Chinese Water Chestnut Cake

My friend gave me three packets of water chestnut flour recently.  I wanted to try this Chinese water chestnut cake for a long time and finally I got my chance.  The above is my Chinese water chestnut cake without the bits of chestnuts.  I didn't have the water chestnuts but decided to make it anyway.  It turned out pretty good I think, tasted like cold jelly straight from the refrigerator.  I will certainly play with this recipe in the future because I saw others people water chestnut cake in yellow color instead of white.

This cake is actually served during Chinese Lunar New Year by Chinese, depended on where they are located.  I don't think we Malaysian eat this during Chinese New Year.  I pan-fried this with the equal mixture of flour: rice flour.  The batter was really crispy!

Stir Fried Pork with Long Beans

This dish was created with something I had in a restaurant here.  They stir-fried it with a kind of Chinese preserved vegetable (usually come in small packet selling for few cents each and slightly spicy, gosh what does it called!).  Anyway, I omitted here because I hardly buy Chinese preserved vegetable.   I read that it is best to eat less of the preserved food, more so if it is from China.  I even stay away from the salted fish and used only dried anchovies as substitute.  The motto for me is "If I don't buy, then I don't have to cook with it, thus we don't have to eat it", with this motto, we certainly eat less of the preserved and salted food.  It is hard to resist from not buying all the times, so once in a blue moon, I gave in.  Do you all stay away from certain unhealthy food? 

Peanut Butter Banana Cake

I am not sure whether you have noticed.  I have been baking lots of banana cake lately, ranging from just plain, marble, chocolate and now I am trying with peanut butter!  I needed variety so that even though I have been baking almost the same thing but it tasted different.  As I was figuring what else I can put into the banana cake or how to make it different and peanut butter came to mind.

I added chocolate chips per my daughters request, but I didn't add much.  You can add more if you like.  Since the top was kind of bland, I decorated it with heart shape chocolate chips design.  It turned out well don't you think?

This turned out great!  We all loved it and we could definitely taste the peanut butter in it even though it was subtle.   Evy even ask me to make it again.  If you are a fan of my banana cake recipe, give this a try too, providing of course you have no peanut allergy in your household.

Chi Ku Teh (Chicken Dark Herbal Soup)

Bak Ku Teh, a popular herbal soup that is dark in color that uses pork ribs, meat, etc.  But there is another version that uses chicken.  This is my first time uses chicken drumsticks for this soup because I believed the pork ribs made the soup sweeter.  After trying this, I can say it was good with chicken too, the drumsticks tasted good with the herbal flavor in it.  I loved to add boiled eggs and taufu pok (fried beancurd puff) in mine.  I was planning to create a marble eggs in this but decided against it at the last minute because I was afraid a piece of the egg shell might fall off and my daughter might accidentally drank it.  Thus no beautiful marbling effect with my boiled eggs here.

For this chicken dark herbal soup, I just used the A1 Bak Kut Teh premix that easily available at any supermarket in Malaysia.  I always bought some of these to bring back here whenever I am back in Malaysia. Got to stock up on food that I can't get it here right?  I noticed there were two types, one was without the Chinese herbs, just the premix and was selling at a cheaper rate.  The other one was in bigger packaging and included some Chinese herbs in it. I bought the one with herbs and just followed the packet direction in cooking this.  My hubby bought some fried yu tiao from Denver and we had this soup with some yu tiao just liked how I used to eat back in Malaysia.

Spicy Long Beans with Minced Chicken

This is one easy and delicious Malaysian dish we often have at home.  At home, we normally cook it with home made sambal belacan and pounded dried shrimps.  Living in the U.S., I managed to find a cut short for this dish many years ago.  I combined the shrimp paste in soy oil (Thai product) and fish sauce (to substitute belacan) to recreate this dish.  Now making this dish is so convenient, just open a bottle!

I finally saw some fresh looking long beans at my Asian store here, so I grabbed a big bunch as I haven't cooked with it for a long time.  Evy loved this long beans too.  If you don't have children at home, feel free to add bird eye chili or chili paste/sambal to make it spicier.  You can use ground pork/beef if that's what you have a home.

Mom's Crepes

This is the crepes I remembered from home.  One that is plain and sweeten.  My mom used to make this plain crepes for us when we were young and I remembered we all loved it very much.  Did you have this plain crepes before?  When I came over here, I was actually surprised that American served their crepes differently, with so many condiments and fresh fruits.

Now, I made it occasionally for my girls (no school day).  As you know, fortified cereal with milk is the easiest breakfast to serve kids in America.  We don't have a pasar pagi (morning open market) to go to buy the kuih-muih, nasi lemak, porridge, or whatever goodies the market sells.  So, I just give them what is convenient and also healthy for them.  Even though most cereals that my kids liked are probably sweet but it is still better for them since all have been fortified with vitamins and minerals and they had it with milk.