This dish was created spontaneously. Never thought of using apple in this dish at all. Not until I finished marinating the chicken meat and slicing the onion. I saw a few small green apples sitting on my counter top that I would really love to finish. We were invited to a friend's house for lunch and later he showed us around the campus that he was teaching. It was a private campus and it has a few grown apple trees there for you to help yourself. It must be the human instinct or what because I couldn't stop myself from picking my own organic apples from the trees! Of course the apples were small and sour, just like eating green apple. Since Tom Yam was sour and this apple was sour, I thought they would be a good match, thus I sliced some up for use in my cooking.
The result? Definitely a good combination because the sourness from the apple compliment the Tom Yam paste very well.
Experiment with wrapping my stir-fry jicama (Mung Kuan Char) with Vietnamese rice roll and nori sheet. 
Resulted a delicious wrapped rice rolls! I served this kind of rice roll with Thai sweet chili sauce. What a good match and we couldn't get enough of this rice rolls. The nori sheet acts as a barrier so that the rice roll won't be too wet from the stir-fry jicama filling. In addition to that, it also acts as a bonus favor to the rice roll. Got my thumb up!
This is definitely a great appertizer to serve in a party since it is served as a cold wraps and great eaten cold.
Click here for my estimated "mung kuan char" recipe.
Another one of my easy home cook dishes: Black pepper pork with onion and red bell pepper.
Ingredients:
1 boneless pork chop, sliced thinly
1/2 red bell pepper, sliced thinly
1/2 yellow onion, sliced thinly
2 tsp. LKK black pepper sauce
1/2 tsp. black soy sauce
1/2 tsp. sugar
A little water
Method:
1. First, marinate the pork with a little salt, chinese cooking wine, white pepper and cornstarch.
2. Heat up wok with oil. When smoking, add in pork slices, stir-fry until pork is no longer pink. Add in onion and bell pepper. Stir-fry for 2 mins. Add in sauces and sugar and a little water. Stir to blend well and serve hot.
Note:
Of course you can substitute red bell pepper with other colors bell pepper. I like red because it's sweeter.
I am sharing this dish with Culinarty's Original Recipe blog event. Check it out every month on the week of 15th for the round up.
While blog visiting, noobcook's Lemon Barley Drink post reminded me to make some barley drink for my family. She made her version of barley drink and photographed it beautifully with the added lemon slice. Usually barley drink is fairly easy to make, you can make one with just water, barley and rock sugar. However since I have the sweet dates and sweet winter melons, I decided to add it into my barley drink.
I used slow cooker to make this. I added all the ingredients with the amount of water I like and turned it on High. Should be ready in 4-6 hours. I used 2 Chinese sweet dried dates, about 1 cup dried sweet winter melons, 3/4 cup barley and 3 quarts water. At 5 hours, before turning off the electric, I added yellow rock sugar to taste. If too sweet, add more water until it reaches your desired sweetness. Actually the resulted barley drink is quite sweet, so only little bit of rock sugar is required.
