Dinosaur Cake 恐龙蛋糕

Dear Ming Ray,

Happy belated 8th Birthday!

Where has time gone? I just couldn’t believe we had just celebrated Ming Ray’s 8^th birthday last week! It felt like it was just yesterday when I still had him in me.  Flashing back to the day of Ming Ray’s birth on the 14^th July 2004, I can vividly recall the more than 6 hours labour agony ending in a forced C-section because of baby’s heartbeat dropped drastically on every contraction. The labour process was awful to remember, but meeting my first born little baby boy for the first time was a moment no words could ever describe and now he is 8.  It didn't seem at all that long ago when he was just a thought...a wish.

Ever since I indulged myself in baking, I had always wanted to bake a cake for his birthday. In fact this dinosaur cake was long overdue, I saw this fantastic Dinosaur cake idea last year from Betty Croker website via YouTube but at that time we just moved back from Auckland and had yet to settle down.  That, plus the house renovation work didn’t make the right opportunity to bake for him.

Like many other kids, Ming Ray loved dinosaurs since he was baby.  Any item related to dinosaurs attracts him. I couldn’t recall how many times he had watched the series of movie Jurassic Park over and over again; I guess it is very common that boys like dinosaurs.

In fact he had designed a very creative dino cake box for his Auckland School's garage sales which I shared in my previous muffin post back in 2010. Check it out here.

I was glad I managed to fulfil my promise to him to make an icing sculptured dinosaur cake. However, I must thank hubby for helping to decorate the cake.  Without his fine touch I supposed I would end up with a flop project as I was struggling with the icing to make volume to the body of the dinosaur cake. The icing I made was a bit too runny hence it was difficult to lay and shape on the cake.

We had a small birthday party with another close friend of ours whose children were also Ming Ray’s buddies.  I felt so happy and relieved when the kids said the cake was yummy!

Yes! Mission accomplished!

Lady’s Fingers/Okra 羊角豆/秋葵

From garden to table - Lady’s Fingers/Okra



The short one was normal okra purchased from market

Following my previous gardening post, this post I wish to showcase one of my successful crops from my recent gardening experience. The star of the day is Lady’s Fingers /Okra.

This tropical plant with its edible green seed pods is commonly known as "lady's fingers" in South East Asian region. However to the westerners especially in United States they are branded as Okra. Okra has high content of fibre and is also known to be high in antioxidants. It may even be eaten as part of a weight loss diet since it is both fat-free and cholesterol-free. However, some may not like the gooey slime inside of an okra pod. This substance is called "mucilage" which is made up of protein, carbohydrate and fibre molecules.

There are many ways to cook lady’s fingers. In Malaysia okra is commonly used as vegetable ingredients in spicy dishes especially curry, stir-fried with sambal belancan or steamed and eaten as salad with sambal. For the Chinese in Malaysia, other than stir-frying and steaming, we like to stuff fish paste in it and boil with a selection of vegetables and tofu and to be served in soup. We call it Yong Tau Foo, one of the signature dishes of Hakka cuisine. In the Japanese cuisine, deep fried tempura okra is another easy recipe to make.

Both hubby and I love lady’s fingers; it is one of our “must buy” in our weekly marketing list. When I resumed my gardening interest, one of the plants that I wanted to grow was Okra. Ten over years ago, I planted Okra in our front yard and it was a huge success. We always harvested more than we could consume and had to give away to friends and neighbours.

I was so pleased when one of my neighbours, an old former farmer offered his okra seeds to me when he saw me clearing and plowing the plot of land into garden bed a few months ago. I told him I wanted to cultivate a piece of own homegrown vegetables and herbs garden. In supporting my wills, he shared about 8 of his okra seeds with me and some with my next door Auntie who is also a gardening lover. Three of us, started to plant the seeds at about the same time. After a week, out of the 8 seeds, 6 germinated but only 4 survived, my successful rate was about 50%.

When I checked with my neighbours, I was surprised to learn from the ex-farmer neighbor that he only had 4 survived out of 30 seeds he planted. Even worse for the lady neighbour, none of her okra seeds survived! I guessed I should be very proud of my result! J

Okra flower and new pod

The okra I planted is longer breed, 2 times longer than normal type purchased from market

The 2 longer okra/lady fingers harvested from my garden

Time to get the harvested crops to the table!

A pan fried fish

Curry paste - click to get the recipe

Fresh mint leaves from garden to garnish

Curry fish with steam okra/lady fingers

Serve with white rice, let's eat!

2012 Tropical Garden

My Malaysian garden experience

After taking a year to settle in with the job and a massive house make over renovation since we came back from Auckland in April 2011, in March 2012 I started to indulge in my gardening hobby again. Argh....how I missed my Auckland garden ! (click to view my Kiwi gardening experience)


With the latest layout, all our back yard had been merged to be part of our constructed dwelling whilst 90% of our front yard was tiled up. We were only left with a tiny patch of soil which hubby preferred to keep for planting soft carpet grass.

Showing a before and after look of the front yard after the renovation we made.



Before May 2011

December 2012

I was hardly left with any spare land to pursue gardening. For that reason, I was left with no choice but to explore cultivating the vacant land located opposite our house. Well, strictly speaking that vacant land belongs to our local council. Hopefully they wouldn't mind for me to use it. After all, I helped to transform a land of disarray into a productive vegetation land aligned with the "Go green" concept. J

It’s fortunate for me to stay in a neighbourhood full of gardening lovers. With their generous gift of seedlings and plant seeds I got off to a good start with my 2 bird eyes chilies (辣椒) plants in my little garden, then later came lemon grass, lady’s fingers/Okra seeds, mints (the plant which I left with my neighbour 2 years ago and now passed back to my caring) and water spinach/ water morning glory (Kangkung in Malay) 空心菜.

Shown below is my recent gardening experience in chronological order.

March 2012

The result of my 3 weekends of hard works in digging and plowing

My tropical garden

April 2012

Mints

If you wish to find out how to plant chili in cold climate check out my old post here

Bird eyes chili

Water Spinach/ Morning Glory - Kangkung 空心菜
This plant is super easy to plant. I planted straight with the roots that I cut off from the water spinach I bought from market, not with seeds.

Okra/lady's finger seedling

Tofu with salted fish and minced meat 豆腐肉末咸鱼粒

Quick and easy 30 minutes meals

If you are a working mom who loves cooking, who still prefers to make delicious home cooked meal for your love ones at home after a long day at work. Following recipe that I’m going to share is a great recipe for you.

This tofu dish is so quick and easy that you can serve it on dinner table in less than 30 minutes even if you included the dish preparation time.

This dish is one of the popular dishes serves in our local Chinese restaurant; it is also kid’s friendly meal. For healthy version you can do away salted fish or if salted fish not available you can replace with dried shrimp or anchovies.  For chilies lover, you can also spice up with chopped chilles.  

Tofu with salted fish and minced meat 豆腐肉末咸鱼粒

Happy Dragon Boat Festival - 端午节快乐

 端午时节粽子飘香

Today is the 5th day of the 5th month in Lunar calender, a significant day celebrated by the Chinese world wide (Duan wu jie) 端午节.

This traditional custom has long been practised annually for more than 2000 years in China, commemorating a famous patriotic poet Qu Yuan (340-278 BC). I am not going to elabroate the history, you can click here to read more about it.

I just wish to highlight the food that I'm going to introduce in relation to this festival. Yes, in general for almost every Chinese festival, it is usually accompanied by some sort of special food.

The special food for this special day is "Zong Zi" (Rice dumpling). I had introduced this rice dumpling before in 2010 - Bak Chang (Savoury Rice Dumpling) 咸肉粽子. Here, not only you get to have a very traditional glutinous rice dumpling recipe, you also get to watch the video on how to wrap rice dumpling.

Yesterday, Auntie Lan again demonstrated her cooking skill in the making of one of her signature dish - Rice dumpling. Since last Saturday, she had asked me to get the necessary ingredients ready. In fact, as long as a month ago she had started her preparation by making homemade salted duck eggs, to prepare one of the key ingredients - salted egg yolks.

Duck egg yolks - eggs soaked in saturated salt water for 30 days

After nearly a day of preparation and cooking, with 2kg of glutinous rice, Auntie Lan managed to make more than 40 rice dumplings.

When I came home from work yesterday, we had rice dumplings and rice porridge for dinner. With over 40 rice dumplings made, I reckon for the coming days, rice dumplings would be our main staple especially for my hubby who is crazy over rice dumplings!

Bak Chang (Savoury Rice Dumpling) 咸肉粽子

I just had another one for lunch today and the only word that I had to say was " Yummy!"

Key ingredients - Glutinous rice, salted egg yolk, peanuts, pork belly and mushroom

Butter Cheese Buns 牛油芝士面包

Butter and cheese, perfect match!

I started to make this dough a night before to try out the slow rising method.  Letting the dough rise in the fridge overnight saved time and increased flavor to the dough.  That night after dinner, I started to prepare the ingredients. After pouring all needed ingredients into the mixing bowl, I sat down in front of the TV and applied my multitasking talent - kneading the dough and watching online soap drama simultaneously. It took me more than 30 minutes to massage the dough until it became ready for proofing. Well, that’s how a busy working mum like me made time for her after work entertainment - watching downloaded drama. J

The next morning at 7.30am, I checked on the dough, it did proof to about 75% of the original size.  As we already had a plan to take Ray to a nearby park for morning jog, I asked Auntie Lan only to take out the dough from the fridge about an hour before our planned return time. Upon our return at 11.30am, Auntie Lan already had the dough left in room temperature for half an hour, I felt the bowl was still pretty cold. It took about an hour more before the dough was at room temperature and doubled in size.

I think this batch of non Tangzhong starter bread was so far my best sweet buns; the bun texture was so soft and wholesome with strong buttery flavor. When the buns came out from the oven in the afternoon, hubby surprisingly asked to have the buns for afternoon tea.  He seldom likes bakery and it got me even more surprised when he ate 3 buns at one go! 

Well, I guess one of the reasons why he liked the buns was the butter in the bun. He isn’t into bakery but he just loves butter J

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。