NOODLE SOUP FOR THE SOUL

Noodles are the second most-consumed food in the world, and a staple in Chinese cuisine. Whether you slurp them, gulp them down, or twirl them with your chopsticks, everyone seems to love noodles.

The noodle recipes in Chinese cuisine can conveniently be divided into soup noodles, pot noodles, hot-gravy noodles, cold-gravy noodles, steamed noodles and stir-fried noodles.

In my family, my second daughter is the real noodle lover. She loves any kind of noodles but her favorite is the soup noodles. For her, there is no food quite so comforting than a bowl of hot noodle soup.

In Indonesia, the way most Chinese restaurants sell Chinese Noodles Soup is either in the form of dry seasoned noodles plus a separate hot soup or a noodle soup dish where they pour the hot soup into the noodle and then top with the meat and vegetables. I prefer the dry seasoned noodle with a separate soup.

One day I was inspired to try cooking Chinese noodles soup when I watched Chef in Black in Asian Food Channel. I did not follow all the details of the ingredients and method he used, but I have captured enough to figure it out myself how to make it. After finished with my first trial of cooking the Chinese noodle soup, I asked my daughter the noodle lover, to try it out and ….she liked it!

Here is my version of Chinese Noodle Soup.

Main basic ingredient:

• 1 pack of dry Chinese egg-noodles

• 
  
  A bunch of Choy Sum or Bok Choy

Meat Ingredients:

• 100 gram ground chicken meat mixed with 100 gram ground beef
• 50 gram of Shiitake mushroom and 100 gram of buttorn mushroom, cut into small pieces
• 4 cloves of crush garlic, chopped
• 1 cm ginger, grated
• 2-3 of green onion, chopped
• 4 tablespoons vegetable oil

Seasoning Mix for the meat

• 1 tablespoon of sweet noodle sauce
• 1 teaspoon of Chinese rice wine
• 1 teaspoon of soy sauce
• A little bit of pepper

Cooking the Meat

• Heat oil in a wok and stir fry the garlic and ginger until fragrant
• Add the mixed ground meat and cook until crumbled
• Add the mushroom
• Add the seasoning mix and stir fry briskly
• Add the green onion

Cooking the vegetables

• On a high heat bring a large saucepan of salted water to a boil.
• Immerse the Choy Sum or Bok Choy in the water for 1 around minutes
• Drain the water and cut the vegie in 5 cm length

Cooking the noodles

• On a high heat bring a large saucepan of salted water to a boil.
• Immerse the noodle in the boiling water.
• Keep the water at a vigorous boil; the constant motion will prevent the noodles from sticking to the bottom of the pan and each other.
• Cook the noodle just until al dente and drain the water
• Put the noodle in a large bowl and season with combined mixture of
• 1 tablespoon of sesame oil and 1 tablespoon of vegetable oil.

Cooking the Soup

• Heat chicken broth in a high heat
• Add meat balls (if desired). Season with salt & pepper

In an individual bowl, put a bundle of noodles then add the meat and vegetables

Serve it together with the hot meatball soup

Stay Young and Juicy

An article in Jakarta Post caught my attention. Here is more or less what it said: “wake up with a cup of strong coffee to get a kick, instant noodle for breakfast, a pack of artificially seasoned chips for later of the day, thick lamb curry for lunch, a pack of cigarette all day long, drink till you drop on weekends and so it goes day after day, week after week”.

Sounds familiar?

Are you aware how much toxins have we accumulated in our body? how can we get rid of it all? Some say ‘try detox’ – from doing a three-day diet of just fruit and veggies to drinking detoxifying herbal milk or lemon juice every morning for a certain period.

Nutrition experts say that fresh fruit and vegetables have a significant role in replacing damaged body cells and cleansing our body of toxins from the residues of food we eat.

Health experts repeat the old rule: eating at least five portions of fruit and vegetables every day. But a single glass of juice could actually do much more to promote your overall wellbeing.

Really?

My ‘love affair’ with fresh juice began about a year ago when I was having breakfast at Harvey Nichols Social House. I ordered one of the fresh juices listed on the drink menu. I forgot the name of the juice written on the list but I remember that it was a mix of fresh papaya, orange, carrot and lime. I have never tried such a mix before. When the drink was served and I tasted it….. wow it tastes so refleshing.

The next day I tried to make the mix myself. Here is my version of the mix.

Ingredients:

• 100 gram of ripe papaya, peeled and cut into small cubes
• 100 gram of carrot, peeled and cut into small cubes
• 10 oranges (I use Jeruk Pontianak – the type of juicy orange ), squeeze to get the juice of around 100 ml
• 100 ml of iced water
• 1 lime, slices and squeeze to get the juice

Method

• Put the papaya cubes, carrot cubes, the orange juice and the ice water in the blender
• Blend the mixture for around 3 minutes or until mix well.
• Pour the mix into a glass and sqeeze the lime juice into the mix.

Serve chilled.

Drink this juice each day and you'll  feel Young and Juicy everyday

Celebrate Chinese New Year with LOVE

Chinese New Year is fast approaching. While January 1st is easy to remember, the specific date of Chinese New Year changes each year, as it falls on the first day of the lunar calendar. Often called the Lunar New Year, it celebrates the beginning of a new year with big family gatherings, gift giving, foods and display of festive decorations. It starts with the new moon on the first day and ends on the full moon 15 days later. The 15th day is called the Lantern Festival, which is celebrated at night with children carrying lanterns in a parade.

This year, the first day of the Chinese New Year which marks the Year of the Tiger, coincidently falls on February 14, the same date with Valentine’s Day.

I noticed that many hotels and restaurants try to cover both celebrations on their Menu . I saw one hotel offered Chinese New Year Brunch for Family and Romantic Dinner for Two.

As some people say that ’Cooking is an expression of Love’ so let’s celebrate Chinese New Year with Love and Love with Chinese cooking.

Cooking Chinese food can involve the entire family. It’s fun, healthy and taste great. I have found that Chinese cooking is excellent way to spend time with my family while maintaining a healthy diet.

Stir-frying is the most popular and common cooking technique used in Chinese cuisine. The most important things to know about stir-frying is preparation. Stir-frying is 90% Preparation and 10% cooking. Once you are ready stir-frying is quick, so you need to be ready.

Let’s try the famous Kung Pao Chicken.

I like the healthier version where the chicken is stir-fried instead of deep-fried, reducing the fat content.

Ingredients:

• 2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts, 100-150 gram each

Marinade:

• 2 teaspoons soy sauce
• 2 teaspoons Chinese rice wine or dry sherry
• 1 teaspoon sesame oil
• 1 1/2 teaspoons cornstarch

Sauce:

• 2 tablespoons dark soy sauce
• 1 tablespoon Chinese rice wine or dry sherry
• 1 teaspoon sugar

Others:

• 8 small dried red chili peppers
• 2 cloves garlic
• 2 spring onions (scallions)
• 4 tablespoons oil for stir-frying, or as needed
• 1 teaspoon Szechuan peppercorn (optional)
• 1/2 cup cashew-nuts
• a few drops sesame oil (optional)

Preparation:

Cut the chicken into 1-2 cm cubes. Combine with the marinade ingredients, adding the cornstarch last. Marinate the chicken for 25 minutes.

While the chicken is marinating, prepare the sauce and vegetables. In a small bowl, combine the dark soy sauce, rice wine, and sugar. Set aside.

Cut the chilies in half so that they are approximately the same size as the chicken cubes. Remove the seeds. Peel and finely chop the garlic. Cut the green onion on the diagonal into thirds.

Heat the wok over medium-high to high heat. Add 2 tablespoons oil. When the oil is hot, add the chicken. Stir-fry until it turns white and is 80 percent cooked. Remove from the wok.

Add 2 tablespoons oil. When the oil is hot, add the garlic and stir-fry until aromatic (about 30 seconds). Add the chili peppers and the Szechuan peppercorn if using. Stir-fry briefly until they turn dark red.

Add the sauce to the wok. Bring to a boil. Add the chicken back into the pan. Stir in the cashew-nuts and the spring onion. Remove from the heat and stir in the sesame oil.

Serve hot

With Love.....

Sticky and Sweet

I can’t agree more with Devi Asmarani (one of my favorite writers) who wrote in one of her articles in Weekender (one of my favorite magazines) that ‘Food, like music, has a way of staying firmly in our memory, linking tastebuds and emotions’.

When I was still in elemetary school, there was a sticky and sweet snack I loved as a child. It is made of sweet potato mixed with sago flour (or tapioca) boiled in water and palm sugar and then served with coconut milk called ‘biji salak’ which literally means ‘the seed of snakeskin fruit’.

I have no idea why this snack is named ‘biji salak’ because it has nothing to do with the seed of snakeskin fruit whatsoever. Probably because the size and shape of the sweet potato ball looks like the seed of snakeskin fruit.

The sweet memory of my childhood favorite snack still sticks in my mind up to now. I remember when my Mom was making ’biji salak’, I used to help shaped the sweet potato into a small ball. It was really fun, because I got my palms all sticky after that. And imagining what it would be like after it is done really make it even more fun and exciting.

This sticky and sweet memory of my chidlhood snack has driven me to browse to internet looking for recipe of ’biji salak’. After going through some recipes, I found the following recipe by Yasa Boga which I think closest to what my Mom used to make.

Ingredients

750 g sweet potatoes, steamed, peeled, and divided into 4 parts
125 g tapioca/sago flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 liter water
200 g brown sugar/palm sugar
3 pandan leaves tied into a knot
1 tablespoon tapioca/sago flour diluted with a little water

For the coconut milk sauce

350 ml thick coconut milk
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 pandan leaf

Method:

Take 3/4 part of sweet potatoes, mix with tapioca flour and salt, knead until even and form into small balls.
Boil water, and palm sugar and pandan leaves
Put in the small balls and cook until they float.
Add the remaining 1/4 part mashed sweet potatoes and tapioca flour and stir
Remove from heat and put into a bowl

To make the coconut milk sauce:

Put the raw coconut milk in a saucepan
Add the pandan leaf
Cook on low heat and stir lightly until boiled

Then pour in the coconut milk into the ‘Sticky and Sweet Snakefruit Seed’.

Go Tell It On The Mountain

Last December, the company conducted the year-end meeting at Mount Bromo.  As ‘queen of convenience’ who grew up and spend most of my life in a big city, the idea of going to the mountain was not appealing to me. If it were up to me, I would love to skip the trip but unfortunately as an employee, I had no choice but joined the trip.

Mount Bromo is the most popular of all East Java’s travel destinations. this active 2,392-metre- (7,85 foot-) high volcano lies 112 kilometres (70 miles), about three hours, southeast of Surabaya. Enclosed by perpendicular walls 350 metres (1,150 feet) high, Bromo’s awesome 2,200-metre- (7,220-foot-) high ’sand sea’ caldera has three mountains within it, craters within one huge crater, the Bromo Semeru Massif. There are also three small crater lakes inside the larger crater

On the appointed date, we left Jakarta for mount Bromo as a group of 140 people. We stayed at one of Bromo resort hotels which is located around 1700 meters above sea level. The temperature was quite cold. The next day, we had to wake up at 3 am to get ready to climb the mountain to be able to watch the sun which rises at around 5 am. I can't deny that the view of the sunrise was so beautiful......

During I was in Bromo, one thing that captured my attention was one of the famous dishes of East Java named Rawon (Dark Beef Soup). Rawon is a special dark beef soup cooked with keluak (fruits of kepayang). The special dark color of rawon comes from keluak as the main spice. Keluak is a dark brown nut from Indonesia about the size and shape of a flattened golf ball. Before cooking, the content of the nuts is white in color. Good nuts after cooking, should be richly dark and oily, with the contents variously described as “opium” or “soft tar”. The nuts come from the Pangium edule or “Kepayang” tree, which grows wild in Indonesia and parts of Malaysia.

My mom came from one of the cities in East Java so since I was a kid I have been exposed to this authentic dark beef soup. My mom cooked very delicious Rawon and she always served it warm to eat with steam rice, boiled salted egg, beansprout sambal and shrimp-crackers. It’s so yummy ……..

When I arrived back home, I tried to find my mom’s old recipe of Rawon and here is her version of Dark Beef Soup:

Ingredients:

500 g beef
1 liter water
6 shallots
Pinch of salt
1 roasted tamarind
2 teaspoons coriander seeds
2 keluaks (fruits of kepayang)
1 piece (around1 cm) of turmeric
1 piece (around1 cm) of galangal
1 stalk of lemongrass

Directions:
Clean the beef and boil it in the water in a saucepan until almost tender
Remove the beef from the saucepan and cut into small cubes.
Grind all spices except lemongrass and galan¬gal then sauté at medium temperature.
Put the spice into the boiling beef stock in the saucepan
Add lemongrass and galangal
Put back the beef cubes into the saucepan
Cook through until the beef is really tender

To make the Bean Sprouts Sambal

Ingredients: 3 red chillies, 5 g of roasted shrimp-paste, pinch of salt and a cup of short beansprout

Grind the red chillies, roasted shrimp-paste, and salt, then add the bean sprouts. Mix well

Complement
Rice
Sambal taoge (bean sprouts sambal)
Boiled salted eggs
Fried shrimp crackers

Serve Rawon warm with steam rice, salted egg, bean sprouts sambal, fried shrimp crackers and Go Tell It On the Mountain........

Who Moved My Cheese?

In December 2009, I had been busy with Project Moving. Just 2 days before Christmas on December 23rd, we moved from the old house in the Northeast to the new house in the Southeast of Jakarta. The reason we moved house simply because we want to avoid the flood which usually comes around end of January each year.

So far we have experienced 2 big floods (water entered the house up to 1 meter high) and 1 small flood (water entered the house up to 20 cm). After 3 flood experiences, it’s time for us to move. And so we moved to a new house which looks like Barbie house.

During the moving preparation, I organized our stuffs in different colors of plastic containers and I ended up having 65 containers which 40 of them contained books (in total we have around 800 books). Some of the books are my precious cooking books.

On the first day we were in the new house, we bought RTE (ready-to-eat) food for our lunch and dinner. We were all exhausted from the moving activities and slept well that night. The next morning, I did not feel like eating RTE food anymore so I decided to cook.

Alas, my kitchen has not been ready yet and most of cooking stuffs were still in the plastic containers. Though we put label on each of container but dealing with stacks of 65 containers were not that easy. I checked my refrigerator, found broccoli, onion, milk and some seasoning. I was thinking of making broccoli & cheese. I remember that I still have some Old Amsterdam Cheese which I bought in Amsterdam last October when I was there for a business meeting. I opened the compartment for keeping cheese & butter in the fridge but I only found the butter while the cheese was no where to find.

Hey who moved my cheese?

I checked with each member of my family in case they happened to keep the cheese somewhere else but nobody knew the cheese where-about. I kept on searching for the cheese coz how can I make broccoli and cheese without the cheese?

Here’s my recipe of Broccoli and Cheese

Main ingredient:
400 g broccoli, cut into small pieces, boil in water for 5 minutes

Cheese sauce
2 table-spoons butter
1 onion, chopped
2 table-spoons flour
250 ml milk
A pinch of ground nutmeg, salt & pepper
200 g cheddar cheese, grated and 2 tablespoons of parmesan cheese

To make the cheese sauce:
Melt the butter in a sauce-pan on medium heat
Stir fry the onion in the melted butter until wilted
Put the flour into the pan, stir well
Pour in the milk slowly while keep on stirring
Put in the salt, pepper and ground nutmeg
Put in the grated cheese, mix well

Arrange the broccoli in a glass dish which has been brush with butter or margarine
Pour in the cheese sauce on the broccoli, spread parmesan cheese on top of the sauce
Bake in the oven at 180 degree Celsius until brown

The Unfortunate Fortune Cookie

My first ’encounter’ with Fortune Cookie was quite a long time ago when I and my family went eating at one of famous Chinese restaurants in Jakarta. After we payed the bill, the waiter came to our table and gave each of us a fortune cookie as a compliment.

A fortune cookie is a crisp Asian American cookie usually made from flour, sugar, vanilla, and oil with a “fortune” wrapped inside. A “fortune” is a piece of paper with words of faux wisdom or a vague prophecy .

The non-Chinese origin of the fortune cookie is humorously illustrated in Amy Tan’s 1989 novel The Joy Luck Club, in which a pair of Chinese immigrant women find jobs at a fortune cookie factory in America. They are amused by the unfamiliar concept of a fortune cookie but, after several hilarious attempts at translating the fortunes into Chinese, come to the conclusion that the cookies contain not wisdom, but “bad instruction.”.

Fortune cookies have become an iconic symbol in American culture, inspiring many products. There is fortune cookie-shaped jewelry, a fortune cookie-shaped Magic 8 Ball, silver-plated fortune cookies..

Although many people do not take the message in a fortune cookie as a serious oracular device, many of them consider it part of the game that the entire cookie must be consumed in order for the fortune to come true.

How to make Fortune Cookies

How fortunes cookies are made is quite complex. It has to go through a painful process first, so unfortunate for the fortune cookies..
Note: This following recipe is adapted from Marcie.

Ingredients:
2 large egg whites
1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon pure almond extract
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
8 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1.5 teaspoons cornstarch
1/4 teaspoon salt
8 tablespoons granulated sugar
3 teaspoons water

Preparation:
Write fortunes on pieces of paper that are 3 1/2 inches long and 1/2 inch wide. Preheat oven to 300 degrees Fahrenheit (around 150 degrees Celcius). Grease 2 9-X-13 inch baking sheets.
In a medium bowl, lightly beat the egg white, vanilla extract, almond extract and vegetable oil until frothy, but not stiff.
Sift the flour, cornstarch, salt and sugar into a separate bowl. Stir the water into the flour mixture.
Add the flour into the egg white mixture and stir until you have a smooth batter. The batter should not be runny, but should drop easily off a wooden spoon..

Note: if you want to dye the fortune cookies, add the food coloring at this point, stirring it into the batter. For example, I used 1/2 teaspoon green food coloring to make green fortune cookies.

Place level tablespoons of batter onto the cookie sheet, spacing them at least 3 inches apart. Gently tilt the baking sheet back and forth and from side to side so that each tablespoon of batter forms into a circle 4 inches in diameter.

Bake until the outer 1/2-inch of each cookie turns golden brown and they are easy to remove from the baking sheet with a spatula (14 – 15 minutes).

Working quickly, remove the cookie with a spatula and flip it over in your hand. Place a fortune paper in the middle of a cookie. To form the fortune cookie shape, fold the cookie in half, then gently pull the edges downward over the rim of a glass, wooden spoon or the edge of a muffin tin. Place the finished cookie in the cup of the muffin tin so that it keeps its shape. Continue with the rest of the cookies..

It’s so unfortunate for the fortune cookie because we have to break it to get the fortune paper