Salmon Patties

I know I have been neglecting my blog for awhile and I hope there are still people stopping by here. I am so sorry about that. Well, I have been very busy for the past 6-7 months, with my home business, then my trip back to Malaysia and after I came back I have to preparing for our moves to another house. So, that was what happening to my life all within a few months. With now settling at a new place hopefully I can get back to my routine of blogging and cooking again. I was just telling Carlos how much I miss doing it.

Anyway, here I am trying to catch up with all the backlogs. There are so many pictures to edit, so many recipes to type out. Let’s start with these Salmon patties which I made some time ago. I like making these patties when salmon fish goes on sale. I will grill a few extra pieces just so I can make these.

Salmon Fish Curry

I have 2 pieces of salmon fish in the freezer for quite some time and I don’t think fresh enough to grill it so I decided to used it to cook curry with whatever vegetable I had in my fridge. So for this curry dish I added some cabbage, carrots, brussels sprouts and potato. This is a very simple version of fish curry like how my mom used to make.

Singapore Hokkien Mee

Even though I’ve been to Singapore so many times but I don’t think I ever tried this noodle dish before. They are very different from our KL style Hokkien mee. KL hokkien mee uses thick yellow noodles braised in thick dark soy sauce. As for the Singapore Hokkien Mee it is white in color with yellow noodles and rice vermicelli/ bee hoon and it’s braised in flavorful stock and serve with sambal chili and lime, giving it that extra zing and tanginess.

I made this dish hoping to submit it for AFF – Singapore month but I didn’t make it. I am just too lazy to blog nowadays. I guess after blogging for nearly 8 years, I am slowly growing out of it. I used to put out 3 post a week now it is just once a week. I still cook and bake but mostly  repeat and easy dishes. Anyway, I hope I am able to find my mojo to blog regularly soon.

Sambal Shrimps/Shrimps in Spicy Chili Sauce

This is one of my favorite Malaysian dishes. It is sweet and spicy and goes really well with rice. Sambal is a terms used in Malaysia and Indonesian cuisine to describe a variety of spicy condiments and side dishes used to add flavor to other dishes. There are different types of sambal available in the stores but I will usually make my own. Every household will have their own version of sambal so there is no right or wrong to it. As for me, I like adding some dry shrimp to my sambal and some might not. I will usually make a huge batch and freeze them up and whenever I want to use it for my cooking it is readily available. I use the sambal to cook chicken, beef and seafood.

For today dish I used shrimp. I left the shrimps unshelled but you can always shell it if you find that easier to eat and you can substitute the shrimp with squid, chicken or beef but it will take longer for it to cook. You can get the sambal recipe here

Salted Fish and Chicken Fried Rice

A friend of mine gave me a piece of salted fish and it has been sitting in the freezer since last year. I thought of using it to make Laksa Johor but change my mind and used it for fried rice. It has been the longest time since I have salted fish. I cook this fried rice for lunch on weekdays as I don’t think my husband can stand the stinky smell of the salted fish. I am sure he will ‘pengsan’ (faint) ha ha.. gosh they taste so good in fried rice. I still have half of it and maybe used it for claypot chicken rice.

Salmon with Turmeric Pumpkin Rice

This is an easy one pot meal to prepare especially for busy weeknights. Just serve it with a vegetable alongside and dinner is done. I added some leftover pumpkins and turmeric powder to the rice as it gives some color to the boring white rice.

Fish in Fermented Black Bean Sauce

My mom and grandma hardly cook anything with fermented black beans so I am not familiar with this ingredient at all. We only used bean paste/tau cheong in our cooking. I only start using it after seeing some of my friend here cooking with it. They will use it to cook pork, fish or vegetable. As for me I like to cook fish with it. I just love how the fish soak up all the wonderful flavor of the fermented black beans. I will steam the fish if I can get them real fresh but since this tilapia came frozen I decided to pan fried it first before cooking it in the sauce.

Thai Red Curry with Prawns and Green Eggplant

When I have time prepare spices for curry I normally do it in big batches so I can portion them out and freeze it up so each time I want to cook it is ready but nowadays we can get readymade paste from the Asian market without any problem. It does make cooking so much easier and I do keep a jar of it in case of emergency or I ran out of homemade paste. I have the recipe here if anyone of you wanted to make it from scratch. You can use it to cook chicken, duck, beef, pork or any type of seafood and even noodles with it. For today I used the paste to cook this prawn dish.

Miso Maple Glazed Salmon Rice Bowl

We were having some pretty hot summer here in Northern CA and during days like this I like to prepare meals that are quick and easy so I don’t have to spend too much time at the hot stove. This particular meal is one of our favorite and I will prepare it at least once a week. It tasted so light and substantial at the same time and it was a wonderful meal in a bowl!

Kerabu Sotong Kering - Kelantan Dish - Dish 5

Like I mentioned previously I have never been to Kelantan but I am very curious about the state and I have been asking my sisters and friends about the state and its food. A friend of mine visited it in mid 1990’s and she was not impressed with it as it wasn’t as well developed as the other states in Malaysia. My family has a housing project there now and my sisters have been flying there once a week. They told me Kelantan is no longer that sorry state. In fact, it has grown so much over the short years that one could hardly recognize certain areas as there was so much development.

My friend Shereen’s been there too and she don’t exactly remember much about the place but the one thing that she can't forget was the delicious lingering smell of smoked squid all over the city. It seemed every street had a hawker fanning charcoal in a makeshift barbeque pit smoking dried squid beside the road. She said once you had the first taste, you’ll be hooked.

I saw this recipe on Betty Saw’s cookbook and I since have some shredded Chinese style dry squid I thought I give this recipe a go. Being so far away from home, I make do with what I can find here but if you are in Malaysia, you can easily find the prepared shredded cuttlefish sold in packets all over Kelantan and Terengganu state. In fact, I am pretty sure that you can even find it in your local supermarket nowadays. I also did not use green mango as I can't find any at the Asian grocery. I've used not quite ripe Mexico mango and I think that it tastes even better from the sweetish and not too sour flesh. Feel free to adapt the recipe to your liking. There is no right or wrong in replicating a recipe as long as you follow the basic.

Prawns Wrapped in Taro Paste

This is another prawn dish that is nice to serve for Chinese New Year. I made this dish a few years ago but never posted it in my blog. I am recreating it again so I could post it here for my record. This dish will be ideal as an appetizer too. The taro which is crispy on the outside and soft on the inside compliments well with the succulent prawn within.

Ingredients:

15-18 large prawns – shell,deveined and leave the tail intake
2 tbsp flour

New England Clam and Corn Chowder

This is a traditional cream base chowder with ingredients like onion, potatoes, clams and additional of corn in it. I made it a wee bit on the healthier side by using half and half instead of heavy cream. I always like clam chowder especially the one served at Boudin Bakery in San Francisco. Their clam chowder is the creamy kind serves on sourdough bread bowl while the Manhattan clam chowder is with tomatoes. Both are just as good as it is simply a matter of taste and preference. I used canned clams but you can always use fresh clams to make this. It’s serve piping hot with some crusty bread and just great for cold winter evening.

Creamy Butter Prawns/Nai Yau Har

My mom cooked a lot of traditional dishes for our Chinese New Year reunion dinner and one of them is this prawn dish. She once saw a chef on TV demonstrating a prawn dish using evaporated milk and she cook it for us. We like it a lot but I tweak recipe a bit by adding additional ingredients to it. Many Chinese families like to cook prawns/shrimps, as a prawn in Cantonese is ‘Ha’ which in English means ‘laughter’ and that associate with the idea of happiness and joy all year round. Being Chinese, all the dishes serve during the festive season need to have auspicious name or meaning to it. This is my version of mom’s dish. Finger licking good!!

 

Chili Fish/Ikan Berlada

I don’t normally fried fish at home because of the smell especially during winter where it is too cold for me to open up all the windows and sliding doors to give it some ventilation. Lucky the Asian supermarkets here in California do provide the service of frying fish for you. I will only do that on certain Monday as it is the day where they use new oil for frying (inside secret ha ha) Anyway, I bought two pieces of mackerel or something that look like mackerel to me and had them fried it. When I get home all I have to do is cook the sauce and add in the fried fish. I always like mackerel as it has less bone in it. I adapted this recipe from Sajian Tradisional Negeri Sembilan by Chef Ismail

Ikan Balado/Fried Fish in Tangy Chili Sauce

Balado is one of the sambal from West Sumatra (a.k.a Minang) Most Indonesian know how to make balado. The basic ingredients are shallots, chilies, tomato, lime juice, salt and sugar. I learned this version of balado from our Indonesian helper in Malaysia many years ago. I like it on blanch vegetables or just simple fried fish like this. The fish tasted so perfect with the tangy sweet balado.

Kari Udang/Prawn Curry

I bought a box of large prawns from the Filipinos supermarket the other day thinking of using them to cook Sang Har Mee for Diana. On the packet it says 9-10 prawns in it but when I open it I found there were about 18 of them in it. So I decided to use half of it to cook this dish so I can submit it to MFF.

Ingredients:
Adapted from MyRecipe.com

10-12 large prawns
½ fresh pineapple – removed skin and cut into 1” chunks
500 ml coconut milk
2 stalk lemongrass – smash
2 tbsp fish curry powder
Salt to taste

Lempiang Ikan/Fried Fish Cake

I am missing out quite a bit on the MFF for the past 2 months because of my travelling and being sick so for this month I will tried my best to participate and submit more than one dish. Let’s start off with this fish cake. This fish cake is one of the many dishes from the Northern part of Malaysia. I am not familiar at all with the food for the state Perlis and Kedah but since they so near to Thai I presume there are some Thai influence in their cooking. Like this particular dish it has Kaffir Lime leave in it and as your know Thai love using Kaffir lime in their cooking.

I actually feature a dish called Thai Fish Cake which is very similar to this in 2008 and you can check it out the recipe here . Taste wise I find them pretty similar.

Fresh Salmon and Spinach with Parsley Pastry Lattice Tart

I am a very simple when come to cooking and baking. I don’t like complicated recipes that requires a lot of work or ingredients. But once a while when my crazy mood strike I will attempt something that requires a bit more work especially in baking. Like this tart, the pastry requires an extra step of chopping the parsley and also doing the lattice for the top. Since I have some leftover cheeses in my fridge it is a great way to finish them up too as I used both Ricotta and Parmesan cheese for the filling. Well it turns out pretty good and we had this tart for our dinner accompanied by a green salad and for the other tart I gave it to my neighbor.

Sweet Potato and Taro Fritters/Banh Tom

I love these shrimp cakes. Banh Tom is a popular dish in Vietnam. It is made of thick cut sweet potato and shrimp, coated with light batter and deep-fried until golden brown. It is often served as an appetizer and commonly eaten wrapped with lettuce, pickle, herbs and dipped into nuoc mam sauce. It is very similar to our cucur udang except it has sweet potatoes in it. Since I have a small piece of taro in my fridge, I added it to the batter beside a few extra ingredients. The sweet potato is usually cut thick but I julienne it for faster cooking. The lettuce and vegetable pickle compliment so well with the crispy fritters, while the nouc mam sauce ties all the flavors together.

Prawn/Shrimp and Pineapple Curry

It was good to take a short vacation with my husband. Every weekend were occupied with something since we moved here until last weekend. Carlos took time away from work and we went to Monterey Bay and Carmel . We had such a great time and I took tons of pictures of the scenic views especially the 17th Miles Drive . We plan to go back again soon as we want to go for dolphins and whale watching. I will post up the pictures on my FB and my other blog later. In the meantime here is the sneak preview of one of the many pictures I took.

Now, let’s get back to this dish. I cooked this last week and I just love it. It goes really well with rice. My rice was swimming in the wonderful gravy and that is how I like to eat it. Yummy!!