Tang yuan, fermented rice and egg drop sweet soup ??????

Tang Yuan ?? are boiled soft chewy balls normally made with glutinous rice flour.

Today is the last day (day 15) of Chinese New Year called Yuan Xiao Festival ???. It's also a full moon day today. CNY starts on the 1st day of lunar month and end on full moon. To end this festive season, many Chinese will eat soft chewy tang yuan. Most people will have the sweet type but savoury ones are also

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Taiwanese meat and mushroom sauce ??????

?????? - Tai Shi Xiang Gu Rou Zao

This is Chinese spag bog sauce Taiwanese style. The flavour is similar to this chunky style recipe.

Cheap, flavourful and very versatile, this sauce is great with plain rice, any noodles (dry or soup), stir fries vegetables or serve with plain rice cake. I normally make a big batch, store some in fridge for up to a week or freeze till ready to use. Hard boiled

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Pumpkin pudding ????

This is a refreshing pudding and easy to make. The mandarin peel makes the pudding quite fragrance.

Pumpkin skin is quite tough to peel. I cooked the pumpkin with the skin on, once cooked the skin will become very soft. For this recipe I cooked about 450g of de-seeded pumpkin with skin, wrapped in baking paper then put in the microwave on high for about 12 - 15minutes (time depends on micro

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Back to basics - Homemade five spice powder ?????

Chinese five spice is a classic flavouring in many Chinese cooking. I have bought and used many different brands of five spice powder. I noticed they all smell different and some didn't have much aroma at all.

Though it is called five spice, it is not a concrete rule to use only five type of spices. Five spice powder can contain 5 or more spices in any proportions. Common spices used can be

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Homemade sweet fermented rice ???

Fermenting cooked rice is a very old Chinese, Japanese, Korean and other S E Asians tradition, the main use is to make rice wine. Fresh partially fermented rice is very sweet, great to eat as it is like a rice pudding or use for cooking.

In Chinese sweet fermented rice is called ??? 'tian jiu niang' or ?? 'lao zao'. This is not rice pulp after rice wine is filtered. The cooked rice is only

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CNY 7th day

Happy Birthday to all!

It's the 7th day of CNY again. In Chinese tradition it's everybody's birthday. We called today ??, reads as 'Ren le' in Mandarin or 'Yan Yak' in Cantonese, literally means 'people's day'.

See previous post and some recipes related to today celebration like yu san and 7 ingredients soup and the reasons why they are selected as special for Ren le.

For a change I am going

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Golden pumpkin cake

Golden Pumpkin Cake ?????

One of Cantonese favourite Chinese New Year's cake is lo bak goh (turnip or mooli cake). This year I subbed mooli with pumpkin. The cake has a mild sweetness and lovely pumpkin flavour. It has a nice golden colour. Gold or golden colour is auspicious during CNY to symbolise wealth and prosperity. So why not try this to celebrate with friends and family. I know it's a

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