My First Fried Rice

I made my first fried rice last Friday for a Chinese school project. I had to cook it the night before Chinese school, the next day it still tasted good even though it became 2 days old rice. Here's the recipe. As you can tell, I added a lot of veggies.

So I just followed all the directions and it turned out good. The only problem I had was the rice sticking to the pan...it eventually became this "chip". This is what happened.


Now the step by step instructions.

First, I prepared the marinade.

Here's the ground meat with the egg.

I then added the amount of meat needed for the recipe into the marinade and mixed it together.

Also, remember to refrigerate the cooked rice a day in advance, to ensure that your rice won't become soggy when it is cooked.


Then I heated up the pan and then added oil. When it was ready I started cooking the meat.


Keep cooking it until it's almost done, but not really.

I realize now that I might have overdone it, but the overall product turned out fine.

Put the meat in a separate bowl.

Prepare the veggies, I used cabbage and spring onions.


Cook the egg, and when the egg is almost done, add the rice. Mix.


Add the soy sauce.


and the cabbage and meat.

After I stirred in the cabbage I was worried that it wouldn't cook because it wasn't in contact with the pan. However, after a while it cooked, so don't worry if that happens to you. I am still a beginner cook though, so I doubt it will happen to other people. :)

Then, we're done! Yay! Mission accomplished.


Funny short story: This rice was for the Chinese school project right? Well, the project was cook a dish, get the recipe, and give a report on how to cook it. It ended up with half the class bringing fried rice cuz it's one of the easiest thing to make. Lol

Coconut Red Bean Jello

As a child, whenever I went to eat dim sum with my family I couldn't wait for the dessert. I loved the cute little umbrellas that they would stick in the jellos. In fact, sometimes I would get a jello just for the umbrella. That was the point in my life where I was obsessed with those little umbrellas; my dad even made an origami one for me. To this day I still have that umbrella. Anyway, today I'm going to share this jello recipe with you. My mom's friend told her how to make this recipe. Her daughter also happens to be a good friend of mine. :)

This type of jellos is common in Dim Sum places. If you have never went to eat dim sum, you should try it. When you go eat dim sum, you find people pushing carts with food. They give you a piece of paper that they stamp when you order a dish. It will be around 1 or more dollars each "dish", but I think it's worth it.


Coconut Red Bean Jello
*4 Packets Gelatin
*1 Can Coconut Milk
*1 Can of Red Beans
*3 Cups Water
*Sugar (optional because the canned red beans that I buy has a LOT of sugar)




Directions
Pour one cup of lukewarm water into the measuring cup.
Pour all 4 packets of gelatin into the cup of water. Stir it around and let it sit for a while, around 1-2 minutes, to dissolve the gelatin. It should look a bit frothy and the water should become thicker.


Open the can of coconut milk and can of red beans.
Pour two cups of hot water into a pan.


Add the coconut milk and the cup of water with the gelatin, mix.

Add the can of red beans and mix.

Pour it into another pan in which the jello can set.

Now there are two different choices:
1) a layered jello




2) a uniform jello




For a layered jello in which the red beans sink to the bottom, and the coconut milk rises to the top with the water in between both layers, just pour the mixture into the pan and let it sit at room temperature, after the jello has been given time for the mixture to separate, refrigerate it.

For a uniform jello, just pour the mixture in a pan and immediately put it in the refrigerator.

Mix the ingredients together.

Refrigerate.

Red Velvet Pancakes

Happy Mother's Day!

For Mother's Day I woke up earlier than is usual for me on a Sunday morning to make my mom breakfast. I chose to make these red velvet pancakes that I found on baking bites. They were really simple to make and I loved the taste. The only thing I would like to change is to maybe add some chocolate chips to the pancake batter. I had to omit the red food coloring because the one I had was like greater than 3 years old. XD Anyways, this was the second time in my life ever eating red velvet "something", so I do not know enough to actually share with you how it tasted in terms of that. All in all, I thought this recipe was healthy too, compared with other pancake recipes you encounter. I advise you to try this recipe out. I wasn't able to take any pictures because I was in a rush, but I did make a few hearts.

Then for dinner, my aunt, uncle and 2 cousins came over for dinner. We had this potluck and here are pictures of what we ate. My grandma cooked lobster, even though it was Mother's Day.




I can never decide which is the best picture, so I might as well post all of them. I think it looks pretty, especially the bowl. And guess what? The bowl was only 2 dollars! What a deal.

My uncle made this awesome pizza. The crust was made using a bread machine. The crust was soft and chewy, a very good combination. The pizza had just the right amount of cheese and delicious toppings.

Hawaiian Toppings



Chicken Pizza

My dad baked drumsticks.

He first marinated them.


My mom prepared Inari Sushi. I think it's tofu skin, never mind, it IS tofu skin and sushi rice, but we (my family) just eat it with regular rice. You can buy the tofu skin at Asian supermarkets.

See the little pockets with rice? You can also add rice vinegar in the rice in a small amount and mix. Put the rice in the pocket and eat it like that, or you can top it with furikake, aka rice seasoning. On the side is a strip of wasabi with soy sauce which is mixed together.

The wasabi/soy sauce mixture is seen in the top left corner.

There was more food, but I didn't take pictures of all of them.

For dessert we ate the jello....

Recipe in another blog post.

...and sour cream angel food cake.

In my opinion it didn't taste that great and it was scary how they (store bought cake) baked it in the plastic container. I mean, are you even supposed to bake in plastic? Isn't that bad for you? o_O Oh well.

The Mother's Day dinner was awesome. I wasn't able to help out though. Somehow, I will make it up to my mom.

Almond Jello

Recipe from my piano teacher. She made it for me one day. I really liked it, so she gave me the recipe. Thank you, Teacher Melody. :)

Almond Jello

Ingredients

Unflavored gelatin
Water
Milk
Sugar
Almond extract 1 teaspoon per portion*

1 envelope of unflavored gelatin 1 cup of water 1 cup of milk
Or 3 envelopes of unflavored gelatin 2 cups of water 4 cups of milk
Or 2 envelopes of unflavored gelatin 1 cup of water 3 cups of milk


Basically the proportion of the gelatin to liquid is 1:2. If you want the jello to be whiter add more milk than water. Also, remember; if you put 3 envelopes of gelatin put 3 teaspoons of almond extract.

Direction:
Sprinkle gelatin over a pot of cold water to soften, turn on the fire to low, stir until dissolved, add sugar (no definite amount, adjust to taste), stir again, turn off heat, add the mild and almond extract, let it cool, then refrigerate until firm.

Optional: mix with fruit cocktail; also if there isn’t enough juice in the fruit cocktail you can add more water and sugar.

*Buying imitation almond extract is cheaper and taste is not affected.

Egg Tarts

Egg tarts are delicious. I especially love the ones they have at dim-sum. Their crispy, flaky crusts with a sweet egg filling always leave me craving for another one. I made egg tarts for my first time a few years back and I had to substitute some ingredients. That resulted in a plain crust that did not taste good. The filling was also ok. I do remember the difficulty I had in prying out the tarts from the tart cups, one by one, pledging to never make them again. A few years later, I changed my mind because I had discovered Christine's Recipes, a great blog to refer to for Asian recipes; there I found this egg tart recipe. However, the crust of this egg tart is the cookie type, kind of like shortbread, not those flaky types.

Here is the recipe. Christine's Recipes is a well organized blog that makes it easy to locate recipes I might be interested in. Also, as a beginner level cook, the recipes are simple enough for me to be able to make them. I haven't had a chance to actually cook some things, as you can tell from my long list of "things to cook", but I hope to hone my cooking skills during the summer. Anyway, back to egg tarts.


Butter and confectioner's sugar ready to be creamed.



Sifting in the flour.


In the process of mixing the crust.


What the texture of the crust should look like after it is uniformly mixed.



Evaporated Milk


The whisked eggs.

Whisk in the evaporated milk.



Now, roll out the dough so that it is around 1/2 cm thick.




I cut out the crust with the tart tins because I do have biscuit cutters. Anyway, the only hard part was getting the "circles" out because of their frilly edges.
I poured the filling into a measuring cup.

That way I can easily pour it into the separate tins.


The messy kitchen. So many things to clean up!





I first baked a tart in the toaster to see if it would stick to the tart tin. It didn't. I did this to see if I would need to butter the tins. It turns out perfectly. I guess it's because there is already a lot of butter in the crust.



The baking process of egg tarts require you to open the oven door a few inches during the last few minutes so that the eggs won't puff up.



Here's what I learned:
Make your crust taller or pour less filling into the tart tins unless you want to have a hard time getting the tarts out. If too much filling is poured in, then when it's baking it will bubble out and caramelize. (I think that's how you describe it) This leads to egg tarts that are stuck to the tin. I had to use a toothpick to loosen the sides to get the tarts out.

Don't make your tart's crust so tall that it goes over the rims of the tins. Why? Because if you make it too tall, you will have a hard time getting the tart out. The cause of this is that if the tart is not loose, you will need to "pry" it out, but in doing so you might break some of the tarts' edges.

Good luck. :)