Tau Foo Fah (Soya Custard)

The best tau foo fah I ever had was bought from an old lady who used to go round the housing area in Damansara Utama. She used to walk around with old fashioned wooden buckets, one on each end of a long pole balanced on her shoulders.

After trying to be lazy and using ready made organic soya milk to make tau foo fah and failing miserably twice, I decided to go the whole hog and made my own soya milk and finally managed to make the tau foo fah sucessfully.

Curry Mee

Curry mee or as the KL-ites wrongly call it Curry Laksa! Yummy mix of rice noodles with egg noodles in spicy coconut soup. The accompanying garnishes vary depending on which part of the country you come from, the Penang version (of the best one) is very distinct with it's congealed pig's blood (tuu huid), cockles and mint leaves... my version sans the pig's blood and cockles (I should be so lucky)

Char Siew Pao

Finally I managed to get my hands on the right kind of flour, which my good friend has kindly brought over from Malaysia, to try making pao. I remember watching the pao man sat on his wooden stool in the kopitiam in Pulau Tikus shaping paos, the speed in which he can churn them out is unbelievable!




Dough resting, filling and the shaped paos waiting to be steamed

Naan Bread

Baking bread is one of my favourite things, unfortunately I'm not very good at it! But I've a recipe for Naan bread that works really well. Without the authentic clay tandoori, I have to make do with a deep based frying pan and my baking sheet as a cover, all very MacGyver-ish.

Tau Cheong Bitter Gourd

Bitter Gourd is one of my favourite vegetable, not something that I would likely have in common with most people! It has a most distinct bitter taste hence the name..why else??!! Most people tend to avoid it but it does have health benefits e.g. drinking bitter gourd tea tends to lower high cholesterol levels as to wether its a long term solution or not you need to do your own research, I eat it because I do enjoy the bitter taste!

The indians have lovely recipes for this vegetable but this time I decided to make use of the tau cheong (fermented soya beans) thats been sat in the fridge for almost more than a year! So this is my Stir Fried Bitter Gourd with Tau Cheong, delicious with hot steamy rice :-)

Soya Vadai (Fritters)

I made tau foo fah and before getting there I had to make soya bean milk (tau sui) which left me with lots of soya 'waste' after blending the soya beans to get the milk. I recalled a friend of mine made good use of the leftover soya by using it to make prawn fritters so I looked up a recipe for vadai. The resulting mixture was a bit awkward as it wouldn't 'clump' together easily but once it gets into the oil for deep frying it was fine.