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Yee Sang is one of my very favourite Chinese New Year foods, together with bah kwa and pineapple tarts that I had previously blogged. In my first few years in the UK, I sorely missed yee sang. I even got boxes of prepacked dried yee sang sent over; but it was never quite the same. Not only does this craving happen in the UK; when I was in the US a bunch of us ordered yee sang at a chinese restaurant one Chinese New Year; only to be served sashimi! It only served to compound my yearning for this obscure dish – and in the end, it was just easier to make it myself. Which also means I can put in more smoked salmon. WIN!

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Yee Sang is a traditional dish only eaten by the ethnic Chinese population of Singapore & Malaysia. It does not originate from China and very few Chinese people out of Singapore & Malaysia know it. It is also only available during Chinese New Year; as it is a popular ‘prosperity’ dish served during the festive period only. Yee Sang really means raw fish (thus the sashimi adventure we had) , and usually it is served with jellyfish, raw hamachi or raw salmon. Here in the UK, I always use smoked salmon when a recipe calls for raw fish; it is pretty obscure to find sashimi-grade fish here. I can get jellyfish though; which bacon actually prefers so it’s smoked salmon for me and jellyfish for him.

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My recipe is not totally authentic; but the textures and colors are spot on; and most importantly, it TASTES the same. This dish is traditionally eaten with a tableful of friends and family; and making it myself allows me to have it in smaller portions, but have it at any time I like. It would be pretty hard to find 10 people to eat this with me every day as tradition calls for . I came up with quite a number of replacement items (missed out certain things like sweet preserved melon ect) ; you can change and tweak the recipe below as per availability of ingredients to you.

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Yee Sang

thinly shaved cucumber
thinly shaved carrot
thinly shaved daikon
thinly sliced pickled sweet onions
thinly sliced spring onions
fried wonton skins, crumbled
smoked salmon or jellyfish
cilantro
julienned gari (pink sushi ginger)
flaked pomelo (chinese grapefruit)
toasted & chopped peanuts
toasted sesame seeds

sauce:
plum sauce
white pepper
5 spice powder
sesame oil
honey

Arrange all the ingredients together on a plate/platter in a nice circular style. Pour sauce over. Toss with 10 other people. That’s it! Oh, and shout ”Lo Hei” when you are tossing.

It’s crunchy, fresh, crispy and soggy all the same time. The flavours of sesame oil,pepper, 5 spice powder and plum sauce flavour packs this dish and makes it awesome. And with a dish rhyming with prosperity, what is there not to like??

Gong Xi Fa Cai everyone!

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I have been meaning to publish this recipe for ages now. Since making it the first time around, I’ve reproduced it with varying success – mostly due to me changing the recipes slightly and tweaking thickness. ‘Bah Kwa’ is a traditional favourite within the chinese community in South East Asia and Taiwan. ‘Bah Kwa’ is literally translated from the Fujian dialect to mean dried meat. It is pronounced as ‘Yuk Kwong’ in Cantonese, but most people irregardles of dialect, understands bah kwa. Especially popular during Chinese New Year as a gift for family and friends, the price of bah kwa shoots up during that period, with a corresponding hike in demand. However, l I love it at any time during the year and I can just eat it….all…day…long. It tastes fantastic grilled and sandwiched in a sweet bun; I regularly have this for breakfast and just microwave the whole bun for 15 seconds when I get to work. It brings back a rush of childhood memories of watching chinese opera and then heading to the charcoal-fired pushcart hawker for a freshly grilled bah kwa sandwich .

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I would have been more than willing to pay through the nose for this delicacy in the years that I’ve spent abroad – alas, I had never managed to source some authentic tasting bah kwa. They were mostly too dried, under flavoured and not to mention way too overpriced for the quality and quantity. So this recipe is heaven-sent for a bah kwa addict like me, I no longer have to import it from Malaysia nor miss it !

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Some people associate this with the American-styled beef jerky, but the depth of flavour and the texture is completely and utterly different from the dry stringy meat of the American styled jerky. I have tweaked this recipe from various others that I found online, and you might want to experiment yourself on the amount of sugars and seasoning – or even using minced chicken or beef! Caution: if you are using 5-spice powder purchased from the supermarket, it might be an idea to put more in – the one I use is freshly mixed 5-spice powder which is way more fragant than the supermarket version. Too much 5-spice powder can make food taste slightly bitter, so just becareful, but do not be afraid to season away! It’s the same with all other ingredients, do not be afraid to change and tweak the levels, this has been tweaked to my taste, but I do sometimes add an extra splash of soy sauce or different sugars i.e. muscavodo.

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Recipe for Bah Kwa – Chinese sweet meat jerky

500g minced pork (slightly fatty)
2 Tbs five spice powder
150g sugar (more sugar will caramalise the meat more, but less with be tasteless)
2 Tbs shaoxing wine
1 Tbs fish sauce (this is very important)
3 Tbs light soy sauce
red food colouring – optional, it turns out brownish otherwise. I do not use this

waxed/parchment paper
cookie trays

Step 1
Marinate all the inggredients for at least 6 hours; best if left overnight.
Ensure that it is well combined before leaving it in the fridge.

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Step 2

Cut two pieces of parchment paper that is the same size as the cookie sheet
Lay one sheet on the upturned cookie sheet (turn it upside down)
Scoop about 1.5 cup of the meat mixture on the bottom parchment that is resting on the cookie sheet (approx – depending on tray size)
With the other parchment sheet, slowly press the mixture down from the top, trying to spread the meat mixture as evenly as possible over the cookie sheet.
Try to get it to cover the whole cookie sheet, using more meat mixture as needed and another cookie sheet if it is not large enough
Your meat mixture should be around 5-7mm thick, and even all around.Use a rolling pin over the top parchment paper if needed; I usually only use my fingers to flatten it out.

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Step 3

Traditionally, this meat mixture is then air-dried for a day or two in the sun. The modern way would be:

Leave it in a 80c oven for 50 -60 minutes to dry it out. Do NOT turn the oven up higher than 100 degrees as this will cook the meat.
We want to dry it out, not cook it.
After about 1 hour, the meat layer should be ‘welded’ together from the fats in the mince.
Leave to cool, and then carefully cut it into squares at this point.
You can freeze this for later, OR

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Step 4

Turn on the grill (charcoal bbq is best) and grill it for about 4-5 mins on each side
The bah-kwa should sizzle and spit and be slightly charred on both sides
Leave it to cool before tucking in – or stuff it into some sweet buns immediately for a great snack
You can keep this (wrapped in more parchment paper) in the fridge for at least a month in a tightly sealed container.
It tastes best warmed- up, you could grill it again prior to consumption or I just stick it in the microwave for 15 seconds

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UPDATED INSTRUCTIONS: Step by step pictures

1) Empty cookie tray with parchment paper
2) Marinated meat
3)Spread meat on tray with fingers
4)Flatten it out an oiled spoon

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5) Should look pretty flat like this
6) Place another piece of parchment paper on top. Flip the parchment sandwich paper over; so the top paper is now on the bottom.
7) Slowly peel the top parchment off. Use your fingers if nessacary to ensure all the meat is ‘peeled’ off.
The meat-sheet should now be flat on both sides. Stick in oven at under 100C for 50 minutes.

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9) When it comes out it should look like this, still soft but the meat has all melded together.
10) Cut into squares -the meat sheet now looks like this with the bottom part a lighter brown
11) Put the oven on broil/grill function at circa 180 on the lighter side up, and grill on both sides, around 5 mins each. Watch carefully to ensure it doesn’t burn.
12) Cool on wire rack once both sides of the meat has sufficiently caramalized. Serve up!

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I’ve even managed to bring a couple of pieces back to Malaysia over the summer, and everyone agreed that it tasted like the real thing! Amazing! I made a batch for my grandmother as well and she was amazed – I don’t think anyone I know had ever thought that bah kwa can be made at home. It is cheaper, better for you (no preservatives – or colourings if you don’t mind it brown) and as you can control the seasonings and tailor it to your tastebuds. Seriously – the best invention yet from my kitchen. And what’s more, I’ve trained bacon to make this!

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If you had never tried bah kwa before, I strongly suggest that you try this recipe out. It is amazing what sweet-salty meat tastes like – I know most people that had not tried this would be pretty skeptical on a ‘sweet’ meat – but it really IS mind blowingly amazing. I can chomp on it all day long….all day every day….

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The flowers seem to dissapear when i scroll down to the next page – anyone having the same issues?

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Yesterday I nearly could not open my eyes. It hurts to even blink. My left eye is nearly swollen shut now. Probably due to the fact that I had peeped at bacon bathing OD-ed on chocs & mandarin oranges for my CNY self-celebration. It’s like as if I cannot stop peeling them oranges – best part is any other time of the year I DO NOT LIKE TO EAT CITRUS. Only in this 15 days of Chinese New Year that I go bonkers over it. Sigh.Anyway. I believe that due to the OD I am now ‘yit hei’ (too much yang, too much heaty food ect ect) and I wish i could just pop into any coffeeshop and ask for a pack of ice cold barley water with lime.All I have now is a measly bottle of Optrex, hopefully to keep my eyes free from infection before I get to the doctor’s tomorrow.Which, due to UK’s absolutely failure of a state-supported medical care, I cannot see until 2.40pm tomorrow.You think got 24hrs clinic ar?? Even hospital also they ask you NOT to go – unless you really are dying.

Best part? I have an extremely important interview tomorrow. Which I shall now be going in a Captain Hook eyepatch.

Hello God.It’s me. If you are listening, might as well you just shoot an arrow through my heart and kill me, kill me now!

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Chinese dessert usually have strange and wonderful names. It is usually some auspicious-sounding name – like four seasons ect. So I have decided to name my self-conccoted desset as well – presenting Growing Treasures.

Ingredients:

Dried white fungus. Be VERY prudent
6 red chinese dates
2-3 pandan leaves (pandanus leaves/ screwpine leaves) tied in a knot
100g of pak kor/ peh kueh (gingko nuts)
a couple of quail’s egg
wonton skin (optional)
rock sugar – according to taste

Soak the white fungus in warm water for a couple of hours. The reason this dish is called growing treasures is because the fungus grows and expands and nearly pop! It is HUGE. A fistfull will grow into a huge potful if you are not careful, and you won’t be able to fit anything else in it.

After the fungus is semi-soft, pop it into the pot and start boiling. You can now put those in:

rock sugar and tied pandan leaves.

Let it boil away merrily for an hour, and then add the dates. In the meantime, crack open the gingko nuts. Make sure YOU REMOVE THE HEART OF THE NUT with a toothpick…if you do not do that you will be very,very sorry when you bite into the extremely bitter centre. Me, in emulating the year of the golden pig, got some pre-cracked, de-hearted gingko nuts. Cheating, my mother laughed at me.

Depending on how long you’ve soaked your white fungus, you might only need to cook it for 2 hours, or like me, you might need more than that. Gingko nuts need at least an hour in the pot, so time it carefully.

When you are satisfied that the fungus is completely cooked, add the wonton skins and the quails’ egg for a quick boil to heat through,should not take more than 5 minutes.

mmmmmmmm…the sweet taste of home cooked thong sui.

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Chinese New Year in my family starts with a buffet at some 5 starred hotel. Chinese New Year in my small family now starts with a mad dash to my local chinese supermarket) for some steamboat foodstuff. So last Friday, I rushed down to Wing Lee Hong after work to stock up on fishballs, prawns, noodles, wonton skin, bok choy,fish tofu, tofu and some quails’ eggs. I also bought a pot of hotpot bean sauce, just to see how it tasted like. Being in the rush of the hoardes of chinese people preparing for their new year as well made me feel, if only for a moment, part of a community preparing for the same celebration – just like christmas.

Saturday afternoon started with making the stock for the steam boat to go happily boiling in. It was a simple stock made out of 3 good-sized pork ribs and a couple of cracked peppercorns. It is then left merrily boiling for a good 3-4 hours to get the full flavour out of the marrow and the flesh.

For wonton filling:

1 pound minced pork
2 finely minced water chestunts
A dash or two of Lea & Perrins sauce
A dash of good-quality soy sauce (I import mine from Penang,so sue me)
some dried shitaake mushrooms, finely minced
pepper
some cornflour

In the meantime, defrost all the frozen foodstuff. Make sure that wonton skins, if frozen, are left out for a good 12 hours before you need it – it is NOT usable unfrozen.

Wontons are very easy to make, and much fun as well. Mix the inggredients for the filling well,coating all of the meat with the seasonings. With your fingers, wet two corners of the wonton skin. Scoop a spoonful of stuffing and place it right in the middle, close the corners up so it forms a triangle. Apologies for lack of pictures – it was then that my camera decided to tell me that I am running out of pictures, so I had to be selective.

Its so easy even Bacon can make it .

Oh, don’t forget to hard boil your quail’s eggs as well. I once saw some kwai lous drop the whole egg in shell and all in the steamboat’s stock – DO NOT DO THAT! Imagine all the chicken shit that you would be slurping in addition to your delicious stock.Gross.

Boil the eggs separately, and peel the shell off – that way all the bird crap on the shells are boiled and removed separate from your stock.Quail’s eggs are pretty small, I tend to just boil it for 3 mins and turn the gas off whilst it continues cooking.

ta-da!

Start dropping whatever you want to eat into the boiling stock. Trick is, anything that is floating is cooked and ready to eat, so tuck in! Most people like rice or noodles to go with it as well, but seeing that me and bacon weren’t that hungry we gave that a miss.

Hmm…what’s for dessert?

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kiam chye ark(Hok.) /ham choy ngap(Can.) /salted vegetable with duck soup(Eng.)

Everytime I refused to follow my parents back to my maternal grandmother’s apartment, she(grandma) would try to seduce me by offering to make my favourite soup of kiam chye ark. It is basically a simple concotion of duck, pig’s trotters and salted mustard leaves but it produces the most wonderfully complex flavours known to men, infusing the kitchen with the signature aroma that had seduced me for so many years. Not many non-straits chinese would know about this dish, I have never seen it sold anywhere other than in Penang. It is one of the traditional dishes to originate from the gourmet central of Malaysia and the island of my birth – other specialties include hokkien(prawn) mee,lam mee (birthday mee), lorh mee (noodle with thick eggy sauce, diff from KL’s) and of course many,many more. To be born in Penang is akin to being born an automatic glutton and I tend to think I make quite a good glutton.

My mom has tried making it but sort of failed miserably because she is healthy – no fatty meats and minimal saltiness. I would wolf down 3 bowls easy of this soup everytime I am at my grandma’s – it would sorta be like MY soup because I love it so much.I had always thought of it as a really hard dish to adjust flavours to because it is a complex mix of sweetness,sourness and saltiness.

As I lurked over a newly discovered blog, I realized its not so hard after all. Initially, I was going to follow her recipie note-for-note; but in the end I rang home and got grandma’s recipie,which has slight variations.

Inggredients:
1 duck (mine was 1.95kg)
1 pig trotter (my butcher did not have any,so mine was without)
2 nutmeg seeds
dried chinese/shitaake mushrooms (soaked and sliced)
3 packs salted mustard leaves (kiam chye/ham choy) – make sure its washed and soaked;i found a dried worm in mine.
3 good sized tomatoes
2 big onions

chop your duck up into 8 pieces; trying to remove as much of the skin and fat as you can. If you can’t seem to de-skin your duck, it’s ok, let it be, but you would need to skim the fat off your soup later

Using a huge pot, boil around 3 liters of water and throw in your duck when it starts to boil. If you are very hard working, let the duck boil for around 5 mins to remove the scum from it, throw the scummy water away, and reboil it again in fresh water. Otherwise, spend time skimming the scum off later when your soup is cooked

soak your salted vegetable for around 5-10 minutes, taking care to clean it properly
chop the vegetable into pieces of around 5cm in length, and boil it together with the duck.

Include the rest of the inggredients and let it boil away merrily for at least 2 hours.

ta-da!Ok, not much to look at, but IT DOES LOOK LIKE THAT! Honest.I did not come up with some fugly looking dish and pass it off as nice.

I am like so proud of myself. if you are new to this masak masak series or you do not know me in real, you should know that I am a relatively inexperienced novice cook – when I choose to cook I do really simple pastas, curries and stirfrys.So to produce a soup on the same level as my grandma is – an achievement even my mommy is proud of.

*sniff*sniff*

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Just because I’ve done this a number of times doesn’t mean that it gets better with time. It is always hard being away from family in times of celebration.And there are no bigger celebration than the annual Chinese New Year. As much as I hate the yearly trek of traffic jams in the name of celebration, I love all the fuss really. I love scoffing down all the food in name of celebration, the laziness of the whole celebration, the yeesang and the reunion dinner that is always held at a hotel – the last time my family cooked a reunion dinner was nearly 20 years ago.

It’s not often that we (as a family – I do it all the time hee hee) go for buffets, so that once a year occasion is usually met with whooping joy even though the food is usually bad and they sometimes have lameass competitions.I miss the day-before rush to get the freshest fruits and the best meats from the wet market and the tradition of visiting ancestral gods at the ancestral village at the stroke of midnight. That is the one day in the year I feel close to my roots and what it is to be a fourth-generation malaysian chinese of the fisherman stock.The smell of burning incense, the loud incessant karaoke blasting through the village complete with mahjong tiles clucking always makes me feel like I belong, if only for a moment. Beer cans are pushed around in truckloads like a carlsberg sponsored event. The females are forced upon bottles of mineral water.And all the while, the karaoke continues blasting like crazy frog on heat.

And the next moment it is gone. I will never be able to connect with the karaoke-blasting sunflower seed-cracking people sitting around every year at the ‘community centre’ awaiting the dawn of the new year. They call each other pighead and smelly teat (not kidding) and treat me like the urbanite I am; gawking at my mannerism and my false airs. The flailing ties that connect us as the same family ( we’re all connected by surname) will end with my father being recognized as the cheeky 3-year old who ran up and down the village in his diapers ready for a game of cards. Me and my brother do not belong here, with the scary-looking ancestral gods and ruddy faced fisherman pushing beers into our hands. We belong in the Starbucks generation, but has Starbucks ever believed that we were one of them,urbanites so completely influenced by commercialization that we do not belong to the people that is part and parcel of a huge family?Of our huge family?

The first day of chinese new year will always start with a vegetarian meal and then off to my maternal grandmother’s. Now here is when it gets even more confusing. Both maternal grandparents are adopted, which makes roots tracing a bit of a problem. Am I 100% chinese? I have no idea. Am I part of another culture three generations removed? Both my grandmothers follow the tradition of the Straits Chinese of beautiful frilly kebayas and living in sarongs all day long. My childhood food is a classic representation of the Straits Chinese food of Penang. We do not only have classic chinese foods like steamed fish and double-boiled soups, we have creamy curry chicken, tamarind-flavoured curried stingray and all sorts of kuihs ( sweetcakes)

But who am I, really?

This year’s ‘reunion dinner’ included a wide spread of hotpot/steamboat assortments and a chinese white fungus desset in my attempt to grasp at the straws of my heritage.It is as chinese as I can get without blasting karaoke, but somehow, a family of two is never the same with the frustration with dealing with a family of 100.

If you are celebrating this year of the Golden Pig with family, rememeber, no matter how painful it is (when you getting married ah?When you having children ah?) or how boring (eat eat eat gamble sleep), you choose your friends, but not your family, because they are and always will be what you are made out of.

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Language ……..Native speakers…….Countries using it as official language

Chinese………..937,132,000 ………………………… 5
Spanish………..332,000,000…………………………20
English…………322,000,000…………………………115
Bengali…………189,000,000………………………… 1
Hindi /Urdu ……182,000,000………………………….2
Arabic………….174,950,000…………………………24
Portugese……..170,000,000 ………………………..5
Russian………..170,000,000………………………. 16
Japanese ……..125,000,000………………………..1
German…………98,000,000…………………………9
French………….79,572,000………………………..35

*taken from a shite history of everything that you ever need to know.

There are so many zeros behind total of native chinese speakers I can’t even count.It is more than Spanish, English, French, German AND Japanese put together.

chinky-ness rules! *blasting happy canto techno*

Kung Hei Fatt Choy/Kong Xi Fa Cai/Keong Hee Huat Chye!

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