Chinese Baked BBQ Meat Buns

I made these for Carlos before I left for New York a few months ago. He loves these little BBQ pork buns. When he comes home from work he can just warm it up in the microwave oven and eat it with his salad. These types of buns are very popular at dim sum restaurant or Chinese Bakeries and it is filled with succulent sweet and savory BBQ pork filling. For these buns, I used some leftover BBQ/Char Siew that I made some time ago but you can always buy some BBQ pork from the Asian restaurant here in the US.

For these buns, instead of using my regular Japanese Sweet Bun Dough I used the recipe from Lena’s of Frozen Wings .

Kimchi Fried Rice

I am not familiar with Korean food except for Korean Pancakes or Hoddeok . All I know is kimchi will be on the dining table in most of the Korean meals. Personally I am not a big fan of Kimchi on its own but it is perfectly tasty when added into fried rice or stew. I made a batch of kimchi and I think it taste much better than the one that I bought from the Asian supermarket.

This batch of fried rice was made from multi-grain rice. I am slowly switching to brown rice or multi-grain rice but giving a cold turkey to the white rice and switching to 100% brown rice is rather difficult so I am doing it slowly ha ha. I still used white rice for my Nasi Lemak or Hainanese Chicken Rice . Here is how they look. There are suppose to have 7 different types of grain like brown rice, black rice, rice bran, split peas, oat, barley and millet in it.

Fried rice is one of those dishes that you can customize and make your own. Really, mostly anything goes and it’s a great way to revitalize that day old rice you have sitting in your fridge. Add some proteins or some greens to it and the meal is done within 20 minutes.

Kaya Puffs/Kaya Kok

It has been many years since I had kaya puffs. This is one snack that I will ask my sisters to bring if they come to visit me but I totally forgotten about it when my youngest sister came to visit in July. In order to get over the craving and also used up my homemade kaya I decided to make these. For non Malaysian/Singaporean readers, kaya is a jam made from coconut milk, sugar and eggs. It is eaten like regular jam or sometimes make into these puffs.

I used the recipe from Kuali but the result was not the same like the one I had back home. The pastry is flaky but on the dry side as I prefer the pastry to be on the tender side but nonetheless it is good enough to get over my craving. I have to try out another recipe soon.

Fried Sweet Potato Balls

This is a well-know snack in Malaysia and mostly sold by the street vendors. These deep-fried sweet potato balls are called ‘fan shu tan’ in Cantonese and it is slightly smaller than the size of a ping pong ball. They are cruncy and golden brown on the outside,soft and sweet on the inside. I remember eating this ages ago at Cameron Highlands. Cameron Highlands is a highland region located around 200km from Kuala Lumpur at the state of Pahang. It is well known for its agriculture and also cool weather which is very popular among tourist. Due to its weather, tea and strawberries, which are rarities in the places under the Equator, are substantially planted here. There is this one street vendor that sells these sweet potato balls at the market and we have to get it each time we visited this place.

I Google for the recipe and there are a few version of it. I finally settle with the one by Angie of Seasaltwithfood . This is a full recipe but I did only half of the recipe which yield about 24 balls