Healthy desserts?

It probably doesn't look like much, but this is one of the best winter dessert in my repertoire.

Sweet potato in brown sugar ginger tea.

Ginger, according to doctrines of Chinese medicine, warms up the body. Brown sugar helps with blood circulation, which in turn improves the flow of chi in the body. Sweet potato helps with reducing water retention in the body, and being high in fiber, helps also with digestion.

The ginger tea featured here is one I brought back from Taiwan. Sold in bags, it resembles nothing like the sugar we are familiar with in Australia. 

Sold in 5cm blocks, this is basically enough to make 2 large mugs of sweet ginger tea. The perfect balance of sugar, the spiciness of ginger, with the aroma of dried dates and longan (both improve circulation and warm the body), the perfect winter drink.

With all the rich and fatty food we tend to consume in winter, and general colder weather, this is a delicious way to restore a balance of health.

Sweet potato in brown sugar ginger tea

Serves 2-3

1 small sweet potato, cut into bite sized chunks

4 heaped tablespoons brown sugar (adjust to taste)

1 knob of old ginger, sliced thinly

3 dried red dates or 2 dried black dates

4 dried longan

1 litre water

1. Wash the sweet potato thoroughly, scrub the skin with steel wool to ensure most of the surface dirt has been removed. Cut into bite sized chunks, then place into a pot with the cold water, and set to the boil.

2. After the sweet potatoes have come to the boil, add the sugar, ginger, dates and longan, and simmer until the sweet potatoes are soft (10-20 minutes). Serve immediately.

Notes:

1. Dried red dates, dried black dates, and dried longan should be available from all good Asian grocers. You should be able to find them at the Chinese or Korean ones.

2. Old ginger should be used for this recipe rather than young ginger. Look for large knobs, golden skin, with wide stripes on the skin. Adjust the amount of ginger to your preference by adding the ginger little by little, keeping in mind the more you cook the ginger, the spicier the tea will become.

3. If you can find Okinawa brown sugar (沖縄黒糖) for cooking (and not as candy), that can be used as well. Otherwise, normal brown sugar from CSR is ok.

Small luxuries

Conpoy fried rice



Fried rice has got to be one of the easiest comfort food made with nothing more than leftovers and whatever happens to be in the pantry and fridge. Usually that'd be stuff like ham, carrots, peas, and pineapple... not quite what I wanted. Luckily, mother left me a small (but sufficient!) supply of conpoy, or dried scallops, proving once again: mothers really do know best.


The price of conpoy has soared significantly over the past few years. Not that it was ever cheap, of course; but it's not the kind of thing you'll need heaps of in any dish, anyway.

Fried rice is usually the last pre-dessert course in a multi-course Cantonese banquet, and conpoy fried rice is probably towards the high-end of middle-of-the-field. But the problem with restaurant versions of this dish is that they skimp on the conpoy. Massively. Which is definitely not the case when it's homemade.





Mmmmm.....conpoy.....



The massive conpoy chunks made for a great ol' load of umami goodness in the fried rice. Delicious was an understatement. The grains of rice popped, having soaked up the umami-filled conpoy soaking water, coated by a thin layer of egg white and accompanied by the chewy chunks of conpoy. A handful of finely chopped spring onion and a smidgeon of minced ginger rounded off the dish satisfactorily.



Rice-ripened persimmon

Dessert was a simple affair: a "water" ripe persimmon, served chilled. The first time I ate a full persimmon was 2 years ago, during a stay at an onsen-ryokan in Hakone. I'll never forget the taste: it was soft, sweet, and juicy, intermingled with jelly-like bits. It was mindblowing. And unbelievable.
And to this day, it is the only time I will eat persimmon. When they're overripe, bursting with watery goodness, and chilled beforehand.
It's quite hard to get this sort of persimmon on the market anywhere. In Hong Kong, the markets will occasionally have a few, wrapped up carefully in layers of fruit netting and styrofoam trays and glad wrap, to prevent any mishaps that could result in a burst--and thus non-merchantable--fruit. Here, though, I've only seen them available for sale as cheap, almost-past-use-by-date at discount prices. If that's not available, there's always the option of burying them in rice, until they resemble water balloons. Literally.


Conpoy Fried Rice (Serves 1)
1 dried scallop, soaked and steamed for 5 minutes
1 stalk of green onion, finely chopped
1/8 teaspoon minced ginger
2 teaspoons oil
2 egg whites, beaten
splash of shaoxing wine
salt, to taste
1/2 cup rice (preferably from the night before)


To prepare the compoy: in a small bowl, cover the dried scallop with boiling water and allow to soak until it has rehydrated and turns an opaque off-white. Steam the compoy for 5 minutes, or nuke in the microwave for 5 minutes, covered, with the water. Separate into strands, and remove any sinewy bits.


Heat the oil in a wok. Lightly fry off the ginger and green onion to release the fragrance. Add the rice, compoy, and a small amount of the soaking liquid. Toss until the liquid has evaporated, and the rice grains are no longer in clumps.
Beat the egg white lightly with a splash of shaoxing wine and a pinch of salt. Add the whites to the wok, tossing quickly to ensure the rice grains are covered by a thin coating of egg white. Season to taste. Serve immediately.

Gyoza! Gyoza! Read all about it!

It started a couple of days ago. I was depressed for various reasons, and when I'm depressed, I get food cravings. The cravings were so massive I had dreams about it for two nights straight. (And another one involving a rather cute doctor and a large black grizzly being injured then left on the side of the road, but that's a story for another time/blog.) This time it wasn't chocolate or peanut butter, but dumplings. The pan-steam-fried potstickers or gyoza bursting with pork juice and loaded with veges.

But life being life, there was no time to go out and gather up ingredients. As for the pre-made frozen type... there's no way I'd buy that out of my own volition, when dumpling and wonton making is like a culinary reflex.

Then yesterday, I got a question about gyozas. A recipe for gyoza fillings, actually. I was stumped, for a moment.

While I can name the ingredients in a filling, I couldn't do the same for the actual quantities. It's always been just meat (minced from the store or hand minced), then a slurp of cooking wine, sprinkle of salt, sugar, and pepper, an egg (or two, if it's a big batch), water, and sesame oil. It was the same for the vegetables: my mother never told me exactly how much was needed, it was always this much meat=that much vegetables chopped up. There was no recipe. And it turned out perfect every time.

Gyoza with Pork and Cabbage Filling

Makes about 40

200g pork mince

1/6 small cabbage, finely shredded

40 dumpling/gyoza skins, approx 8-9cm in diameter

1 egg

1 tablespoon Shaoxing cooking wine

2 teaspoons sugar

1 teaspoon salt

large pinch of pepper

4-5 tablespoons chicken stock/water

2 teaspoon sesame oil

2 tablespoon cooking oil

1. In a large bowl (preferably deep rather than overly wide), mix the pork mince, cooking wine, sugar, salt and pepper well.

2. Make a small well in the middle of the mince, and place the egg in the well. Beat slightly before mixing it into the pork mince, until well incorporated. Continue stirring the mince in one direction, until the mix feels slightly "elastic" and offers slight resistance when pushed with a wooden spoon/chopsticks.

3. Add stock or water to the mince, 1 tablespoon at a time, mixing until the liquid has been completely incorporated into the mince before adding the next. Once all the stock or water has been added, mix in the sesame oil. It should look similar to the second picture above.

4. Add the shredded cabbage. The cabbage should not be too long (no more than 5cm in length), and very finely shredded (no more than 2mm wide). Mix through the mince well, until evenly distributed.

5. To wrap the dumplings (this is by no means definitive; merely what I believe works the best.)

Place the wrapper in your hand, so that the small well between your fingers and palms is covered by the centre of the wrapper. Put a heaped teaspoon of filling slightly off the middle, towards the bottom.

Fold the bottom over to the top, place your thumb and second finger to secure only the middle of the arc by a fingertip.

With your other hand, make a small fold about a quarter of the way on the arc of the semicircle. 

Follow the natural fold to "pleat" by pushing the skin down.

And it should end up like this:

Then repeat on the other side. The dumplings should sit on its own quite well.

6. For potstickers, heat some cooking oil in a pan until almost smoking hot. Place the dumplings in the pan as it sits naturally. Allow it to pan-fry until the bottoms are crispy and golden, then add 1/2 to 1 cup of water (depending on the size of the pan and number of dumplings) over the dumplings and cover. Cook over medium to high heat until all the water has evaporated, and bottoms are well crisped. Serve immediately with vinegar and chili oil dipping sauce, if preferred.

By all means, these babies can be steamed or boiled.