Grow Spring Onions in a Jar

Bring the spring in, I say, bring it in!  We've been experimenting with spring onions 珠蔥 also known as green onions or scallions, trying to find a way to have this essential to Chinese cuisine flavoring unit at hand whenever we need it.  

I don't know if it's just my luck but, really, almost every time I need spring onions, all the stores are out of it!  And if you cook Chinese food, you know as I know that you will always need some spring onion for your dinner dishes, be it a sprinkled garnish, a way to aromatize your oil, or even as the tasty vegetable portion of your stir fry.  

Which is why, here in Hong Kong, I have never understood why it is so hard to buy spring onion after a certain time of the day.  A shake of the head, a shrug of the shoulders...sorry, no spring onions.  Urghh...how devastating to that delectable dish that you have in mind for dinner!  

Recently we have discovered a way to easily insure ourselves against the abyss that is the lack of spring onion:  we have been growing our own spring onions in a jar!

Five Spice Kumquat Jam

I'm so happy with my latest jam!  I feel like I've bottled up some serendipitous springtime sunshine in a jar.  This is because the lovely golden kumquat is in season again and after making Chinese Candied Kumquats  糖漬金橘 last year, I decided this year to make some marmalade with it.  

Marmalade, for me, is always associated with Paddington Bear, that adorable little hatted bear from deepest, darkest Peru.  His most favorite, absolutely preferred food was marmalade.  When I think of him I always see him with one furry paw, sticky with orangey goopy goodness, just out of the marmalade jar.  But enough of bears!  Back to the jam at hand!  

I had never made marmalade before.  But since the surprising easy success of my Easy Homemade Strawberry Jam, I decided to try making jam with kumquats.  A bit more work, but oh my gosh darn it!  This Five Spice Kumquat Jam  is soooo addictively tasty, refreshingly sweet yet tangy, a touch of that distinctive citrus bitterness, all rounded out by the warm spiciness of five spice.  

Oh, dear, oh dear, I keep finding myself in deepest, darkest Fridge-ru, dipping one paw into the goopy golden goodness that is my very own marmalade jar!

Stir Fry Scrambled Eggs with Char Siu Pork 叉燒炒蛋

It's been so nice and quiet these few days.  Spring is coming, it's getting warmer and I've started seeing little tender green buds everywhere.  Right now it is the long Easter holiday for the school kids here in Hong Kong and I've been lazing around the house a lot with my little girl at home.  It's so nice to have her to myself all day again!

So we've been cooking (and baking) a lot as well and I suddenly realized that we had somehow missed out on writing about one of the most totally kick ass Chinese comfort foods, the amazing Stir Fry Scrambled Eggs with Char Siu Pork.   How could we have forgotten this humble and easy to make home style dish?

Tender just set flakes of golden yellow eggs clinging to caramelized chunks of Char Siu, that yummilicious world famous Chinese barbecued pork.  This Stir Fry Scrambled Eggs with Char Siu Pork 叉燒炒蛋 is one of those soul satisfying Chinese dishes, a veritable rice slayer, that is really easy to make and guaranteed to produce shiny licked over plates and rice bowls. There will be nothing left, seriously!

Fragrant Pear 香梨

Tis the season for the best, I kid you not, the best pear you're ever going to have!  If you're a pear lover, and who isn't, you have to do your pear shaped duty and find a source for these special Chinese pears.

Our latest fruit obsession, these Fragrant Pears or 香梨 are amaaaazing: light, tender, snowy white flesh, delicately crisp, filled to the brim with the most refreshingly sweet and flavorful pear juice.  They are so good that we can't stop gobbling them up right away and having to run back to the market to stock up on more!  And why not indulge, tis the season for the Fragrant Pear 香梨 and they'll be gone soon enough if you don't hurry and get some for yourself!

Easter Decorated Sugar Cookies

Happy Easter!  This year, instead of our usual Easter Eggs, we decided to make some Easter Decorated Sugar Cookies instead.  I love Easter Eggs, especially the ones we make from natural Easter Egg dye, but sometimes I find it rather stressful to have that many eggs to eat up.  We shouldn't really eat that many eggs because both I and my daughter are eczema prone and too many eggs means itchy.  

So we switched it up and did Easter Decorated Sugar Cookies.  And you know what?  Making and decorating these cute Easter Cookies was a super duper fun and creative project to do with my little girl, as fun or maybe even more fun than doing our usual Easter Eggs!  Plus now we get to eat all these yummilicious beautiful to look at cookies!

Easter Glass Noodle Nests

The Easter Bunny is coming and we've been busy preparing for his arrival!  My little girl, as perhaps typical of an only child, has a huge collection of stuffed animals of all sorts and sizes that serve as her 'children' and playmates.  And as the both of us have recently just discovered those magical Cadbury Candy Coated Easter Eggs (I know, I know...where have I been?) my little girl really wanted to make some little Easter egg nests to share the chocolate eggs with her little stuffed friends.

Nests...humm...how to make a wee little Easter nest?  After some thought I decided to use an ingredient we had at home already, the Chinese glass noodles, to experiment.  And, woo-hoo, we were sooo delighted how our experiment turned out.  Our Easter Glass Noodle Nests not only turned out translucent, elegant and fairy like but also were super duper easy to make!

Chinese Black Bean Sauce 蒜蓉豆豉醬

Do you know what these rather plain looking beans are?  These humble little beans are the Chinese fermented black soybeans, known also as Douchi, or 豆豉.  These black beans are used for the making of that ubiquitous Chinese sauce that is used in all kinds of Chinese dishes, be it pork, beef, or seafood, the Chinese Black Bean Sauce, or 蒜蓉豆豉醬.  

As I was saying in our previous post about Chinese Steamed Fish with Black Bean Sauce, I didn't used to be a fan of this sauce, finding it rather overpowering and creating a 'sameness' in each dish in which it was used.  

Until, of course, the day that my 老公 decided to start making his own Chinese Black Bean Sauce, that is.  It turns out that homemade Chinese Black Bean Sauce is soooooo much better than canned or what you get in restaurants, a delightfully unique, multi-layered, intriguingly flavored sauce that will complement whatever dish you decide to pair it with!

Chinese Black Bean Sauce Steamed Fish 豉汁蒸魚

In our many experiments cooking the lovely Antarctic Queen fish this last week, we found that our favorite way of cooking up this tender, sweet and mild fish was pairing it with the classic traditional Chinese Black Bean Sauce, or 蒜蓉豆豉醬.  

You must have tried Chinese black bean sauce before, it is a common sauce for many a Chinese dish and is popular at restaurants as an easy, flavorful way to prepare a dish with a minimum of fuss.  For myself black bean sauce was never a favorite, I found it too overpowering.  Never, that is, until we started making it at home.  

WOW!  Homemade black bean sauce is a different creature altogether, rich yet subtle, many layered, just delicious and completely different from the out of the can black bean sauce that is almost always used in restaurants.  Try our Chinese Steamed Fish with Black Bean Sauce 豉汁蒸魚 recipe yourself and see if you don't find it yummilicious as well!

Antarctic Queen Southern Hake Fish 澳洲無須鱈

Dear readers, guess what landed on our doorstep last week?  If you're thinking something long, cold and sea-fresh, you're on the right track!  We were invited to try out a new seafood import coming into the Hong Kong market, the Southern Hake 澳洲無須鱈, also know as the Antarctic Queen and Merluza Austral, a deep sea fish caught off the coast of Chile, an amazingly beautiful and curious country with contrary landscapes ranging from oceans to mountains, volcanoes to deserts.  (I kinda want to visit Chile now.)

Red Braised Fish Tail with Roast Pork 紅燒斑尾

Okay, I have to say right off the bat that just thinking about this dish makes me sooo hungry.  This traditional Cantonese fish dish maybe does not sound super exciting when you describe it in words but once I had tasted it, it just burned into my food memories as one of the most delicious, comforting, unforgettable kind of Chinese dishes that I've ever had.  That's a tall order, I think, and I confess that now that I have written that sentence I'm nervous that people will make this dish and think, what the hey is she talking about?  

But then I backtrack in my mind to the last time I had this spectacular dish, cooked up by my Cantonese cuisine extraordinaire 老公, and all I can remember is joy and muffled sounds of eating and the soft slurping sounds of delight and happiness.  You know what I mean.  All those funny body movements and facial expressions people have when their food makes them really, really happy.  

So I present you with the Red Braised Fish Tail with Roast Pork, or 紅燒斑尾, a truly yummilicious fish dish braised to perfection with heapings of succulent roasted pork and tender chewy bean curd skins, all smothered in a thick, glossy, delectable sauce, the one fish dish besides the glorious Steamed Garoupa Fish, that I think is truly fit for a Chinese festival table.