Pork Bone Congee with Dried Bean Curd Strips

You don't normally see pork bone congee in the menu at congee restaurant because this is one of the ingredients you should cook with the congee from the start for the flavours to really meld together.

You might ask, "why use pork bone instead of just the meat?" The reason why I used pork bone is because there's a certain sweetness that comes from pork bone when you make soup or congee. You can definitely use meat in your congee instead of pork bone, but that's another type of congee that I will post about at an other time.
Different flavours and different styles.

I cooked this for 30 mins to ensure that the flavours is mixed nicely into the congee.
I also pre-treated the pork bone when I first brought it before I froze them in the freezer so I can use it at any time. For the pre-treatment, I quickly blanched the bones. Then washed it under cold water with a brush to brush off any impurities. Once cooled and dried, I bagged them and stuffed them in the freezer to be used in soup/congee.

This will cook a very big pot that can feed up to 5 people.

Pork Bone Congee with Dried Bean Curd

Makes 1 big pot Prep Time: Overnight Cook Time: 40 mins

Ingredients

• 1000g Pork Bone
• 3 to 3.5L of water
• 1.5 rice cooker cup of frozen rice
• 85g (1/2 bag) dried Bean Curd (picture to the left)
• 2 tsp salt

Directions

1. Put 3L of water into the pot and boil.
2. Add in the pork bone, bring it back up to a boil.
3. Rinse the Bean Curd and put the Bean Curd and the rice into the pot of boiling water.
4. Stir and bring back to a boil.
5. Turn the heat to simmer and leave it alone for 20 mins.
6. Check on the thickness and add more water if needed.
7. Add salt and stir and cook for another 10 mins for 30 mins in total.

If you added water, you'll have to turn up the heat again.

And you're done :)

The congee will continue to thicken after you cooked it and it's cooling!!!
I used 3.5L of water, when I first started eating it, it was still a bit watery. By the time I was on my last bowl, it was at a thickness I prefer.
So if you start off with 3L of water and you have left overs, you might need to add more water the next time you eat it.

Intro to congee and trick to making smooth congee in short period of time

Congee (粥) is a rice dish that can be eaten at any time but it's a very common dish at breakfast, brunch and late night snack times.
You can find it when you go yum cha (some people like to call it dim sum but dim sum actually refers to the food you eat there), cafes, food court or specialty restaurants that specialize in congee, noodles and fried rice.
It can be full meals on it's own or one of the many dishes you eat.

It's also a very common dish to eat when you're sick as it's suppose to be easy on your digestive system so it doesn't zap the energy you need for healing.
Although when you're sick, you're eating very plain congee with minimum things added to it.

Congee is very very versatile. You can make many different variations depending on what you put in it. You can either add the additions at the beginning and let things cook together to enhance the flavours or add it at the end. If you look at the menu at a congee restaurant, you'll find that most of the different flavours are things they can add to a plain congee base and cook so they do not have to have 10 different pots of congee all waiting for people to order. Great idea for even home cooking if you need to save on time and you want a different congee flavour every day.

Besides all the different things you can add to the congee, there's 2 distinct style and it's determined by how the rice appears.

The most common kind you'll find is the one where the congee is a porridge with the rice all broken down and smooth. My parents will cook the congee for several hours to ensure all the rice is broken down. Some people will put it in one of those pots that stay hot over night for the rice to break down. Others even go to the extent of putting the congee through a food processors to ensure that it'll be smooth.
To make this style of congee, you use very little rice to make lots of congee. The water to rice ratio is huge. 1.5 to 2 rice cooker cups of rice makes a huge pot of congee that can be enough for 5 people to eat at least 3 bowls each.

The other kind is 潮州粥 (Chiu Chow style Congee). This one is not as common. You usually have to go to a Chiu Chow style restaurant to find it. The rice in this congee is solid and not broken! It's almost as if you made a soup and added cooked rice to it after. Very different then the more common style congee. I find this one definitely more filling then the other one as it requires more rice.
There are other Asian countries that cook this style of congee too so it's possible to eat it at those restaurants but I don't have a full list of what style each country cooks as I haven't tried them all myself.

After all that explanation, onto the tip.
Here's the trick my friend taught me to make that smooth congee without cooking the congee for hours or using the blender.
It's very simple, just freeze the rice before you cook it!!!
Wash the rice that you are going to cook, drain it and then freeze it for at least 2 hours.
I froze it over night as I was making the congee in the morning.
The frozen rice broke down much faster then unfrozen rice.
Within 20 minutes, the rice was broken down and basically the congee was ready to eat.
You can continue to boil it down so it thickens up to a thickness you like.
I found my congee continued to thicken up even after I turned off the heat and it was starting to cool.
It was definitely a lot thicker by the time I was finished eating and trying to pack up the left overs. Perfect for the next several days :)

Give it a try, definitely simple and makes it much faster to get your breakfast up and going in the morning.

Chocolate Swiss Buttercream Cupcakes

Here's an other new flavour I tested. Chocolate.
Yes, it's weird, I've baked for so long but never tried making a chocolate buttercream before.  It's actually so much easier then the fruity flavour creams I make that I don't understand why I didn't do it earlier.
Worked well on top of vanilla cupcakes but I can see chocolate lovers putting this on top of chocolate cupcakes as well. Double whammy.
I know some people use melted chocolate but I used cocoa powder instead.
The cream was smooth, no powdery clumps and nicely flavoured.

Why I used cocoa powder?

Several reasons:
1. I always have cocoa powder on hand as I use it for the cakes. Chocolate on the other hand, you'll want to buy specifically dark baker chocolate so it's deep in flavour and it has less added sugar.
2. It's bitter so it's great to use to balance the sweetness of the cream so it actually doesn't taste too sweet.
3. Easy to use! No need to slowly use a double boiler to melt the chocolate, wait for it to be the perfect temperature before you mix it in etc
All I did after the Swiss Buttercream was finished whipping was scoop in cocoa powder and mix.
4. Easy to adjust flavour. You can easily add more flavour by adding more powder where as if you melt chocolate, if you didn't melt enough, you have to go through the whole process to add more and it's honestly a pain.


Try it out! Easy and pipes very beautifully.

Red Date Tea (紅棗水)

Dried Red Dates (紅棗) are commonly used in Chinese soups so it's always in the pantry. Besides soup, I like to make it into tea.
I find it especially helpful after that time of month or when I feel light headed and I'm looking pale (usually due to lack of sleep and my blood pressure is lower then normal).
My Chinese Dr recommended it to me when he noticed how pale I was and after a week of drinking this tea, I really did feel better and look normal rather then pale.

According to Chinese medicine, red date helps strengthens your blood. Since I have poor blood circulation and low blood pressure, he recommends using this tea to strengthen my blood.

Red Date is herbal so it's safe for anyone to drink and it's sweet!
You can also easily buy it from Chinese supermarkets or the Chinese seafood and dried medicine stores. There's different grades of Red Dates but I honestly haven't notice a difference myself.
If you don't have much time, get seedless Red Dates.
If you have the time, then it doesn't matter but removing the seeds is time consuming as the meat sticks to the seed.
The picture to the right is my current bag of Red Dates. I brought it because it's sealed in 4 packages
inside so I don't have to worry about the storage of the remaining Red Dates as much. Yes it's wasteful but I don't use it enough to justify getting 1 big package.



Why remove the seed? This is a bit harder for me to explain. In Chinese Medicine, they believe in balance in your body for hot and cold. It is said that the seed in the Red Date will contribute to the "hot" in a bad way and can throw off you off balance so you should remove the seeds.



How to Remove the Seed?
They easiest way I found was to cut a slit along the long side of the Red Date.
I cut all the way to the seed and dig in.
I use my knife to scrape the side of the seed to keep as much of the meat as possible in the date.
Just scrape on all sides and pull the seed out.

Red Date Tea

Makes 5 cups of tea Prep Time: 0 to 20 mins Cook Time: 10 mins

Ingredients

• About 5 cups of water (I fill my Britta Jar once and use all the water there)
• 10-15 Dried Red Dates (My mom uses even more but I find this to be the minimum amount, the more you use the sweeter and more potent it is!)

Directions

1. Boil the water in a pot.
2. Once it's boiling, add in the seedless Red Dates.
3. Boil for 10 mins.
4. Let it simmer for about half an hour.

And it's ready to drink :)
You'll get a nice bit jar of tea that you can drink warm or cold.

Green Tea Buttercream Cupcakes

I love drinking green tea and eating green tea flavoured food.
So I figured, why not make green tea buttercream?
If you can make it into ice cream, you can definitely make it into buttercream.

So, with my trusty matcha, I added it until I got what I wanted. It reminded me of the ice cream with a different texture.

The wonderful thing about matcha is that it's dried so you don't have to worry about the buttercream breaking due to too much liquid.
It's also bitter so you will not make your cream overly sweet. If anything, it'll help balance the cream out to be less sweet because of the bitterness.
Good matcha is also very strong in flavour. So depending on the cream's batch size, you may only need 2 Tbsp of Matcha.
I used around 2 for enough buttercream for 16 cupcakes.
I usually add a little vanilla extract as well to help enhance the flavours. Vanilla might be a little boring on it's own, but it's a wonderful enhancer and usually adds that little touch to your baking.

I've tried this cream on both vanilla and chocolate cupcakes. Both are wonderful with green tea.
People who have never tried green tea flavour food before like the results.
For the Asian people who love eating green tea ice cream, they couldn't stop eating the cupcakes and went back for seconds.
All in all, I believe that means success.
Next step, bake green tea cupcakes and then put the green tea buttercream on top.
Maybe I'll make it even more Asian and add red bean paste in the middle too.

(It looks much greener under bright lights)