Cooking with Mum: Red Tofu Braised Chicken

Here is my favourite everyday recipe for red tofu braised chicken. It's made out of a very hard to stomach fermented bean curd mixture, which has an extreme alcoholic pungency and eye watering taste. Considering the mild taste of every other soy product, fermented bean curd tastes like a roundhouse kick to the face. Once cooked however it turns extremely mild and makes a wonderful sauce. If you like blue cheese, you'd probably like this stuff.

Don't worry about this stuff going off, the longer it lives, the more delicious the flavour, I've had a jar for three years that was absolutely delicious. Just keep it in the fridge with the lid firmly screwed on, upside down to prevent mould growth.

With the vague proportions for the sauce, I recommend start small, maybe 4-6 cubes and half a cup of water. Once you start to dissolve the sauce down, you can thin or thicken it up as much as you want. I normally use 10-12 cubes and a cup of water, since I love the sauce on rice.The bean curd we use, normally comes with chilli added, so we don't add any extra.

Red Tofu Braised Chicken

Vague Ingredients:
1-2 tablespoons of sugar for the caraml
1/2 onion, finely diced
2-3 cloves of garlic, finely minced
500g chicken
Fermented bean curd
1/2-1 cup of water
Sugar
Chopped red chilli

1. Heat up a pot on a steady medium, splash in a tablespoon of oil and once that has heated up, throw in some sugar.

Creating the caramel, essential to thit ko

2. Continue to stir rapidly up the colour changes to a shade of caramel you find agreeable.

Woah! Action shots!

A little bit darker than this

3. Take off the heat immediately and stir in the garlic and onion, stir briskly for about a minute or two, until they have begun to soften and smell fragrant.

Go go go!

4. Throw in the chicken and cook until no paleness shows.
5. Throw in the sugar, as much bean curd as you can stand and the water. The more sauce you want, the more water and bean curd you should put. Add in a little of the liquid that the bean curd was preserved in as well for extra flavour.

So much bean curd

Give it a mush

6. Put on a lid and allow to simmer for 20-30 minutes, until the chicken has cooked through. Taste at this point and add extra bean curd, if you want a stronger taste, or more sugar if you need to balance out the flavours more.

Sticky Chicken

Every home has their own sticky chicken recipe. This is one of ours, specifically my mum's one. I have no idea how she came up with this recipe but its a cracker. Its sticky, sweet, salty, a bit sour and super garlicky! All the best things in a sticky chicken recipe.

Un/fortunately its also Vietnamese so its got fish sauce in it. You have to put it in a hot pan and it stinks up the house. I don't know what the ratios are, you just do.

Sticky Chicken

Uses: Delicious chicken for dinner, fumigation.

Ingredients:

Oil
Chicken wings/drumsticks
Fish sauce
Sugar
White Vinegar
Minced garlic

Instructions:
1. Shallow fry your chicken at a medium heat in oil, until it is this brown. Pat dry and place aside.

2. While you're waiting for your chicken to cook through and brown, mince up some garlic. Set aside.
3. Mix up at least 3 tablespoons of sugar, vinegar and fish sauce together. It should taste a lot like nuoc mam cham.
4. Brown your garlic in a large saucepan. Throw the sauce on top, avoid the fumes and when its starts bubbling like this, coat your chicken in it. Toss rapidly to ensure a good coat.

5. Serve immediately in all its garlicky goodness. No pics cause I ate them all already.

Orange and Chocolate Cake aka Jaffa Cake

"Imma make a cake tomorrow." I said to the girls as we were walking home from work.

"Vat vill you be making tomorrow?" The wonderful Mrs I asked me. Mrs I has a very thick Hungarian accent.

"I don't know." I replied thoughtfully.

I had been thinking about it all day and had hit up absolutely everything in my arsenal of food sites, all my the food blogs I frequent, my list of recipes to try on Facebook, Food52, taste.com, my collection of magazine clippings and nothing was enticing enough to try. I didn't have enough time to go shopping and buy anything else so I only had what was in my house. What to make, what to make?

I was browsing the internet when I thought, I want to make a jaffa cake, an orange and chocolate flavoured cake! A CAKE THAT HAD BOTH CHOCOLATE AND ORANGE IN IT. In my mind I had two thoughts, an orange scented light sponge coated in a chocolate ganache with candied orange slices on top or a dense chocolate cake with orange zest and juice baked inside and then doused in an orange sugar syrup.

I scoured the googles to find a recipe to inspire me. There was shit bugger all. All the recipes I found had weird stuff that I didn't have, like liquors, package orange jelly, cold mashed pumpkin, condensed milk or worse, didn't seem like it would work. So I decided to make up my own recipe!

You leave me no choice

First, I had to be consumed by doubt. I asked first Shishi, Yannikins, Dr H, VGirl, T., Lis., and L., what their thoughts on which cake I should make. Everyone but the contrary VGirl agreed that the latter of the two, the dense chocolate cake with orange juice/zest and the sugar syrup sounded like the better of the two. Yannikins thought of the little Mexican girl.

YEAH

L., was sending me lots of recipes and recommending stuff I didn't have. Shishi and Dr H., warned me that I should be careful of the balance of the sugar syrup since it could make the cake sickly sweet. They also wanted me to use dark chocolate and minimal sugar when I baked it. Dr H and Yannikins added that its pretty uncommon to see sugar syrups used on anything besides plain flavoured cakes and teacakes. Dr H was wondering why I asked Yannikins and Shishi when they don't know how to cook, but I told them that they know what they like and she agreed that Asians know what they like in a cake.

So I played around with my solid flourless chocolate and hazelnut cake, changed some of the ingredients around, added some juice, some zest, made up a syrup and bam baked it. I'm unsure if the reason why the cake batter solidified so greatly was because the chocolate cooled down too much, since most of the time I barely have the patience to allow it to cool down at all, or because I used way too much flour. It got very thick and claggy and I had to really enthusiastically fold the egg whites, so I think the cake could've been lighter and taller than what it turned out to be honest. I made a tester batch that puffed up beautifully so I think that had the majority of the egg whites in it.

It turned out very nicely I think. As a result of all the orange zest, it has a great fragrance especially when freshly baked but also as a cooled cake. Due to the high butter content its a very moist cake as well. The cake is also very fluffy despite this because of the folded egg whites. I don't think it needs any extra sugar as the syrup adds a lot extra. Mama Pham aka my mum gave me her stamp of approval when she tried some of this cake and said it smelt good, was rich and that it was just sweet enough and any sweeter and she wouldn't eat it. Its a great thing to have my mum's approval, she is highly critical of a lot of food.

Inside of the cake.

I used navel oranges in this cake because that's all I had. Valencia or any other juicing orange would be preferable because of their increased flavour/juice production. Since you're eating the zest, organic would be the way to go here. A bitter dark chocolate would be the way to go as well. You can also bake the cake at 180 for 40 minutes if you have a well controlled temperature, but I would be extremely cautious about doing so, because if it overheats, you could have an ugly cake on hand.

I brought it into work and people were raving over how light it was, the fluffiness of the cake, its great moisture, its orange flavour and that it tasted exactly like a Jaffa should. I made it for Dr. H's parents as well when we went out with VGirl, Shishi and Yannikins. I later learnt that Dr. H's dad went to work with the rest of the cake and Yannikins parents mugged him for his cake as soon as he went home. I have now got his mum's recipe for chiffon cake. I also made this for my Boyfriend's parents who made lots of excuses to have it with tea and coffee.

Orange and Chocolate cake = JAFFA CAKE

Uses: pretending to be healthy, using up oranges

Ingredients for cake:
4 eggs, separated
200g of dark or milk cooking chocolate
150g of butter, cubed
1 cup of self raising flour
2 oranges worth of zest
1/2-3/4 cup of orange juice, depends on how good your oranges are
3/4 cup of sugar

Ingredients for orange juice sugar syrup
1 cup of orange juice
1/2 cup of sugar
1/2 cup of water

Compulsory loaf of bread in background

 Instructions for cake
1. Cube your butter and break up your chocolate into small bits. Melt this all in a bowl, however you want, microwave, in a double boiler, just get it melted! I'm a fan of placing a bowl above boiling water, and allow the heat to melt it that way.

So shiny

2. Meanwhile, line a 20cm springform/normal cake tin with baking paper and separate your eggs into yolks and whites.

I couldn't find my other stainless steel mixing bowl

3. Zest your oranges, juice both of them and strain the juice. Eat the pulp, its good for you. Turn the oven to 150C.

We lost the rest of the citrus juicer a long time ago

4. When the chocolate melts, allow it to cool slightly while you make the rest of the cake.
5. Combine the yolks, sugar and zest. Beat until creamy, thick and pale.

Yes there are yolks under there

Is this upside down? Does it matter?

Oops almost forgot

6. Combine the chocolate and orange juice with the yolk mixture and stir until just combined.

It looks really gross somehow

Pretty

7. Sift the flour on top of this mixture, stir until combined. 

Bleh

Chunky

Looking gooood~

8. Whisk your egg whites until you reach soft peaks, gently fold a third of the egg whites into the cake and then fold the remaining 2/3s.

Haha I forgot to take a picture of the final batter

8. Pour into your prepared cake tin and bake for at least an hour, resist the urge to open up the oven and flip it around or poke it with a skewer too early on.

Instructions for orange juice sugar syrup
1. Wait until about 5-10 minutes before the cake comes out of the oven. Mix all of the ingredients.

Add caption

2. Heat over a steady medium-low heat, get rid of any orange foam.

Weird orange foam! Scoop and throw away!

3. Take off the heat when it thickens to 1/3 or 1/2 of original volume, or slightly thick, depends on how you like your syrup, I like mine thick and almost caramelised.

Intensely orange flavoured

4. Poke lots of holes into the top of your cake with a skewer.

So many holes. Also Siri

A hole because I ate a bit to test

Both the cakes together!

Crater face cake

5. Pour the hot syrup over the still warm cake.

Kettle Corn

I've always wondered about the Popcorn Man stall at the Jan Power Markets. They're a very distinctive red and yellow booth with bags and bags of fresh kettle, caramel and butter salted popcorn made in huge metal vats with rice bran oil and stirred with a long stick. This is their website.

I've always wondered what kettle corn tastes like since its touted as having a lightly glazed salty and sweet flavour. One day, when my Boyfriend and I were planning what to pick for a picnic at the Botanic Gardens, I decided to get some as a snack while we were shopping.

Our first kettle corn

Admittedly, our first taste of the stuff wasn't the best. Alternatively super sweet, and buttery salty, it was like someone had mixed a batch of movie popcorn and caramel corn together and not quite amalgamated the pair. We ate the entire cup but we weren't sure if we liked or disliked it, because we would get a good taste of one flavour, to have the next kernel of corn spoiled by the other flavour and so on. The popcorn itself was fantastic, crunchy, light, fluffy with a predominately lovely mushroom pieces and not many of the butterfly around.

Mushroom vs butterfly

Read up the Wiki article on it for a more in-depth understanding of the difference. It basically boils down to, mushroom are less fragile, are small/compact, tend to weight the same, have more hull pieces and are better for lots of stirring like with caramel/kettle corn. While butterfly are more tender, melt in the mouth texture, they take up a lot of space and have way less hull. Hull being that shiny brown stuff that sticks in your teeth or braces!

So I was really surprised to find myself craving it again the week. That time it was perfect! A wonderful crunchy mixture of salty/sweet caramel like salted caramel! It was amazing. Then I realised, four dollars for a cup of popcorn was ridiculous.

So then I had a brain wave. I knew that one of my friends, NZ-A, knows how to make popcorn the ol' fashioned way, with a hot oiled pan, some popcorn and a deep saucepan. If she could make it, and she said her kids loved making it, then I would do fine as a relatively solid cook. I vaguely remember seeing a packet of popcorn kernels sell quite cheaply at around $1-2 per bag. I googled quite a few recipes as well as the history of kettle corn, good work North American Dutch settlers.

The first batch I made was at my Boyfriend's house. It was terrible, I used a tiny saucepan and a quarter of the popcorn burnt with nowhere to expand into. There was a terrible charred caramel base at the bottom and despite all this, we ate it all.

That saucepan eventually came clean

Not bad looking. Noticeably smoky notes

The second batch I made, scorched the bottom of my saucepan and my mum declared it ruined. She then ate all my popcorn and said it was pretty good, she didn't like the hard kernels leftover but she still ate them. My aunt said the same thing, about how lots of fibre isn't good for her, she has diverticulitis, but she still sat there eating it whilst complaining.

Second batch. Notice the more caramel notes. More shaking required

The third batch was for night shift. This was by far, the most perfect batch I've made to date. Evenly coated, golden brown popcorn pieces with a good combination between salty and sweet. On coming home from work, my mum shoved her fist into the box and ran off to her room with about a third of the box in her hand. When I was shouting at her that it was for work and that she couldn't have any, she was yelling back at me, "JUST GIVE ME A LITTLE. ITS SO GOOD."

Dat popcorn.

Anyway, this is the slightly tweaked recipe I stole from this random blog I found.

Kettle Corn

Uses: pre picnic snacks, night shift snacks, feeling fancy with popcorn

Ingredients:

1-2 tbsp of oil, high smoke point oil is preferable
1/3 cup popping corn kernels
1/4-1/3 cup of sugar*
3/4-1tsp of salt

Ingredients.

*Brown gives a better colour, but clumps, which is hard to separate over burning hot oil. White is easy to distribute. Raw sugar is halfway between both.

Random stuff:
The biggest goddamn saucepan with a lid you have. Preferably cast iron, or something with a heavy heat retaining base. Something that doesn't burn easily.
A hot stove, like induction or gas burner. 
No loose handles.
Oven mitts or a tea towel, so you can hold down the lid without burning.

Instructions:
1. Fill up your saucepan with oil and half the salt. Heat over medium to high heat
2. Once the oil is just starting to smoke, throw in three kernels of popcorn. Put on the lid.
3. Once popped, throw in all your corn.
4. Then throw all your sugar/sugar on top, as evenly as possible
5. Put your lid back on, hold on tight and start shaking your pan. After 2-5 seconds of shaking, put back on heat for another few seconds until it starts popping.
6. Expect nothing to happen for the first 10-30 seconds? Once the kernels start popping, start shaking more vigorously, in a fancy arse tossing salad type motion. Try to do it away from you, so if the lid comes off, you don't get a face full of burning caramel.
7. Once the kernels stop popping every 1-2 seconds, take off heat and keep shaking until the popping slows down. Pop it back on the heat for another few seconds if the popping stops and once the popping restarts, keep shaking.
8. Dump in a large bowl immediately, do not keep it in the pot or it will continue to burn. Eat ASAP or it will go soggy, still delicious but not as delicious as it could be.

There are no pictures of the process because of how fast it cooks. Also my Boyfriend didn't think to help me with making this.

Also! In other news, I've risen to the top 50 of Urbanspoon's Brisbane blogs yay!

Random stats for my blog show that my first post, "Becoming a Cat Lady", is the most popular post. The next most popular food related post is my Cirque review.

The most commonly used search words to get to my blog are, "Crazy cat lady." With 56 hits.