Spicy Sticky Chicken Wings

Almost every kid I know loves eating chicken wings, no matter how they are cooked, pan-fried, deep-fried, baked or brined. All wings would be gone very quickly once they are served. Besides, I don’t know what magic ketchup (tomato sauce) has. Take my family as an example, anything with ketchup won’t stay on a plate for too long. It's easy to predict how popular it would be the combination of chicken wings and ketchup. So, whenever I have to bring something to a social gathering, with kids are attending there, I’d think of making chicken wings in the first place. This time I experimented a way to reduce most of the fat in wings, at the same time retain the most flavours to entertain their taste buds.

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Homemade Salted Eggs (鹹蛋)

Salted eggs are normally brined duck eggs. Chinese people use them to make moon cakes（月餅）, glutinous rice dumplings (粽子) and many other dishes. Some families I know, like to steam salted eggs that go with congee for breakfast.

In my good old days, salted duck eggs are often sold covered in a thick layer of salted charcoal paste. Nowadays, the producers might know how to do marketing and give the humble salted eggs a nicer presentation. The salted duck eggs I come across here recently almost have the salted paste removed, wrapped in plastic, or vacuum packed. The best salted eggs should have a briny aroma, translucent egg white, with the yolk bright orange-red in colour. The yolk that releases oil after being cooked is considered as a high quality product.

Sadly, here in Australia, it’s quite hard to find fresh duck eggs, yet it’s much easier to get some cooked ones. Weird, isn’t it? If any fresh duck eggs put on rack for sale in any Asian grocery stores, they would be gone very quickly.

As I have been missing and craving this homey food very much, I brined a dozen and then cooked several traditional Chinese dishes with the salted eggs. Would you like to know what dishes I cooked? I'll post them in a series later on.

I was glad to hear that Penny of Addictive and Consuming and Trix of Tasty Trix would host an International Egg Incident Party. Lucky enough I can manage myself to participate this time. Here in this post, I share an easy way to make salted eggs at home. This time I used chicken eggs. If you can find fresh duck eggs, that’s even better. But I found the end result of using chicken eggs was very satisfied. This recipe was tested for many times. Not long before, I shared this recipe with my Chinese readers, all salted egg lovers were fascinated and many of them tried it on the next day they read my recipe with satisfied outcomes. Here’s a picture of my fan's salted egg. She shared her joy with me when she successfully made some delicious salted eggs.

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Tortilla with Chorizo

Breakfast is very important to my family. We’d like to have different things with rich nutrients to start a day. Eggs are my family’s favourite, especially for my husband. He’s a big fan of eggs. Or I can say, he likes to have any dish that cooked with eggs. That’s easy for me, isn’t it? The tortilla with chorizo sausage is quick and easy to make. We’d love it served hot with a cup of tea.

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Strawberry Yoghurt Ice Cream

Yoghurt contains a kind of good bacteria, called lactobacillus that helps build our digestive system healthy. When we catch a flu and need to take any antibiotics, we'd feel our appetite decreases too. Why? The antibiotics help us to kill the bad guys (harmful bacteria) in our digestive system, unfortunately at the same time they kill the good guys (good bacteria) too. The lactobacillus is the good guy we need then. Yoghurt is rich in protein, calcium, and other vitamins.

The fruit I like the most to add into yoghurt is strawberry. Although summer hasn’t come yet, I love to take as much as yoghurt ice cream as I love. It’s a really good dessert after dinner throughout the year.

If anyone asks me where to get great ice cream recipes and ideas, I won’t hesitate to recommend David Lebovitz’s blog to him/her. David Lebovitz has generously shared heaps of useful information about how to make delicious home-made ice cream. One of his popular cook books, The Perfect Scoop: Ice Creams, Sorbets, Granitas, and Sweet Accompaniments is surely a keeper too.

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Hong Kong Style Egg Waffle (雞蛋仔 Original Flavour)

The egg waffle shaped like an egg, in Chinese it’s called 雞蛋仔 (literally means little eggs), one of the long standing popular street foods in Hong Kong. It’s one of my favourite childhood foods. I remember that I ate a whole packet after school nearly every weekday. 

After moving to Australia, I miss this delicious snack very much, yet hardly tried to make any at home, simply because I don’t have the mould specially designed for making this snack. After posting the recipe of waffle (Hong Kong Style), many readers sent me emails asking for the recipe of 雞蛋仔. My dear readers you get it now after a long wait. One of my fans of my Chinese food blog, Anne Yeung wrote a guest post sharing her recipe. Anne and I share the same love of this unique Hong Kong hawker food. Many thanks for her time and generous sharing.

Origin of Hong Kong Style Egg Waffle
The Hong Kong style Egg Waffle is a unique street hawker food in Hong Kong. Piece by piece they come in a golden coloured honeycomb shape and gives out a rich aroma of cake flavour. It is in fact hollow in shape … it gives one an extraordinary experience when biting on it as it has a distinct texture of having a crispy shell with inner softness.

In accordance to information available, the Hong Kong Style Egg Waffle is originated in the 1950s. In an effort of making use of some cracked eggs, an Asian grocery shop’s owner made an attempt of developing this egg batter. Sugar, flour and evaporated milk were added to an egg batter and was poured into a honey-comb metal plate to cook into waffle. Traditionally, the Hong Kong Egg Waffles are made over charcoal flames. However, most people nowadays use electric stove tops due to cost efficiency and safety reasons. (Information gathered from https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh/雞蛋仔).

Nowadays, the Hong Kong Style Egg Waffle has its original formula improved to also come in an array of different flavours and they include chocolate, strawberry; original flavour with shredded coconuts, black sesame, etc. However, the original flavour still remains as the majority out of all.

My special feel with the Hong Kong Style Waffle
My childhood is like many others ... I grew up with the ‘companionship’ of the Hong Kong Style Egg Waffles …

I can never forget about that special bond I had with the Hong Kong Style Egg Waffles … perhaps I should have said I am reluctant to have forgotten about it, probably due to the fact that the deep rich egg aroma has concealed within it my personal growing up memories in Hong Kong.

My son is already the generation which is born overseas … it is not possible for him to fully understand that feeling that I have with the Hong Kong Egg Waffle. But what a mother can do is to learn making so at home, at least to give that tiny little chance to my next generation the opportunity of tasting that rich egg aroma over the other side of the world.

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Warm Handpull Chicken Salad with Sesame Dressing (Thanks to gourmettraveller88)

Not only is food blogging fun, but also does help me acquaint with many wonderful people with the same mind, same taste and same passion with foods. I met Janet on twitter and started to read her food blog, gourmettraveller88, regularly a few months ago. You can’t imagine how wonderful I feel, when I get to know a food blogger who came from the same home country, Hong Kong. We love the same old-fashioned and modern fusion Hong Kong cuisine. Janet is now living in Basel, Switzerland with her husband and a new-born baby.

Before she gave birth to her lovely son, Marc, her husband gave her a lovely present, helping her to publish her own cookbook, “Gourmet Traveller 88”. I’m so glad that Janet sent me a complimentary copy. In Janet’s cookbook, there are 7 sections, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese and Western, all recipes in each section were carefully chosen by Janet and her husband through months. I love Janet’s cooking passions, and feel she has her own style in creating dishes with simplicity, with creative ideas of whipping up her favourite dishes of different countries. Take this warm handful chicken salad as an example, Janet really knows how to tweak the dressing to go with the chicken and fresh veggies, that tastes very similar to the one that Japanese cold noodle salad often used.

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Apple Custard Buns (Tangzhong Method)

I wouldn’t know how good this tangzhong recipe is until I tasted the fluffy buns that made from it. My friend, SK told me she nearly makes fresh bread everyday for her family with the tangzhong recipe. She’s got so many good and creative ideas of making different fillings for her buns. I can tell she’s more addicted to making tangzhong bread than me, and admire her passions. She really motivates me in turn, and I feel myself have to pick up baking bread more often. The question is that what fillings I can wrap inside the fluffy buns.

I recalled the first moment I tried the apple custard scrolls from Bakers Delight a few years ago, I immediately fell in love with their creamy custard mingled with fragrant diced apple inside. Here I experimented to whip up the filling for baking more tangzhong buns.

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Homemade Salted Mustard Greens (雪菜/雪裡紅)

Salted mustard greens (雪菜/雪裡紅) are very popular in stir-fry with meats, tofu and noodle soup in traditional Chinese cooking. I often keep some in my fridge, and throw a bit of it whenever I like to enhance the flavour in my Chinese dishes, like green beans stir fry, shredded pork rice noodle soup.

It’s pretty easy to make salted mustard greens at home, simply add a small amount of salt. After a few days, you can enjoy the aromatic pickled vegetables. Compared with those canned ones, you're 100% sure it's healthy without any preservatives at all.

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