Hearty Dinner

I have been taking the easy way for dinner for the past few days - steamed fish, mee suah, soup and etc. So I have decided to cook a better dinner for EG on Sunday (esp. since he has been very patient bringing me shopping for almost 6 hours+ on Saturday).

I tried surfing for a few recipes on soy sauce pork belly. Everyone use slightly different ways to cook soy sauce pork. So I have decided to combine all the recipes to be my own recipe. :P. I mistakenly took down pork rib instead of pork belly from my freezer in the morning. Anyway, I assumed that the recipe for pork belly will work for pork ribs too - and I was right of course. :P

Pork Ribs

Ingredients & Seasoning

The ingredients are simple - garlics (I put a lot as I love garlics), chinese mushroom (soaked till soft and sliced), dried chili, dried cuttle fish (cut into small pieces), 2 pieces of star anise & 3 inches of cinnamon. I got the star anise & cinnamon (or kayu manis) from Giant after church today specially for this dish. For the seasoning, I mixed 2 tsp of Oyster sauce, 1 tsp of Hoisin sauce and 2 tbp of dark soy sauce.

1) Pour in the seasoning 2) Pour in water + all the other ingredients 3) Simmer for 1.5 hours 4) My yummy tao yu bak

So what's the sugar for? I followed some of the recipes online, I heat up the pan and add sugar. Once the sugar caramelised, I put in the meat and coat it with the sugar to lock the juice in (according to the online recipe :P). EG smelled the nice aroma and came in the kitchen to check it out and be the photographer. Next, I put in the seasoning, pour in water, put in all the ingredients and let it simmer for 1.5 hours to make sure the pork became real soft. I also added boiling water occasionally to make sure the gravy didn't dry up. EG commented the gravy was not thick so I add in some corn flour to thicken the gravy. And that's it!

Ingredients for stir-fry lotus root & the dish

For the vegetable dish, I have some left over lotus root from the soup yesterday. So I cleaned and cut up everything and stir fried them in the following sequence - minced garlic > carrots > mushroom > prawns > snow peas > lotus root > capscicum. And ta-daa... it's done in <5 minutes.

Now you see, now you don't

The dinner was served hot with rice. The tao yu bak tasted fantastic and the vegetable dish was still very crunchy. And as usual, EG loves the dinner - especially the tao yu bak. He loves the gravy as he said the saltiness + spiciness tasted really good. He was literally "drinking" the gravy. Funny thing is - the dried cuttlefish didn't make much difference. Maybe I should have put more.

Nom nom nom....

Next time, I'll try with the pork belly and hopefully it'll be as good as this. =)