This is one of my recent, most favourite one-pot rice recipes. It is a Hokkien recipe where you cook rice with enough ingredients to make it ‘salty’ – hence the term ‘kiam png‘ (literally ‘salty rice’). It is a healthy dish though, as much as it sounds unhealthy. There are vegetables, meat and rice, all to be eaten at the same time. The fragrance is irresistible and the flavours bursting with the different textures from the rice, cabbage, mushrooms, roast pork and shrimps.
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.
