Swedish Meat Balls

The kids love the meatballs at Ikea. I've bought the frozen meatballs from Ikea and cooked it at home. It's yummy! Then I thought that I should try making the meatballs. Googled for the recipe and found a few.

CL recently ordered 2 cookbooks from Amazon--The America's Test Kitchen. I love the cookbooks! Thanks CL! These cookbooks are written by a team of people who tried out recipes. They will then give their recommendations on what works best and the reasons behind it. I thoroughly enjoy reading the books. There's a recipe on meatballs and I kind of modified it and incorporated with the recipes I found on the net. Tried it out for the first time. The secret to the meatballs being moist and tender is to add torn pieces of bread soaked in milk. I added a little too much of that. The meatballs were too soft and wet and it was rather hard to shape. Hence the horrible shapes! But it tasted okay and the sauce was tasty. Everyone enjoyed it...will certainly do it again. Made mashed potatoes and coleslaw to go with the meatballs.

Kueh Salat

This is one of my children's favourite nonya kuehs. I have always wanted to try out this recipe but somehow the high coconut milk content have deterred me...unless there is an occasion that calls for it.

Since my last refreshment duty was during the March holidays, I had more time on my hands to try out this recipe. The texture was on the soft side--hence the difficulty in cutting into neat blocks. But the taste was quite close to what I hoped it would be. Thanks to Florence for her recipe--visited her blog and got inspired to try it out.

Ingredients:
Rice Layer
200g glutinous rice (soak in water for 3 hours)
100ml coconut milk + 50ml water
2 pandan leaves
1/2 tsp salt

Egg Custard Layer
3 eggs
30g flour + 25g rice flour
350ml coconut milk
140g castor sugar
2 tbsp pandan juice
1/4 tsp pandan paste
1/4 tsp salt

Method:
1. Drain rice and steam on pandan leaves for 20 minutes.
2. Remove from heat, fluff up the rice with a pair of chopsticks and pour in the coconut milk + salt + water mixture . Mix well. Steam for a further 20 minutes or till cooked.
3. Remove pandan leaves and press cooked glutinous rice firmly onto a pan lined with a sheet of banana leaf.
4. Sieve the 2 flours mixture and add them to lightly beaten eggs. Strain mixture.
5. Combine coconut milk with pandan juice, salt and sugar. Cook over low heat till sugar dissolved. Stir in the egg mixture and cook till slightly thicken.
6. Pour this slightly thickened egg custard over the steamed glutinous rice and steam for 15 - 20 minutes.
7. Cut kueh into serving slices when cool.

Radish Cake

I love carrot cakes! Whether it's cakes made with fresh carrots and cinnamon or chinese radish cake or chai tau kueh, I love them all!

I chanced upon this recipe from my surfing and tried it out. Indeed it tastes quite close to the hong kong style radish cake. It tastes even better when it's pan fried. For my last refreshment duty in church, I made two trays and fried them. However, only the adults enjoy it. The young people somehow cannot appreciate this kind of carrot cake. Sigh...

Bread--Passion Rekindled

My sis-in-law gave me a recipe book for Bread for my birthday. I was thrilled to receive it since i have been mulling over baking of bread for quite some time now. You guessed it. I never got down to doing it. I bought a few packets of bread flour and it has been sitting in the kitchen cabinet for a few weeks now.

Now that I've read the book, I've kind of rekindled my passion for baking bread. I used a tried and tested recipe for Soft Bun Dough as I wanted to build up my confidence before trying new recipes. The recipe was given by Annie some years back when we first bought our breadmaker. This recipe gives a soft texture to the buns. I can also try to shape the buns in different ways and with different fillings. This makes it exciting to bake buns because they can turn out in different shapes and sizes.

Popiah

Popiah is a hot family favourite, especially Ah Ma's popiah. Whenever we went to Ah Ma's place, we look forward to her popiah. But in recent years, Ah Ma hasn't done popiah due to all the preparation involved. So I found out from her and also from Jiji our family's recipe. She includes belly pork in her recipe, but I left that out, so that our helper can enjoy it as well.

Having popiah when friends come over is a good idea since only the filling need to be heated up. We can take our time to eat it. So we had popiah when our friends came over on the 2nd day of Chinese New Year. The only problem was finding fresh popiah skin during the new year period. Mummy found out from Jiji that a shop at Bedok North Ave 4(industrial estate) sells popiah even during the CNY period! At a higher price of course!

Grandma’s Popiah

Filling

A
3-4 turnips
3-4 bamboo shoots
1 pkt green beans
2-3 carrots
2-3 leeks
4 pcs beancurd

10 cloves garlic
3 Tbsp tau cheo (red date salted bean paste)
Prawn / ikan bilis stock—4 cups

Method:

1. Slice or grate A finely.
2. Fry garlic and taucheo until fragrant.
3. Add in A. Season with salt.
4. Add stock and boil. Simmer for 20 minutes.

Accompaniments:

1.5 kg popiah skin
1.5 kg prawns – head and shell removed and steamed
50 cents of bean sprouts—blanched in hot water
10 eggs – boiled and chopped
600g chinese lettuce
cilantro
400g peanuts—roasted and chopped
Garlic – grind to paste
Chilli – grind to paste
1 big bottle sweet sauce
Flat fish – fried and grind to powder

Yu Sheng

Having Yu Sheng has become a family favourite every Chinese New Year. Ever since a dear colleague J passed me the recipe, my friends whom I've shared this recipe with have all used it for their yu sheng instead of buying ready-made ones from the stores. The ingredients are much fresher and not "over-poweringly colourful" due to the artificial colouring of the pickled ginger and leek. As you can see, this is also very attractive and naturally colourful--with the green and white radish as well as carrots in place.

Somehow for homemade yu sheng, no matter how little carrot and radish I grate, I always end up with a BIG plate of yu sheng...after adding all the ingredients. But no one's complaining! As this is basically a salad dish, it is really refreshing! A great accompaniment for all the rich foods during this festive season. My mother-in-law loves this dish, over and above the steam boat we have every reunion dinner! She would go for the yu sheng before everything else and would usually be the one to polish off the remnants.

Yu Sheng (serves 10-12 people)

Ingredients

A
2 carrots
½ white radish
½ green radish
½ pomelo
½ bottle pickled ginger
10 pickled leek bulbs
1 dried tangerine – chopped

B
250g peanuts—roasted, skin removed, chopped
30g sesame seeds—toasted
2 pkts crispy biscuits
Smoked salmon—sliced thinly

C
2/3 bottle plum sauce
Juice from 8 limes
2 Tbsp shallot oil
Pepper, allspice, cinnamon, nutmeg – to taste

Method:
1. Arrange A. Alternate different coloured vegetables.
2. Sprinkle B.
3. Mix plum sauce and lime to make sauce. Pour on top of veg. Add spices.

Reunion Dinner

We had a reunion dinner with my in-laws on New Year's eve at Mike's place. Tonight is the reunion dinner with my mum and brothers. KL and HN are going to HK with Baby tomorrow, so we had to have our dinner early tonight.

We had yu sheng, steamboat, popiah and for the first time, I tried cooking fish maw soup. Turned out to be okay.