Dejah

Gravy is not part of this dish in my experience. I called this Cantonese Egg Foo Yung on our menu. Sometimes I add diced BBQ pork and baby shrimps. Then it was the "Deluxe" one: add $2.00. Brown gravy was typically served with BarbaraY's "bean sprouty hockey pucks!"

What he means is, " I don't know the characters!!" and, neither do I. However, Ah Leung is well on his way to fulfilling your request, Susan.

Oh, I know the alcohol boils off; it's the flavour I was thinking about... Perhaps you can rename it as Drunken congee!

If I am being questioned, I just say, " Po-Po said so." I don't really think about what my body needs, I just feel it when I need to make a specific tong. Must be all the years of "indoctrination" through the generations. Po-Po is 97.5 and healthy as could be, so the "old ways" must work!

1 cup of wine??!! (Dejah staggers back to bed)

It's even better with diced lap cheung, diced onions and peas! And, we like to eat it dipped in sweet hot chili sauce.

And it doesn't matter that I myself am a granny, MY Mom has been bouncing my "yin and yang" around for the last week. One more week of Po-Po sitting and I should be young and healthy like Gastro, tepee, I_Call_the_Duck.......................... Just pulled out a book from my shelves: The Chinese System of Using Foods to Stay Young by Henry C. Lu., Sterling Publishing Co., Inc. New York ISBN 0-0869-9460-6, 1996. It's never been opened because I have a "living book" close to home. It discusses Chinese food remedies, deficiency and excess diseases, energy Tonic foods, blood tonic foods, Yin Tonic foods, Yang tonic foods. There are chapters on foods for eleminating toxic heat, damp heat, sputum. The final sections deal with getting to know your system and how to correct your weaknesses.

These were available around Dec. - plump and juicy. I sit and peel them for my grandson as we watch TV - brings back fond memories of MY Po-Po doing the same thing for me in Hong Kong, as we ride the trams on a warm evening. Right now, we have dragon eyes (loong gnan). I don't eat as many of these as I do lychees. Neither causes any disharmony to my body.

Please send ASAP FedEx so I don't have to make it myself for Po-Po. Sorry, Tepee. He's already calling me Dai Ga Jeah, so you must be...niece...or, I suppose you COULD be Mui Mui. But then, you'd always get the drumsticks!

Not at all. A bit of ketchup is what I use all the time. And I am authentically Chinese. ← Funny thing, a while back, I was making tomato/beef for supper at Po-Po's. I was about to add some ketsup as she had shown me years ago. This time, she stopped me and said "No, No. Don't add ketsup!". I swear she changes her mind each time she catches me cooking...just to keep me off balance. Now, I just use vinegar and sugar. Next time, she may tell me to add ketsup.

Yes. Ah Leung, Silow: Great job! I think I'll attempt this next weekend as a surprise for Po-Po. I just picked up a new jar of nam yu in anticipation of this pictorial. We can get small chickens, but usually 2-3 lbs. I'll need to do 3 for my family... Mizducky: Cornish hens would work, but as Ah Leung said," Adjust your cooking time".

jo-mel, I DO remember that discussion, but can't remember in what thread! Wasn't it just store bought frozen bread dough that was used? I don't remember it being frozen bun dough from Chinese store though.

That's on par with what we pay here, and that's in Canadian $s, in Winnipeg, a smaller than Toronto and less exotic locale than Malaysia, on the Canadian prairies! I'm curious about the covering on the shrimp. Is that a white/cream sauce?

This is one of our family favourites. Have never used tomato sauce; I just use vinegar and sugar and chicken stock. I find the tomatoes themsleves give enough of a tomato flavour. When I make it for Po-Po, I slip the skins off the tomatoes. Rice is really all you'd need for this dish. I always cook extra rice as we seem to eat mor rice to soak up the sauce! Sometimes, I cook the eggs like an omelet, then cut it into strips.

Ahem! Ben Sook: Glad you said "tendency to cloud" as mine was never clouded

We used ketsup for colour only in the sweet'n'sour sauce. Our base consisted of vinegar, sugar, ketsup (small amount) and "meat juice" from simmering deep fried pork ribs. Our sweet 'n' sour spareribs were always put through egg wash then coated (squeezed individually by hand)with cracker crumbs. These were deep-fried and kept in the cooler. We would simmer the lunch/supper hour's supply of sweet'n'sour ribs in water, sugar and vinegar until the ribs were tender. The ribs were strained then kept warm in the steam table until needed. The liquid from the above process was kept in big pails in the cooler. When we make the sweet'n'sour sauce (in large quantities), we would fill at least half the stock pot with this "stock" ( a transparent amber colour), top it with hot water, add more vinegar and sugar, add enough ketsup for a bit of red (NEVER Xmas red), then adjust the sweet and sour elements of the sauce. Once this came to a boil, we would thicken it with a cornstarch slurry until " a trail is momentarily visible when the ladle is pulled across the sauce". I rarely make this at home because it would involve making the ribs, but I have improvised with chicken stock, vinegar and sugar. It's workable, but I do miss the "deep-fried" flavour. This was what set us apart from all the OTHER Chinese restaurants.

What's wrong with staying with honey? The recipe is for honey-garlic pork chops!

These are a pain to make from scratch. The ammonia powder may be difficult to find and you really need a huge wok/deep fryer to fry them properly.So much easier to buy them. Do you have them in Melbourne? I tried to make them in my restaurant kitchen acouple of times. They puffed up, but they got hard quicker than the stor bought ones. The store-bought ones do freeze well if you can only find them once in a while. I wrap them up well then reheat, wrapped in foil, in the oven. Gotta have 'em with congee. Some people do eat 'em dipped in sweet condensed milk. I haven't tried that altho' as a child, I used to slather the sweet sticky milk on bread.

Periwinkles, from what I remember, are as you described, Ben. I loved eating those in black bean garlic sauce, as well as the ones boiled in along the beachs of the North sea in England. Haven't been able to buy them for a very long time. At first, I thought Ah leung's were clam meat, but the shape is different. Just trying to visualize what I saw in the seafood freezer in Wpg. I may have seen packages of "snail meat", but they were bigger pieces. Man! They make a racket when you toss them around in the wok!

Here are three of the many tems that we enjoyed for CNY. The rest of the food was "disturbed" by the hungry horde before I took pictures. I had enough ingredients prepared to make this jai three times: one for my students' party, one for home, and one last night. I used all the foo-juk for the first batch. The 2 following items: Mah-Lai Goh is from Wei-Chuan's Cantonese Snacks book. On the advice of the "Aunties" I replaced 2 porcelain spoonfulls of the AP flour with equal amount of glutineous rice flour. It gave it more of a dim sum chewy (gnun) texture. The rice flour sesame seed balls turned out much nicer than my first attempt at Mom's last year. It was all in the deep-frying/turning/pressing technique. We don't put red bean paste in the centre for these. We used chopped sweetened coconut and sesame seeds. Once deflated, I cooked them with guy choi.

I do have a couple of questions: [*]What is "velveting"? [*]Is it me, or does Chinese cooking not have a middle sort-of heat? I guess I mean this in two ways. First, the dishes seem to be either delicate or screechingly spicy; and you have soprano heat like ginger and chiles, but there doesn't seem to be anything like the baritone of black pepper, which I thought really improved this dish. Am I just uneducated? ← Dave, Velveting is the process of marinating any meat/seafood for stir-frying with a mixture of seasonings, oil and cornstarch. This process gives a velvety "mouth-feel" to the meat after frying. I cook the meat and vegetables separately, then tossed together for a last minute or so before serving. We DO use pepper, usually white, especially with seafood. That's why your addition of pepper to scallops would really improve this dish. I don't use chilis unless I want fire, but I do use ginger and pepper for a little kick and flavour while maintaining "delicate". Snowangel: I am interested to know how the char siu worked out at 250F. I usually cook mine at 375-400 so there is charring on the "ridges".

← I forgot I had this stuff marinating in the fridge. And, I don't have any S hooks that aren't in use. Should I go to the hardware store? Is there a way that requires less equipment (and less chance of the cook impaling herself on someting)? ← I use thin poultry skewers bent into S hooks when I do char siu. While roasting, I place a pan with water under the strips, to catch the dripping goo and to keep the meat moist.

TP: THose vegetarian shrimps look amazing! Can you get more directions from your Mom for those? Next time we have vegetarian friends over, I'd love to try these. Now we know where you got your exemplary culinary skills - from YOUR MOM!

I know what you mean about getting an even browning on the noodles in a wok. That's why my large crepe pan will work better. Not sure about the kind of noodles Ah Leung uses, but I use cheapies - .88/400g pkg. These I have to cook until al dente, drain, then cooled in the fridge, preferrably overnight. If I don't drain or chill them well, they never crisp up! The ones Ah Leung used may be steamed noodles in the refridgerated section of the grocery? Even these, I find I have to dunk them quickly in boiling water, drain then pan-fry. Your noodles really look light and crispy.

I'm thinking this looks like taro root. Just a guess. ← The green spiky vegetables are indeed bitter melon, a slightly different variety than the ones I use. The Chinese bitter melon I buy has bumpy skin, not spiky. These melons can be used in soup with lots of ginger and oysters, or stir-fried either with meat or stuffed with ground meat and black bean garlic sauce. Medicinally, bitter melon is used for "cooling" the system when you have "too much heat"- and I don't mean hot flashes! The long brown tubers are cassava. The brown "striped" tubers on the left are taro. Taro makes a wonderful savory cake or taro puffs often served at dim sum. Enjoying your blog. Enjoying ALL the blogs! Salivating over the pics of the coconut cake.