This is a very easy recipe to cook and uses only a handful of ingredients. You only need pork or beef, preserved szechuan vegetables, garlic, cooking oil and dark soya sauce. The preserved szechuan vegetable, which is spicy hot and salty, gives a natural flavouring to the dish and you don’t really need to put any others seasoning apart from the dark soya sauce to give the dish some “colour”.

This is my recipe for Stir-Fried Pork with Preserved Szechuan Vegetable.

Ingredients

• 200 grammes of tenderloin pork (sliced thinly)
• 1/2 piece of szechuan vegetable (julienned and washed thoroughly)
• 4 cloves garlic (chopped)
• 1 tablespoon cooking oil (preferably palm oil)
• 50 ml of warm water

Seasoning

• 2 teaspoons dark soya sauce
• Sprinkle of sugar (optional)

Method

Heat oil in wok and add chopped garlic. Stir for 5 to 10 seconds. Add pork and preserved szechuan vegetables and stir-fry for 1 minute.

Add dark soya sauce and water and cook until pork is thorougly cooked and sauce has reduced. Sprinkle some sugar if you find it too salty.

Further to my last post on Long Beans Rice, I did mention there that it tastes great with soup. I am referring to Kiam Chye Tau Foo Soup which is basically Salted Mustard Leaves and Beancurd Soup in Hokkien dialect. Somehow or rather, the salty, sour and sweet nature of this soup complements the Long Beans Rice well.

Remember the water used to boil the belly pork in the Long Beans Rice recipe? The stock is used for this soup and in fact, you can retain a couple of slices of the pork to enhance the flavour of this soup. Nothing goes to waste! See the Long Beans Rice recipe for the preparation of the stock.

This is my recipe for Kiam Chye Tau Foo Soup.

Ingredients

• 5 to 10 pieces of salted mustard leaves (kiam chye)
• 2 large tomatoes (quartered)
• 1 piece beancurd (soft type, approximately 6 inches x 2 inches x 2 inches - LxWxD, cut into 8 pieces)
• 2 bowls of stock (prepared using 2 1/2 bowls of water used to boil belly pork)

Method

Bring stock to boil and add tomatoes and salted mustard leaves. Simmer for 1 hour or more.

3 minutes before intended serving, bring back to boil and add beancurd.

Serve steaming hot.

Foreground : Long Bean Rice
Background : Kiam Chye Tau Foo Soup

Rice cookers are not meant just to cook plain rice. Prior to this, I have a recipe for Chicken Rice cooked in a Rice Cooker. Apart from Chicken Rice, you can also cook other types of rice, one of which is Long Bean Rice.

Ingredients

A meal on its own, you will find out here that you can also cook a soup as a side dish arising out of the use of the ingredients here. I will give the recipe for the soup another day. Anyway, the fact that all the ingredients are firstly stir-fried and then cooked in the rice cooker gives the whole dish maximum flavour from the various ingredients used.

Place into rice cooker before turning on the cooker

Long Beans can be stir-fried on its own with belacan or even garlic and is highly nutritious. Eat too much, however, you may end up with too much gas in your stomach which is common among beans. Once you master this dish, you can substitute the long beans with other vegetables such as cabbage, pumpkin or even “kua chye” - I am still trying to find out what’s the anglo-name for this vegetable.

This is my recipe for Long Bean Rice.

Ingredients

• 2 cups rice pre-soaked for 30 minutes (measured using the cup that comes with your rice cooker)
• About 15 pieces of long beans (cut to 2 inch lengths)
• 400 grammes of belly pork (try to get the 3-layered pork. Remove skin)
• 5 to 8 pieces dried chinese mushrooms (pre-soaked till soft. Remove from water and cut to slivers but retain water for later use)
• 30 grammes of dried prawns / shrimps (pre-soaked for 5 minutes. Remove from water but retain water for later use)
• 5 bulbs shallots (sliced thinly)
• 2 tablespoons of cooking oil (preferably palm oil)
• 3 bowls of water

Seasoning

• 4 teaspoons salt
• 1/2 teaspoon white pepper powder
• 2 teaspoon light soya sauce
• 1 tablespoon dark soya sauce
• A pinch of msg (optional)

Method

Bring water to boil. Add belly pork and let it boil till cooked. Remove pork. Cut into small pieces.

Heat oil in wok and fry shallots till golden brown. Remove fried shallots.

With remaining oil in wok, fry the cooked belly pork till beginning to brown. Remove pork. With remaining oil, fry the dried prawns and chinese mushrooms for 1 minute till fragrant. Add long beans and put back the pork into the wok and continue to stir fry for 1 more minute. Add seasoning and a little bit of water (used to soak mushrooms / dried prawns) to keep it moist.

Add pre-soaked rice into the ingredients and stir well for 1 minute.

Transfer the ingredients into rice cooker and add water till it covers rice completely just like how you usually cook rice. Turn on the rice cooker and wait for it to cook automatically.

Sprinkle fried shallots over rice before serving.

Stingrays are sometimes sold at the wet market and we buy it once in a blue moon. The most common method to cook stingrays are to grill them after marinating them in some spicy sauce. In fact, most hawkers selling grilled seafood will have stingrays amongst other seafood available.

We don’t grill our food at home because…we don’t have a grill in the first place. But what we do like is to cook the stingray with taucheo chilli and salted vegetable. The taucheo chilli gives the stingray a slight spicy taste whilst the salted vegetable lends an interesting salty twist to the dish. Taucheo is preserved soya beans which are bought from grocers in bottles. The salted vegetables mentioned are also known as kiam chye (in hokkien) or preserved mustard leaves.

Stingrays can have a rather “fishy” smell and that’s one of the reasons why it is cooked with chilli. By past experience, we find that the ones where the white-coloured flesh is riddled with black dots are tastier and have less “fishy” smell. If anyone can share the name of this specie or why it is riddled with black dots, that would be most appreciated.

This is my recipe for Stingray with Taucheo Chilli and Salted Vegetables.

Ingredients

• 400 grammes of stingray (wash thoroughly and cut to bite sizes)
• 3 to 4 red chillis (remove seeds and pound finely. Use more chilli if you like it spicier)
• 3 bulbs garlic (chopped finely)
• 4 slices of ginger
• 2 teaspoons taucheo (preserved soya beans)
• 3 to 4 leaves of salted vegetables julienned (kiam chye / preserved mustard leaves)
• 1 tablespoon cooking oil (preferably palm oil)
• 1/2 cup water

Seasoning

• Dash of white pepper
• Sugar to taste

Method

Heat oil in wok. Add chilli, garlic and ginger and stir till fragrant or slightly brown. Add taucheo and salted vegetables (preserved mustard leaves). Stir fry for 30 seconds.

Add stingray and stir till the meat is turns colour / cooked on the outside. Add water and close lid. Cook for 2 minutes on high heat (till stingray is thoroughly cooked).

Add a dash of white pepper and sugar to taste prior to serving.