Cantonese-Style Pickled Vegetables

Ingredients:

1 chinese radish
1 carrot
3 cucumbers
1 large piece young ginger

Seasonings:

4 tbsp salt
1 cup sugar
1 cup white vinegar

Preparation:

Peel carrot, rinse radish, cucumbers and young ginger, cut all vegetables into a diamond shape.

Dissolve the sugar in the vinegar to make sweet and sour pickling stock and pour into a container.

Cooking Instructions:

Marinate radish and carrot with 2 tbsp salt for 1 hour. Flatten; rinse with cold water and drain.

Marinate cucumber and ginger with 1 tbsp salt for 20 minutes, rinse and drain.

Put all ingredients in the sweet and sour pickling stock and seal. Refrigerate for 24 hours. Ready to serve.


About this dish:

When eating, use a clean, dry utensil to remove the pickled vegetables to prevent spoilage.

The pickling stock may be reused when the vegetables are eaten up. If there is not enough stock, simply add sugar and vinegar in the ratio of one to one to replenish it.

Happy Dumpling Festival

The Dumpling Festival (or Duan Wu Jie) is celebrated on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month (May 28 this year), honours scholar-poet Qu Yuan who took his life by jumping into a river. He did so because he was greatly saddened when the King refused to take his advice, leading to a war. Fearing that fish would eat Qu’s body, his friends and supporters made dumplings and threw them into the river so that the fish would eat them instead of the body.

There are so many types of dumplings available for sale in the market now and you can even buy the dumplings at any time of the year, but for me, eating the dumpling on the day of the Festival has a lot of significance. When we were young, my mom would make the dumplings a few days before the festival and for the next few days, we would be eating the dumplings for breakfast and supper. Nowadays, we would just buy the dumplings from the market and eat them on the day of the festival.

Talking about the different types of dumplings, my favourite is still the ba chang (with pork) but I prefer the green bean filling to the white bean filling as I find them more fragrant. It is quite difficult to find them as those dumplings available for sale in the market are normally with the white bean filling. There is also the Baba-Nyonya dumpling and the gan-suei (non-meat glutinous rice) dumpling (plain or with red bean filling). The normal price of the dumplings can be between RM2.60 to RM3.20 depending on the type and size but since the price of the ingredients and bamboo leaves had gone up, it might be more expensive . Anyone know where I can get nice and reasonably priced dumplings in PJ?

Happy Dumpling Festival!



You can check out the recipes for the different types of dumplings here.

Sliced Chicken With Pear

Ingredients:

200g Chicken breast
1 Pear (150g)
15g Ham
20g Mushroom
1 Egg White
100g Peas
5g Scallion
2½ tbsp starch
1 tbsp cooking wine

Seasoning B:
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp starch water
1 tbsp sugar
1 tsp salt

Method:

Cut the chicken breast into pieces and marinate with the cooking wine. Coat the chicken pieces with starch and dip in egg white. Preheat the pan with oil, fry the chicken breast till golden, drain up.

Cut the pear, ham and mushroom into slices.

Mix seasoning B well to be the cooking sauce.

Fry scallion briefly and take it out, Fry pear, ham and mushroom for a while and then put in the chicken breast. Add the cooking sauce and mix all the ingredients together. Turn off heat and dish out.