Roast Chicken

Interesting – I’ve never come across any instructions on roasting chicken that involve covering the chicken in a cloth soaked in oil. Also, most standard directions for testing doneness simply tell you to check if the juices run clear, rather than what is stated below.

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Fried Chicken Superb

The use of cheese makes this an interesting recipe for the 1950s; even today, many Asians are lactose-intolerant. Even more interesting are the variations: one using cornflakes – a modern, processed, consumer food product, and the other using curry powder. I wonder if the curry style version was a Singapore invention? Then again, curry was [...]

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Oven-easy Chicken

Oven-cooking was probably something my grandmother first learn in YWCA cooking classes in the 1930s. Chinese, Peranakan and Malay cooking didn’t (and still doesn’t) make use of the technology of the oven. Perhaps because of this early influence on grandmother’s cooking, which even pre-dates the nonya dishes learnt from her mother-in-law, we’ve always had a [...]

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Timpra – Chicken or Dried Prawns

‘Timpra’ is also spelt ‘tempra’, and in The New Mrs Lee’s Cookbook Vol. 2: Straits Heritage Cuisine, the sourness in the dish comes from lime juice rather than vinegar.

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Chicken – fried

After that long series of poh piah postings, let’s move on to some chicken recipes.
This one seems straightforward enough, but there’s probably some skill involved in doing good fried chicken – probably to do with getting the correct temperature of the oil.

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Bee Cheo

These days, we’re most likely to buy our sweet flour sauce, bee cheo, ready-made from the shops. As an essential ingredient for poh piah, my grandmother would always insist on getting Buddha brand, which isn’t that easily available in all supermarkets – try the wet market provision store.
Anyway to make your own bee cheo from [...]

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“Sak luk” = buah keras = candlenut

I have finally conclusively identified the mysterious sak luk ingredient. My hunch proved to be correct.
This is what I’ve put up on the ‘Unfamiliar Ingredients’ page:
sak luk (Cantonese) – solved: 18.5.07
= candlenut/buah keras
= 石栗果 (Cantonese: sek6 leot6 gwo2/ Mandarin: shi2 li4 guo3)
= also known as 石古仔 [used in Patsie Cheong's bilingual English/Chinese Malaysian recipe books]
My [...]

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Poh Piah Filling – instructions

The ingredients for filling and egg skin one more time! However, this time there are finally instructions on how to prepare the filling.
Notes:
- the pork is specifically ’sam chang’, the pork with fatty layers which make it tender and juicy :),
- ‘tau cheong’ (Cantonese) is used in the list of ingredients here, but [...]

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