"Japin" pork belly

If you follow my blog, you should know that I am a big fan of pork, especially pork belly. I bought thin pork belly slices from Jusco last weekend and temped to make my imagination pork belly dish. Weeliem and I both loves the pork belly menu from Japin. I can't remember whether it's called BBQ pork or another name in the menu but it's about RM17-rm19 per set. I was so happy last night because I made the almost similar dish! I even harvested spring onion from my own garden (read: a pot with soil and spring onion plant) for garnishing.

I don't remember how much pork belly I purchased in term of the weight , but the price is about RM7 for around 10 slices of thin pork belly.

Marinate the pork night before with:
1 tbs of sesame oil
1 tbs of soy sauce
2 tbs ginger juice (I squeezed from old ginger after I crushed the ginger with mortal and pestler)
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 cloves garlic, minced

To cook:
Add a little oil in wok
Add the pork belly with the leftover marinate juice and stir-fry for about 4 minutes
Add 1 tbs oyster sauce and 1 tbs soy sauce, stir for another 2 minutes
The pork belly is very thin, you do not need long time to cook it.
Serve hot with white rice and garnish with spring onions !




Confession: I am still thinking about the dish until now :) I want to eat again!

Easy chicken tomyam

I just feel lazy to update blog lately and I know it's a bad practise. I am thinking of eating tomyam but I don't want to eat seafood. So I made my own chicken tomyam. Weeliem was telling me that this time he doesn't want to eat tomyam with meehun (rice vermicelli) because we just made meehun soup last weekend. So we had tomyam with white rice today.

It's a rather easy way of making tomyam, my mom's way which is by using the tomyam cubes available in few brands, like knorr and ayam brand. Don't be fool by tomyam cubes, because it doesn't contain much taste that represent the real tomyam unless we add the main tomyam ingredients like kaffir lime leaves, lemon grass and lime juice. At first I squeezed only 1 lime into the soup but I felt the soup is like missing something important. I feel guilty to eat tomyam which is not sour! So I squeeze one more lime. If you like to eat spicy tomyam, you can add some bird eye chillies but not for weeliem, he can't stand even a hint of spiciness and will sweat like he just ran 200 metres

Easy ingredients:
2 tomyam cubes
2 chicken legs cut into small pieces
2 lemon grass, cleaned, and cut vertical lines on each stem
6-8 kaffir lime leaves
2 limes juice
2 crab sticks, halved
2 baby carrots, sliced
100g grey oyster mushroom, tore into edible pieces
1 red onion, wedged

Recipe:
Boil 5 bowls of water in pot.
When water is boiling, put in all ingredients except grey oyster mushroom and lime juice.
Let simmer for 30-40 minutes.
Add grey oyster mushroom and lime juice, simmer for another 10 minutes.
Add salt to taste
Serves 4

Rice dumpling for Dragon Boat Festival 2011

It's a month since I last updated my blog. My life is so busy. I am either with work or busy with work, nothing else. I almost want to skip making rice dumpling this year for Dragon Boat festival but at last I moved my butt to go to the market and bought ingredients for the dumpling on Saturday morning. However I dozed off again at 12-2pm , total unconscious. After that I did all the preparation needed like soaking the leaves and string in water to soften them, place the chesnuts and chinese mushrooms in separate bowls of sugared water and keep them inside the fridge.

Today I woke up, cut the ingredients, marinate, and cook them in wok before starting the wrapping work. I did not prepare a lot of ingredients, just the chinese mushrooms, chesnuts, pork and salted egg yolk.



It took me around 2 hours to complete wrapping all the dumplings, finishing the ingredients I had. http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif


Weeliem woke up in the middle when I was wrapping the dumplings and he started taking photos.



I found a spot at my sink area to hang the strings so I can tie the dumpling easily.



Put all the dumplings into boiling salt water carefully


The dumplings are relatively small compared to what people sell out there, merely because I just can't wrap them big. The ingredients keep pouring out when I was tying the dumpling. I ate 6 since afternoon. The end product was not salty at all, that's why I did not plan to bring any to office this year. It didn't taste as nice when it's so plain in flavor. I had the add some soy sauce to it before eating.