5 Spice Chicken Congee

I had chicken that was over marinated because we left it marinated for way too long. So what to do with a salty chicken? Make congee with it :)
Turned out it was a pretty awesome mistake. It made a weeks worth of breakfast and some lunches since you can reheat it in the microwave in the mornings.

5 Spice Chicken Congee

Time: 60 mins Makes: 1 big pot of Congee

Ingredients

• 1 Cornish Hen or 1 Small Chicken (depends on how much meat you want)
• 1 muk or 1.5 muks of rice (frozen over night)
• 1/2 tsp or 1.5 tsp salt (pending on which bird you picked)
• 1/2 tsp or 1.5 tsp 5 spice powder (pending on which bird you picked)
• 1 green onion
• 1 cm block of ginger
• 1.5 - 3L of water

Directions

1. Wash your Cornish hen or chicken. Dry and then rub the chicken with the salt and 5 spice powder. Let it sit for 30 minutes to marinate or leave overnight in fridge if you desire.
2. Start off with 1.5L of water and bring to a boil.
3. Wash the green onion and ginger. Cut the green onion into smaller pieces and put both green onion and ginger into the water.
4. Add the rice
5. Once the water is back up to a boil, add the hen. The amount of time it makes Congee is about the amount of time required to cook a chicken so it's safe to add at the same time.
6.  Monitor the thickness of the congee and add more water as required. You'll probably want to increase it by at least 0.5L if you want to leave it unmonitored. 
7. Let it simmer at medium-low heat for half an hour until everything cooks through.
8. Once it's cooked, take 2 forks and shred the meat into the congee.

Serve hot. Great for breakfast or brunch. 

Chayote Squash and Pork with 雲耳 and/or 木耳

The Chayote in the picture above is home grown so they might look a little different from store brought ones.
This is an other one of those dishes where there are many different variations.

The very basic of this dish is Chayote, meat, soy sauce, sugar and cornstarch.
The onion, garlic and 2 types of black fungus is actually all optional.
The onion and garlic will add more flavour so I always cook with it as long as I have some on hand. But the fungus doesn't add flavour, just nutritional value.
My mother in law only cooks this dish with 雲耳
My parents likes to cook with both 雲耳 and 木耳.
I like to cook with both because I find the texture of both to be slightly different and I enjoy mixing the 2 together.

If you google the word of both types of black fungus, it'll return the same name in English! So when you go shopping, write these words down to find them both.

Chayote Squash and Pork with 雲耳 and/or 木耳

Ingredients

• 2 Chayote Squashes
• 150g pork neck 
• 1 small onion
• 1 tsp minced garlic
• 1/2 tsp soy sauce
• 1/2 tsp sugar
• handful of dried 雲耳 (optional)
• 5 dried pieces of 木耳 (optional)

Directions

1. Soak the dried 雲耳 and 木耳 for a couple of hours, or 30 mins in warm water.
2. Peel the chayote. Use a fruit peeler. You may want to use gloves to peel the chayote. I find it'll make my hand peel but it doesn't affect my mom in the same way. So give it a try.
3. Cut it in half. The seed is quite soft so you'll probably cut it right in half. Take the seed out. 
4. Cut it into slices like you would for apple slices. 

5. 

   This is 雲耳

   Cut the onion into strips. 
6. Cut the pork into thin strips and mix in a bowl with the soy sauce and sugar.
7. Once you're done all this, the dried 雲耳 and 木耳 should be ready for use. They should have expanded a lot. 雲耳 expands a lot more then 木耳. 
8. Lightly rub the expanded fungus to wash it. Rinse under the tap.
9. Check the back of the 雲耳 to see if you need to cut off any connection points. It should be small segments of hard white ridges. 
10. Cut it into 1 inch pieces so you can quickly and easily cook it. 
11. There usually isn't connection points on 木耳 but check and 

    

    This is the back of  the 雲耳

    cut away if necessary. Then cut into similar size as the 雲耳.
12. Heat a wok to medium heat, once it's warm add the oil, onion and garlic.
13. Once you smell the mixture cooking, add the chayote slices. Stir and let it cook at medium heat.
14. After 2-3 mins, add in the slice pork. Cook and stir. To speed up cooking time, cover for a bit in-between stir.
15. When the pork is about 80% cooked, add in the 雲耳 and 木耳
16. As usual, stir around to ensure it's getting cooked.
17. Cover and cook for another 2 mins and cover again and let it cook until the pork is done.
18. And you're good to go :)

Notes:
木耳 is firmer in texture where as 雲耳 can be softer.
Do not over cook either of them, especially 雲耳. It can be a bit slimy when overcooked so do not overcook it.

This is 木耳

Buttermilk Banana Bread

This is one of those baked goods that's more forgiving and easy to make.
All you need is a bowl and a fork and you can mix this by hand.
It's fast, easy and yummy. And it freezes well.
I use silicon modes to make bit size treats and freeze anything I want to keep for later

Buttermilk Banana Bread

Makes 12 normal size cupcakes

Ingredients

• 1 egg
• 40g buttermilk
• 40g vegetable oil
• 1 big banana, mashed
• 105g brown sugar
• 105g all purpose flour
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/4 cup chopped walnuts (optional, can be replaced by pecans as well)

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees F and prepare your pans (either parchment paper or oil/flour them)
2. Mash the banana.
3. Add the egg, buttermilk and oil to the banana and mix.
4. In another bowl, sift together the sugar, flour, baking soda and salt and mix.
5. Mix the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients.
6. Pour into prepared pans. Add nuts to each individual cupcake to guarantee nuts in every bite. 
7. For cupcake size, bake for 20 to 25 mins or until cake tester inserted in the centre comes out clean.
8. Remember to completely cool before you freeze. 

叉燒醬 Chinese BBQ Pork Sauce (Char Siu)

It's true you can buy the Lee Kum Kee Char Siu sauce from the supermarket but honestly, I usually have all the ingredients I need to make it, so I just make it whenever I need.
I typically make it, then use it to marinate something and freeze it.

The color of your Char Siu will not be as bright as what you buy from stores. The only way to make it that bright color is to use food coloring which I refuse to do. But when you eat it, you can totally tell it's char siu. :)

Char Siu sauce can be use to make Char Siu or you can just use it to cook other items like spare ribs.

叉燒醬 Chinese BBQ Pork Sauce

Prep time ~5mins

Ingredients 

• 30g (2 tablespoons) soy sauce
• 25g (1 tbsp) oyster sauce,
• 20g (1 tbsp) hoisin sauce,
• 15g (1 tbsp) wine
• 30g (3 tbsp) brown sugar
• 5g (1 tsp) garlic
• 85g (1/4 cup) honey,
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/4 tsp  5 spice powder

Directions

1. Measure all the ingredients and mix it together
2. Store in jar or use right away

This amount will  fit into a small mason jar.
It will also marinate 3lbs of pork butt to make into char siu.

Korean BBQ Sauce

I love KBBQ ribs but it's very expensive to order when you're at the restaurant. So I asked my Korean friend how he makes his KBBQ ribs.
And his response was, it's simple, just throw in everything, blend and marinate it overnight and then cook it.
He was able to give me a list of all the ingredients but he was not able to give me the amounts since he never measures it.
I tried the same and I found that generally, the taste is very similar as long as I don't go overboard on any one of the ingredients (ie half a finger of ginger, too much soy sauce etc).
So I took the time to measure and test the recipe and tested it on my husband until he thought it matches fairly well.

Another note I wanted to make up front is what I used for the sweetener.
He uses only honey, it has a unique flavour and it thickens the sauce!
Honey will make the sauce nice and thick and clingy which makes it easier to use to marinate. But at the same time, honey can be very expensive depending on you live. So my recipe below uses a bit of brown sugar to replace some of the honey but you can always swap it out for pure honey.

So this post will cover the marinate itself. You can make a big batch and keep it in the fridge or freeze it for future use or just make it as you need.

Korean BBQ Sauce

Prep Time: <5 mins Makes enough to cover about 500g of ribs pending on the box/bag you're using for marinating

Ingredients

• 40g Soy Sauce
• 5g Ginger
• 10g Garlic
• 2 Green Onion
• 20g Honey
• 10g Brown Sugar
• Juice from Half a Lemon
• 10g Vinegar
• 40g Water

Directions

1. Measure and put all the ingredients into a blender and blend
2. Let the foam settle, after 10 mins or so, stir the foam and bits into the sauce if it doesn't mix in on it's own
3. Use right away or save in fridge or freezer. Shelf life is shorter then what you buy because there's no preservatives

Simple right? :)

Enjoy!

King Oyster Mushrooms

Have you ever seen these at grocery stores and wonder what to do with them? How they taste like?
I live in Canada and I remember the first time I saw them at the grocery store was several years ago.
It was on demo, I tried it and fell in love with it.

Since then, I've seen the popularity of this mushroom grow. I now see it in restaurant dishes (both Asian and non Asian places) and I see more groceries stores carrying it. However I noticed a lot of people still don't know what it is and after so many years, it's still one of the demo booths I see at the grocery store every week. So I thought I would do a quick post on how easy it can be to cook these tasty mushroom.

Even though I first found these in an Asian grocery store, they are actually native Mediterranean, Middle Eastern and Northern African plants. It became popular in Asian and now different Asian countries also grow it.

How to store?
If you're not eating it right away, take it out of the tray and plastic wrap and put it into a paper bag. Then place it in the fridge. If you leave it in the tray, sometimes you'll find something fuzzy on it. That's still safe to eat but I find you avoid that if you put it in the paper bag.

Here's a super simple way to cook the mushroom to try it's flavour and texture.

King Oyster Mushrooms

Prep Time: <5 mins Cook Time: ~5 mins

Ingredients

• 1 package of King Oyster mushrooms, normal or baby size works
• 1 green onion
• 1/2 tsp minced garlic
• Dash of oil
• Salt and pepper to taste
• Optional sesame oil

Directions

1. Rinse the mushrooms
2. Cut into slices as shown in the picture to the right with the white line.
3. Cut the green onion into strips
4. Heat up a pan to medium heat
5. Add oil to the hot pan to help make it non-stick and add the garlic and white part of green onion and stir
6. Count to 30 and add in the mushrooms
7. The mushrooms will start turning more translucent as it's being cooked. Add in the green onion when the mushroom is about 75% done, just the centre is still the original raw color.
8. Add some cracked salt and pepper to taste and you're done!

The sesame oil is optional because it's a very strong flavour and it can over power the mushroom if you're trying to figure out how it taste like. But adding a little gives it extra fragrance.
Simply, yummy and fast!
Enjoy

Mini DIY Floor Revitalizing Project

Hi!!

Sorry for the lack of posting.
I was moving houses and doing some mini fixes so we've been crazy busy.
Finally more or less moved in now.

I learnt a lot about flooring during our mini project.
In general, apparently whatever you think your timeline you need and add 20-50% more time.
We thought we would be able to do everything in a week but it took us an additional half a week.
So what did we do? We decided that the carpet is very old and dirty so we wanted to rip it out and use the original hardwood underneath. Yes, someone covered hardwood floors with carpet! Seems baffling now but the house is about 50 years old and carpet was the thing to do back in the 70s/80s.

Each piece of carpet is held down by a strip of nails poking up and there's foam stapled into the board that's in-between the carpet and the floor.
So really, pulling up the carpet is the easy part.
Removing all those strips of nails and the staples was the painful part of the removal.

After removing the carpets, this is what we had:

It seems like some floors had stains on it, some spots were ok, some spots still had old varnish on it. So it all depended on what happened. We had one room that had broken glass and paint all over the floor. That was the worst to sand and clean up.

I honestly thought now, the hard work is done and it's easy stuff now with the sanding and varnishing but boy was I wrong. 

We used 80 grade and 120 grade paper.

We rented a floor sander to do the floors. It was great on floors with no varnish, but floors with a bit of varnish left gunked up the sand paper so we would either have to spend time cleaning the paper or use new ones.

After the fact, we were told to use courses sand paper first. It'll still gunk but easier to clean. 

But sanding made a huge difference for majority of the room.

Half sanded

Fully sanded 

We rented an edge sander too but had too many issues with the varnish and sand paper. And we found that the circular motion went against the grain of the wood so it messed up the wood even though we ran 120 over it. Perhaps we needed even a finer grain to finish but that was upsetting.

So we ended up scrapping and sanding by hand after doing 1 room unsuccessfully with the edge sander. That took us days cause it was back breaking.

Now that all the floors are nice and sanded, we had to decide if we will stain or just varnish. 

Because some of the dirty stains were not removed during the sanding process, we decided to stain to hide it. We did not imagine staining would take us hours to do.

The small room took 1.5 hours. The family/dining room took me 3 hours to stain. 

There's no short cut when it comes to staining. You have to wipe on and wipe off the excess and then leave for 24 hours to dry.

At least it looks good after. 

The varnish is pretty fast. I just run around with my roller and varnish. 

Several days later, this is the result.

We decided not to stain the stairs and the hallway in the upper floor and learned something else.

Apparently, if you use an oil base varnish, it will tint the wood so you really don't have to stain if you're looking for a pretty normal color floor!!!!

It turns the very white floor you see and tints it with enough yellow so that it's not just the pale color you see after sanding.

If we didn't have dirty stains to hide, we would have just done this and saved us 2 days of staining time. Live and learn :)

Good luck to anyone else doing floors.