wings that is soooo what perfect chicken wings should be that it's almost sinful.  Just tasting of fresh yummilicious chicken with just the right hit of baked salt on crispy skin to kick up the flavor a notch or two.

No extras, just 200% pure chicken goodness.  Oh folks, it's really, really good!

Bang Bang Chicken Salad 棒棒雞絲

Bang! Bang, bang! Want to get back at all those annoying things that happen all in a day's work that you can't do anything about like...being stuck in traffic because you stupidly decided to get a taxi instead of using public transport or...waiting in line forever as the person in front "chats' with the cashier or...your boss giving you a hard time for something that's his fault or...hey, I could go on forever.  

Well how about taking out your frustrations on a tender juicy piece of chicken breast, before ripping it to tiny little pieces?  But then you feel a wee bit mean and so you have to make amends by dressing that shredded chicken with a drizzle of spicy numbing sesame soy dressing, then nestling it tenderly on a cool crunchy bed of cucumber strips and translucent mung bean noodles?  Yummmm...amiright?  And don't you feel better already?  I know I do.  

Make this cool and yummilicious Bang Bang Chicken 棒棒雞絲 for your dinner tonight and see if you don't get a right 'bang' out of it!

Spicy Indian Baked Chicken Masaledar Murghi

Something easy and super tasty for dinner, right, that's what everyone wants?  This is the second post about our adventures into real Indian cuisine, about our mini Indian feast that we indulged in starting with the vegetarian dish Spicy Indian Potato Cauliflower Aloo Gobi that we wrote about the other day.  

To go with these delicious dry curry vegetable dish we made this super easy Indian Spicy Baked Chicken Masaledar Murghi, a tender, fragrant, super spiced up meat dish.

Chinese Style Chicken Liver Pâté 中式雞肝醬

I love getting a bit of organ meat into our meals if I can, they are just so power packed full of vitamin goodness.  One of my favorite ways to do this is to make liver pâté (with a Chinese twist of course!) which we then have in the mornings for breakfast, smeared on a bit of toasted homemade bread.

Yummy!  I love liver!  It's just so tasty.  It is definitely one of my favorite organ meats.  And if you make this Chinese Style Chicken Liver Pâté, it's super easy to make, very yummy, pretty to look at, and a little pate goes a long way!

Three Cups Four Flavors Chicken 三杯四味雞

In Hong Kong there is a small circle of venerable grey beards that are respected by all as the authorities on traditional Chinese food.  They eat and then they talk about what they eat.  What a great job, eh?!  My 老公 likes to check out what they have to say and decided the other day to try out a recipe by one of these famous Chinese food connoisseurs, a William Mark Yiu Tong, known in Chinese as 唯靈.  

This sophisticated food lover created this easy recipe for his daughter before she went off to university as both a way for his daughter to be reminded of her father and as a way for her to make new friends in a new place.  Because, as the old man stated so eloquently: memories of eating good food together is the glue that binds friends and family.  Very true, no?  

So we made his very easy to prepare recipe and we were bowled over with pure deliciousness! Seriously amazing!  These old guys really know what they are about!  We ended up eating (licking!) all of this savoury, perfectly balanced sweet and sour tender chicken dish all up just like that (and neglected the other dishes on the table!)  

This simple to prepare Three Bowls Four Flavors Chicken, or  三杯四味雞 is really out of this world!

Clay Pot Wonton Chicken Soup 砂鍋雲吞雞

This really easy classic all-in-one Shanghai dish is a showstopper at the dinner table, bound to elicit oohs and ahhs of delight both for the awesome presentation and for the yummilicious flavor.  Tender melting chicken, flavorful wontons, delicious chickeny soup and broth cooked vegetables.  The real secret to this dish is how easy it is to make!  

You'll be pleasantly surprised just as I was the first time we made this, it just requires a few basics and then you kinda throw it all together and then, TA-DA!,  the beautiful, classy Clay Pot Wonton Chicken Soup 砂鍋雲吞雞 is sitting pretty at your dinner table.

Lotus Leaf Steamed Chicken 荷葉蒸雞

We love Macau, the Real Macau that is. Not the new fake cardboard Macau that has appeared, Quite literally, out of the blue sea these murky past few years, the gracious but rather charming old city that has survived by crook and nook for over 400 years. This is the Macau that began as a Portuguese colony and first major European settlement port and trade in Asia. What an incredible richness of history is implied! And you can feel it when you walk through the old streets in Macau which, thank goodness, have been left largely untouched: the secrets, the hidden stories in the twists and turns, surprises around every corner.

And, a-hum, most importantly for us, the food in Macau is fantastic! Our favorite Chinese Restaurant, Tou Tou Koi 陶陶居**,  is in Macau. We go to Macau and eat, eat, eat!  Yumm! And then eat some more!!  Psst...at Tou Tou Koi the dim sum is something else too!  This time upon returning to Hong Kong after a short trip to Macau we came down with the 'food blues'.   So...to help heal our blues and as an ode to Tou Tou Koi's wonderful traditional Chinese food, we decided to make our own version of Tou Tou Koi's Lotus Leaf Steamed Chicken, or steamed lotus leaf which is soooo delicious!

Ahhh...I miss Macau already...

Soy Sauce Chicken Wings 紅燒雞翼

Every chinese kid will tell you, soy sauce chicken wings, or 紅燒雞翼, is one of their favorite snacks bar none.  And how could it not be?  Melting from the bone chickeny goodness coated and infused with the aromatically sweet, savory, sticky coating of red cooked soy sauce with a subtle hint of licorice and ginger.  This is chinese snack food at its supreme. Well at least for kids and those of us who still keep their inner kid alive and kicking.  

My family originally being from the Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, we grew up eating this kind of thing pretty much every day, be it red cooked (another name for soy sauce cooking) chicken or beef or pork.  This kind of cooking is more of a northern china kind of thing and since I've been in Hong Kong I have missed it.  

I know, I know, you can find some red cooked meats in Hong Kong too, but, honestly, I don't think it's that good.  It's only so-so on the taste radar.  Usually the flavor's not quite right or it's been sitting around too long.  

So what else to do but make it myself every once in a while to sooth my nostalgic longings.  Beware, though, these little suckers will disappear before you can say "Soy Sauce Chicken Wings"!

Hong Kong Late Night Snack 食宵夜

Published: 2011-10-12

In Hong Kong there are the usual standard three meals a day: breakfast, lunch and dinner; and then there is the special Hong Kong style forth meal: late night snack or 食宵夜.  You don't have to 食宵夜 but the opportunity and the luxury is always there.  

So there we were one late, late night, hungry as wolves for some reason and looking for some good hot satisfying food.  We ended up at our local late night Hong Kong style roasted meats eatery, or 燒味舖, which sells the classic Cantonese roasted meats atop of rice or noodles or a la carte.  This little eatery is open until 4 am every night, proving the 'Oh So Seriousness' of the Hong Kong people towards 食宵夜.