My final cookie baked for this year. Next year I will be starting on Chinese New Year cookies, hard to believe it is just a month away. Hereby wishing all my readers a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to those who don't celebrate it. Oh, in case you are wondering, I cut my biscotti in half for easy storage.
I also had a minor accident two days ago. Believe it or not, I accidentally cut my left index finger (cut into half of my nail) and my left thumb while chopping a cooked chicken into smaller pieces. That was pretty scary especially I used my biggest and sharpest cleaver at home. Of course some screaming and blooding scenes followed and then rushed to an urgent care facility to see if any stitches needed. Luckily no stitches required because they could not possibly stitch through my nail, just some sterilized strips and bandages for now. But half of my nail will probably fall off in due time (that was too scary and painful to imagine and I am too afraid to take off my bandage!). Needless to say, with my left index finger and thumb bandage, working in the kitchen has been slow and quite inconvenient. I made those biscotti prior to the accident that morning.
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Today is Winter Solstice festival or Dong Zhi “冬至节”. Chinese celebrating this day by having a reunion dinner and eating tang yuan (glutinous rice balls in sweet syrup). I always make tang yuan on this day, have been doing it for years so it's like a custom already. This year I made Pandan flavored tang yuan with Gula Melaka syrup. I actually made a mistake because I was out of glutinous flour and I added too much water, so the dough was too wet. So I had to use some rice flour to make the dough pliable. In my mind, I was hoping that it works because throwing away the dough was too wasteful , also Evy was too eager to help and eat the tang yuan. In fact, she has been bugging me to make tang yuan and I always postponing her by saying wait until Winter Solstice day. So, I can't possibly disappoint her again. Luckily it still works! The shape is not as round as I prefer but taste wise it is still very similar to tang yuan texture.
Now, wishing everyone in U.S.A a Happy Winter Solstice Festival (as Malaysian celebrated it yesterday).
Guess what? I decided to play with my cookie dough recipe again. I substituted some butter with cream cheese and came out with this. The dough came out to be a little hard to manage, I couldn't roll it out without breaking the dough. So, it was very hard to cut it with a cookie cutter, so I had to change my method. Hence, I rolled it into a ball and press a thumb print in the middle (follow the thumb print cookie method), even that the dough was very difficult to handle. Look at the above picture you would know, the dough cracks like that even before baking. I used raspberry preserve for my cookie. Surprisingly it came out pretty good because it was all in our tummies already. I won't be sharing the recipe though because I am not sure about this recipe.
This is one of my lazy night dinners. I would store some dried wontan noodle (egg noodle) in my pantry for a day I bought some ground turkey. This noodle dish is very simple, only few ingredients needed, dried egg noodle, ground turkey or meat of your choice, dried Chinese mushroom and garlic. And the result would be a satisfying meal.Ingredients:Egg noodle (about 6 bundles), boiled in boiling water until cooked, drained and set aside.
Ground turkey (about 1/2 pound) or ground meat of your choice.
Chopped Chinese mushroom (About 6-8, soaked in warm water until soften)
2 cloves of garlic, chopped
Oyster sauce
Dark soy sauce
A little sugarMethod:1. In a heated oil, add cooking oil. Add ground turkey and garlic, stir-fry until the meat is cooked. Add mushroom and stir-fry well.
2. Add drained noodle and stir well. Season with sauces and a little water if needed. Dish out and serve with chili of your choice.
Decided to make some Christmas cookies with my kids. Evy would be the little helper while Edda would be the on looker. Whenever I told them mommy is going to make a cake or some cookies, they would be really thrilled and ran over to my kitchen countertop. Evy would say can I help to do this or that. Edda would be happy just sitting on the kitchen island stool starring at us working. I did not try any new recipe but picked my simple crisp lemon cookies recipe. What to do, I prefer easy recipe and my kids loved lemon cookies.
Edda is starting to pick up more words. She is also trying to express herself more with words instead of action. That was good as compared with her sister, she was considered slow in speech development. Evy now is really talkative and she has so many questions, can be quite annoying. So, when the mommies said once your kid started talking, they won't stop is so true, so should appreciate the time when they still couldn't talk much. Hahaha...
Received this as a suggestion from a reader. And since I have some canned red bean and water chestnut paste in my pantry, I decided to give it a go. I used my green tea yogurt muffin recipe and added a dollop of red bean and chestnut paste in the middle before baking. I thought red bean paste pair better with green tea flavor, so I tried it with green tea muffin. It yields 18 muffins for me, so again I have to give some away and freeze some for later consumption. I will take it out a night before and let it defroze and be ready for breakfast the next day.
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