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.

Steamed Pork Patty With Dried Squid - 鱿鱼蒸肉饼

Growing up, my Mother was a stay-at-home Mom. So almost everyday, we enjoyed delicious home cooked meals. When I grew up, I noticed many people mentioning things like, "my Grandmother makes the best dumplings..", "my Mother makes the best chicken curry.." etc. But many wonderful homecooked recipes were lost because somewhere down the line, the recipe was not learnt, and thus lost forever. Such a waste!

I created a YouTube channel, CoKohKitchen comprising of me recreating my Mother's recipes and also some of my own recipes. Hoping that the trial and errors that we went through would not be lost. Hoping that someone, anyone, would be able to benefit from watching the videos. Maybe, one day, my own children would be able to learn a thing or two from there even if I'm not around.

My brother surprised me by asking me to make this dish for my YouTube channel. I didn't even know that he was subscribed to it. This is such a simple and humble dish that even I had forgotten all about it. But I did remember that it was one of his favourite dish growing up.

So I had to go ask the guru (a.k.a. Mommy) how to cook it. The problem with "Mom's recipes" is that it's always very vague. She can tell you the recipe, but because everything is agar-agar (estimated), it just doesn't turn out the way you want it to be. So a seemingly simple dish took me a few tries to master it, and to finally write it down.

Here are some things to take note for this recipe.

1. Buy big pieces of dried squids.

You can smell them. They should have a strong aroma. Smaller ones doesn't have any flavour. After soaking them, peel off the cuttlebone. This is a bone of the squid. It looks like a long piece of plastic. Use your fingers to feel the squid. If there's a lump in the middle, remove it. It's the eye or beak. Honestly I can't tell. It's tough and not for eating. Gross, I know. Sorry.

2. Pork
For best results, go to a butcher, choose a nice piece of pork belly. I find that meat that is darker pink have better flavour and more tender than the light pink ones. You can decide how fatty or lean you want it to be. At least 40% fats please. Ask your butcher to mince the meat to save you the effort. My Mother would go home and chop up the meat herself. You can do that too. DO NOT buy pre-minced meat. Yup, those packets of minced pork have no flavour and way too lean. The meat patty would turn up super dry and tough. Don't.

3. Always check seasoning
Don't blindly trust how other people season their food. When you are cooking for yourself, always, always check the seasoning. Everybody have different taste, so always under-season, taste it, and then gradually adjust according to your liking.

That said, here is the recipe.

half a piece of dried squid
2 pieces of dried scallop (conpoy)
280g Minced fatty pork
1/4 tsp salt
a dash of pepper
1/2 tsp sugar
1 tsp Chinese cooking wine
a pinch of Chicken powder (optional)
5 tbsp water

1. Rinse the dried squid and dried conpoy and soak it in cool water until it's soft. About 30-40 minutes.
2. Remove the squid bone and eye. Chop the squid and scallop finely.
3. Add chopped seafood into the pork and mix in all the seasoning.
4. Check seasoning by cooking a little of the meat and tasting it.
5. When you are happy with the seasoning, spread out the meat onto a plate and add in the water. (use the water from soaking the squid and scallop)
6. Steam for about 5 minutes.
7. Serve!

For a better understanding, check out the video for this recipe.

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.

No skills required - Braised Peanuts 焖花生

There's this Chinese restaurant that we love to go to and the moment we settled down they would serve these delicious little plates of braised peanuts as appetiser. My son would demand, "peanuts!" and us the servants would pour a few at a time into his kiddy bowl. Before the food arrived he would have polished off at least a third of the plate. Back before we had kids, the both of us can leisurely enjoy the delicious plate of peanuts while we chat. Now it's like a competition. If you eat any slower the kid would finish all the food! -_-"

But as a parent I'm always on a lookout for food inspirations. Especially food that the kids like to eat! I did a little research on the internet and I was a little surprised that this dish is really a no-brainer. But to be honest, the 1st time I did struggle to catch the perfect cooking time. Those peanuts sure take a long time to cook! Once I got the timing right, it's really a too easy recipe. To me, the peanuts have to be soft and NOT crunchy. BUT, it should still hold it's shape. That would be perfect. No wonder the kids love it!

1 cup of raw peanuts
3 cups water (double the height of the peanuts in the pot)
2 tablespoons light soya sauce
1 tablespoon dark soya sauce
1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 tablespoon oyster sauce
1/4 teaspoon Chinese 5 spice powder
a few dash of pepper

Put everything into a pressure cooker and stir well.

• Pressure Cookers:
1. Bring to pressure using high heat.
2. Bring to low heat and cook for 1 hour and 50 minutes.

• Regular Pots:
1. Bring to boil using high heat.
2. Bring to low heat and cook for 2-3 hours.
3. Check every 30-45 minutes to make sure it doesn't dry out. Add water if necessary.

And that's it! Sorry but it really is that simple. Haha, but it's so good, you cannot stop at just one. Yummy! Here's a video tutorial.

Stir Fry Long Beans with Pork - 乱棍打死猪八戒

乱棍打死猪八戒 This was the name my Mum used for this dish and it stuck in my head for years! It's a clever name as the string beans were the poles while the pork was Zhu Bajie, one of the characters in the story Journey to the West.

Names aside, this is a simple home-style dish that is easy to whip up and it goes nicely with a bowl of rice. I cooked the long beans a little more softer because of the kids, but you can cut the cooking time if you prefer it more crunchy.

Long beans
Pork shoulder
Seasoning:
1 tsp Bean paste with garlic
1 tsp Sugar
a dash of pepper

1. Slice pork shoulder into thin slices. Marinate with seasoning for 15 to 20 minutes. 
2. Wash the long beans, cut into segments. 
3. Add a teaspoon of salt and oil in boiling water and cook long beans until desired texture. Drain and set aside. 
4. Stir fry marinated pork slices. 
5. Add a little water until just half of meat level. Bring to boil, cover up and simmer in lowest heat for 10 minutes. 
6. After 10 minutes, stir in cooked long beans and thicken sauce with corn starch and water slurry. 
7. Serve.

See video here.

Mother-in-law's Pa Mee version 2

My hubby's dialect is Heng Hwa (兴化), which is a little known sub group of the Hokkien clan. In order not to disrespect their tradition, I would say this is a modified version of their Pa-Mee (打面). They always sing praises of their grandmother's pa-mee, but since their grandmother is no longer around, I can only judge by my Mother-in-law's version of the noodles, which is pretty good. Too bad I can't taste the original version!

I previously did a post of this noodles and here it is. But as the time pass, I tweaked it a little here and there, adding ingredients to pump up the flavour in nutritional factor for my babies. Also, I watched the way my MIL cook this dish and copied accordingly.

Now here is the updated version. Hope you like it, cause I sure do!