Fruit Juice Chia Seed Drink

Dear readers, this food story starts with one word: 'regular'.  As I'm sure y'all would know, being 'regular' sometimes can be an annoying problem.  So just add more fiber, amirite?  Easy peasy, amirite?  But what happens when one tries prunes, more veg, more fruit and more fibery food and the 'regular' problem still persists, what is one to do?

And all that jazz led us to this new drink we're making in our house these days because we discovered the amazingness of chia seeds!  Easy and quick to make, this Fruit Juice Chia Seed Drink is super yummilicious and super good for the 'regular' you!

Fermented Gooseberries

Okay, this whole food adventure happened because of a show about food that led me to a book that is all about fermentation!  The show that I stumbled on was "The Bear", the quirkiest, craziest show about chefs? restaurant business? food?   Umm...not actually sure but it was totally fun to watch.  

Anyways at one point one of the restaurant employees wanders in totally engrossed with a thick cook book in hand.  A quick screen grab and some furious searching later, I realized it was a real life cookbook, The Noma Guide to Fermentation.  Wow.  I had to get my grubby little hands on that book!

Once I finally managed to wrangle a copy of the book I gobbled away at it and here is our first 'making' from the book, fermented gooseberries, tangy little bursts of intense flavor and texture.  I've never pickled fruit before.  Aren't they beautiful?!

Mangosteen Fruit

Another fruity post!  I  know, I know.  We've gone completely fruity!  But how could I resist?  The  tropical mangosteen is in season now!  We've seen heaps and heaps of these ball shaped purple fruit with its cute green hat everywhere recently.  This small and humble looking fruit hides a most delicious taste sensation inside, delicate white juicy flesh, lusciously sweet and tangy, reminiscent of the flavors of peach, pineapple and lychee.  Taste buds say 'Wow!'

Homemade Passion Fruit Soda

Deliriously delicious passion fruit soda!  Heady tropical scent and flavors burst out in this most refreshing concoction and it's so easy to make!  The best thing to do with passion fruit if you ask me.  And super duper easy to make it right at home!

Rose Dragon Eye Jelly 龍眼玫瑰茶果凍

This delicate little jelly is actually inspired by my one of my attempts at a super fancy type of cake, known as 'entremet', which pretty much gobbled me up and spit me right back out.  Delicious but, ouch, not much to look at.  Oh well, live, try, fail, and try again, amirite?  

But one thing that I took away was this utterly delicious rose infused jelly.  Oh my gosh darn!  What a taste!  The delicate heavenly scent of rose (I LOVE the scent of roses!) captured in a cool quivering jelly state contrasted oh so sweetly with the clear fresh sweetness of the dragon eye fruit, also known as longan.  So good had to share!

Homemade Raspberry Powder

Look at this lusciousness!  This beautiful vivid red.  And the fragrance is unbelievably intense, tart and sweet and fruity.  What is this, you ask?  Why it's Homemade Raspberry Powder, used to add flavor and color to all kinds of pastries and other baked goods.  

You can buy this premade at bakery supply stores but it's so easy to make a home and so much more fragrant when just made.  Why not try making this super easy to make Homemade Raspberry Powder at home?

Homemade Grenadine Syrup

This particular food love of mine started on a day long ago.  It was a perfect day, the sky was blue and shiny.  From the inside of a quaint cafe came the tantalizing aromas of coffee, however, that day I wanted to try something new.  I ordered something called ‘Grenadine Italian soda’.  I fell in instant food love at the first sip of this beautifully pink, refreshingly bubbly fruit flavored concoction.  

Fast forward to the near present and it had been years since I last had a grenadine soda.  Actually, I had forgotten all about it.  But one day, while browsing the liquors available at the supermarket, I saw a bottle of grenadine syrup and the memories came crashing back.  Excitement!  I would make it for my little girl and she would love it just as I had!

However upon closer inspection I discovered to my disappointment that the bottle of grenadine syrup was just sugar and artificial flavorings and colors.  Yucky!  Surely that was not what grenadine syrup really was.  To my relief I discovered that traditional grenadine syrup was made from pomegranate.  It was time to make some delicious fruity and refreshing Homemade Grenadine Syrup!

Caramelized Figs

Happy Halloween!  For our spooky day sweet treat, we decided to fig it out!  It really is the season for figs in Hong Kong as the markets have been absolutely flooded with fresh plump figs recently.  A bit of sugar and a hot pan and you’ve got really scrummy caramelized figs.  It’s an easy and non tricksy way to prepare a perfectly perfect and healthy sweet treat!

Persimmon Jam

We’ve recently raved about the perfectly phenomenal persimmon in our post about the Spanish persimmon.  We’ve been buying boxfuls of these lovelies at a time, that’s how obsessed we are with this fruit!

Unfortunately, as happens with the best of fruit, boxfuls of the stuff can lead to having too much fruit and too little time to eat it.  What to do with too much fruit?  Jam it, of course! 

If you make just a jarful of jam, it’s quick and easy to do and you don’t have to deal with all the serious sterilization that is required for mass and long term jamming and canning.

We just gathered up our extra persimmons, a bit soft and sad from our neglect and whipped up this yummilicious persimmon jam, an explosion of cheeky orange lusciousness,  tasting of honey with hints of plums and apricots and the mellow sunshine of a late summer's afternoon.

Kidney Mango 腰芒

As our dear readers will know, we like to share the love when we find new and yummilicious fruits.  Well, we've found a new one!

We discovered this gem of a mango recently.  Though, to be honest, this fruit has been hiding in plain sight.  We just never noticed these little guys cuz these mangoes are so small and humble looking, as well as being really affordable!  I guess I just thought that these little mangos weren't going to be worth the work of peeling and pitting.

So that was it until one fine day when, on the casual recommendation from the fruit lady, my hubby brought a bagful of these kidney mangos 腰芒 home.  Wow-wee, what a wonderful surprise!  Seriously, we've tried all kinds of mangos but this had to be the best mango ever!  

Macerating Your Fruit

Dear readers, this one is for all you fruit lovers.  Spring is here at long last and the markets are filled with all kinds of delectable friuits.  Yum!  I'm pretty serious when I buy fruit, trying my very best to choose the best ripe fruit, checking for the right color, the right hardness or softness, the good smell, no bruises, etc.  And still, sigh, sometimes, I end up with fruit that's totally 'meh'. 

Tasteless, lifeless fruit.  Why even sell such fruit, amirite!?  So disappointing!  😞   

At other times, I forget the fruit that I bought and stashed in the fridge for too long (I'm quite absent minded) and when I rediscover them they look sad, shriveled and resentful (my bad).  I have however discovered that there is a super simple fix for both these cases of fruit gone sad.  

A bit of sugar, a bit of time and the magic of maceration will turn your Plain Jane or neglected fruit into plump, juicy, flavor intensified fruity superstars!  It's time to Macerate your Fruit!

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 Deseed Pomegranate

Pomegranates are a gorgeous fruit, chock full of fabulousness for your mind and body, its red juicy seeds shimmering in the light like living ruby teardrops.  Famously, pomegranate seeds were the temptation that Persephone succumbed to when abducted by Hades, the Lord of the Underworld.  Those few ruby red seeds tied her to the world below forever...  (Lesson: when in a fairy or god/goddess situation, never ever eat or drink anything!!!)

On a brighter note the pomegranate is the perfect fruit to celebrate the upcoming Chinese Lunar New Year festivities, its color the lucky happy red that the Chinese consider a harbinger of luck and its many seeds an apt symbol for fertility.  

While I actually really love eating pomegranate seeds, they're super yummy...but gosh darn it, I always found that getting the seeds out to be a real b*tch.  Picking them out takes forever...  But then I discovered that there is a really easy and quick way to get those pomegranate seeds out after all.  A fabulous fun method where you get to beat something up!

Oven Dried Longan Fruit 自製龍眼乾

The funny thing is that I like the luscious lychee fruit more than its sedate cousin the longan dragon eye fruit.  But, turn that around when it comes to these fruits in dried form, cuz I love, love, love dried longan fruit more than anything!  

The fresh longan fruit, a small berry like fruit with a hard shell encasing a translucent sweet white flesh, is delicious and all that but, man oh man, when it is dried it becomes so sinfully sweet, in a natural way, deliciously chewy and just so absolutely yummilicious that it is better than candy!  

Yes, that's right, Oven Dried Longan 龍眼乾 is even better than candy (except chocolate of course) and that's how we eat them in our house, as a naturally deliciously sweet and healthy fruit candy.

Longan Dragon Eye Fruit 龍眼

It's that time of the year for that exotic summer fruit, the lusciously sweet Longan Dragon Eye Fruit 龍眼, another fruit that originates from southern China.  This small rather humble looking fruit hides an inside of translucent soft white flesh that is unbelievably sweet.  

I do believe it could be the sweetest fruit that I have ever tasted, even giving the summer favorite and Queen of Fruits, the Lychee 荔枝 , a serious run for the money.

Lychee Jam

Oh jam it!  Presenting our delicately sweet and tenderly lush pink jam made from the Queen of Fruits the luscious Lychee 荔枝!

That's right my friends it's time to run to your nearest Chinese market and stock up on these seasonal beauties while they last.  We love lychees way too much in this house and always end up indulging a bit too much on them.  But heck why not they only come around once a year!  This year though we got a gift of a whole box full of lychees, a whole boxful!  What to do with a whole boxful of lychee?  

After eating as much as we could I decided to turn some of it into a batch of our Luscious Lychee Ice Cream (our most favorite homemade fruit ice cream!) and the rest I decided to try to make a Lychee fruit jam, which I have never attempted before.  

After a nervous planning and setting out, gosh darn it, the results are totally worth the effort, our homemade Lychee Jam came out tinted a gorgeous rosy pink and tasted ever so intensely of sweet, fresh lychee flavor with a delicate fragrance of summer florals!  Absolutely yummillicious!

Homemade Strawberry Mango Jam

La, de, da... this is a super fun kind of summer jam!  Strawberries and mangos are in abundant supply.  What better idea than to mix 'em up into a fabulously yummilicious mix it up jam!  I wasn't so sure that the flavors would "jam" so to speak, but wowzer, it did "jam" in the most interestingly tasty way.  Try it out yourself with our luscious double flavor packed Strawberry Mango Jam!  

Do note this is a quick recipe for making one lovely jar of jam only for consumption within a couple of weeks and not a recipe for batch making of jam!

Luscious Lychee Ice Cream

I remind all our dear readers that this is the time of year for the Queen of Summer Fruits, the lovely Lychee!  We've been gorging ourselves on luscious, juicy lychees, desperate to gobble down as many as we can before they disappear until next year.  We got inspired by the abundance of lychee and the hot sweltering temperatures of the summer to make our favorite homemade summer treat, ICE CREAM!  

You've got to check out our Lychee Ice Cream, 荔枝雪糕, a soft luscious velvety ice cream packed through and through with delectable real lychee flavor and aroma.  We think it's the best ice cream we've ever made...voted our new family favorite ice cream flavor!

Easy Homemade Raspberry Jam

I just had to share this because this is the best and easiest jam you can make!  I know we have written previously about making homemade strawberry jam, which is pretty easy to make, but making this yummilicious raspberry jam beats it by a mile.   It's super easy!  And so yummy!  

In only about 10 minutes or so you can magically transform fresh raspberry fruit into a jar of gleaming ruby red jam.  And let me say that this Homemade Raspberry Jam is our all time FAVORITE jam, held above all others, always requested by my little girl, better tasting than store bought jams by a long shot!

Note:  This recipe is for lazy folk (like us!) who don't have the time and patience for the mass sterilization of jam jars and all that fuss that generally goes with jamming.  This is for making only one jar of delicious sticky red jam that can made in a flash and kept in the fridge to be eaten within a week or two, if it lasts that long!

Chinese Hawthorn Fruit 山楂

This little red fruit is something I had never seen before in the flesh, so to speak, until the other day when we walked past a neighborhood mom and pop grocer 士多 and I spied the rosy orbs rolling about in a cardboard box placed along the sidewalk in front.  Actually I had never actually properly seen these fruit even in images, as I had only ever seen them as part of a traditional sugar coated candy fruit treat called Tanghulu, or Bingtanghulu 糖葫蘆.  

I had wondered about them and so was extremely delighted upon inquiring to discover that these tiny red fruits were indeed the elusive Chinese Hawthorn, or 山楂.