Hakka Yam Abacus Seeds - Vegetarian

This month's Aspiring Bakers is about Heirloom and Local Dialect Recipes (家传菜/籍贯菜). My dialect group is Heng Hwa (兴化). When I was still in school many years ago, at that time, hardly anybody nobody knows what is Heng Hwa. So when people happened to ask my dialect group, I would always reply, "Oh, I'm Hokkien", to avoid people asking further and save the trouble of explaining. Now, most people know Heng Hwa, if they don't know, tell them Putien (our famous local restaurant that serves Heng Hwa cuisine), they will know. ;P

In my family, only my father knows how to speak Heng Hwa, this language is going to 失传 soon (in my family). Even the dishes also hardly appear at home. I do love the Heng Hwa noodles, so we eat occasionally at the restaurant. No surprise that this post is not going to be about any Heng Hwa dishes (such a regret). In fact, I'm more attached to Hakka dishes, influenced by my mum. I love Hakka Yong Tau Foo 客家酿豆腐 especially.

This year's Chinese New Year, since there's plenty of yam at home, I decided to try making Hakka Yam Abacus Seeds (客家算盘子) for the first time. This is a vegetarian version so that my parents can enjoy the dish too.

Hakka Yam Abacus Seeds (客家算盘子)

Abacus seeds
200g yam, peeled and cut into slices
60-80g tapioca flour (I prefer less flour)
A pinch of salt

Ingredients
1 tbsp sesame oil
2 slices ginger, shredded
50g dried shiitake mushrooms, soaked and shredded
50g black fungus, soaked and shredded
50g carrot, shredded
50g long beans, diced (or any green vege)
1 piece of firm beancurd, shredded and fried
1 red chilli, chopped (optional)

Seasoning
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp sugar
1/2 tsp sesame oil
1/2 tsp light soy sauce
1/2 tsp dark soy sauce
1 tbsp vegetarian oyster sauce

Method

Abacus seeds
1. Steam the yam for 15 minutes or until soft. Remove and mash the yam with a fork while still hot.
2. Add tapioca flour and a small pinch of salt to the yam paste, knead well to form a dough. (I just add enough flour until the dough is not sticky anymore, as I prefer more yam than flour.)
3. Roll the dough into small balls. To shape them into abacus seads, press the centre of each ball with the thumb and finger to make a slight indentation.
4. Cook the abacus seeds in a pot of boiling water until they float to the surface when done. Quickly remove the abacus seeds and transfer into a bowl of cold water. Then drain well, mix with a little cooking oil to prevent sticking. Set aside.

Dish
1. Heat sesame oil in a wok. Add the ginger and mushroom and stir fry until fragrant.
2. Add in black fungus, carrot, long beans and fried beancurd and stir well. Add some water and simmer until the vegetables are cooked.
3. Add in seasoning sauce and stir well.
4. Add in the abacus seeds, simmer for 1-2 minutes till the sauce thickens. Stir in the chopped chillies and serve.

* For non-vegetarian version, you can add minced pork and dried shrimp.

I am submitting this dish to Aspiring Bakers #29：Heirloom and Local Dialect Recipes 家传菜/籍贯菜 (March 2013) hosted by FHL of Faith Hope Love.

Aspiring Bakers #10: Chicken Pie

Thanks to Aspiring Bakers! For I have challenged myself making pies and tarts the second time in a month. Yes, I mention "first time" every now and then in my blog. And there is neverending "first times". Because the more you bake, the more things you find you don't know how to bake. Learning never ends!

This Chicken Pie was posted by Lena of Frozen Wings few days after this month's theme starts. She was fast! She calls this Easy Chicken Pie. I read through the recipe and find it indeed easy to follow, so I immediately bookmark it. Luckily, I manage to make it on the last weekend.

Is it easy? Yes, I make the pastry and filling on separate days.
Is it nice? Very nice! I almost cannot believe myself I can make savoury pastry like this!
The pastry uses rub-in method. It is a more flaky crust than the egg tarts I make earlier.

I make vegetarian version for my mum using vegetarian ham instead of chicken. To differentiate between the 2 types, I make "C" for Chicken Pie and "V" for Vegetarian Pie using the excess dough.

Lena suggested adding cheddar cheese and cream for creamier fillings or oyster sauce + hoisin sauce + char siew sauce for an oriental style. Sounds good!

Check hers for the original recipe. Here's my slightly modified version to make more tarts.

Easy Chicken Pie

Ingredients (makes eight 6.5cm tarts)

Pastry:
165g plain flour, sifted
100g cold butter
1/2 tbsp sugar
a pinch of salt
25g egg, beaten
1-2 tbsp cold water

Filling:
1 tbsp oil
100g chicken breast meat, diced
1 potato (about 130g), diced
1/2 carrot, diced
some water
1 hard-boiled egg, divide into 8 portions
(* I omitted onions, you can add if you like. You can also add mushrooms, mixed vegetables, or anything you like)

Seasoning:
1 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
some black pepper

Glazing:
1/2 egg, lightly beaten

Method

1. Pastry: Put all ingredients (except egg and water) into a mixing bowl and mix to a crumble. Add in egg, and slowly drizzle in water, just enough to form a soft dough. Keep dough in the fridge and rest for 30 minutes.

2. Filling: Steam diced potato and carrot for 10 minutes, set aside. Heat up oil in wok, fry chicken meat until nearly cooked, add in steamed potato and carrot and some water. Add in seasoning and cook for 5 minutes, or until the mixture has thickened. Adjust the filling to taste and leave to cool for later use.

3. Take some dough and press into pie or tart cases. Poke holes on the base using a fork, place filling and 1 piece of hard-boiled egg each on top and press firmly. Cut another piece of dough to cover the top. Using fork, poke a few more times on the cover of the pie and glaze with beaten egg.
(* for my own reference, 25g for base and 15g for top)

4. Bake in a preheated oven at 180 deg C for 30 minutes.

Recipe from: Frozen Wings.

I am submitting this Chicken Pie to Aspiring Bakers #10: Easy as Pie (August 2011), hosted by Not the Kitchen Sink!.

Aspiring Bakers #8: Potato Hotdog Buns 马铃薯热狗面包

I'm becoming very slow in updating my bakes. This was baked almost 1 month ago and I lost what I was ready to write about.

Anyway, to keep this short, this is another recipe from 孟老师的100道面包. It uses some mashed potato in the dough. It makes the dough very sticky and difficult to handle. Everytime when you try to push with your palms, the dough sticks to your whole palm. To avoid the mess, I simply throw the dough on the table, fold, and throw, and fold and continue until the dough become elastic and easier to manage. See the video from Carol below.

Instead of making 5 hotdog buns, I made 3 and the other 2 into Vegetarian Otah Buns for my mum. It was a great idea! Someday I must buy some otah and make otah buns for myself.

Dough: Very sticky
Same day softness: 8/10
Next day softness: 7.5/10

Potato Hotdog Buns 马铃薯热狗面包

Ingredients (makes 5)

(A)
110g bread flour
40g cake flour
15g sugar
1/4 tsp salt
70g cold water
1/2 tsp instant yeast
1 egg yolk (18-20g)
30g mashed potato (remove skin, steam and mash)
(B)
15g unsalted butter
(C)
5 hotdogs
tomato sauce

Method

1. Mix all ingredients in (A) and knead until the dough is smooth.
2. Add in butter and continue to knead the dough until it becomes smooth and elastic and able to stretch into a thin film without breaking.
3. Place the dough in a lightly greased mixing bowl. Cover with cling wrap and let proof for about 60 minutes.
4. Lightly knead the dough to punch out the gas. Divide the dough into 5 equal portions. Roll round, cover with cling wrap and rest for 10 minutes.
5. Slightly flatten the dough, roll flat into rectangle shape with width approximately the same as the length of a hotdog. Put the hotdog in the centre, fold the dough from 2 sides to wrap and pinch to seal well.
6. Use a scissors, make 5 equal cuts along the length of the dough. Make sure you cut through the hotdog but do not cut through the dough. Shape the bread, cover with cling wrap and proof for another 25 minutes.
7. Brush the top with egg mixture and drizzle some tomato sauce on top.
8. Bake in preheated oven at 175 deg C for about 19 minutes (upper rack).

Recipe adapted from: 孟老师的100道面包

I am submitting this Potato Hotdog Buns to Aspiring Bakers #8: Bread Seduction (June 2011), hosted by Jasmine of The Sweetylicious.

Vegetarian Curry Rice

22 April 2008

Both my parents are vegetarians, or to be more specific, lacto-ovo vegetarians, who can eat eggs and dairy products. As they are buddhists, they are not allowed to take 五荤 (Five Acrid And Strong Smelling Vegetables) or 五辛 (Five Spices), which generally refers to onion, garlic, chives, shallot and leek.


In order to make their meals more interesting and appetising, I will occasionally look for recipes from the internet. I recently found a very good vegetarian recipe blog from Singapore, The Modern VEGETARIAN Recipes. It has many vegetarian recipes very suitable local Singaporeans. The blog is also constantly updating, you can always expect new recipes coming up. It's worth a visit for simple home-cooked meals even if you are not a vegetarian.

Some recipes are very simple to cook like this one that we have tried, the One-Pot Curry Rice. Like what the author says "not much work is required and can be ready in just a moment." You simply put all the ingredients into the rice cooker, turn it on, and it will be ready in just a moment.

Maybe I should try and whip up a meal for them in the future. Paiseh (*embarrassed*), so old already, still not able to cook a proper meal for them. Haha... SSB must learn how to cook! :)

A new bread machine

6 April 2008

Updates for the past week...

I had 2 not very successful bakes, so not in the mood to post them up. I tried baking the Milk Loaf again using the borrowed bread machine, adding some green tea powder to it after I saw this Green Tea Milk Loaf. However, the bread didn't turned out to be good. The centre of the bread seemed to be a bit moist. No idea why it was like that. Didn't taste that good either so I didn't take any photos too.

Then I tried making the Thin-crust vegetarian pizza from Happy Homebaker. But again, it was not good. First of all, the crust wasn't thin at all. It was actually quite thick and hard to bite in. I had used the bread machine and set it to "Dough" function to knead the dough. Then I also overbaked the pizza and the cheese on top was burnt.


The good thing about this week is, I have just bought the Bluesky bread machine from Carrefour at the promotional price of $69.90.


Then, I happened to borrow a new book from the library called "Bread: The definitive guide to making bread by hand or machine". It has a basic guide of using the bread machine and the recipes show procedures of making breads both by hand or in a machine.


To try my new machine, I bake the simplest bread in that book, the Farmhouse White Loaf. It doesn't include any milk or egg so I thought it would be nice to try. If it turns out good, then I can prepare the ingredients at night and use the delay timer function to get freshly baked bread in the next morning.


No bread improver is used and this bread still taste quite soft and fluffy, except that the crust is quite thick. No idea how it will turn the next day as it was finished up in the same day (my father eats bread 3 times a day, haha!). It is best eaten toasted or spread with jams as it is just a pure plain bread.


Farmhouse White Loaf
(Recipe from Bread: The definitive guide to making bread by hand or machine)

Ingredients (500g loaf)
300g bread flour
1 tbsp butter (about 14g)
1 tsp sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp instant yeast
175ml water
2 tsp milk powder (optional, for richer and golden crust) (I forget to add)

Method
1. Lift the tin out of the bread machine, fit the kneader blade then add the measured cold water and butter. Spoon in the flour then add the sugar and salt (make sure the flour covers the liquid completely and add sugar and salt in different corners of the tin). Make a slight dip in the centre of the flour and sprinkle in the yeast.
2. Insert the tin into the bread machine. Shut the lid and set to basic white bread, select size of loaf, and medium crust (I choose light crust). Press start.
3. At the end of the programme, lift the tin out of the machine. Loosen the bread with a plastic spatula then turn out onto a wire rack and leave to cool.

For 750g/1kg loaf, or making by hand, refer to the book. Lazy to type all. :)

That's all for the long post!

Vegan Chocolate Cake

1 November 2007


I tried this Vegan chocolate cake yesterday as I'm very curious about how a cake that does not contain any butter, egg and milk would taste like. It's not a very beautiful cake. I'm not sure if I bake enough or not. The cake is quite dense and moist. The taste I would say is ok. Can't compare it with other chocolate cakes. But it's definitely a healthier cake and probably would taste much better with frosting.


Ingredients (8 inch round)
300g self raising wholemeal flour (I use self raising flour)
50g cocoa powder
3 tsp baking powder
250g caster sugar
few drops vanilla essence
9 tbsp sunflower oil
350ml water

Method
1. Preheat the oven to 170C.
2. Sift the flour, cocoa powder and baking powder into a mixing bowl. Add the caster sugar and vanilla essence, then gradually beat in the sunflower oil and water to make a smooth batter.
3. Pour the cake mixture into a lined and greased tin and smooth the surface with the back of a spoon.
4. Bake at 170C for about 45 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the centre of the cake comes out clean. Leave in the tin for about 5 minutes, then turn out and cool on a wire rack.


Bake another Marble chocolate cake today for my mother's friend.

I have also bought a bottle of bakeable green tea powder. Will try out some green tea cake soon.

My mother makes sushi

5 August 2007

My mother makes sushi on Sunday. These are vegetarian sushi cos she's a vegetarian. She uses japanese cucumber, carrots, eggs, vegetarian ham and vegetarian meat floss as ingredients. This is her 3rd or 4th time doing sushi I think. Still not quite good at rolling the sushi. But it still looks great to me. :)

Pizza

3 June 2007

Pizza fresh from oven. Me and my mother made this together. Recipe taken from a book and slightly modified. I put on the 2nd lower rack of the oven. (ok, this is for my own reference :) )

Ingredients
Dough:
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp instant yeast
110ml water
200g plain flour, sifted
1/2 tsp salt
1 tbsp olive oil / corn oil

Pizza topping:
tomato puree
mushroom
ham
yellow bell pepper
shredded cheese

Method
1. Mix sugar, yeast and some water in a bowl and leave for 10 minutes or until it begins to bubble.
2. Sift flour and salt in a bowl. Add in yeast mixture, oil, and remaining water and knead until very smooth and elastic.
3. Put dough in a greased bowl, cover with damp towel. Leave to rise until it doubles in size (about 45min). Punch down, shape it into a ball and rest for 10 minutes.
4. Roll and pull gently into 3mm thick round shape. Place onto a greased pizza pan. Use fork to prick holes onto the dough.
5. Brush tomato puree onto the dough. Evenly put the topping ingredients over the dough.
6. Bake in a pre-heated oven at 200C for about 15-20 minutes, until cooked and golden brown.