Pressure Cooker Red Bean Soup

Red Bean Soup!

If you are not Asian you probably think this dish sounds kindda gross. But this is actually a dessert. A sweet porridge-like dessert made from red beans. They do sell this at food courts, but they are usually very stingy with the beans, so with every scoop, there's only a few beans floating around in the sweet soup. So sad.. When you make this at home, you can have a whole spoon of beans with every bite!

Shiok!!

Plus, do you know they are super good for you? Red beans are packed with protein, vitamins and minerals. Dessert that is actaully good for you!

The traditional way of cooking it is quite straight forward. Just put the beans in water and boil. But like all dried beans, it takes FOREVER to cook, and boiling over is unavoidable and messy. Not forgetting constantly checking it to make sure the water didn't dry up or burnt at the bottom of the pot! With the pressure cooker, all I had to do was to put everything into the pot, press 2 buttons and wait. Clean and simple!

In fact, this dish is so easy to make, I decided to just let the 2 babies do it for me. All they have to do is to follow the recipe I wrote down. Turned out that making the dish wasn't the difficult part. I forgot that my 2 babies HAD to fight about EVERYTHING. There was so much shouting, including myself, that I had to edit out the noise.. 😅

Sibling rivalry aside, the red bean soup was delicious. But when I gave it to Hubby, he ate it quietly and said, "I prefer green bean soup.."

😑

So I made green bean soup by myself the next day, and I literally only took less than 5 minutes before pressing the START button. Haha... everything really IS more difficult when the kids are around!

The green bean soup was also just as good. The beans were intact but soft and cooked. The dish was sweet and satisfying~!

You can enjoy the dessert :

• Warm
• Chilled
• Blended
• even as a side with ice cream!

OK, will stop talking now and give you the recipe.

RED / GREEN BEAN SOUP
makes 3 generous bowls

1/2 cup dried red/green beans
2 tablespoons glutinous rice **
1 stick of 片糖 (70g Chinese brown sugar)
2 pcs of Pandan leaves (tied into a knot)
2.5 cups of water

** Optional: Adding glutinous rice makes the dessert more sticky and thick.

1. Wash the beans and rice with water and drain well. 
2. Add all ingredients into the pressure cooker pot. Close the cover, make sure the pressure seal is closed. 
3. Choose 'BEAN' mode and press 'START'. Let the pressure cooker cook (30 minutes) and allow it to naturally release it's pressure by itself. (about 20-30mins) 
4. Adjust the thickness of the soup and sweetness according to your own preference. E.g. If you want it thinner, add water and bring it to a boil before serving.
5. Serve as is or with a drizzle of coconut cream.

Crispy Cheese and Spinach Wontons

Hubby and I decided to restart Meatless Monday. Where we would not eat any meat once a week. Times like these I really take my hat off for those vegetarians. It's so hard to make a filling dinner without any meat! How do they do this everyday!?!?

My initial idea for a spinach wonton came from Ding Tai Fung's fried spinach wonton. We love it, but I think there's some pork in it. So I was surfing YouTube for fried spinach wonton recipe when one suggested video showed Cheese and Spinach Wontons. I was intrigued. My kids love cheese and anything crispy. Spinach and Cheese? Sounds like a good idea! I don't know who's recipe this belongs too, but it seems like many people are making them and loving it. So I gave it a try.

The result was... Delicious!

Packed with nutritious spinach and cheese for strong bones, sinfully crispy, and best of all, it's so easy to make! Wah.. No wonder it's so popular.. Don't take my word for it, my 2 kids were fighting each other for the last piece while the 2 adults barely have enough to eat. T_T So I would say this is a successful recipe. One for the books!

Cheese and Spinach Wontons
Makes about 25 wontons

250g Chinese spinach
2 cloves garlic 1⁄4 teaspoon salt
1⁄2 teaspoon sugar
160g cream cheese
1 packet wonton skin
1 tablespoon flour
1 tablespoon water

1. Wash and cut the spinach. Cut and discard the roots, cut into smaller sections and wash thoroughly. 
2. Heat up a deep frying pan with some oil and add in crushed garlic. If you don’t have a garlic crusher, mince it as fine as you can. 
3. Add in the Spinach before the garlic turns brown, (which only takes less than a minute) salt and sugar, and stir fry vegetables until it is tender. 
4. Put cooked spinach in a strainer and strain out as much liquid as you can.
5. Chop up the spinach finely. Set aside in a big bowl. 
6. Add room temperature cream cheese into the bowl with the spinach and mix well. 
7. Mix flour with water to make the “glue”. 
8. Place spinach and cheese fillings in the wonton skin and seal up the wonton with the “glue” mixture. See video on different ways to wrap a wonton. 
9. Fry in medium-high heat oil until the wonton is light golden brown.
10. Serve.

Note: 
You can freeze the raw wontons. Place them in a ziplock bag but make sure they don’t stick onto each other. Carefully place them into the freezer. When it’s frozen, you can bunch them up together. When you want to serve them, directly deep fry them as per normal until light golden brown.

Brinjal with Minced Pork - Oh So Purple

Growing up I never liked vegetables, and brinjals would be pretty high in the ranks of vegetables I detest. But when I grew up I learnt to like many vegetables. My Mum's spicy yong tau foo with dark soya sauce made me fall in love with brinjals again. But like it's name suggest, the whole dish, along with all it's ingredients is dark brown.

Experts say you should eat your colours, like red, orange, blue, green and purple. But it seems inevitable when cooking brinjal right? Whenever you cook it, it turns into a sad, greyish brown shade. Recently I stumbled upon a few videos on YouTube that showed how to keep the brinjal purple even after cooking. One suggest you coat it with vinegar first, but it would also require you to fry the brinjal first. I hate frying. All the oil needed is so troublesome and messy! The other method is this, super high heat with a minimum amount of time. The only way to achieve that is to use the microwave.

I've had my microwave for such a long time that I actually don't know what model it is or it's maximum voltage. I do know how to cook under maximum power though, and it really works! The brinjal is actually cooked, but the colour remains a pretty purple! Amazing!

Minced Pork gravy
75g Minced pork
1 onion (diced)
1 garlic (minced)
Seasoning:
1 tsp dark soya sauce
1/2 tsp oyster sauce
1 tsp sugar
1/2 tsp fermented soya bean paste
water

1. Brown the minced pork (you can use any type of meat) with a little oil. 
2. Add onion, garlic with a small pinch of salt and pepper. The salt will make the onion sweat, so it will soften rather than brown. Stir fry until onions turn slightly translucent. 
3. Add enough water to cover all the meat. Add in the seasoning, mix well and cover up to let the meat braise for a few minutes. 
4. After 5mins, check the flavour before thickening gravy with a little cornstarch slurry. Set aside. 
5. Cut brinjal into bite size pieces and place on a microwave safe plate skin side up. 
6. Coat the skin in oil. 
7. Cover with a microwave safe cover and cook in the microwave at the highest heat setting for 3 minutes. 
8. Take out the brinjal, pour the meat gravy on top. Cover and microwave under full power for 1 minute. 
9. Serve!

Looking at those shades of purple reminds me of the recently departed singer, Prince. Rest in peace!