Chicken Herbal Soup 药材鸡汤

Let’s have a bowl of nourishing tonic soup

Chinese herbal soup is good for replenishing certain nutrients needed by our bodies; stimulating appetite and especially good for women either during pregnancy or post delivery. For post delivery, one of the key herbs to be added in is Dang Gui (当归), a common ingredient used during confinement period to speed up after birth recovery.

However, this nourishing tonic soup is not restricted to women only but it is also good as a supplement source of nutrients and energy in addition to boosting the immune system.  The following simple chicken herbal soup Auntie Lan used to prepare for us does not include Dang Gui. The herbs she used were general purposed Chinese chicken herbal soup combination for daily consumption. Apologies again for not giving the exact measurement of the ingredients used, however the portion I estimated she used for following was about: 1:0.5:0.5:0.25:0.25:0.125:0.125

Nowadays you can easily find this pre-packaged dry herbal soup ingredients at any Asian Grocery shop. All you need to do is just to add in water to cook and salt to taste. For working moms, even this may still be too much a hassle. Here’s a way to further make life easier. Read on.

The secret is to have a 24 hour 24 hour timer timer switch device  and a slow cooker (Crock-Pot).  Instead of cooking over stove and watching over the heat, all you need to do is to plug the slow cooker to the timer, add in boiling water to slow cooker, dump in the packaged herbals and chicken (you can wash chicken a night before) and set the timer on to cook it at high heat for 1.5 hours before you leave your house in the morning. With the timer, you can also set to warm the soup again by setting the timer to automatically switch on half an hour before you come back from work.

I bet when you come back from work, as soon as you open the door you will be overwhelmed by the nice strong tonic aroma coming from your kitchen! What you need to do next is to have another 30 minutes for you to cook the rice and you and your family will get to enjoy a healthy chicken herbal soup dinner. Now who said working moms do not have time to prepare healthy and nutritious meals for her family?  J

Chicken Herbal Soup 药材鸡汤

I extracted explanation of the herbs and medical effects from this site Complementary and Alternative Healing University:

Item	Herbs Name/药材名	Medical Functions/功效
1	red dates (Chinese dates or red jujube) 红枣	Treats weakness, shortness of breath, lassitude, lack of appetite, loose stools due to spleen deficient. 强筋壮骨，补血行气，滋颐润颜。
2	qi zi (Wolfberries or goji berries) 枸杞子	Nourishes and tonifies the liver and kidney, helps eyesight, improves blurred vision, alleviates sore back, strengthens the leg and stomach, improves circulation, boosts immune function, promotes longevity. 养肝，补肾，滋阴，明目，益气。
3	dang shen (Codonopsis Root) 党参	Corrects blood deficiency, invigorates Qi (lack of appetite, fatigue, thirst, diarrhea, vomiting, polapse of uterus, stomach, rectum due to spleen deficient), improves digestive system. 补中益气，养血补肺。
4	yu zhu (Rhizoma Polygonati Odorati) 玉竹	Nourishes Yin, promotes the production of body fluids and relieves dryness syndrome. 养阴，润燥，除烦，止渴。治热病阴伤，咳嗽烦渴，虚劳发热，消谷易饥，小便频数。
5	huai shan (Dioscoreae Oppositae) 淮山	Invigorates Qi, nourishes Yin, controls spermatorrhea and reduces urination. 补脾养胃，生津益肺，补肾涩精。
6	bǎi hé (Lily Bulb)百合	sweet and cooling in properties. The herb is also associated to the lung and heart meridians and help to relieve coughs, dry throats, clear heat, and moisten the lung. Dried lily bulb is also used as an herb to calm the spirit, promote restful sleep, and lessen irritability. 养阴润肺；清心安神。主阴虚久嗽；痰中带血；热病后期；余热未清，或情志不遂所致的虚烦惊悸、失眠多梦、精神恍惚；痈肿；湿疮
7	xing ren(Semen pruni armeniacae) 杏仁	for arresting coughing and asthma, expelling phlegm, help bowel movements. 降氣止咳平喘，潤腸通便。用於咳嗽氣喘，胸滿痰多，血虛津枯，腸燥便秘。

Madeira cake 马德拉蛋糕

Classic English Cake

When I found out our newly recruited HR manager was going to celebrate her birthday on Sunday, 29th April, I decided to make her a birthday cake to share it in our Friday morning tea meeting in conjunction with the welcoming of her joining the company.

However, given the short notice and a week day, I didn’t have much time to prepare in the evening after work.  Eventually I chose to make a simple and easy cake. I was pleased Ray offered a helping hand that night and we had a fun bonding time in making the cake together. 

My handsome kitchen helper

Flipping through recipes, I came across this lemony and buttery Madeira cake. Following the Victoria Sandwich I made earlier, this was another classic and simple to make English sponge cake. This cake was traditionally consumed with a glass of Madeira wine, where the name of the cake originated from. Nowadays it is good to go with a cup of tea too.

This cake took longer baking time than usual, about an hour at lower temperature of 160 degree Celsius. Initially, when I saw the cake with cracked surface, I thought it was yet another failed project.
The next morning, I did some google search and was relieved to learn that it was normal for Madeira cake to have peaks and crack on the surface.  I found the cake texture to be very light and a bit dry. It is no wonder the English like it to go with Wine.

I was wondering if I should increase the portion of butter or reduce the baking time for my next trial.

Madeira Cake

I was glad the birthday girl Sandee liked the cake; we had a small celebration at her office before sharing with the rest of the managers in our morning tea meeting.

Happy birthday Sandee

Bunga Kantan (Torch Ginger Flower Bud) 姜花

From garden to table

Etlingera Elatior, the scientific name for TorchGinger Flower, or Bunga Kantan in Malay and 姜花 in Chinese, is a type of tropical flower commonly found in South East Asia. Its pink flower bud is particularly important to be used as a spice ingredient in Malay and Nyonya cuisine, with its distinctive, aromatic fragrance to zest up curry and seafood stews i.e. Tomyam and Laksa.

Over here, we also call it Laksa flower (Bunga Laksa in Malay), since it is used in the famous Penang Nyonya Assam Laksa. In addition to Laksa, it is also widely used in Malay, Nyonya and Thai fruit salad i.e. Rojak or Kerabu.

We had this flower planted opposite our house by my late mother-in-law a year before she passed away in 2008. It took more than a year to flower. The leave stalks and flower stalks grow out from an underground stem and the flower plant can grow over 4 meters in height. It requires larger space and is not suitable to be planted in a pot. I didn’t place much attention on it and just let it grew wildly. When we were about to leave for NZ in mid 2009, we got to see it just started to flower.

Taken in year 2009

First flowr

By the time we came back from NZ, we were surprised to see it still grew healthily and flowered so well.

About 4 years old trees - April 2011

Flowers grew wildly

Harvest to use

When I was in Auckland, instead of fresh buds we were lucky enough to be able to find frozen ginger flower buds from certain Asian grocery shops, as I knew many people could hardly find it in European countries and the US.

To use Bunga Kantan, we only take its bud and chuck the stalk.

TorchGinger Flower, or Bunga Kantan

Few ways in using the buds in cooking:
First slice bud into half or quarter and place into curry/gulai/tomyam
 to cook to flavour the soup.

Flower bud to add in curry, gulai or tomyam soup

or you can also opt to finely shred the whole bud and use for garnishing or adding into Kerabu or fruit salad

Victoria Sandwich 维多利亚三明治蛋糕

Pandan Victoria Sandwich

Victoria Sandwich is one of the classic English tea time treats. From the name you can easily guess it must be named after Queen Victoria, who favoured a slice of this sponge cake with her afternoon tea. 

I adopted this cake recipe from Agnes Chang “ I can bake”.  You can have many variations by substituting the spreads with various kinds of fruit jam.

In conjunction with my Pandan series, for this first try, I made Victoria Sandwich in Pandan flavour, spread with my fresh homemade Pandan kaya (Coconut Egg Jam in Pandan flavour) , made earlier in the morning.

If you are keen to learn to make homemade kaya just click on the name to bring you to my old post on homemade kaya using microwave method which was faster and easier than the traditional way of kaya making.

Homemade Pandan Kaya (Coconut Egg Jam in Pandan flavour)

I brought the sandwich to the office and shared it in our office morning tea meeting. J

Custard Cream Puff 吉士 (卡士达) 泡芙

Pâte à choux

Hubby is not a sweet-toothed person as he does not favour most pastries except for cream puff.  For him to appreciate my baking, I reckoned it was time for me to learn his favourite pastry – Cream Puff.

Cream puff was originated from French pastry name Choux Pastry or Pâte à choux with butter, water, flour, and eggs as main ingredients. I had a cook book from Agnes Chang illustrating Choux Pastry recipe and I was preparing to give it a go. Later, I had the idea to check out some video demonstrations before attempting it. After watching a few Choux pastry videos on youtube , I dived straight into it.  

Result? I was glad the pastry turned out nicely, however I was a bit disappointed with the custard fillings as the custard was not thick enough. I guess I should have stirred and cooked the custard a bit longer to thicken its consistency. Either sweet fillings or savoury fillings can be used.

Since I found visual demostration was much more informative and easy to follow, here I’m showing a clip featuring my Choux pastry making experience.

Pandan Bread 班兰香草面包

Since I resumed my baking hobby, I gave myself a target to explore at least one new baking recipe a week. Below is another bread recipe I adapted from a new local bread making cook book I bought recently.

This recipe used one of the local plants, Pandan to enhance the bread flavour. Pandan a.k.a. Screwpine, is a common tropical plant widely used in Southeast Asian cooking. The natural green coloring extracted from Pandan leaves and the characteristic of its aroma is especially useful for enhancing the color and flavour in cooking especially in dessert making.  Other than as a flavour, the pandan leaves can be used to wrap savory dishes and weaved into handicrafts. Visit my previous dessert recipe Kuih Talam and Kaya posts, which featured the use of pandan leaves as one of the ingredients.

While in New Zealand, the cold weather wasn’t conducive for growing Pandan plant and I could only go for frozen pandan leaves or Pandan essence/paste to get its flavor in cooking. Now in Malaysia, I can easily find this plant grown in my neighbourhood garden.  They grow so easily and wildly in this country. Whenever I wish to use a piece or two, I just need to ask from my neighbour and they would generously share with me. 

For this Pandan bread recipe, I again hand kneaded the bread dough. If you are a follower of my blog, you would know I hand kneaded all my bread dough. This time, I reckon it would be much more effective to show a video clip of my hand kneading process.

I must admit hand kneading is quite a tiring process. In fact, I’ve been considering getting a good stand mixer but held back by the low frequency of my usage as a branded mixer such as Kitchen Aids can be really expensive in Malaysia. On the other hand a cheaper mixer is not powerful enough for dough mixing. L

If you have any good mid budget range mixers to recommend (powerful enough for dough mixing), please drop me a line. Thanks.

Wholemeal Chocolate Marble Toast Bread 可可双色土司

My new Oven is in action!

It has been a while since I last baked. Part of the reason was work while another was the condition of our house that underwent a major renovation for an extended period of time.
I was waiting to get the new kitchen ready with a new oven before I could start to try out new baking recipes. However, it took us more than 4 months to get the house ready before I could put on an apron to try out a new oven in a whole new revamped kitchen.

I was quite excited waiting to play with this kitchen new toy, thinking that I could finally retire my little desktop oven and shelved it in a storage room.  However, to my disappointment the very moment I switched on the oven, it tripped the power supply to the entire house! It took another few weeks for us to arrange for warranty claim and technical support to fix and reinstall the oven before I got to use it again.
Finally, we had a pilot by baking Vanilla muffins last month; Ming Ray was the main master chef in coming up with a successful batch of baking from the oven.

Subsequently, that night I used it for my signature roast pork.  The pork was a bit burnt out, as I was still trying to play around with the oven temperature. This new oven was a bit more sophisticated than the one I used in Auckland.  It had more heating functions, more choices of heating elements and if desired the option to turn on a fan to help circulate the heat inside the oven. I was not familiar with it initially, definitely far more complicated than my little desktop oven! J

Last weekend, I finally made my 1^st loaf of bread in 2012.  This was another recipe adapted from Tangzhong (water-roux) bread from Taiwan famous baker 孟老师的100道面包. If you’ve been following my blog you would know Tangzhong was one of my favourite bread baking method which guaranteed a soft and fluffy bread texture.

Actually this was not a new recipe to me, I did try this recipe back in Auckland in 2010, however it was a failure back then. (Read the post mortem report here).
This time, I didn’t follow the recipe exactly; I had made minor adjustments because some of the ingredients required was not available in my pantry. I left out cheddar cheese while making Tangzhong, I didn’t mix in chocolate chips and also replaced a portion of high protein flour with wholemeal flour. I wanted to get rid of the balance of 30g wholemeal flour which I had on hand.
Nevertheless, when I saw the dough rise nicely, I knew these minor adjustments wouldn’t matter much. True enough, the bread came out nicely, soft and fluffy and the brown and white swirl of marble look effect gave great color combination.

Overall, the bread tasted not as sweet as expected as I didn’t place any chocolate chips. The sweetness of the bread depends on the kind of chocolate chips added in and the coco powder used. If milk chocolate chips or sweet coco powder is used, it will be sweeter. I found even if it was not sweet it was still good to eat on its own. J