Chinese Salt Pickled Vegetables 自製中式泡菜

These little veggie goodies that you can make at home are fantastic little bombs of fermented probiotic goodness!  With a simple brine of salt and water vegetables can be transformed into delicious health boosting pickles that can keep for a long time.  

This process to do this is known as lacto fermentation whereby good bacteria known as Lactobacillus are used to break down starch and sugars into lactic acid, a natural preservative.  The transformative result is veggie pickles with a tanginess introduced, flavors intensified and layered with new taste notes, texture still packing a bit of crunch.

As this was the traditional way to preserve vegetables in the days of old, one can find lacto fermented food in most every culture.  Sauerkraut, kimchi, jalapeños, dill pickles, yogurt, kefir, natto (our new obbession!), kombucha, tempeh and miso are just a few examples of the endless variety of fermented foods found around the world.  

Today we introduce the traditional Chinese way of making Pickled Vegetables 泡菜, a brine soak resulting in yummiliciously delicious veggie pickles infused with aromatic Chinese spices.  It's super simple to make, just need a bit of time and patience.

Salt Baked Fish Head 鹽焗魚頭

Nowadays you can get sashimi and sushi just about everywhere as folk all over have fallen in love with the deliciousness of the fresh raw fish that Japanese cuisine has introduced to the world.  Twenty years ago I'll bet most of these people could never have imagined themselves eating and loving raw fish!

One of the unexpected benefits for seafood lovers such as ourselves is the fact that supermarkets that produce sashimi and sushi for sale are left with very very fresh fish heads.  And they put these out for sale at very reasonable prices!  Whoppee yeah!  Well as least for fish head lovers.  

For those of us in the know, fish head is deliriously delicious, amirite?  Fat and fatty meat and cheek meat (yum!) and soft cartilage, crispy skin...  Oh yeah...seriously yummy.  

Quick Salt Pickled Cucumbers

Here's a quickie...a lovely little thing to have as bit of a side dish on your dinner or lunch table.  A small dish of something piquant and refreshing to contrast against the main dishes in your meal.  

I discovered this japanese shiozuke style of Quick Salted Pickled Cucumber that is, to my delight, super duper easy and so quick to make that you can just toss it together as you're beginning to cook and have it ready by the time you're putting the meal on the table!

Chinese Salt Baked Quail Egg 鹽焗鵪鶉蛋

Cheep, cheep!  Presenting our interpretation of a 'natural' Easter: this year we bring together the idea of Easter eggs and the idea of street food culture in Hong Kong.  Our Easter nest is full of tiny naturally speckled eggs!  

Namely the delicate Chinese Salt Baked Quail Eggs, or 鹽焗鵪鶉蛋, usually found at your local street hawker, these roasty, just salty wee eggs come still piping hot in a paper bag.  There's nothing quite like it to have in your pocket on a windy day to warm your fingers with!  

Sea Salt White Pepper Crackers

It must be one of the ironies of modern life that we have everything at our fingertips and yet...we seem to miss out sometimes on just as much as we gain.  The reason I've been contemplating such dreary thoughts is that I realized recently (gulp...hangs head in shame) that I have never ever in my life eaten homemade crackers or even thought of making my own crackers!  I have always eaten the delicious (well sometimes delicious usually just kinda stale) boxed crackers that one finds in plentiful supply at the grocery shops.  

It never ever occurred to me to make them myself, I guess because I somehow thought that one needed a special machine to make edibles so thin and perfectly shaped.  Well it turns out that I was completely wrong!  You don't need a machine or special skills.  

It turns out that not only are crackers dead easy to make but these homemade Sea Salt White Pepper Crackers are so much more amazingly delicioso than the crackers that you buy at the store!  Seriously now...I'm kinda mad no one ever told me about homemade crackers!

Homemade Salt Preserved Vegetables

This tale of Homemade Salt Preserved Vegetables, or 自製干腌菜, started one sunny Hong Kong afternoon when we decided to take my little girl to a park (which shall remain nameless for reasons you will soon understand) which was not our usual neighborhood park.  A small trip for our small family.  A fun, though still hot and muggy, day spent in a magnificent old park.  A refreshing sojourn amongst the green trees for us weary city dwellers.  

As the twilight fell we were resting and eating ice cream on park benches when my 老公's sharp eye spotted something strange nearby.  We sauntered over in the quickly fading light and discovered to our surprise, where once had been flower beds was now a bed of vegetables!  How, you ask, did we know it was a vegetable bed?  

Well, dear readers, there were little melon/cucumber looking vegetables snuggled amongst the vines!  Why on earth these vegetables were growing in a prime spot of a Hong Kong park I know not, but I will admit (Sh! Don't tell anyone!) that two of these melon/cucumbers were tucked into our pockets as we left the park that day!