Bak Chang (Dumpling)

Bak Chang is tied the folklore underlying the Duan Wu Festival (Dragonboat Festival) about a famous chinese scholar and minister to the King from the southern Chu. If you want to know more WIKI it as to me Bak Chang is just simply delicious and that's all I need to know! As you can tell from all that I've said so far, when I attempted to make bak chang last year during the chang festival (as I know it) and it should come as no surprise that by the time I whipped out the bamboo leaves, I was about 2 months too late! Nevertheless, I set out to conquer the mysterious art of wrapping the chang, for this I roped in a friend who has observed her mum doing it. After much twisting and tangling and coming to the conclusion that two hands are actually not enough and that octopi (-pusses) are way much better of than humans, we managed to wrap the chang!

The change drying out after boiling for a couple of hours

The final product, unfortunately in my excitement, I 'attacked' the salted egg yolk and some of the meat before realising that I should have taken the photo first.

Roti Jala

Roti Jala is a Malay dish normally served with chicken curry. Roti Jala strangely in my house is a staple item on the Christmas menu. We use the recipe taught to us by our cookery teacher from school aka Tiger Tan, I say 'us' as cooking the Christmas lunch is a family affair, strangely too both my sisters and I were taught by the same teacher. There have been several attempts to remove it from from the menu as it is quite tedious to make and we need to start the production line early in the morning in order to finish in time for lunch. Early starts on Christmas morning is hard when you only have several hours of sleep preceeded by midnight mass and visiting my sister's godmother and some of my dad's friends till the early hours.


Roti Jala - our style is to fold into triangles and serve with chinese style chicken curry

Siew Bak (Roast Pork)

I think of Siew Bak or Siew Yuk (in cantonese) when I think of Siew Yuk Fun. The trickiest part of making the siew bak is getting the skin right, all kinds of technique can be found. The skin on my siew yok turned out ok with the skin only crispy on certain parts and really hard on some but the meaty part was delicious! One word of warning though, while is the oven, the siew yok will happily 'spray-paint' the entire inside of your oven with grease and you will end up spending lots of time trying to get it clean again... I will really have to 'gian chiak' siew bak before I try it again.

Muruku

After carrying the muruku press all the way from Malaysia from my last trip home approx 7,000 miles, I've been waiting for the oppurtunity to test it out and I did not have long to wait. One of my friends very kindly invited a group of Malaysians to have food so I immediately got to hunting down the right kind of flour, spices.


The muruku press bought from a shop in little india in Penang run by a nice man who kindly took the time to explain how the press works albeit looking sceptical that a chinese girl could cook indian food successfully. The price tag says RM35 but it was reduced after some bargaining.


The dough with all the ingredients mixed in, resting for 10 minutes as per instructions. Some other recipes that I looked at mentioned that the dough is to be cooked immediately after kneading but I will let it rest as instructed and let the results do the talking.



After overfilling the press and getting nowhere with it unless you are superman, I removed some of the dough and voila! we are in business, above is the shaped muruku ready for the pan.


Getting closer to the end here, muruku happily deep frying away, filling the kitchen with lovely smells.....


and the final product..... looks great but I'm not entirely satisfied with its crunch factor, I will probably try a different recipe next time.