Ji Mai Lo ~ Sai Mai Lo with Purple Rice

As you know I love Sai Mai Lo. I also like to experiment by adding different ingredients to make variations on this favorite. A popular addition is purple rice, which really is black glutinous rice.

Ji Mai Lo

1 C black glutinous rice
18 C (4.5 liters) of water
3/4 to 1 C rock sugar (I use about 3/4 of a box)
1 C tapioca pearls
2-3 C water
1 can coconut milk (approx 400 mL)
1 can evaporated milk (approx 370 mL)
mango pulp (optional)

1. In a large pot, bring 4.5 L of water to a boil.

2. While waiting for water to boil, rinse rice and drain. Once water boils, add rice to pot. Turn heat to medium-low and cover. Occasionally check to make sure pot does not boil over and give a stir.

3. After 30 – 40 minutes add rock sugar. Stir occasionally.

4. Meanwhile, bring the 2-3 C of water to a boil (I do this in a kettle). Place tapioca pearls in a medium-sized heat-proof bowl. Pour the 2-3 C of boiling water over the tapioca and stir lightly. Let soak for approximately 5 minutes. This starts the cooking process for the pearls and may help in preventing clumps (I still get a lot of clumps though). Though I've never tried, this step may be skipped. If you do opt out of this step omit the 2-3 C of water.

5. Test the sugar mixture to see if it is sweet enough. You will still be adding 4 more cups of liquid to this so if it is a little more on the sweet side, it is okay. Also, if you are serving this chilled, I would recommend that you make it on the sweeter side. Add tapioca to the pot and cook on medium-low heat. Cook and stir until tapioca becomes clear. If the tapioca is clumpy, use a wooden spoon or potato masher to break them up. DO NOT cover the pot as it will boil over (I learned that the hard way and that was with the stove turned off!).

6. Remove from heat and if you want, you can put the pot in an ice bath (I'm usually in a rush to eat it and I like this dessert chilled). Stir in the coconut milk and evaporated milk to the pot. It is ready to eat. Serve hot, warm, or chilled.

Chinese Sponge Cake

I started making this sponge cake a decade ago. An elderly lady I used to work with would bring in the most spongiest (is that a word?) cake ever and it had a very light egg flavour. I like to call it Chinese Sponge cake because it’s not like other sponge cakes. We Chinese do not like our cakes to be overly sweet and this cake fits the bill. The elderly lady wrote the recipe out for me:

Chinese Sponge Cake
(makes 1 angel food pan)

8 large eggs, separated
1 C sugar
1 C flour
3/4 C water
1/4 C oil

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. If your angel food pan is non-stick, you do not need to line it with parchment paper.

1. In a medium mixing bowl, beat egg whites with 1/2 C of sugar until soft peaks form.

2. In another mixing bowl, combine egg yolks, 1/2 C sugar, flour, water and oil. Beat until smooth but do not overbeat.

3. Fold egg white mixture into egg yolk mixture.

4. Pour into angel food pan and bake for 45 minutes (or until a cake tester/toothpick comes out clean).

5. Cool on a cooling rack, inverted.

Lychee Cupcakes

After seeing it on a lot of food blogs, I ordered my copy of Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World: 75 Dairy-Free Recipes for Cupcakes that Rule.

As soon as I saw Lychee Cupakes, the Asian in me knew I had to make it. Unfortunately, I can't share the recipe with you since I followed the recipe exactly.

I was really amazed that after cooling, the cupcakes didn't deflate. They were nice and round.

Aren't they beautiful in their shiny coating of coconut glaze? They would've looked a lot prettier with a colorful flower (made from fondant or a real one).

How did they taste? They tasted delicious and you could taste a hint of lychee and coconut. Not at all overpowering. The coconut glaze was out of this world. My 4-year old son really liked them - he ate 2 cupcakes in one sitting.

Would I make them again? Probably not. These were really dense cupcakes. I like my cupcakes to be light, with a fine crumb. However, I will be making use of the coconut glaze recipe on cookies, cupcakes and cakes. All was not lost.

I can't wait to try the other recipes in the book.

Sai Mai Lo with Mango Pulp

Sai Mai Lo is an Asian tapioca sweet dessert soup. I've been making it for over 10 years (on and off) and it is still one of my favorites. It is so easy to make and it is inexpensive too. This makes a lot.

Ingredients:

18 C (4.5 litres) of water
3/4 to 1 C rock sugar (I use about 3/4 of a box)
1 C tapioca pearls
2-3 C water
1 can coconut milk (approx 400 mL)
1 can evaporated milk (approx 370 mL)
mango pulp (optional)

1. In a large pot, bring 4.5 L of water to a boil. Add rock sugar. Stir occasionally.

2. Meanwhile, bring the 2-3 C of water to a boil (I do this in a kettle). Place tapioca pearls in a medium-sized heat-proof bowl. Pour the 2-3 C of boiling water over the tapioca and stir lightly. Let soak for approximately 5 minutes. This starts the cooking process for the pearls and may help in preventing clumps (I still get a lot of clumps though). Though I've never tried, this step may be skipped. If you do opt out of this step omit the 2-3 C of water.

3. Test the sugar mixture to see if it is sweet enough for you. You will still be adding 4 more cups of liquid to this so if it is a little more on the sweet side, it is okay. Add tapioca to the pot and cook on medium-low heat. Cook and stir until tapioca becomes clear. If the tapioca is clumpy, use a wooden spoon or potato masher to break them up. DO NOT cover the pot as it will boil over (I learned that the hard way and that was with the stove turned off!).

4. Remove from heat and if you want, you can put the pot in an ice bath (I'm usually in a rush to eat it and I like this dessert chilled). Stir in the coconut milk and evaporated milk to the pot. It is ready to eat. Serve hot, warm, or chilled.

5. For some variation, try adding fruit. This time I tried it with mango pulp. Some people like taro root in their sai mai lo. For this variation, add 2 C cubed taro root to the pot of water in step 1 and bring to a boil. Once the taro is cooked, add the rock sugar and continue at step 2. Use a masher to mash the taro and in turn breaking up any tapioca clumps.

Note: All ingredients can be adjusted to your liking. For example, if you like it to have more of a coconut taste, add more coconut milk. If you like it thinner, use more water next time or if you like it thicker, use less water. These measurements are the way I like my sai mai lo but there is no right or wrong way.

This dessert is great served chilled on a hot summer day = )

Tuxedo Sesame Encrusted Wasabi Salmon

Salmon is my favorite fish. If it were up to me, I would have salmon more than once a week, unfortunately hubby thinks that once a week is even too much. Rich and meaty, I like my salmon cooked any which way or as sashimi. Well, we haven't had salmon in a while so after hubby agreed (should he have a choice when he isn't the one cooking?), I picked up a beautiful slab of lusciousness from Costco for $22.56. I usually bake my salmon in the oven with a lemon butter sauce but I didn't feel for it. I decided to make a sesame-crusted salmon that would be pan-fried. I've made this many times before, but this time I wanted to add more depth to this dish, so I incorporated soy sauce and wasabi (the dipping sauce for sashimi) and to make it more special I added black sesame seeds to the usual white.

The ingredients (not pictured are the salt and pepper):

The assembly line:










Look at the sesame. So fancy looking. I eyeballed the amounts and would say I used about equal parts of the black and white sesame. I mixed the wasabi into the soy sauce (add as much wasabi as you want to the amount of heat you and your "diners" can handle). I used a paper towel to dry off the salmon fillets and seasoned them with salt and pepper. Then I dipped them into the soy sauce, followed by the sesame mixture. In a preheated non-stick pan sprayed with oil, fry the salmon to desired doneness.










Served with stir-fried zucchinis in the wasabi-soy sauce mixture and rice, both topped with a sprinkle of tuxedo sesame seeds (do not use the sesame seeds from the assembly line since they've come into contact with raw salmon):


This dish is a winner. It tasted A.M.A.Z.I.N.G. Even hubby said it was delicious. This will be on our menus more often. It was so easy and quick. From start to finish, dinner was on the table in 30 minutes. And clean-up was a breeze: 1 knife, a cutting board, spatula, and 1 pan.

Comfort Food Revisited

I had leftovers from my lunch get-together. There was Chinese sausage, lettuce and a lot of steamed rice. What did I make? Fried rice. All that I needed to do was add 4 eggs. I used a fork and beat the eggs with some salt. I added half of it to the heated non-stick frying pan sprayed with corn oil and made a thin egg pancake. When done, I took it off the heat and cut it into slices. I diced 2 sausages and shredded a little lettuce. I heated up the rice in the pan and added some salt. Once warm, I added the sausages. Once heated through, I added the lettuce and egg pancake. When the lettuce wilted I added the remainder of the beaten eggs and stirred quickly to coat the rice. This is how I like my fried rice. Each grain of rice enveloped in a layer of yummy goodness. I'm not a big fan of putting soy sauce in my fried rice, I mean it's alright, but not my fave. So there you have it. Two dishes with the same ingredients (sans salted duck eggs which would've made the best addition to this dish but it was already gobbled up the first day).

Comfort Food, Chinese-Style

What is your comfort food? Some might say Mac 'n Cheese, cookies and milk, grilled cheese, ...Well, for my girlfriends and I it's Chinese-style sausages (lap cheong), salted duck eggs served with steamed rice. All right, so it's not that healthy and you shouldn't eat it on a regular basis. There's a lot of sodium, saturated fat and preservatives. You wouldn't want to have this meal before you go for a medical checkup. My girlfriends have been asking me to make it for the last little while and, of course, I happily obliged. This is a classic, simple meal that many Chinese have had growing up. And it is so easy. And did I mention quick? It takes only 30 minutes to cook, but for the most part you can walk away and do something else.

So here's how I did it:

1. Rinse the rice and put it in the rice cooker (a must-have in any Chinese household) and add the appropriate amount of water.

2. Rinse sausages and add to the rice.

3. Clean and rinse the salted duck eggs. The eggs are covered in black soil. I'm not sure about the purpose of this soil. I think that it is to protect the eggs in transport? Or is it a salty soil that preserves the egg? Anyways, once the soil has been scraped away, rinse the eggs clean and place them on a small plate which is then placed on top of the rice and sausages. Set the rice cooker (I set it to the Quick setting, about 20 minutes).

Now I would've stopped there and called it a meal, but to round out this dish I wanted some vegetables. As the main part of our meal was cooking, I put a pot filled halfway with water on the stove. As I waited for it to boil, I sliced up some ginger and half of a head of lettuce. I added it to the boiling water and cooked it until wilted. I also wanted to add one of my all-time favorite comfort food to this meal - a fried egg, but not just any fried egg. Eggs fried into a coin-purse style. Why do I call it that? Well, actually, my mom uses this term. The egg is kind of shaped like a coin purse. I love it. When you break it over steaming rice, you see the runny yolk seep into the crevices between the grains of steamed rice. It's almost like a sauce for the rice, especially if you add a dollop of Oyster-flavoured sauce to it. Out came the frying pan. Once the pan was hot, I sprayed it with oil with my oil sprayer pump. I cracked 3 eggs into the pan, away from each other. After the bottom side turned opaque, I folded one side of egg over to meet the other side of the egg, almost like closing a book, or in this case, closing your coin purse, and waited for it to set. When the bottom of the eggs are done to your likeness, flip them over carefully so that you don't break the yolk. Once nicely browned, you're done.

Just in time. The rice cooker gives 3 beeps to let me know that it's done. I opened the lid and the steam fills the air. Once it dissipated, we saw our delectable treasures within:

I wanted to show the girls my newest toy, an egg shaper. I quickly peeled a piping hot duck egg and put it the mold and ran it under cold water for a minute. The egg was a little small for the mold so it didn't turn out perfectly but my friends still oohed and ahhed.

Chinese-style comfort food doesn't get better than this: