Classic Chinese Claypot Chicken Rice Recipe

This is another dish I would cook whenever I am a little lazy to prepare a complete meal for my family. I just have to marinade the chicken and then put them on top of the rice. Then I can serve the food for my family to eat within half and hour. For additional taste I actually fried some fried Chinese Sausage to go a along with the Claypot Chicken. It would taste better with the addition of crispy fried salted fish but I don’t have any in my fridge at that time.

Ingredients
Chicken, 10 pcs
Rice, 1 ½ cup, add water until 1cm above the rice before cooking

Marinate
Light soya sauce, 2 tablespoons
Dark soya sauce, 1 teaspoon
Sesame Oil, 1 teaspoon
Salt to taste
Pepper, a little
Corn flour, 1 table spoon

Marinate the chicken for around 10 minutes. Meanwhile, cook the rice in claypot until the water almost dried up then put the marinated chicken on top of it. Cover up the claypot and continue cooking the rice until the chicken is cooked. Garnish with spring onions and serve.

Authentic Malaysian Chinese Barbecued Char Siew Recipe

Opps, to much red colouring! But the taste is nice!

My regular pork supplier had some nice fresh pork belly and I snapped them up without actually planning of what to do with it! Anyway it was a weekend and I decided to fire up my ‘small’ barbecue pit to grill some nice Char Siew from the pork belly. I let the charcoal turned into amber first before I start barbecuing so that the meat would turn out nice. By the time I finished cooking the Char Siew and cut them into slices, my kids already started eating them nonstop and left half of it for dinner! So, I guess it must have turned out ok or they were very hungry waiting for me to barbecue the char siew! Ha ha ha!

Ingredients
Pork Belly, 1 cut
Five Spice powder, 1 teaspoon
Sugar, 3 table spoons
Light soya sauce, 2 table spoon
A little red food colouring (optional)
Chinese cooking wine, 1 teaspoon

Marinade the pork belly for at least one hour before you BBQ it. Barbecue the pork belly using charcoal that has turned into amber until well done. Alternatively you can use oven to roast the pork belly, 180 Deg C for 1 hour. Eat with rice cooked using chicken stock!

Paprik Style Fried Prawn Recipe

This is one of my favourite dishes whenever I eat at Malay stalls. I think paprik style of cooking originated from Thai. Chicken, beef, sotong (squid), prawn or even fish meat can be cooked using paprik style. Kaffir lime leaves additional flavour to the spicy and sweet paprik gravy.
I tried to guess what they actually put inside the paprik dish and came out with this recipe.

Ingredients
Prawns, 200 gms, cleaned
Onions, 1 pc, cut into slices
Lemongrass (serai), 2 pcs
Kaffir lime leaves, 5 pcs
Chili paste, 3 table spoon (use bird eye chili if you want this dish to be spicier)
Vegetable oil, 2 table spoons
Long beans, 3 pcs, cut into 1 inch length
Cabbage, 3 leaves, cut into small pieces
Salt to taste
Sugar to taste
Nampla (Thai Fish Sauce), 1 teaspoon

Heat up wok and put in the vegetable oil. Add onions, lemongrass, chilli paste, nampla and kaffir lime leaves. Stir fry until fragrant and then add in the long beans and cabbage. Then put in the prawns, add salt and sugar to taste. Serve with white rice!

Peteformation Chocolate Cake Recipe

This is the way to melt and cook the chocolate toppings

I like chocolate cake very much and happened to come across blocks of chocolates being sold at Tesco Mutiara shelf at the baking section. I am not good at baking but since I have successfully bake butter cake, I guess I can modify the recipe a little bit to make chocolate cake. What I am trying to do is to make chocolate cake from using basic ingredients and not using fancy ingredients. This is not a moist type, but the cake turns out quite ok! I did not put too much sugar in it because my wife doesn’t like cake that is too sweet! Next time around I will try to insert some frozen chocolate chips into the cake to see how it will turn out.
Here is my recipe for chocolate cake.

Cake
220 gms
Self Raising Flour 4 cups, sifted
Castor Sugar, 80gms (more if you want it to be sweeter)
Baking powder, 1 teaspoon
Eggs, 4pcs
Vanilla Essence, 1 teaspoon
Cocoa powder, 7 table spoons

Chocolate Cream Toppings
Cooking Chocolate, 1 block
Butter, 4 table spoons
Sugar to taste
Vanilla Essence, 1 teaspoon

Beat butter and castor sugar mixture until they are soft and fluffy. Slowly pour in the eggs, baking powder and shifted flour while beating the mixture at the same time. Add vanilla essence and cocoa powder to the batter. Pour batter in baking tray and bake in preheated oven at 180 Deg C for 20 minutes.
To make the chocolate cream dressing, use a wok and put some water in it. Then put a metal bowl in the water and add in the chocolate block. When the chocolate melt, add butter, sugar and vanilla essence. Let the mixture cool down a little bit and apply them on the cake before it hardened.

Shat Kei Ma (Crispy Egg Flour with Molasses Biscuit) bought From Kepong Baru Wet Market

Ipoh is famous for its’ Shat Kei Ma biscuits. Nowadays you can buy Shat Kei Ma, virtually in most places in Malaysia. Shat Kei Ma (Crispy Egg Flour with Molasses Biscuit) is made from eggs, salt, sugar, baking powder and flour, shaped into flat strips that are fried until crispy. Then they are bound together by molasses and then made into blocks. In the olden days, lard is actually added into the Shat Kei Ma. I am not sure the one I bought from Kepong Baru wet market has lard added or not but it is very tasty, crispy and fresh! Eight blocks of these Shat Kei Ma cost me RM3.30. One thing about Shat Kei Ma, once you start eating, you can hardly stop! So, get a packet Shat Kei Ma and try it out when you visit Ipoh, next time!

Nice Apple Pie for a Light and Easy Sunday Morning Breakfast – Recipe

Apple pie hot out from the oven.............................Yummy, the first piece!


Almost gone..............................................................Cooking the fillings for the apple pie!

I learn this recipe from picking up bits of pieces of information while watching AFC. The apples that I bought from Tesco have been sitting for quite some time in my fridge and they have turned a little bit dry. One fine Sunday morning, everyone wakes up quite early and I decided to make an apple pie from these apples. As this is the first time I bake an apple pie, I am really not sure how the taste would turn out to be. Thank god, it turned out quite nice and really tasty when hot out from the oven. My family had a very nice breakfast of apple pie and my little toddler son loves it so much, especially the pie pastry!
Here is my Apple Pie recipe

Pie Pastry
Flour, 7 cups
Butter, 170gms
Salt to taste
Sugar to taste
Iced cold water

Apple Fillings
5 apples cut into big chunks
Brown Sugar to taste
Cinnamon powder, ½ teaspoon
Butter, 2 table spoon
A little water

Mix flour with butter, sugar and salt until it turned into granules liked form. Add cold water a little bit the time to the dough. You don’t to end up with a pie pastry that is too soft to work with. Knead the dough until all the ingredients in it are well mixed. Put the dough in the fridge and then continue to work on the fillings.
Heat up a little water in saucepan. Add butter, apples, brown sugar and cinnamon. Let the fillings ingredients simmer in the pan until thick liquid caramel form. Then turn off the heat.
Take the dough out from the fridge and make the base for the pie. I actually use my hand to shape the dough instead of using a rolling pin because I wanted to have the ‘chunky’ and uneven effect to make the pie looks tastier. Pour the filling into the pie pastry base. Cover it up with the leftover dough. Poke some hole on the top to release the hot steam when it cooks in the oven. Bake in preheated oven at 200 Deg C for 20 minutes or until pastry turned dark golden brown.

Round Soft Mi Ku – Red Tortoise Bun

The original Red Vegetarian Red Tortoise Bun – Ang Mi Ku looks like this.



modified version.............


Round soft miku, a little bit compressed!, after I brought it back to KL all the way from Butterworth!

Over the years someone came up with a new version of mi ku which is softer and fluffier than the original one. I bought these round miku from Chai Leng Park wet market, Butterworth during my last trip back home. Normally miku will be available during Chinese festival seasons or at the 15th or 1st of Chinese Lunar calendar days. The texture of this mi ku is very nice and smooth. They even have the bakery name (Delight Confectionery) and contact number printed on the paper below the miku. After steaming the miku in the morning I ate them with roast pork that I bought from my favourite stall in the same wet market as well! Posted about this roast pork stall in Chinese Roast Pork, Chai Leng Park Wet Market, Butterworth.
Speaking of roast pork and miku, I am very hungry now and will soon be eating the HL Char Siew Pau that I bought this afternoon from Jalan Ipoh, KL, for supper!

Related post :

1) http://veganformation.blogspot.com/2009/05/vegetarian-red-tortoise-bun-ang-ku.html

Cooking Hard Boil Eggs Using Rice Cooker – Hassle Free and Easy Way!

We normally use boiling water to make hard boil eggs but there is another easier and hassle free method that you might be interested to try.
I learned how to cook hard boil egg using rice cooker from an email forwarded to me recently. I don’t know where the original source of this email is from but the method works really well when I tried it! The best thing is the egg will not crack if you use rice cooker to cook it and the time taken is also faster than using boiling water. As you only use a very small amount of water, very little energy (electricity) is needed to generate the steam that cooks the eggs. Therefore this method saves energy, money, time and water!

1) First wet some tissue papers (3 to 4 pieces) and put them at the base of your rice cooker pot. Then put the eggs on top of the wet tissue papers.

2) Set the rice cooker to ‘cook’ just like you are cooking rice. When the light turns green, the eggs will be ready.

3) Tada!!!!!!, your perfect hard boil eggs!

4) Hard boil eggs with skin peeled off. See, they are perfectly cooked using the rice cooker way.

Then........I made some stripes on the eggs using dark soya sauce and put them in my ‘Tau Eu Bak’ (Soya Sauce pork belly). I told my kids that these are dinosaur’s eggs! Unfortunately, my kids didn’t believe me but they were very happy to eat the ‘dinosaur’ eggs. Gosh, it is not easy to bluff little kids nowadays! ROLF!

Malaysian Attap Chi (attap palm fruit) Biscuits (Gem Bisquits)

I remembered as young boy, Gem Biscuit was one of my favourite snacks. I used to buy them from the grocery shop at my neighbourhood or get my mom to buy a packet of it from the wet market. Anyway, as a kid I would always try to tag along with my mom whenever she goes to the wet market, so that I can check out the fish monger stalls for any live seafood or what ever animals that are alive out there. I love to keep pets, so sometime I will find small little baby horse shoe crab in heaps of shrimps. I will collect them and bring them home. Then I would make some saline solution from salt and water, tasting it at the same time to see whether it match the sea water saltiness. Horse shoe crab can survive quite well in water with different salinity. Most of the time my baby horse shoe crab cannot survive very long but I managed to observe some of them changing their hard armour shell (skins) a few times!
Oh oh, sorry I got side tracked a little, back to the original topic of Gen Biscuits. I am not sure why we call it Attap Chi (Hokkien dialect) in my hometown. It has got nothing to do with Pua Chu Kang, Attap Chi (Attap Palm fruits) that his mother put in to the ice kacang (shaven ice with sweet syrup).
The base of Gem Biscuit is made from flour and it is top with brightly coloured icing sugar. If you ever visit any biscuit factory or bakeries that produce gem biscuit, get the owner to show you how they make the gem biscuits. The automated machine that produced the gem biscuit is just awesome. The process is very fast and you can see that they make thousands of these in just a couple of minutes. Just pop one in your mouth, you will taste the crispy based and the sweet icing at the same time. Yummy, I am going to eat my gems now!

Related post on biscuits
1) http://peteformation.blogspot.com/2008/10/penang-roti-tapai-biscuits.html
2) http://peteformation.blogspot.com/2008/11/beh-teh-soh-roti-gula-putih-hiong-piah.html
3) http://peteformation.blogspot.com/2009/04/pong-piah-and-hiau-piah-chinese.html
4) http://peteformation.blogspot.com/2009/07/sheng-hiang-tambun-biscuit-biskut.html

Butter White Bread Recipe

My butter bread and.............................................made into toast the next morning with bacon!

I was experimenting with a few ways to make different types of bread and last bread that I made turned out little bit too dry. This time around I added some butter and shortening to the dough and the bread turns out quite nice. I made the dough when I came home around 7pm and let it rise until 11pm. Then I baked it in the oven and let it cool down till next morning. It was great to have home made bread for breakfast. My favourite is bacon, eggs and toast.

Ingredients
Flour, 500gms
Butter, 3 table spoons
Shortening, 1 table spoon
Dry Yeast, 1 teaspoon, mixed with warm water to wake them up!
Salt to taste
Milk powder, 2 table spoons

Slowly pour the yeast mixed with water on to the flour, add salt, milk powder, butter, shortening and knead them into dough. Let the dough rise for around 2 to 3 hours. Bake the dough in preheated oven at 220 Deg C for 20 minutes or until golden brown crust form on the bread skin.

Related Post :

1) http://peteformation.blogspot.com/2009/04/bread-roll-with-chicken-meat-sausage.html

Stir Fried Chinese Black Ear Fungus Free Range Chicken with Celery Recipe

I cooked this quite some time ago when there was some leftover Chinese black fungus that I bought for my wife’s confinement when she delivered our youngest child.
I thought that it should go along well with chicken and celery. A little addition of Chinese rice wine provided some added flavouring to this dish.
Chinese fungus need to be soaked until they turn soft before you can cook them I like the crunchy texture of black fungus. They are also know as ear fungus, wood fungus, wood ear fungus, cloud ear fungus and.....many more names. It was found that Chinese ear fungus have anticoagulant properties. Being anticoagulant, means it stops blood from clotting, therefore I guess the Chinese people eat them for this purpose. Maybe they can improve blood circulation.

Ingredients
Half Free Range Chicken, cut into small pieces
Onions, 1 large, cut into four
Garlic, 5 pcs, chopped finely
Ginger, 5 to 7 pcs
Celery, 2 stalks
Chinese Rice wine, 2 table spoons
Salt to taste

Put wok in high heat and add 2 table spoon of vegetable oil. Fry the onions, ginger and garlic for a short while. Add chicken and stir fry until chicken are cooked. Add little to prevent the chicken from sticking to the wok. Add salt, wine and celery. Serve with white rice.

Kam Heong Tilapia Fish (Fei Chow Yee, Fresh Water Cichlid, or St Peter’s Fish with Curry Chili Paste)

Tilapia is a very hardy fish and it multiplies very fast. When plentiful of food are available, the tilapia will breed and have more offspring. The numbers of female will also be more. However when food are scarce, there will be more males than female in its habitat. Tilapia will eat virtually anything that can be considered food including algae. This fish which belongs to the Cichlid family is an important source of protein and are commercially breed extensively for food. I am not very sure why they named it St Peter’s fish but it has got to do with the Bible story about Apostle Peter the fisherman.
I bought a big red tilapia (Cichlid, St Peter Fish) from my usual fishmonger. Since it was quite a large fish, I have him cut it into to for me. The tail portion has been sitting in my freezer for 3 days before I decided to cook Kam Heong Tilapia with it.
Here is the recipe.

Tilapia Fish, 1 large fish, Deep fried
Ginger, 2”x2”x2”, cut into thin strips
Shallots, 5 pcs, chopped finely
Serai (lemongrass), 2 stalks, bashed
Dried Prawns, 2 table spoons, soak in water and bashed slightly
Curry powder, 2 table spoons
Curry leaves, 5 stalks (optional)
Chili paste, 3 table spoons
Oyster sauce, 2 table spoons
Light Soya Sauce, 3 table spoons
Dark Soya Sauce, 1 teaspoon
Corn Flour, 2 table spoons, add with a little water
Long Beans, 3 pcs, cut into 1 “ length
Salt to taste
Vegetable oil 3 table spoons

Deep fried Tilapia fish until golden brown and put aside.
Sautéed ginger, shallots, serai, dried prawns, curry powder and chilli paste mixture in hot oil until fragrant. Add long beans, oyster sauce, light soya sauce and dark soya sauce. Put in the corn flour water mixture to make the gravy thicker. Add salt to taste. Pour the gravy over the fried Tilapia fish.

Related Post
1) http://peteformation.blogspot.com/2008/10/kam-heong-lala-recipe-spicy-curry.html
2) http://peteformation.blogspot.com/2009/07/kam-heong-barebreast-jack-fish-ikan.html
3) http://peteformation.blogspot.com/2009/06/hot-and-spicy-kam-heong-prawns-recipe.html

Quickie Chilli Ikan Bilis (Anchovies) Recipe, Quick to Cook, Good to Eat

Sometimes when I am a little bit lazy to cook, I would prepare this dish which only takes me 5 minutes. You can use any bottled chili sauce that you fancy. Life Chilli Sauce (the one in KFC) was my choice as the gravy for the ikan bilis (anchovies). It has the right combination of sweetness and spiciness in it. Somehow it blends quite well with the anchovies. You might want to try Kampung Koh Garlic Chili Sauce if you like the garlic taste.

Ingredients
Ikan Bilis (Anchovies), 1 bowl
Chili Sauce, Any brand you fancy, 3 table spoons or to taste
Roasted peanuts, ½ bowl (I just buy it from the Mamak kacang putih man instead of roasting it myself)

Deep fry the ikan bilis (anchovies) in hot oil until they turned crispy or golden brown. Remove ikan bilis from the wok and drain away any excess oil. Add peanuts and chili sauce to the ikan bilis, mixed well. Your quickie Chili Ikan Bilis meal is ready! Your MIL and spouse will not even know that you used bottled chili sauce to prepare it! Ha ha ha! LOL!