Malaysian Sponge Recipe

Here’s the recipe for Malaigo
6 eggs
2 cups sugar
1/2 cup corn oil
7oz? evaorated milk
2+3/4 cups flour
3 tsp baking powder
2+1/2 tsp baking soda
3 tbsp water
3 tsp treacle
1. Mix baking powder and baking soda in water (should bubble, if not, your powders are duds). Set aside for later use.
2. Beat egg with sugar, add oil & treacle.
3. Stir [...]

阿蘇’s recipe 糖醋青瓜荷包蛋

糖醋青瓜荷包蛋 = sweet & sour cucumber with fried eggs? something like that.

May sound weird to Westerners (& to some extent, Japanese), but as Chinese people traditionally don’t really eat vegetables raw, cooked cucumber is perfectly fine & quite delicious. I like just cooking it with sesame oil, ginger & soy, but this one combines fried [...]

Superfood Series: Seaweed 健康食品シリーズ：海藻

Seaweeds play a huge part of the traditional Japanese diet, way beyond the Western and other cultures’ common belief of being used in wrapping sushi (nori) rolls.
It’s main role in Japanese cuisine, by far the most common & very important, is use of ‘kombu’ (thick kelp from the northern seas of Japan), in making stock [...]

Mike’s recipe: Napolitana sauce

Mike’s tomato sauce for pasta – can be Napolitana/Puttanesca/Arrabiata/Primavera/Amatriciana -the name changes depends on what you put in it I guess.
Ingredients:
1 onion – chopped roughly
2~4 cloves of garlic – chopped
2 tinned tomatos (fresh if in season, but still 1/2 tin 1/2 fresh, or if only fresh, add tomato paste)
pancetta – chopped to 5mm squares (bacon [...]

Superfood Series: Pumpkins 南瓜・かぼちゃ

I love pumpkins! They’re around all year, but autumn/winter is when I want them most. It’s timely because of Halloween! Roasted, soup, even salad, pasta, stir-fry… (baby food?) They’re super! Always cheap too! When our house was rented over summer, I’ve been told that our veg patch got overtaken by pumpkin! (probably from our compost, [...]

Superfood Series: Bean shoots もやし・芽豆

Beanshoots (English) moyashi (Japaese) ah-choi (Cantonese) – I really like them, they’re so versitile, cheap, and great filler when you’re on a diet (16kcal/100g) Use it instead of noodles for a filling meal – but don’t eat toooo much – it can cool your tummy
I got really excited when I first [...]

Superfood Series: Ginger 生姜・薑

Ginger is fresh, cheap & plentiful, in semi-tropical HK, which is good to see as I got used to buying often dried up, hard gingers back in Perth… It’s absolutely necessary is Cantonese style cooking, particularly in seafood and stir-fries, and used fair bit in Japanese cooking also. Originally from the tropics, it’s used in [...]

Superfood Series: Shungiku (Chrysanthemums leaves) 春菊

Known as Crown daisy in English, edible chrysanthemum leaves & stems (or shungiku 春菊) are only eaten in East Asia. It has a distinctive fragrance (of course not dissimilar to daisy leaves), and full of vitamins, calcium and folate. It’s commonly used in Japan as greens for hot pot, particularly fugu or blowfish hot pot, [...]

Superfood Series: Bitter melon 健康食品シリーズ：苦瓜

Vegetable in the family of cucumber & grown in the tropics, as per its name, it is bitter, so it usually divides people to those who loves them or hates them.  It is extremely good for you, contains 2.5 times the amount of vitamin C as lemon & good for fixing constipation  - so much [...]

Superfood Series: Sweet Potatoes 薩摩芋

Japanese people like their’s reddish/purple skinned, yellow/cream inside, HK people seem to like it quite soft & there’s purple, orange (Kiwi Kumura’s) and brown varieties, but I think the health benefits very similar. I saw this doco once where they showed intestines of pigs fed exclusively sweet potatoes compared to those with other diets. Intestines [...]