Tempeh

Originally posted on littleborneogirl:
I have heard so much of this superfood, a health product.  Wikipedia has a very comprehensive description ……………. Tempeh is a traditional soy product originating from Indonesia. It is made by a natural culturing and controlled…

Simple Brussels Sprouts Pie

Originally posted on littleborneogirl:
I had some Brussels sprouts sitting in my vegetable crisper for four days.  Bought a packet and certainly didn’t want them to turn yellow so I created this recipe. If you are not a Brussels sprout fan, you can…

Jiggly Japanese Cheesecake

Originally posted on littleborneogirl:
Jiggly like jelly Inviting and delicious Glorious and moist Goes well with a cup of tea Luscious and finger-licking good Yummilicious Japanese Cheesecake. ? I am happy with my first attempt baking this cake from Michael…

Cha Siu Beef (Chinese BBQ Beef)

Finally got round to roll up my sleeves and created Cha Siu Beef. All you can get from the local Chinese BBQ Restaurants are Chai Siu Pork, never beef. I could not even find a single Cha Siu Beef recipe in Goggle so I invented my own and was very happy with it. Yummilicously sweet & juicy.

littleborneogirl

I finally rolled up my sleeves to marinate those sirloins!

Here’s my recipe for Chinese BBQ Beef.  Not a pork person, I experimented my own version of the popular Cha Siu Pork (using beef/sirloin instead), a Cantonese cuisine of ‘roast pork’ that you see hanging from hooks in the window of Chinese BBQ Restaurants.

You can use ready-made Chinese BBQ sauce available in the supermarkets but the taste of the dish would be rather bland.  I made the marinade from scratch.

Instead of baking, my method of cooking is pan-frying which caramelized the sauce giving the meat the added sweet and salty flavour.   After trying this method, I can vouch that the taste of the ‘cha siu’ (Chinese BBQ)  beef is much better than oven baked or slow cooked.

The other bonus is the shorter cooking time compared to baking.

Ingredients
1 kg Sirloin steak
3 tablespoon Maple Syrup or Honey
3…

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One-pot lamb with Israeli couscous

My Chef cooked me dinner last night.

He read the recipe line by line and the couscous lined the one-pot lamb dish so beautifully.

 

littleborneogirl

I prefer cooking to baking.

Why?

In cooking, you can often ‘agak-agak’ (Malay word meaning estimate or not exactly, roughly, approximately).  I call myself an ‘agak-agak’ cook.  I am also not someone who cooks using a recipe book.  No doubts, I have a whole library full of recipe books because I am so attracted to the pictures rather than the words.

I guess I may not be a very good baker as proper measuring is critical to baking.  Definitely an ‘agak-agak’ method or taking shortcuts can’t guarantee the cake to rise.

Today, another Chef at home offered to cook and whenever he cooks, I will have the honour to choose which recipe from the cookbook for dinner tonight.

This Chef is slow and steady.  He sips his wine as he cooks and his cooking always takes hours when mine usually takes nothing more than 30 minutes.

The dishes he prepared are always good. …

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A healthier pie

Dear ‘Little Girl Story’ followers, new or old.

Please follow me on this new blog (Little Borneo Girl) and give us some Likesplease for creating and sharing this recipe.

This is an invitation to all our valued fellow bloggers, not a crank call.

Little Girl Story blog is now totally full and I no longer have storage left to write new blogs from this site.

Thank you.

Happy blogging

littleborneogirl

This recipe is a ‘pie’ with a difference.

I consider this a ‘healthier pie’ because it has lots of vegetables.  The ingredients can be substituted with any vegetables you fancy.  I have used microwave to soften the pumpkins and potatoes for a more even cooking.

Ingredients
2 square pastry sheets (or a roll of pastry)
Half a butternut pumpkin (or any pumpkin) – cut into small pieces
3 medium-sized potatoes – sliced thinly
200gm chunky bacon pieces (or 8 slices of bacon)
3 carrots – shredded
2 big yellow onions – chopped into pieces
150gm shredded tasty cheese
1/2 cup milk (about 150 ml)
7 eggs (4 whole and 3 to be beaten with a half portion of the milk)
A few dashes of Lemon pepper salt and/or garlic salt
Hickory Sauce (about a tablespoonful)
1-2 tablespoon of cornflour for thickening and holding the cooked ingredients together
Butter for cooking the…

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Whitebait

littleborneogirl

The word whitebait does not refer to a single species. It is a general term used in many countries to describe small freshwater fish that are tender and edible.

In spring, whitebait (could be various species about 4-5 cm long) make their way upstream from the sea, swimming near the river’s edge. Large shoals are referred to as runs.  Big runs often follow floods, a few days after the water clears – usually in the daytime on a rising tide.  White baiters will catch and sell them around $120 per kg which makes whitebait a delicacy.

NZ Whitebait is tender and the entire fish is edible including head, fins, bones and guts.

Chinese whitebait is raised in fish farms and plentiful quantities are produced for export. The Chinese whitebait (silverfish) is larger than the New Zealand whitebait and not nearly so delicate. The frozen product is commonly available in supermarkets at…

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It must be Golden Churn

What is Golden Churn?

This is a household name for premium butter in Singapore, Malaysia, China and also perhaps other Asian countries.

Golden Churn is imported butter made either in New Zealand or Australia.  It came in a 340gram tin (mostly made in NZ) or 250g foil wrapped (made in Australia).   It is a halal product, indicating that a great chunk of the product is for the overseas market.

It’s the time of the year where Golden Churn is so much sought after.  When the festivals are here, it is time for making cookies, cakes and everything nice.  All bakers put in their best efforts with the best ingredients so their goodies will melt in your mouth with a taste of pure creamy butter.

Indeed it must be Golden Churn, goodness guaranteed.

While the rush for Golden Churn is happening in Singapore, Malaysia, China (and elsewhere), this is definitely not happening here in New Zealand or Australia where this butter is supposedly from.

I wonder if many overseas buyers know that Golden Churn is not even in our supermarket shelves.  These are the butter you see at our local supermarket shelves.

Thinking that we live in New Zealand, my elderly aunt beamed every time we return home to Malaysia and gifted her with tins of Golden Churn, her whole year’s supply, not realizing that we had to specially go to the Souvenir Shops to grab her favourite Golden Churn.

What a bliss, sometimes we left the gifts shopping till the last minute and still managed to see displays of Golden Churn along with other gifts at duty free shops at the airport.  Aren’t it blissful when you don’t have to crack your head to think hard what to buy for this aunty or that aunty.

Way to go, Golden Churn.  Goodness guaranteed !

By the way, do you know that it is cheaper to buy Golden Churn in Malaysia (for example) than to buy them in Australia or New Zealand?

Jolly BBQ

It’s been ages since I had the time to sit back and blog.

The festive season is close and as always December is a wonderful time.  Being summertime, it is time for the outdoors.  It’s festive time too so it is a time to be jolly, a time of giving, eating and rejoicing.

We got the family and close friends round to my place for a get-together with a jolly good bbq of mussels, fish, salad, a very long German Bratwurst sausage and thick special ordered rump fillet from our regular butcher.

Our little grandbaby joined in the fun posing her big smile for photos.

Everyone had a good jolly time.

Family isn’t always blood.
It’s the people in your life who want you in theirs;
the ones who accept you for who you are.
The ones who would do anything to see you smile
and who love you no matter what.

Taste of Auckland 2017

Yearly, Taste of Auckland transforms Western Springs into a food haven.

It is an event not to be missed.  You get the opportunity to try signature dishes from some of Auckland’s most exciting restaurants in a beautiful al fresco setting surrounded by pop-up winery stands, food stalls and drink experiences.  I went all out with a huge backpack as my shopping bag.

This year, we visited on the last day of the event.  The weather was wet and miserable which in fact was a bonus as we managed to get a car park without having to walk as far as we usually did in previous years.  The sun did come out eventually so it was a nice transformation from rain to shine!

There were ten top restaurants taking part.  In fact, I thought there were more stalls last year but I may be wrong.  Definitely, I could not find the stall selling smoked juicy salmon.  How I craved those thick juicy cubes on crackers.  We bought lots of dips and snacks home but no salmon this year.

My friend was attracted to the hangi, a traditional New Zealand Māori method of cooking food using heated rocks buried in a pit oven.  I knew the meat would be bland (strictly my own opinion) but he was in front of the camera so had to make the bite look mouth-watering for others, I supposed.

We should have gone to Miss Moonshine instead as they had the best display.

I had bunny chow from 1947 Eatery which was quite nice but very spicy. Bunny chow is a very interesting dish.

During the Great Depression in 1933 Indians, whites and Chinese in Durban, South Africa, suffered hunger like everyone else.  The kids then discovered that the cheapest curry they could buy (for a quarter penny or half a penny) was made by a vegetarian Indian caste known in Durban (slang as the Bania). It was made from dried sugar beans (no meat). The children didn’t have plates, and one kid got the bright idea to hollow out a quarter bread, asked the seller to put the bean curry in the hollowed-out bread, and then used the broken bread he’s taken out as a sort of eating utensil. Chinese food was called “chow”. Somehow the two words came together: Bania Chow.  In time, it simply became known as Bunny Chow.

Bunny Chow was what the Indian sugar plantation workers took as their day’s food to the lands: curry in hollowed-out bread halves. Cheap and practical … 

We were looking for Tok Tok but by the time we found our favourite stall, our tummy no longer have room for their yummilicous crispy duck.  Too bad we couldn’t fit in the curry fish either.  How disloyal were we then, though it now gives us all the reason to travel all the way to Tok Tok, Takapuna for a proper dine-in.

In between that, we sampled lots and lots of sausages and I seemed to have gone off drinking so our two glasses that came with the tickets were pretty much souvenir pieces in that end.  I knew I have quite a few of them that we brought home yearly and never used.  What a hoarder.

Indeed, Taste of Auckland is quite an expensive day out though we only spent 140 crowns ($140) this visit which included entries for two and 80 crowns for spending amongst the two of us.  This was a lot less than last year’s spendings as there were no bottles of wine, beer or salmon in my backpack!