Butter Cookies & Season Greetings!

 
I wanted to bake some cookies for Christmas, something fun to look at for kids and delicious to eat of course.  I wanted a basic butter cookies and I found the recipe at Joy of Baking website.  Then, I just used my figure cookie cutter and started creating.  I enlisted both my girls to help me to decorate as this was the fun part of making Christmas cookies.  Needless to say, both of them were so happy that they got to help.  Edda did the buttons, Evy did the red sprinkles and I drew the eyes and mouth. :-)

This butter cookies were buttery and crispy when you baked until the edges were brown.  If you take it out too early, the cookies would be soft.   They couldn't wait for the cookies to be cool completely before trying.  Got to say, we all loved it and had fun making it!  We loved the fragrant of the butter!

Hereby wishing all my readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy and Safe New Year 2011!!!

Pumpkin Tang Yuan or Pumpkin Glutinous Rice Balls

Happy Solstice or Dong Zhi “冬至节”everyone!  Today is the first day of winter and in tradition, Chinese eat Tang Yuan and reunion meal on this day.  This year I made a pumpkin tang yuan or pumpkin glutinous rice balls.  I used the leftover dough from making the Chinese Pumpkin Sesame Cakes to make this.  I will show some before and after pictures in the next page.

At first I thought of serving it in a thick sweet syrup but later changed my mind and served this in my Red Bean and Black Glutinous Rice Sweet Soup.  Just have to make it sweeter as the tang yuan is plain. 

Steamed Pumpkin Cake (Pumpkin Kuih)

My one pumpkin can help me create so many new dishes.  If you have been following my blog, I have been popping out all sort of pumpkin recipes recently, have you even noticing it?  And it's not over yet, I still have more pumpkin recipes to share.  Just stay tuned!

I love my stir-fry pumpkin with eggs, so yummy delicious and this steamed pumpkin cake, soft and moist and so well seasoned.  It's so great eating it this way, but I also like it pan-fried because I like the crispy crust on the outside before I bite into the softness inside.

I was so happy I created this recipe.  I never thought of making this kuih in the first place but once I found out that the defrosted pumpkin was soft in nature, I had to change my plan.  Since the soften pumpkin contained lots of liquid so I needed a recipe that suitable for this.  Once I planned on making this, I realized that I only had 100g of rice flour, no more and no less, so I had to create a recipe based on 100g of rice flour.  Luckily it turned out so well and delicious.

This recipe is not hard to make at all.  If you try it, feedback to me ya! ;-)

3-2-1 Chicken Chop

Oh man, the way I crisscrossed it, it looked more like liver wasn't it?  Luckily the main star in this dish was not the chicken chop but the sauce that I invented.  I saw a Kikkoman commercial on my Chinese cable and it was introducing it's 3-2-1 chicken chop sauce using it's Kikkoman special sauce (I didn't really know what kind of sauce, might be some sort of special soy sauce), sweet rice wine and sugar.  Oh well, I didn't have the Kikkoman sauce neither did I have the sweet rice wine but I do have other sauces at home that I could experiment with.

I thought of Worcestershire sauce and Shao Xing rice wine instead.  Worcestershire sauce had a bit of sour taste to it like vinegar so I thought it would pair well with some rice wine and sugar.  I also added a touch of sesame oil in the end.  This sauce got our stamp of approval, we all loved it.  If you tried it, credit me for my creation and feedback to me ya.  It would go well with pork and steak too.

Stir Fried Crunchy Cabbage

I loved crunchy and sweet cabbage.  I finally found the way after all these years.  I saw it at the Chinese cooking show where the host said never to cut the cabbage but tear it with your fingers.  It will give you a different texture.  But I guess I always took the easier way out, that is to slice it with a knife and thinking that shredded cabbage will cook faster and soften easily.  Not sure why but my shredded cabbage never really gives me the sweetness of the cabbage and the crunch that I looked for.

But now with my new way of handling my cabbage, that is to tear it with my fingers, I found the crunch and the sweetness of the cabbage when stir-frying.  This dish is delicious, you can taste the sweetness of cabbage and the crunchiness.  If you read my recipes, you must have noticed that I have been using quite a lot of fish sauce recently.  I think I found the secret of fish sauce in stir-frying, it really give certain dishes a kick in taste.

Pureed Brown Rice Pumpkin Soup

I am not sure of whether to call this brown rice pumpkin soup or brown rice pumpkin porridge.  I made this for my little girl when she was having diarrhea and vomit since everything went into her mouth, it came right out.  I thought if I pureed the porridge, it would go down easier on her.  But guess what?  She refused to eat it, not even a taste test.  The only thing she would eat was Popsicle and of course she could have as many as she wanted since that was the only thing she would eat and won't throw up.

So, I was the one that finished this soup.  I loved it actually, it was sweet and tasted like brown rice.  Now I know what was the difference between white rice porridge and brown rice porridge.  Brown rice taste really stood out. This is suitable for baby, toddler or older people as it's very nutritious and easy to swallow.