CONVERT YOUR VEGETABLE DISH INTO A SOUP

If you do not like the idea of serving the leftover vegetable dish during your next meal, you can convert it into a bowl of soup. Greens that taste good as stired fried dish and as soup are:

Petola
Winter Melon
Labu Air (Long Melon)
Bayam Merah (Red Spinach)
Labu Siam
Beijing Cabbage 

You can stir fry them according to the instruction I have noted on this chart.

To convert the dish into a bowl of soup, I boil some chicken drumettes with a bowl of water.  To save time, I usually boil the broth in a 2 layer pot so that I can heat up or steam another dish in the upper steam pan layer. Recently, I bought a 28cm wide pot cum steamer with an about 10cm in height cover. Other than the regular rack with handles for steaming, it is also supplied with two extra plates for steaming additional dishes. The smaller piece can be placed inside the pot while the larger piece fits on top of it or the rack. That makes it a 3 layer pot. 

Once the drumettes are tender enough, I remove them from the broth and cook them with Kam Heong chillie paste. You can decide if you want to include the drummets in your soup. Since there are pork slices in my leftover vegetable dishes, I decided to use them to cook another dish.  

I don't have to use the whole pack to cook my drummets. For about 6-8 pieces of drummets, I use only 1 1/2 tablespoons of the Kam Heong chillie paste. After fyring the paste with garlic oil in a wok, I added: 

2 Tbsps of water
1 Tbsp of dark soya sauce
1/2 tsp of sugar
2 Tbsps of corn starch slurry to thicken the sauce before adding the drumettes. 

This is how they turned out once some of the liquid is cooked up.

To convert my leftover dish of Winter Melon into soup, I poured it into the chicken broth to boil and added salt or soya sauce and pepper to taste. It is ready once it is boiling. 

I have added glass noodles to the soup. You can check out other optional ingredients you can add to the soup by looking at this chart:

How To Chop Every Vegetable

Before we start on that, let us learn how to handle the knives first.

Now let us learn how to slice (nearly) every vegetable at the market from Amy Chaplin.

Easy Creamed Spinach (Spinach Gratin)

I found this Quick Creamed Spinach with Cream Cheese Recipe recipe on Masala Herb.  It is an interesting way to serve Spinach.  

I made some modifications to the recipe as I do not cook with olive oil.  I also do not keep stock of herbs usually used in Western dishes.

Here is another variation of it which you can cook with just onion and cream cheese.  It can be served: 

-spread over pancake and rolled up to be eaten.
-with the rolled up pancakes topped with cheese and baked in creamy sauce. 

You can watch this video for instructions.

TENDER LEAFY GREENS BROTH

You can use vegetables to make soup.  You can decide what you would like to add to the soup by looking at the optional ingredients listed.


This is how the cooking process looks like.



Here is a unique way to cook soup with Spinach, century egg and salted egg.

BLANCHING VEGETABLES TO COOK WITH OYSTER SAUCE

This is a 3-ingredient dish.  You will need:

1) Vegetables with heartier stem
2) 2-3 Tbs of oyster sauce
3) Fried garlic with oil

Watch this video to have a look at how the blanched vegetable is cut and served.

 

SPICY RED SPINACH OR BAYAM

Here is how you can fry red spinach or bayam with spices or without.