This recipe is a very famous Hakka recipe where pork belly is braised and steamed for a long enough time to make it very soft, so soft that it’s supposed to melt in your mouth. This signature Hakka dish goes very well with white rice as it has a lot of gravy that goes along with it. The mustard green also helps to give it an additional texture and flavour to give the dish a more balanced taste and richness.
The last week or so was a very sick and tiring one. Literally. I was sick throughout most days and hence very, very tired. It all started over the weekend and I almost had to forego my long-awaited circus show (Kurios, Cirque du Soleil) last Saturday (but no!). I decided to force myself to go to sleep earlier on most nights last week and fortunately, the bad bout of flu which lasted for quite a while was finally able to go off at the end of the week.
I didn’t know a simple bowl of steamed egg would require so much skills and knowledge to make it. Well, if you don’t mind just any steamed egg such as the ones I used to make – ugly pocker-faced ones, diluted ones – then it is really simple steps we’re talking about. You can simply beat the eggs with some water and then place the whole thing into the steamer and wait for things to happen. But if you are looking at making really silky, soft and smooth (the 3 ‘S’-es), then you’ve got to put in that little bit more effort to get what you want.
This was an interesting recipe that I found in the German Hessian recipe book that I bought in Frankfurt. The gravy is the bit that makes this dish stand out because it’s not what we typically do with ours in Chinese style. Thought to give it a try just to see what it looks like, and to get a bit of my memories of Frankfurt back in Singapore to reminisce for a while. I must be honest though – I’ve never tried this dish when I was in Frankfurt; neither have I seen it anywhere. But if I follow the recipe a hundred percent, I doubt I could go wrong anyhow!
Chwee Kueh is a famous dish that almost everyone in Singapore would have tried before, or if not, would at the very least know about. Chwee Kueh, literally known as steamed water rice cake, has a very simple recipe. Just mix rice flour with water and some basic condiments such as salt and oil, then steam it to get the rice cake. This dish is always served with chye poh, a preserved radish that is both sweet and salty and stir-fried so as to give it a nice fragrance when you eat the rice cakes with it.
