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!

Christmas Sugar Cookies

A very very Merry Christmas to all!!  It's that wonderful time of the year again, time for the baking, decorating and eating of Christmas Sugar Cookies!  

Do you like my little girl's Santa Claus Cookie?  We're going to save this cute one to put out for Santa Claus when he comes by on Christmas Eve.  (Don't know how he's going to get into our tiny house!)  

These cookies are a great Xmas project to do with your kids cuz all kids love to draw and what better thing to draw on than a cookie you can eat!  My little girl and I had a blast making these decorated cookies in preparation for the holiday season and we figured out some great tips for the cookie decorating part that made it much, much easier for my little girl to work with the icing to decorate the cookies.

Perfect Stove Top Steamed Rice 蒸米飯

In the past I have always been astonished that people would want to steam rice in a pot instead of using a rice cooker.  Why, I would wail, would anyone want to add more work into cooking a Chinese dinner!  After all, if you wash your rice out well and are careful with the measurements, your rice cooker cooked pot of rice is a beautiful thing.  

However, recently we decided to try to Cook Steamed Rice on the Stove 完美的蒸米飯 and I realized at the moment I first tasted the perfect, perfect steamed white rice, that it was soooo worth that little bit of extra effort!

Watercress & Fish Ball Soup 鯪魚球西洋菜湯

Recently my 老公 has been trekking out to all the far flung ends of Hong Kong for his work.  There has been a wonderful side benefit to us on the eating side of things, though, cuz he's been finding and bringing back home all sorts of delicious things to cook and eat!  

The other day he came back tired and hungry with a really huge bag of something green.  I scratched my head at first, wondering what on earth he could of brought back that was so big and green.  Turns out it wasa big ol bag of farm fresh watercress, picked that very day from Hong Kong fields!  

Wow, I could have never imaged that, living as we do in the middle of a concrete jungle, we could still cook up a yummilicious pot of Watercress & Fish Ball Soup 鯪魚球西洋菜湯 using freshly picked watercress!

Steamed Lap Cheong Rice 蒸臘腸飯

A classic (and easy!) way to wrangle two delicious things to eat out of one pot!  If you've never tried Chinese Lap Cheong, or Chinese sausage, you are in for a treat.  These lovely dried sausages hung from hooks in pairs tied to colorful strings are so distinct in look, texture, taste and smell, just thinking of them reminds me of all the chinese groceries I have ever visited.  A happy memory indeed!  

So this is one for all the sausage lovers as well as all the rice lovers in this world, not only will you end up with a delectable dish of steamed Lap Cheong but also a heavenly pot of rice aromatically infused with all the sausage's flavors!  Steamed Lap Cheong Rice, or 蒸臘腸飯, is the perfect cold weather comfort two-in-one dish!

Winter Melon Pork Bone Soup 冬瓜豬骨湯

For the Cantonese, drinking soup is like drinking from the fountain of life.  Since I've been in Hong Kong, I've caught the soup bug too, and why not, Chinese soups are soooo delicious!  Once I got used to having soups like these, I now find that I long for them, feeling like a wrung out rag when I don't get enough of these luscious liquids into my tummy.  

Lately we've been super happy cooking with our latest yummilicious discovery for making soup: using pork bones!  (I know, I know...everyone knows that already, right?!)  But do you seriously realize just how good of a soup you can make at home with just a bit of pork bones?  It is so good that it's sinful!  

It's a soup so sweetly savoury that it'll knock your socks right off!  Try out our Winter Melon Pork Bone Soup 冬瓜豬骨湯 recipe (with our secret for intensifying flavor) and see if you're still wearing socks after your first luscious sip!

Chinese Fried Fish Skins 炸魚皮

Do you like potato chips?  I do!  I love crispy crunchy potato chips so much I usually end up eating the whole bag!  Well, if you love potato chips, you'll love, love, love these Chinese Fried Fish Skin Chips as much as we do!  

A local Hong Kong staple available as a side order in most noodle shops, these absolutely deliciously thin, tasty and crispy deep fried Chinese Fried Fish Skin, or 炸魚皮 could possibly be more yummilicious than potato chips! (Seriously, I'm not kidding!)

Steamed Sun Dried Dace 蒸臘鯪魚

The fact is that Hong Kong is an island, though sometimes this is easily forgotten living inside of Hong Kong's massive, soaring concrete jungle of a city.  And because of this island history there is a strong tradition of fishery, seafood, and also, to many a food lover's delight, a diverse and rich local history of many ways of preserving, preparing and eating that seafood.  

We love the super fresh and happening seafood we get at the wet market in Hong Kong and have posted many recipes of our favorite fresh and preserved seafood dishes.  

Today I want to introduce you to an amazing southern Chinese speciality, the Sun Dried Dace, or 臘鯪魚.  This sun preserved fish, also know as Mud Carp, is nowadays rarely to be seen, but we found some the other day at the market at one of our favorite stalls and snapped it up quick as a flash!

Stir Fry Chinese Pea Shoots 炒豆苗

This classic Chinese vegetable dish is one of those things that is really, really simple to make and yet unforgettable in all its comforting yumminess.  I first had Stir Fry Chinese Pea Shoots long ago in a little hotel restaurant in Beijing on my first ever trip to China.  

This was rather long ago, when China was not the aggressive China of today, a much more relaxed and (for me at least) a much more interesting China.  I remember clearly that this humble little stir fry vegetable dish which my cousin ordered, though nothing special to look at, was a revelation to me.  

What was this vegetable, so tender, distinctive and tasty, I wondered while stuffing my face full of greens.  The really cool thing about this classic vegetable dish is that ever since that first tasting, every time I have happened to have this Stir Fry Chinese Pea Shoots, or 炒豆苗, it is always cooked the exactly the same perfect way!

Roasted Pumpkin Seeds

Happy (after) Halloween to one and all!  I hope all of you have had just as gruesome and spookity a Halloween as we did!  Well, to be honest, ours was probably not so spookity as yours since it was mostly centered around tiny crazy costumed kids and their apparently insatiable appetite for sugary treats.  

And of course there was the Halloween costume to be made to order (umm...anybody else still traumatized from weeks spent making a Queen Elsa costume?) and the treats to be purchased and distributed and...last, but not least, one of my personal favorite parts of Halloween, the choosing and the carving of dear ol' Jack O' Lantern pumpkin!  (Do you like the slightly creepy way Jack's eyes came out?)   

And under the general motto of 'Waste not, want not," we always try to repurpose dear ol' Jack by eating his flesh (see our delicious Anise Pumpkin Cookies recipe!) or, this year, by ripping out his gook-ily guts and making yummilicious Roasted Pumpkin Seeds from the very seeds that we plucked out from Jack's innards!