Dejah

Thanks, XiaoLing. I do sometimes make my own dough, and they seem to be the best when I use cake flour instead of all purpose. This time, for convience sake, I used a pre-mix bao flour. I always worry when the baking powder is not mixed in throughly, and I can taste the bitterness. Makes my tongue curl. My trusty old cast iron tortilla makes perfect circles, and cupcake liners are more convenient than cutting squares of wax/parchment paper.

Wonderful blog, Doddie. I enjoyed every picture and morsel. One final question: Is Bill Senior of Asian descent? I will definitely make restaurant scrambled eggs from now on!

Company's coming tomorrow! Busy, busy here tonight: Per requests: hot'n'sour soup; spring rolls; chicken, sweet peppers, onion, and tomatoes in Soo's BBQ sauce hot plate; crispy ginger beef. My choices: pickerel steamed with dow see, ginger and scallions; seared scallops and gai lan; rice; and mango pudding for dessert. I should never ask if guests have requests.

Mmmm... I could live off of dumplings and pastries. ← OK, then here's some pastry for you, sheetz. The first one is more Middle East, I suppose: ground lamb, cumin, chili peppers, etc in filo pastry baked in the oven. Inga and I did these yesterday. The filling: Rolled up and baked. Would the sesame seeds on top make it ok to be in the Chinese forum? My Mom was wanting chicken baos. The filling has both dark and white meat, Chinese mushrooms, onion, and lap cheung, and a touch of oyster sauce. The filling: hard to keep people's fingers from scooping up dollops while it was cooling! The bao:

Are you ready to make it jtnippon? Cooking tendons takes 2 to 3 hours. I remember that you wouldn't want to spend over 10 minutes to make jook. Here is one way to make it. Same procedure, just use beef tendon instead of beef shank: Beef Shank Braised with Five Spice and Soy Sauce (五香牛腱) ← I think we need to have "project" in here to explain - even for jook. I saw a post from him in another forum. What would he do with sheetz's nor mai gai?

Dejah - here's the actual page where I wrote it 29 years ago. Yes, I still have the notebook. ← Thank you, Doddie. That's excellent.

My Icelandic friend Inga and I had a cook-in all afternoon! We made a variety of dishes: spiced ground lamb in filo pastry, Chinese curry chicken in puff pastry, chicken and ginger potstickers, and hor mok talay - "Elsewhere" fish mousse. In between every item, we "cleansed" our palate with delighful papaya. This fruit is supposed to help with digestion, but I'm still feeling quite bloated. This was the first time I made potstickers with commercial dumpling wrappers. They are small compared to when I used to make my own wrappers. The filling was diced chicken, ginger slivers, Spanish onion, and a bit of oyster sauce. I stir-fried this first, cooled it, then made the potstickers. They were very good! Sorry no pictures. Hubby had the camera at work.

This is a wonderful virtual tour, Doddie, of the food and sights in and around your home. Any chance we could see your first published poem? I'm sure it is on topic as you wrote it at your Mom's burger stall.

Sadly, this is why it's so hard for me to find a place to eat this. The taste of it makes me cringe for some reason, just the way a piece of pork fat would. Yes, you may strip me off my eGullet membership now. I don't think you usually fry the yam cake this way. What my family does is slice it and panfry--crispy edges! ← What makes you cringe? The texture of the cake or the minced preserved radish? If it's the latter, you can leave it out if there are lots of other ingredients. My family is like yours, MLI. We've never cut it up into chunks then stir-fried. We've sliced and panfried for the crispiness.

Cruellers cut into rings so they can get globs of jook inside; diced pei dan; slivers of preserved chili radish; and cilantro! Kids must have pork silk, cruellers. Grandson likes siu mai in his. Smart boy - meat eater!

Doddie: You mentioned in your introduction that you are a writer. Can you expand on that - or did I miss that particular post?

Huh...you young'uns are teaching this old dog new tricks. Thank you! But, to be honest, I don't think I'll ever learn to control my "lieu hand" - so my taro or turnip cake will always fall apart if I try to stir-fry the slices!

I think I've had something similar. It was just plain white turnip cake cut into long pieces (like fat fries) and stir fried with scrambled egg and green onions. ← Really? Must be quite a bit of rice flour in it to make it very firm. Am I missing out on something special?

Taro and turnip cakes are just that - cakes/goh. They are not ingredients to be cooked into another dish. It accompanies other dishes - as part of dim sum or as a snack. There are so many flavours in these cakes : doong goo, lap cheung, har mai, some even put in oyster sauce and cooking wine. If you try to "stir-fry it in with other ingredients, it would just crumble.

You can use the blender to grind the sesame seeds. I seem to remember someone else using a blender, and they had enough water in with the seeds so that it ended up like a thick black smoothie. Then you can adjust the thickness when you cook it. The rice flour would be the thickening agent - nor mai fun, I think. I'm sure peony would be able to elaborate on this.

I remember my Mom grinding the black sesame seeds and rice into flour form. Then, this is boiled with Chinese rock sugar (made from cane juice) into a slightly thickened soup. It was also said that you shouldn't eat gima wu too often as it will turn your skin black.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that you can fry up strips of Pilsbury canned bread dough if you don't have any yao zha guai. ← "guai" means devil. How can you call the Pilsbury Doughboy "devil"? SheenaGreena: The term "gruel" is not allowed at this time.

So, Dang Msians! Congee is like a foreign word, but porridge isn't! Sure, Pan. "Thorw another log on the fire, won't cha?" To add to the list, what about gruel then? jtnippon! Show thine face in here! Mumble, mumble - Give me that can of Campbell's Chicken and Rice SOUP!

Oh Oh! GIRD YOUR LOINS, ERGO SUM YOUR COGITAS', DRAW YOUR LINE IN THE SAND. The storms of another semantic war is gathering. Does porridge have to be made only with oatmeal? Do we not call jook rice porridge? When my mother fed me savoury oatmeal porridge did she not call it mak pei jook? ← According to Oxford dictionary, - congee is a "thick Oriental soup made of rice" -porridge is a dish consisting of oats or another cereal boiled in water or milk, - cereal is any kind of grain used for food, and rice is a grain. Therefore, I decree that congee can be called savory porridge, but a savory porridge made with oats or grains other than rice must be called savory porridge, and not congee. Only savory rice porridge may be called congee. Now, can anyone find the word "jook" in a dictionary? And, "mares eat oats and does eat oats, but we all eat congee..."

Doddie: What kind of rice do you use? From the pictures, it looks like glutinous rice. I asked my Korean students if they ate rice for breakfast every morning. Both of them, one being 35 years old and the other is 24, said they don't, but their parents do.

You can get creamy jook by "whipping" it with a big whisk at the final stage of cooking. I prefer to have "grains of rice" in jook. The creaminess depends on how much you whip it. I don't tend the pot very much while it is cooking because I like the "browned stuff" stuck to the bottom of the pot! This thread is not good for people on Weight Watchers or South Beach diets!

Good Morning, Yemyem, and welcome. Now that you've posted, you are no longer a "newbie"! Leftover rice is certainly a good option for quick jook fix - better than farina.

Some Chinese food ingredients, like aged red wine and brandy, are more precious the older they get. Examples: chan pei (dried mandarin peels). ← Ahem! You forgot to mention Chinese women before Chinese food ingredients.

I cannot visually imagine what this dish is. Is it still called "jai"? "Jai", which simply means a vegetarian dish, is typically a mixed stir-fry like what sheetz had or some wheat gluten or pressed tofu cooked with some sauces. ← Yes, it is still called jai, but gon (hard G)=dry jai. There is no sauce. Maybe it's a Toisanese or local dish. Ben: Any ideas?

Any rice cooker can make jook, but on top of the stove doesn't need to take more than an hour. You'd have to "mind it", I suppose, but that's all part of the joys of making jook!