Chinese Fermented Rice Poached Egg Soup 酒釀蛋

 

We made a big jar of Chinese Fermented Rice 甜酒釀 recently cuz my little girl loves the stuff and she's been bugging me to make some for her.  And it's the perfect thing to help boost our immunity for the oncoming winter weather.  

This wonderfully fresh, sweet and slighty winey fermented food is packed full of all kinds of probiotics, amino acids, vitamins and minerals that your body needs to thrive.  The probiotics in particular help to balance the bacteria in your gut which is a key player in helping to boost immunity.  

Now that we have a big ol' jar of this stuff, I've started making this homey but wonderfully satisfying breakfast treat, Chinese Fermented Rice Poached Egg Soup 酒釀蛋, a simple soup of sweet fermented rice mixed with hot water and topped with a poached egg.  Each spoonful carries the winey sweet taste of fermented rice and a swirl of bright creamy egg yolk.   This soup makes you feel warm and fuzzy and totally ready to take on a new day!

Chinese Cha Siu Bao Roasted Pork Buns 叉燒包

A hot Chinese bun is a wonderful thing.  Hot, steaming and fragrant, each soft pillowy bun encases a delicious filling, sometimes just a bite of savoury meat, sometimes a yummy mix of meat and vegetables and sometimes just a sweet bit of something.

When I was little my dearest grannie 奶奶 would make buns for us girls all the time.  We were skinny Chinese girls in the growing stage and boy-O could we eat alot!  I loved the meat and veggie buns she made (I could eat 3 buns in one go!) but my favorites were the buns stuffed with red bean paste.  To my young taste buds red bean paste tasted as good as chocolate!

This particular type of Chinese bun, the Cha Siu Bao Roasted Pork Bun 叉燒包, is not something my grannie ever made herself but, since living in HK, it's become one of my favorites.  Chinese roasted pork Cha Siu 叉燒 by itself is already soooo good.  But luscious roasted pork cha siu, diced into a deliciously sweet and savory filling as the secret heart of a warm and incredibly soft and hot Chinese bun?  Ammmaazing!

Chinese Sesame Candy 黑芝麻酥糖

For the upcoming Chinese Mid Autumn Festival, my most favorite festival of the year, we decided to make some traditional Chinese candy along with making mooncakes (we decided on snow skin custard mooncakes 奶皇冰皮月餅 this year!).   I've always loved these Chinese Sesame Candy, buying them by the bagfuls, but wowzers if homemade Chinese Sesame Candies don't beat em all for fresh nutty fragrance and a delightfully crispy crunch!

Chinese Egg Fried Rice 蛋炒飯 - A Different Method

Here's a different and tasty way to make that old favorite, Chinese Egg Fried Rice!  This alternative method my hubby 老公 discovered makes for a gorgeously yellow hued and creamy version of fried rice.  It's super yummy and just as easy to make.  I haven't decided yet which version I prefer, the traditional way of making Chinese Fried Rice or this new creamier version of fried rice.  

White Bread

I'm so happy today!  Today I made and baked a bread using a new method and it came out really fabulous and was easy to make (mostly)!  

Sooo...confession first...I'm a bit obsessed by bread baking (and eating!) and have, over the years, baked bread time and again.  In the beginning my efforts resulted mostly in what I fondly call 'brick breads'...true story, I once almost broke a tooth foolishly bravely trying to eat a slice of one of my handmade 'brick breads'!

Wind forward to nowadays and many, many breads later and I can finally happily supply my little family with homemade yummy fragrant bread stuffs, yay!  (Check out all the way down for more about our other yummilicious breads!)  

Chinese Crab Sauce Noodles 蟹肉醬麵

This Chinese Crab Sauce Noodle is a dish to impress, no doubt about it, and it's perfect both to amaze with its gorgeous sexy looks as well as its sublime knock it out of the ball park taste explosion of ultimate crabbiness.  Luckily for us the ones we most like to impress with good food is ourselves...meaning me... because we're making this for my birthday!  (I'm a summer baby.)  

It's the Chinese custom, for those of you who don't know, to have a bowl of noodles to celebrate a birthday and what better celebration of my wonderful self (hehe) and our love of pure foody goodness than this bowl of sinfully decadent Crab Sauce Noodles 蟹肉醬麵, slippery chewy noodles smothered with a generous golden dollop of rich umami packed crab meat and roe sauce.

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.  

Chinese Sachima Soft Flour Pastry Cake 沙琪瑪

With the Dragon Boat Festival 端午節 around the corner, we're already dreaming of those aromatic, meltingly tender bites of savory pork filled zong zi and sweet red bean zong zi.  YUM!  I love festival foods!  

This year, in addition to these traditional festival dumplings I decided to try making a personal childhood favorite of mine, the delectable Chinese Sachima Soft Flour Pastry Cake 沙琪瑪 (or 馬仔 as it is known locally in HK), a light, fluffy, tender pastry made of fried dough strips tossed with delicious caramelized syrup, dotted with raisins and roasted sesame seeds, then pressed and cut into delectable squares.  Kinda like a Chinese rice krispie cake in principle but uniquely different and even more delicious!  

I remember that my folks used to go all the way downtown to the Chinese bakery to bring back these treats, packed carefully in a beautiful pink box tied with a red string.  My sisters and I, the three of us, would fight fiercely over the biggest squares of sachima, which my sneaky older sister usually won.  Nowadays my little girl loves it as well and so we decided to make it together, it was so much fun!

Chinese Hot and Sour Soup 酸辣湯

This classic Chinese Hot and Sour Soup 酸辣湯 is always on the menu at Chinese restaurants, its bold contrast of sour and spicy and loads of delicious bits of flavors and textures in a thickened broth make it a perennial favorite with all Chinese food lovers.  I remember ordering it with my family when eating out at China town restaurants when I was a little girl and I'm still ordering these days whenever I see it's on the menu.

Since we've been at home A LOT lately, we've been missing its deliciously vibrant flavors so we decided to try making this soup at home.  Or rather my hubby 老公 decided it, he really loves this soup, has done so since in utero apparently.  (His mom lived off this stuff while pregnant with him!)  We discovered that this Chinese Hot and Sour Soup 酸辣湯 , while requiring a good bit of knife work, is actually quite easy to make at home and comes out just as good as the ones we've had in restaurants and maybe even a bit better!

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.