Tom Yam Braised Chicken

Before we had our Korean craze, we were so in love with Tom Yum. Tom Yum soup, Tom Yum steamboat, Tom Yum fried rice, etc. I looove Tom Yum! So instead of the usual Tom Yum Soup, I'm going to cook something a little different. Tom Yum braised Chicken!

Head to any major supermarket and you should be able to find a jar of Tom Yum paste. It consist of all the spices you need to make the soup. 

Yes, I guess you can call this a cheat dish. But in order to keep it wholesome, you can start reading the ingredients list on the food packaging. Choose the one that has the least amount of ingredients that you don't recognise. XD

Point to take note will be, the paste is usually very concentrated. I only needed 1 teaspoon to make 1 dish. But different brands have different flavours and seasoning. So always taste your food and adjust the according to your taste.

My original recipe is much more simpler, which consist of only the chicken and the sauce. But I realised that if you add in a few selected vegetables, it makes a whole lot of difference! Best thing is that it is so quick and easy to make. The spicy and sour flavours will make you salivate! Another bowl of rice for me please!

6 pieces of chicken wings with drumlets

1 onion

1 tablespoon light soya sauce

1 teaspoon instant tom yum paste

1 teaspoon instant tom yum paste oil

1 stalk lemongrass (smacked and cut into sections)

1 teaspoon sugar

200g abalone mushrooms (can use straw mushrooms)

1 tomato

1. Separate the chicken wings with the drumlets and blanch them in boiling water for a few seconds. Drain and set aside. 
2. With a little oil, stir fry the chicken parts with soya sauce until the skin is a little brown. 
3. Add tom yum paste and the oil inside the paste, if available. Add in sugar and the lemongrass and stir fry until everything is mixed well. 
4. Add in the mushrooms and give it a good toss. 
5. Add just enough water to reach halfway of the food in the frying pan. Cover up and let it cook in high heat for about 10minutes, or until the liquid has been reduced by half. Cooking in high heat releases the gelatin in the chickenskin, making the sauce thick and sticky. 
6. Check seasoning. 
7. Add in a sliced and de-seeded tomato. Give it a few toss only before serving.

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.

Simplified Chicken Curry With Potatoes

When it comes to making chicken curry, my hubby and I would always go for the instant curry paste. (video here) But my brother asked if I could make chicken curry like how Mom makes them. So I guess I go check it out anyway. So it turns out to be quite a time consuming "project".

After getting the recipe from my Mother, which was strangely simple, she insisted that we NEED to get the right curry powder, which HAS to be from the spice seller at Tekka Market. Tekka Market literally on the other side of the island! So we had to wait for a few days before she is free to go buy the curry powder.

photo source: CNN.com

If you are not familiar with the spice sellers at wet markets, they are like spice gurus. You just to tell them what you want to cook, your preferences, (how spicy you want it) and they will blend different spices for you. Anyway, we got the curry powder and I tried out Mom's recipe.

Strangely, it does not taste satisfying. Like... there's not enough depth in flavour.

So I did some research and tried focusing on the process rather than the ingredients.

1. STEP BY STEP

Instead of just throwing everything into the pot, I did it step by step. Slowly and steadily, I fry up the ingredients one at a time. And the results was amazingly different. Even though I did not use as many ingredients as a traditional Malaysian Curry, I compensate with my special custom mixed curry powder, which includes a wide variety of dried and grounded spices like tumeric, corriander, cumin, dried chilli, etc. So for my simplified curry, most of the ingredients are commonly used in my kitchen. Only need to buy 1 or 2 extra ingredients. Good.

2. LOW AND SLOW

Another hurdle was frying the spices. After making the 1st successful batch, I got cocky. So the 2nd time I cooked it, I up the fire when I was frying the spices, hoping to speed up the process. Unfortunately I got distracted and the spices got slightly burnt. It was just a little brown, so I continued cooking anyway. But the final curry looked strangely brown instead of the gorgeous red yellow. When I tasted it, there was a slight bitter taste to it. It was a definite fail. :( So please take your time when frying the spices. Don't be impatient like me!

Now let's look at the recipe.

Serves 2-3 persons

500g Chicken (I use thigh and wings)

3-4 waxy potatoes

1 large onion, diced (130g)

3 garlic cloves, diced

1 tablespoon grated ginger

1 birdseye chilli/chilli padi (optional)

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon sugar

1 stalk lemongrass (bruised)

1 stalk curry leaves

100ml coconut cream

2 tablespoon curry powder

cooking oil

1. Par-boil your potatoes in salted water for about 5 minutes. I'm using waxy potatoes because they hold their shape better.
2. Mix enough oil to the curry powder to make a thick paste. 
3. In low heat with a little oil, stir fry the onion, garlic, chilli and ginger until SLIGHTLY browned. Some may say that is not browned enough. That's because we are not done frying! If we continue to fry them after they have been browned, they will burn and turn bitter. So just ever so slightly browned will do. 
4. Add the curry leaves and curry paste in and continue to stir fry in low heat for another 2-3 minutes. Same thing, the spices in the curry powder needs heat in order for the fragrances to be released. But they also burn very easily. So LOW and SLOW please. 
5. When you start to smell the fragrance and see tiny bubbles sizzling on the curry paste, add in your chicken and boiled potatoes. Increase the heat and stir fry until all the chicken and potatoes are coated with the paste. 
6. Add enough water to cover about 3/4 of all the items in the frying pan. The thickness of the curry is subjective to personal preference. I like my curry thick, like a stew. Some like it more watery like soup. So add more water if you want.
7. Add salt and sugar. 
8. Bring to boil in high heat. When the curry is bubbling, lower the heat and simmer in medium heat for 15-20minutes.  
9. Check your seasoning and adjust accordingly. If too salty, add water or sugar. 
10. Add coconut cream. Mix well and simmer for another 5-10minutes. 
11. Serve with rice, noodles or bread.

You can see my video for a clearer picture

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.