Mung bean Paste 綠豆蓉餡

HAPPY MOONCAKE FESTIVAL 中秋节快乐！

In advance of the mid autumn festival (a.k.a. mooncake festival) tomorrow,I would like to take this opportunity to wish all my friends, relatives and readers a happy moon cake festival and happy reunion with your family.

To the Chinese, especially those staying away from their home town, the mid autumn festival (八月十五中秋节）is a big day for them to rush back to get together and celebrate with family members. The Chinese believe full moon symbolises reunion (月圆庆团圆).

This year, I had made both types of moon cakes, traditional baked moon cakes and snow skin moon cakes. (Click to access my old posts on moon cake making).

I had made 3 types of fillings which were Taro paste, red bean paste and mung bean paste. For the first two, I had already covered in previous posts. Just click on the words to lead you to the posts.

I brought these moon cakes and shared with my colleagues in the office a few days ago:

In conjunction with this happy occasion, I’m going to introduce another traditional moon cake fillings that I had used for my homemade moon cakes this year – Mung Bean Paste.

Mung bean is more widely known as green bean in South East Asia. As the name suggests, they are green in colour but when their skins are removed, Mung beans are light yellow in colour.

Mung Bean 綠豆

When these green beans are left to germinate and grow in water for days, they become “bean sprouts”, a type of vegetable that is commonly used for stir-frying, salad and soup in many Asian cuisine.

Check out my old post of Stir-fry Bean Sprouts with Prawn cutlets 豆芽炒虾球 this is a super fast and easy stir fry vegetable recipe.

Similar to red beans, Mung beans are also widely used in Chinese cuisine especially as dessert filling when made into paste form.

For the recipe I shared, I didn’t specify the measured quantity in details but merely sharing the major ingredients.  Usage ratio is very much depending on the flexibility of own taste preference.

The result of my mung bean paste was a bit dry and crumby. To have a finer texture I recommend to blend it further with a blender just like the red bean paste method. If you wish to have creamier and more flavourful texture, I recommend to substitute water with milk or coconut cream but for weight watchers it's better to stick to water.

Mung Bean Paste 綠豆蓉餡

HOMEMADE PASSION FRUIT YOGURT自制百香果酸奶

Healthy and Cost effective homemade yogurt

I forgot where I heard this quote which said there were 2 good habits that’re all good and no bad - swimming and yogurt! Hubby is a strong believer in this quote and has been promoting this health message to our boy from young.

Frankly, I must admit all these years I have had no problem practicing the 1st habit but not so much on the yogurt part.  The reason that put me off from yogurt is its sour fermentation taste and smell. Only recently, knowing yogurt has a great benefit of slimming, I gradually acquired its taste and able to consume flavored yogurt.

For us to maintain the swimming habit is no issue as we live only 5 minutes away from our club which has an Olympic size pool. However for the yogurt part, we tend to have some difficulty where the nearest store for us to get fresh yogurt is 30 minutes away. Not only is the distance a letdown, yogurt is quite costly too if consumed daily.

Even though I’m a keen enthusiast in venturing into homemade cooking, homemade dairy products have never crossed my mind. Not until one day I stumbled upon a blog on cheesecake making that lead me to homemade cheese and yogurt.

When I made further research on the Net and watched some YouTube clips, I was thrilled to learn that making own yogurt is so simple and need no expensive and special gadget such as a yogurt maker.  All we need are the ingredients of fresh milk (low or full cream), milk powder, yogurt starter and sterile bottles, towels and microwave/oven which are standard items found in most kitchens. Next is the incubating time for the live bacteria in the yogurt starter to do their gem in culturing the liquid milk into tart to yield yogurt.

For my attempts, I made the yogurt at night around 9pm and by the next morning at 7am when I checked, I had beautiful fresh yogurt to serve for breakfast. Once you have successfully made the yogurt, do scoop out some of this yogurt and keep as yogurt starter for your next batch of homemade yogurt. Unless you are making yogurt daily, the yogurt starter can typically last for only 5-6 batches.   After that, you may need to buy new commercial plain yogurt to start the cycle again.

My 1^st attempt using pasteurized milk with the incubation time of 8 hours showed the resulting yogurt to be a bit too runny. As for my second attempt using milk powder and a longer fermentation time of 12 hours, the texture was firmer (like bean curb) with stronger and more sour fermentation taste which better suited hubby’s preference.

homemade yogurt - 12 hours fermentation

You may notice a layer of yellowish liquid when the yogurt formed; this is the Whey water which is rich in Whey protein, an ingredient that’s good for fat burning. That is why yogurt is great for slimming.

A layer of Whey water on the surface of yogurt

However for both Ming Ray and I who preferred to have fruit flavored yogurt, we decided to make Passion Fruit Yogurt.  The outcome was a big thumb up from us! You can also enjoy simple sweetened yogurt by merely adding honey into the homemade yogurt.

Passion Fruit yogurt

Are you a yogurt lover? A LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability) believer? Cost conscious in household planning? This homemade recipe is definitely a gem in your kitchen!

Palm Sugar Steamed Cake 椰糖马来糕

 24^th August 2012 marked the 8^th day of the 7^th month in the Lunar calendar and was my late mother in law’s 4 years passing anniversary.  To commemorate that, Auntie Lan reminded us to pay respect by making a lunch meal as prayer offering at home.

With a week-long Raya break at home not going anywhere, I offered to make cake and my signature dish Hong Kong Style Crispy Roasted Pork Belly as part of the offering.  As I remembered my late MIL loved eating roasted pork.

HK style Crispy Roasted Pork Belly

The following steamed cake is a type of Malay Kuih/cake which is similar to Chinese “Huat Kuih” (发糕) commonly served in Chinese prayer offering. 

Palm Sugar Steamed Cake 椰糖马来糕

Palm sugar, also called Gula Melaka in Malaysia is a type of sugar made from palm tree. In Malaysia, this dark chocolate colored sugar is usually sold in a solid log form and the Malay loves to use it as sweetener to their dessert.

Lam Mee/Birthday Noodles 淋面

Nyonya Lam Mee

Traditionally for the older generations in Penang, Lam Mee is a must serve during birthday celebration to symbolize longevity. Therefore last July when we had a small birthday party for Ming Ray, his favourite Auntie Lan insisted to make Lam Mee as his main lunch meal.    

The specialty of this dish lies in the gravy, which is made of clear soup by boiling pork ribs/chicken bones for hours which gives strong flavour of the meat taste. It is then served with yellow noodle topped with shrimps, shredded meat, pink colored shredded omelets, shallot crisps and coriander leaves. Different from the variation served in Kuala Lumpur, Penang Lam mee is not as starchy and not as dark colored compared to KL Lam Mee.  

For a true authentic way of eating Lam Mee is best eatenwith a little bit of Sambal Belacan.  However since our host and his 2 little guests couldn’t take spicy food, we did not make effort to prepare it. 

Thai Style Deep-fried Fish Fillet 泰式脆鱼条

With a week of Raya holiday at home, I decided to spend some time to tidy up my photo folders and blog posts which was long overdue in my “to do” list.  I was surprised to find this blog post left in the folder yet to be published. It was over a year old post which I wrote in the final week in Auckland in March 2011.

Last Thai in Auckland

With our fridge sold in preparation for our repatriation to Malaysia, I had to do marketing on a daily basis. This morning when I saw fish fillet was on special, I bought a piece for dinner meal.  But without a fridge I had problem to keep the fish fresh until dinner time. To prevent the fish fillet from turning bad I had to marinate it first. To come up with deep fried ideas, I went through series of Hawkers delights cookbooks I had and spotted this yummy Thai recipe from Yummy Yummy Hawkers’ Fair by Chef Phang Fah.

The original recipe called for sweet basil leaves, which I didn’t have. Too bad basil was one of the herbs that was not available in my garden that I could harvest easily.  Without basil leaf, I substituted it with fresh flat-leaf parsley. I knew with this substitution, it would change the flavour of the dish. Basil has a sweet spicy flavour and was stronger but parsley was lighter in flavour. Nevertheless, I was glad the deep fried fish fillet turned out tasty.

For a true Thai flavour, next time I would give the original recipe a try.

Cranberry Chocolate Chip Cookies 蔓越莓巧克力曲奇

Last Friday when Ming Ray learnt that my sister from Penang planned to bring her daughter Kyra to spend a weekend with us in KL during the Raya holiday, he anxiously counted down the days looking forward to welcoming his little cousin sister and to show her around. However, we were surprised with the little 6 years old Kyra asking for a baking session with me. Seeing my little niece being so keen to learn baking, of course as her aunt I had no reason to disappoint my adorable niece. J  When Ming Ray knew about this plan, he too eagerly wanted to join his cousin sister in baking.

Kyra asked to make heart shaped cookies.  As teaching 2 kids to bake was undoubtedly a challenging task, I decided to make this simple butter chocolate chip cookies. With kids around, you could expect this wouldn’t be a proper baking session.

Yes, it ended up more like a play dough time to the kids. In between both of them had arguments to take turn to use the mixer and to mould the cookies dough but we were pleased to see both kids enjoyed their baking session anyway.

Heykids, baking or play dough time?

I was so relieved to see the cookies came out from oven still in one piece and in proper shape. Most importantly, Kyra enjoyed her baking time and loved her cookies very much and even gave 2 thumbs up for the taste of the cookies! J

RED BEAN PASTE 红豆沙馅

Red Bean Paste filling

As promised in my wholemeal steamed Pau post, this post I will illustrate  how to make homemade red bean paste. Red bean paste is a common ingredient for Asian cuisine especially for Chinese and Japanese cuisines. It is usually used as a filling ingredient for buns, dumplings, desserts and confectionaries.

I know it is not difficult to source ready-made red bean paste at bakery ingredients shop. In fact even when I was in Auckland I could easily find it in most Asian groceries shops. However, the homemade version always seems to taste better and feels healthier, doesn’t it? J

In return to enjoy better quality and healthier food we have to spend a little more time and hassle to prepare for it.  It is quite time consuming to cook the dry red bean into its paste form. Normally you will need to soak the beans for hours or even overnight before cooking to soften the beans. A quicker alternative is to skip this step  is by using a pressure cooker or a slow cooker.  Cook until the red beans turn soft. To have very fine and smooth texture, it is best to blend the cooked red bean puree until creamy form. Lastly, cook it again with oil and sugar to transform it into smooth creamy red bean paste that is ready for use.

For this trial, I used slow cooker to cook red beans overnight, this has cut down my hassle in spending time to monitor the red beans over stove.  The whole process took me more than 9 hours, but my actual working hours on blending, and stir frying the bean puree into paste only took me around an hour.

As mentioned it was pretty time consuming to get this paste done, but when you think of your loved ones getting to consume homemade paste which is free from preservative and unknown additive, plus the added benefits of adjusting the sweetness to your own preference, it all seems to justify the effort.

Mid autumn festival is around the corner. Why not give it a try to make your own red bean paste for the moon cake fillings to enjoy a healthier red bean flvaour moon cakes? You can also try out Yam/Taro paste filling, and the traditional moon cake recipe here.