Tau Sar Pneah (Tambun Biscuits)

Among the many varieties of local chinese biscuits, tau sar pneah is my favourite. This crumbly and fragrant biscuit when eaten freshly made is just the best, be warned to have a plate handy to catch the crumbs! At home in Penang, I was lucky enough to live close by one of the biscuit factories so always have first dibs on the fresh batch!

My attempt to make this biscuit started with a long string of disasters. Unclear instructions in the recipe, tedious skin removing process from the green beans and finally being so tired I mixed up the 2 doughs in the wrong order with a final result of extemely crumbly biscuits. However, the taste was spot on which encouraged me to try again so after another 3 hours of picking the skin off another batch of soaked green beans the results below...perfect!

The painstakingly skinned beans and fresh out of the oven!

Char Mee (Fried Egg Noodles)

Char mee in the style of Char Koay Teow, this time I was trying to make my own egg noodles with my brand new pasta maker. The noodles was easy to make and now I will no longer end up with a large amount of ready made noodles which I would have to keep eating for the next few days!

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.