Chinese Pickled Garlic 醃蒜頭

Ah, garlic!  That humble culinary bulb, the stinking rose!  People always say that garlic is one of those things where either you love it or you hate it.  For myself, I have found that my personal relationship with garlic fluctuates.  

Sometimes, in some forms, I love it!  And sometimes, in other forms, I can find myself avoiding it.  I can't imagine cooking without it and yet, when I was pregnant and for a long time after, I could not stand raw garlic.  And then I swing back, ruminating on the creamy flavor of garlic after a deep slow long roast...or the flavor layers one smashed bulb can add to a simple stir fry!  

One thing I have always found harder to like is raw uncooked garlic.  Recently we decided to try making Chinese Pickled Garlic, or 醃蒜頭, and I was really, really pleased to find that this sweet vinegary pickled garlic is not only immensely more yummilicious than raw garlic, but also packed with great health benefits and you also end up with the most amazingly garlicky flavored vinegar syrup in the world!

Pan Fried Tofu Stuffed with Fish Paste 煎釀鯔魚滑豆腐

A simple and homey Chinese classic.  Easy to prepare and delicious and fun to eat.  An intriguing play on textures and tastes.  The smooth silky blandness of tofu contrasted against the sea sweet fragrant chewiness of ground fish paste.  Pan Fried Tofu stuffed with Fish Paste, or 煎釀鯔魚滑豆腐, is such a comfort dish and it's super easy to prepare!

Chinese Cooking Stories from the Heart 煮食故事

Dear readers, I want to first of all thank all of you that wrote in to tell us your wonderful Chinese cooking stories for a chance at our cookbook giveaway!  We reviewed 'Chinese Feasts & Festivals: A Cookbook' and made the delicious Homemade Chinese Pork Jerky Bakkwa  自制猪肉干 from a recipe in the same cookbook.   For a chance to win a free copy of the cookbook we asked for your best Chinese cooking stories.

 Well, we have chosen our two favorite stories (the winner's cookbooks are on their way!) and we thought that you might enjoy reading the winning stories as much as we did.  I have to say, (excuse the cheesiness!) that it was wonderful to see how cooking really brings people together!

Crystalline Iceplant Salad with Soy Sesame Dressing 冷拌水晶冰菜

After stuffing ourselves on festival foods merrily all through the Chinese New Year celebrations, we really felt like taking a breather and eating light for a while.  So we've been oohing and aahing our way through platefuls of our latest discovery, a plant/vegetable that, delightfully, looks as though it is covered with ice!  

Its dewy sparkles caught my eye one day at the local wet market and I immediately asked about it.  The vegetable vendor enthusiastically vouched for this strange new vegetable, telling me that it was absolute perfection when eaten as a cold dish.  She even suggested a recipe!  

And indeed she was right, this unusual vegetable made for a fabulous Crystalline Iceplant Salad with Soy Sesame Dressing 冷拌水晶冰菜, an easy to make, light, Chinese style cold dish.  Not only was this dish yummilicious, we have gotten seriously addicted to this icy plant!

Braised Dried Oysters with Black Sea Moss and Roast Pork 髮菜蠔豉燜燒肉

First of all let me greet you with this hearty Chinese New Year Greeting: Wishing you Prosperity and Good Fortune!  祝你好事發財!  And now let me invite you to eat that exact same greeting!  Whaaat, you're probably thinking, she's too much in the kitchen and has finally gone nutso!!  Wait...what I really mean is let me invite you to feast on the very traditional and very fabulous Chinese New Year's dish of Braised Dried Oysters with Black Sea Moss and Roast Pork, or 髮菜蠔豉燜燒肉.  

The Chinese characters for dried oysters and sea moss is 蠔豉髮菜  which sounds almost exactly like 好事發財 which means Prosperity and Good Fortune.  Thus, through this auspicious twist of words,  you can actually feast on a savory dish of Prosperity and Good Fortune to start off the New Year of the Sheep!  

And, indeed, what better way to start off the Chinese New Year than to partake of this intriguingly mysterious yet surpassingly yummilicious combination of unique Chinese ingredients that is the Braised Dried Oysters with Black Sea Moss and Roast Pork!

Homemade Chinese Pork Jerky Bakkwa 自制猪肉干

Kung Hei Fat Choy!!  恭喜發財!! Welcome to the Year of the Sheep!!  I don't know about y'all but it's been a busy few days of cooking for us.  Lots of delicioso type of traditional Chinese New Years dishes that we make once a year to celebrate the coming of the New Lunar Year!  

We've been a-making new year treats like Chinese Sweet New Year Cake 年糕, Steamed Radish Cake 蘿蔔糕, and the Braised Dried Oyster with Black Sea Moss 髮菜蠔豉燜燒肉.  

One of the things we made for the first time this year is Homemade Chinese Pork Jerky, also know as Bakkwa,  or 自制猪肉干.  The reason we attempted to make our own jerky is because we received a most beautifully illustrated cookbook to review, Chinese Feasts & Festivals: A Cookbook, by S.C. Moey, and we were delighted to discover what looked like a pretty easy recipe for making this delicious treat at home.  

I love chinese jerky and never realized you could make it yourself at home!

Chinese New Year Flowers 中國新年花

The one thing you have to do every Chinese New Year if you live in Hong Kong is to visit the Chinese New Year Flower Market, or 中國新年花市.  

This huge, chaotic market located yearly at Victoria Park in Causeway Bay began as a flower market to sell New Year's flowers to all the households preparing for the New Year (one must have flowers in the house for New Year!) and has evolved over the years into not only an amazing flower market but also general fair or market, where anything and everything is sold, from toys to gadgets to political literature and t-shirts.  Everything with strong emphasis on preparing and celebrating for the upcoming Chinese New Year, of course.  

We go every year to enjoy the very festive (though very crowded) atmosphere, to buy a balloon (a giraffe balloon!) and a toy or two for my little girl and, most importantly, to pick up our Chinese New Year's Flowers 中國新年花.  The Chinese New Year Flower Market is just so gorgeous and fun, with festive and colorful New Year's flowers as far as the eye can see!

Happy Valentine's Day! 情人節快樂

Happy Valentine's Day from all of us at The Hong Kong Cookery!

We think there's no better way to celebrate the holiday of love than to spend some time making and decorating cookies to give as Valentines to your sweethearts and friends.  So here is my little girl's funny family of heart cookie valentines (there's Mommy and Daddy Heart, Baby Heart, Sister Heart, and Grams and Gramps Heart.)

Our Valentine to you, dear readers!   情人節快樂!

Chinese Candied Kumquats 糖漬金橘

This Chinese New Year recipe is a delicioso combination of a couple of things I really love: candy and fruit, and something really lucky for the Chinese New Year, the kumquat, or 金橘.  金橘 translates as "gold orange" which symbolizes that good fortune (which for the Chinese always means MONEY!) will find you in the upcoming year.

Which, to be honest, is always a good thing, right?  More money means more yummy food, amiright?  What people usually do is to buy big pots of kumquat laden trees (tying on lucky red pocket envelopes all over it) to put in their house and invite in the luck for the new year.  

This year we decided to not just decorate our house with kumquat trees but to make some 'golden' food to ingest into our bodies so as to increase our likelihood of golden luckiness even more!  And thus we present to you our version of the Chinese Candied Kumquat 糖漬金橘, a choice snack for the festivities of the Chinese New Year, bringing you not only yummilicious delight for your sweet tooth but also a fun way to swallow some of that 'golden luckiness' right into your very being!

Macanese Style Portuguese Curry Chicken 葡國咖哩雞

I'm always so happy when I get a chance to write about Macau. It's a place that pulls me in some way, there's something so interesting about this little city that started out as one of the first European trading port cities in Asia and now, 500 years later, is a gracefully beautiful yet contradictory grand dame, full of sometimes shocking flirtations and many, many secrets doors into her long, intricate past. 

One very interesting part of this past of Macau is the ethnic group known as the Macanese otherwise known as the folks who are/were born with Portuguese and Macau ancestry.  ( Macau was for a long, long time a Portuguese colony. )  

The Macanese developed the eclectic original fusion food known as Macanese Food, a mix of Portuguese and Chinese cuisine that is very distinctly their own.  We were reminiscing eagerly about Macau today and about how much we missed the delicious food there and oh, we should make a short trip soon, blah, blah, blah.  

Long story short, what else to do to stave off our cravings but to make this yummilicious Macanese Style Portuguese Curry Chicken Portuguese Chicken 葡國雞, a dish unique to Macau and Macanese food!