This herbal chicken soup is sweet. Most herbal chicken soup can be bitter and kids do not like them. This soup, however, is sweet due to the ingredients used. With a combination of American dried fig, red dates, honey dates, gojiberries, dried longan, pei ji and yuk chuk , you can be assured of a sweet tasting soup filled with goodness. This amount of herbs used in this soup are estimates only and do not come under any special recipe from the chinese medicine store.

The herbs used are from top (clockwise) - red dates, dried longans, american dried figs, pei ji, honey dates and yuk chuk. Kei chee is not shown in the picture but you can see them floating on the 1st picture above.

This is my wife’s recipe for Herbal Chicken Soup Read the rest of this entry »

You can give me Curry Chicken with Potatoes anytime and I will gladly savour it. It’s great when eaten with rice and no less delicious when bread is dipped into it. There are many types of Curry Chicken and this is more of a crude home recipe which I experimented with from time to time.

I have always wanted to be able to cook Curry Chicken just like how the Indians do but will just have to make do with a more “Chinese” flavoured recipe for now. I think I will have to pester my Indian colleague for her home recipes.

Meanwhile, this is my own recipe for Curry Chicken with Potatoes Read the rest of this entry »

Last weekend, I was looking at my bottle of Hoi Sin Sauce and wondering what I shall do with it. With 3 chicken drumsticks available in the fridge, I decided to give the chicken a marinade and try out something new. It turned out tasty, albeit slightly charred due to the frying process. I have a feeling that the sugar content in the Hoi Sin Sauce caused the quick charring of the chicken. Perhaps, I did not coat the chicken enough with corn flour.

Anyway, the use of garlic gives the chicken a unique fragrance (unless you find garlic repulsive, which some do) which my daughter enjoyed very much. I had never seen her eating so much meat at one go! I would recommend this dish as a good finger / snack food or as an accompaniment to either rice or pasta.

This is my recipe for Garlic Hoi Sin Chicken Read the rest of this entry »

Ayam Sioh (Chicken in Spicy Tamarind Sauce) is a variant of Duck Sioh (Itik Sioh). This dish is essentially a sour and sweet based stew with a strong hint of tamarind juice (asam jawa) and ketumbar (coriander) spice. I have a feeling that this dish is a Baba-Nyonya Peranakan dish but I stand corrected. Anyway, I was introduced to this dish by my mother-in-law a couple of years back and took a liking to it due to its appetizing taste.

Thankfully, my lovely wife has inherited her mother’s recipe and over the weekend, decided to cook up this dish for Father’s Day lunch. We could not finish the dish as we used 1 whole chicken but we are not complaining because the longer this dish keeps, the tastier it gets. For better results, duck is preferred as the meat is “tougher” to withstand the marinate using tamarind juice. If you can’t find duck, try using “village / kampong” chicken or free-range chicken. Read the rest of this entry »