Cooking Good Time

Most of you who read my blogs know that I like to cook for my family. This past weekend, we cooked a few meals which were so satisfying...

For Saturday lunch, we roasted pre marinated boneless chicken legs on top of lots of vegetable, including bell peppers, carrot, potatoes, onions, japanese cucumbers, brinjals and tomatoes which were added with a little butter, olive oil and salt. Roasted for an hour in the oven, the result was a very satisfying meal indeed. The  chicken was tender and flavourful and the vegetables were delicious too. Wanted to cook mushroom soup and have some bread to go with it but looking at the amount of vegetables we had, we rightfully decided against it.

Before going to the oven.

Cooked and served in bite size pieces on my plate, yummy...

For dinner that night, I tried something for the first time, Tung Po Pork! I have seen my mum done this several times and it seems quite easy. Of course we have to have pork belly, the ones with skin, fat and lean meat together. I bought about RM17 worth of pork belly and used half for this dish. It was quite fatty, i even had to cut off some of the fatty part and used that to make fried crispy lard. Didn't know what to do with the fried crispy lard yet but didn't want to waste the fat! For the Tung Po yoke, I researched a bit and did some modification, I based my recipe on the one in this link but added star anise and cinnamon sticks to it. I also omitted to steam it for 30 mins at the end because I was a bit lazy and I checked the meat was already soft and nice. I cooked it in a slow cooker for more then 2 hours. Next time, I will go easier on the star anise because the smell of the spice was a bit overpowering. After I added more brown sugar, it was ok. This is a nice dish to have with muntou. But for dinner that night, we had rice, fried egg, radish and carrot salad and stir-fried siew pak chow. I also sprinkled the fried crispy lard I made early on the vege and everyone enjoyed dinner, even my little picky-eater daughter.

Lined my slow cooker with spring onion, ginger, star anise and cinnamon stick before placing the pork inside.

After 2 hours of braising in the slow cooker. The sauce is thicken with corn starch in a wok before serving.

My dinner (white rice on the bottom).

My daughter's dinner, she insisted I take a picture of her plate too!

Sunday, we ate out for lunch since we had church and the boys also had Sunday classes. But I already planned ahead that I will be making homemade siew yoke for the other half of the pork belly we bought in Saturday. Made shallow cuts in the meaty part and marinated with 5 spice powder, Chinese Red Fermented Beancurd (Nam Yue), sugar, pepper, chinese wine and salt. The skin part was rubbed with salt. I tried to poke holes into the skin, but the skin was really hard, I only managed to make some lines on it (Later I found out that this caused failure to the skin from becoming crispy and popping, they were hard instead :( ). The meat was left in the fridge uncovered to help in the drying process. When we were back home in the afternoon, I started roasting the pork in the oven at 200 degrees. After 20 minutes, I put some vinegar which was supposed to help make the skin crispy and popping. Continued roasting for another 40 minutes. The result was a bit disappointing, the skin was a failure :( but the meat and the flavour was there. Really fragrant and tasty. I highly suspect that my failure to make deeper holes in the skin caused the failure. Nevermind, I will retry again.

Apart form the hard skin, the meat tasted great! Next try will be better...

But overall, I was still happy with what we made. We had it for dinner, with radish and groundnut soup, stir-fried beans and my hubby's favourite: crispy fried tempe and ikan bilis, stir-fried with onions, dried chillies and caramel. Yummy dinner!

Our dinner on Sunday.