sheetz

Hire a translator for legal work. As far as ordering in restaurants, I'm not sure how much it would help to learn to speak Chinese. I would think learning to read characters on the menu would be far more helpful. Hence, learning standard Chinese (Mandarin) would be more useful, IMO, as Cantonese is primarily only a spoken dialect and you will not be able to find much of anything actually written in Cantonese dialect. Actually, Toisanese ARE considered Cantonese, but not from the city of Canton (Guangzhou). Toisan and Guangzhou are both located in the Guangdong province and, linguistically and culinarily speaking, fall under the umbrella heading of "Cantonese." Wikipedia explains it a little better. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taishan

I followed this recipe but did the roasting in a turbo convection oven.

No, it wasn't dry at all since pork belly has plenty of fat to keep it moist.

Looking at the delicious pics of aznsailorboi's braised pork belly made me develop a craving for siu yuk. This is a small piece of roasted pork belly cooked in my tabletop turbo convection oven.

They're really not that hard to make. The only "tricks" to know are: 1. Keep the dough adequately chilled or else the inner dough might leak out when you roll them. 2. Make sure to give the dough enough resting time. Well rested dough rolls like clay, whereas unrested dough rolls like rubber bands.

Yeah, here's a pic of the ones I used.

It didn't occur to me to take a cross section this time because I did one already in the other thread. I'll just repost that one here.

This is an adaptation of a recipe by cookbook author Amy Beh. Ingredients Filling: 165g candied winter melon, chopped 20g toasted sesame seeds 20g toasted coconut flakes 60g cooked glutinous rice flour (koh fun) 80g water 4 tsp oil Outer dough: 150g Gold Medal Harvest King flour (or 50/50 blend of bread and all purpose flours) 1 Tbl sugar (castor/superfine preferable) 1 1/2 tsp golden syrup 50g lard, melted 1/8 tsp vanilla 75g water Inner Dough: 80g all purpose flour 65g lard (solid) Glaze: 1 egg yolk mixed with a pinch of salt Combine filling ingredients. Cover, and chill. For outer dough, mix flour and sugar in a bowl, then stir in the rest of the ingredients until a soft dough is formed. Wrap with plastic and set aside. For inner dough, blend flour and lard Wrap with plastic and chill for 30 min. Divide the two doughs into eight equal portions and form each portion into a ball. Shape one of the outer dough pieces into a cup and place a ball of inner dough inside. Bring the outer dough edges up around the ball and pinch to close. Repeat for the rest of the dough. Cover the dough balls with plastic and refrigerate for at least 15 min. Roll one of the dough balls between the palms of your hands to form a cylinder. Roll it out to a oblong and roll it up jellyroll fashion. Repeat for the rest of the balls. Rotate the dough 90 degrees and repeat the last step for each of the balls, beginning with the ones you worked with first. Cover the dough pieces and refrigerate for 30 min. Divide the filling into eight equal portions. Place a dough portion on its edge and flatten with a rolling pin, making the edges slightly thinner than the middle. Place a portion of filling in the center and bring the edges up to cover. Pinch to close. Repeat with the rest of the dough and filling. Wrap one of the filled pastries in plastic and press into a 3 inch mold. Here I'm using a plastic storage container but you can use anything like a cup or mug. Place pastries on a baking sheet and brush with glaze. Using a sharp knife cut two slits into each pastry. Bake in a 350F (180C) oven for 25 minutes.

This is a Chinese inspired Salt and Pepper catfish.

This is my favorite! My mom makes it like you do, but she also puts some pork stomach in. YUM!

gok = corner, horn, turnover http://www.yanksing.com/our-cuisine/deem-s...e-dumpling.html

Oh, hom sui gok (or what Toisanese call hom gai lung) is another one of those tricky dim sum items. If you don't make the dough properly they will burst when you fry them. Some people add sweet potatoes to the dough to keep it from bursting. Back when I was experimenting with doughs I found that sugar also helped to prevent that problem. I never got around to perfecting a recipe, but my guess is that a blend of glutinous rice flour and wheat starch will work best. Habeas, welcome! Those ribs look so scrumptious!

They would not take as long to make as you think. When making conventionally sized wife's cakes most of the time is consumed by forming the individual flaky pastry doughs. When making miniatures sized ones you can streamline the process by making one large flaky pastry dough similar to French puff pastry and then cutting rounds using a biscuit cutter. ← But wouldn't that smush the edges flat and not make them rise as much? Just wondering if that would happen. ← Er, huh? The edges are tucked underneath the pastry so it wouldn't make any difference. Oh well, when I do the pictorial you'll understand.

I just used egg yolk for the glaze. I didn't use lard but oil, maybe that's the diff ?. ← Hmm, I used egg yolk as well. Maybe I need to spread it on thicker? I only brushed a thin layer on them. aznsailorboi, that soup looks excellent! Two more things I can't get here: chicken with the heads and feet, and fresh ginseng. That fungus you put in looks like "snow ears." Is bok ni the same thing?

I'd never heard of it, either, but it's a common ingredients at the Kuali.com website. I know it sounds weird, but I went ahead and steamed a cup of glutinous rice flour just to see what would happen and to my surprise it didn't form a huge sticky mass. There were a few blobs where condensation dripped on the flour but those were easy to fish out. Then I put the steamed flour in the microwave and heated it until it started to turn an ivory color and used that in the recipe. There's a photo of it at this food blog about 2/3 down the page. http://pwmf.blogspot.com/2005/10/baking-essentials.html Using koh fun instead of regular glutinous rice flour makes the filling less gooey.

Made clay pot rice with chicken, lop cheong, mushrooms and bacon. The recipe called for Chinese bacon but I was all out.

They would not take as long to make as you think. When making conventionally sized wife's cakes most of the time is consumed by forming the individual flaky pastry doughs. When making miniatures sized ones you can streamline the process by making one large flaky pastry dough similar to French puff pastry and then cutting rounds using a biscuit cutter.

These suckers are huge, though! Much bigger than any I have ever seen anywhere. My preference is to make them big enough so that each one is a single serving because if you try to cut them up into pieces the delicate pastry tends to fall apart.

I tasted the wife cakes today and they do seem to taste much better than before. When they are warm the sweetness is muted and the layers aren't as set. Also, I think with the recipe I used that the ratio of crust to filling was too high, and that the cakes themselves were much too large. I wouldn't be averse to making the recipe again with some minor adjustments and doing a pictorial. The only problem is I ran out of lard and would have to go get some more.

Hispanic butcher shops will also usually carry lard.

Peony, that's a beautiful glaze you have on those. How did you do it?

For Cha Siu So the crust wouldn't have any sugar, but otherwise it's the same. There's chunks of candied winter melon, along with some toasted sesame seeds and chopped peanuts. Lard, of course!

Majra, welcome and thanks for your beautiful pics. I dream of a wok setup like yours. As promised, these are my wife cakes made using this recipe. They tasted ok, I guess. Not the best I've ever eaten, but not the worst either. I think I prefer the pastry using this recipe more.

This is the only recipe I've found for them. http://www.recipegoldmine.com/worldasian/asian264.html

I plan to more or less follow this recipe. http://kuali.com/recipes/viewrecipe.asp?r=2258 Here's a good pictorial for making the pastry skins http://www.jodelibakery.netfirms.com/chine...try%20Dough.htm This would be the first time I'd follow this particular recipe so I don't want to do a pictorial "a la Ah Leung Goh" in case it doesn't turn out. Note to hzrt8w: "a la Ah Leung Goh" means "in the style of Ah Leung Goh," not that she is requesting one from you. Also, I'm developing a recipe for baked char siu bao just for non-bakers such as yourself which I will try to do a pictorial of once I've perfected it.