Cooking with Bitter Gourd

Children, your dad loves eating peppers and bitter gourd. Here is a recipe that we should try making for him.

Since we are small eaters, we should not have any problem cooking the second dish too with just one large bitter gourd.  As I have tried it with cucumbers, we can also use the steamed dish to make soup for dinner if there are any leftovers.

Tom Yam Soup

I bought my MasFood Instant Tom Yam Paste from TESCO. I like it that they share how to use the paste on their site. It helps me to decide if I would like to give it a try.  

When I received the paste, I see that the same instruction as follows is already printed on the packaging:  

Preparation: 

800ml (4 bowl) water, 1 packet MasFood Instant Tom Yam Paste, 2 nos. tomatoes, 1 clove garlic (crushed), 1 nos. shallot (crushed), 1 sprig coriander, 6 nos red chillies (crushed), 3 nos prawns, 3 nos. cuttlefish and 1 nos. chicken breast (cooked).

Cooking Method:

1.) Tear the cooked chicken breast into shreds. Set aside.

2.) Boil 4 bowls of water in a pan. Add in tomato, garlic and shallot. Then, cook about 10 minutes.

3.) Add in MasFood Instant Tom Yam Paste, cooked chicken breast, coriander leaves, red chilli, prawn and cuttlefish. Then, cook about 3 minute. Serve.

It should interest you to know that you don't have to use the ingredients suggested if you have some soup leftover from your last meal. The soup I like to add the Tom Yam paste to is the ABC soup, which I usually boil with pork. Check out the ingredients required to boil the soup and you will understand why it makes such a great soup stock for cooking other dishes.

I seived the ABC soup into a pot. I did not include the ingredients from the ABC soup to make my Tom Yam soup. Once the soup is boiling, I added the paste, spoonful by spoonful, till I get the taste I like. Instead of fresh seafood, I used Figo 5 in 1 Steamboat Choice.  I did not use the whole pack. I added just enough to feed my family without overcrowding the soup.

I drizzled the soup with garlic oil. You can add fried shallot or its oil if you have it at home. I served it garnished with a sprig of coriander.  

The next time I make the Tom Yam soup, I will add chicken to it.

A Reason to Boil Extra Pork Ribs in Soups

Whenever I make ABC or Old Winter Melon soup with pork ribs, I will take some out to cook another dish. 

That will reduce your time to cook 1-2-3-4-5 Ribs dish.  

When your pork ribs are already cooked tender in the soup, you don't have to simmer them for 25 minutes. Just pan fry the pork ribs from the soup to brown them both sides. Then cook them in the sauces till the liquid thickens to coat the meat. 

You can also use the following sauces to coat the pork ribs:

1) Soya Sauce
2) Garlic Oil
3) Honey or Brown Sugar
4) Water 
5) Dark Soya Sauce (optional)

Here is a video with another variation for sauces. I like it that the cook also shared substitute sauces you can use:

Cooking with Cucumbers

I managed to grow cucumbers in our garden.

Since our harvest is good, I am able to give some to my friends and relatives. Other than eating them raw, I have to figure out how to use them in my dishes.

I discovered that the Thai are making soup out of cucumbers. I found Thai Stuffed Cucumber Soup (Gaeng Jued Taeng Kwa Yad Sai) recipe from Siam Sizzles. I modified the marinating sauces for my minced pork.

Since I prepared too much minced pork for my cucumber soup, I decided to use the leftover to cook Braised Minced Pork with Potato and Carrot.

I love the way it turned out, cooked with the finely chopped carrot mixed in the minced pork.

Onion Paratha

I am always on a look out for easy to cook method for an otherwise time consuming dish. 

No kneading is required for this Onion Paratha recipe as it is made with liquid dough. 

These are the ingredients and method to cook it:

The second option is to buy ready made frozen Paratha with Onion from Kawan.  I like it that they have shared other ways you can make use of their Paratha in this video.

Leftover Makeover for Red, Green and Yellow Peppers Dish

 Whenever I buy red, green and yellow peppers, I will cook two different dishes with them. 

One will be my version of Sweet and Sour Pork. The other stir fry bell pepper dish I like to cook have some of the ingredients used in Sweet and Sour Pork, except cucumber. While the ingredients are cut into cubes for the Sweet and Sour Pork, they are sliced lenghwise in the second dish. Pork for Sweet and Sour Pork are deep fried with batter but the meat used in the second dish may be marinated chicken or pork which have been cut into strips.

There are a variety of sauces I used to cook it. These are the combination I have tried:

1) oyster sauce or
2) vegetarian oyster sauce or
3) BBQ sauce with honey or
4) Soya sauce with Worcestershire sauce

Sugar and salt are also added to taste.

If I want to use chicken instead of pork to cook this dish, I will marinate the pieces with garlic oil, soya sauce and sugar. I place the marinated chicken in a round metal container to air fry for 4 minutes at 180°F. I turn the chicken pieces over and air fry another 4 minutes or till the meat is well cooked. The sauce from the chicken is good enough to cook the peppers and other ingredients in.

If there are some leftover from this bell pepper dish, I add celery to the dish to serve it at the next meal. 

Recently, I came accross a recipe for Korean Street Toast. 

It inspired me to made my own version. I replaced the cabbage with thinly sliced bell peppers and the ham with minced or thin sliced pork.  I cook it with BBQ and pepper sauce.  It can be eaten with rice as is or added to scrambled eggs to pan fry for making toast like it is done in the Korean Street Toast recipe. 

I also serve any leftovers from my bell pepper dishes on toasted bread and top it with cheese.  This is how it turned out after I airfry it.

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: