Gosh! It’s Saturday again…and it has been two Saturdays already since the Saturday when Melissa flew back to Malaysia from Wellington via Auckland. How time flies!
Well, before she and I flew back to Sibu the following day – Sunday, the mother had cooked some chicken curry for her to enjoy when she got home, so we had that to eat for dinner for a couple of days and since Wednesday last week (17th November) was a public holiday – Hari Raya Haji/Adiladha, she was able to cook something else – this braised pork leg in soy sauce with five-spice powder…
…and she fried this plate of salted vegetables with pork belly…
My daughter was o.k. with the pork leg – not really a fan but she enjoyed the salted veg dish a great deal and it certainly had been quite a while since she last had that.
Over those few days, since we had the meat dish for our dinners – the chicken curry and the braised pork leg, all I had to do was to fry the vegetable dish to go with it. There was not much of a choice of vegetables in the fridge though – some greens and a few strands of long beans. I sliced a few of the latter thinly and fried it with egg…
…and Melissa liked that. She said that they did not have long beans in Wellington so over there, she would have to eat french beans instead.
On a different day, I cooked the rest of the long beans. I broke them into lengths of around 1 inch and fried them with dried prawn sambal…
…and as there wasn’t much left, I added an egg to it so as to make it more substantial and there would be enough for all three of us. Melissa loved this too.
And since we’re on the topic of homecooked food, I remember Philip asking me a while ago whether there are alternative ways of cooking broccoli. Well, since I saw the photo in a recipe book of Chinese cooking, I would boil the veg in water with a pinch of salt – do not overboil so it will still be nice and crunchy. Then, I would arrange it in a circle in a plate and in the middle, I would fry some meat with ginger in thick soy sauce gravy and pour that in. Lately, I’ve seen them doing that in the restaurants but they would have mushrooms and pacific clams in the middle.
My daughter loves mushrooms, so when I cooked the broccoli the other day, I fried some abalone mushrooms with prawns and fishballs in oyster sauce and poured that into the middle like this…
My missus would fry everything together which would mean that the taste would go into the broccoli. Otherwise, you would have to dip the veg in the gravy while eating…or it will be somewhat bland.
I also cooked this braised pork in barbecue sauce…
…and if I remember correctly, I had a post on something like this not too long ago. My daughter saw it while she was still in Wellington and was grumbling that she was drooling away over there. Ah well…this is one of my easy-to-cook recipes and I could whip it up in no time at all. No sweat!
After some 9 months in New Zealand, away from home, it certainly appears that Melissa thinks everything she eats here, be it at home or outside, tastes so great …and I’m glad, real glad…
...STILL CRAZY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS! 