Soya Bean Sprouts are different from Mung Bean Sprouts. The former has a big bean head whilst the latter is smallish, which is understandable because soya beans are much bigger in size compared to mung beans. In the market, mung bean sprouts (most of the time just simply called bean sprouts) are easily available but not soya bean sprouts. You will also realise that mung bean sprouts have yellow coloured head (bean) after the removal of the dark green coloured skin covering the bean. As for the soya bean sprouts, you can see them above.

Cooking time wise, soya bean sprouts take a longer time to cook due to the bigger sized bean head. In terms of taste and texture, I think soya bean sprouts are slightly heavier in taste (sweeter) and no doubt, crunchier. When you are chewing on mung bean sprouts, you practically can only feel the texture of the body rather than the bean. I think soya bean sprouts are also more nutritious as what soya beans are famed for. If you can get your hands on the ingredients, try out this simple stir fry recipe.

This is the recipe for Stir Fried Soya Bean Sprouts with Ikan Bilis Read the rest of this entry »

Watercress and Red Dates Soup is my wife’s favourite soup. It is a popular soup among the Chinese and is another one of those really simple soup to cook. You can either cook it over the stove, slow cooker or even double boiled. The ingredients used are also pretty simple and the cooking steps are suitable for beginners whilst the nutritional benefits are aplenty. Though some restaurants use the older shoots for cooking this soup, I prefer the younger shoots as they are more tender and chewable-friendly

To cook this soup, I actually boil the meat (pork) for about 1 to 2 minutes and removed the scum appearing on the surface of the boiling water to get rid of potential “unpleasant” taste. The water is thrown away and the meat is then cooked into the soup. I prefer using bony pork parts (eg. ribs, shoulder, back) for this soup but you can also use chicken parts.

As for the watercress, I will pluck the tender shoots / stem with its leaves intact and discard the main longish stems. The shoots will shrink in size upon cooking by at least 70% in volume. Hence, you might have 3 soup bowl volumes of watercress shoots but upon cooking, you will be left with approximately 1 bowl or less.

This is my recipe for Watercress and Red Dates Soup Read the rest of this entry »

Vegetarian Mixed Vegetables with Wheat Gluten! What a title! What I meant to say is that this dish is suitable for vegetarians and that it consists of mixed vegetables like carrots, broccoli, shiitake mushrooms and with the star attraction - wheat gluten or meen kan. You would have read about the ridiculously simple recipe on how to make wheat gluten in the previous post and this recipe is one where you can put your fried wheat gluten to the ultimate test of deliciousness.

You can add or substitute the choice of vegetables above with other vegetables like baby corn, straw mushrooms, button mushrooms, cauliflower and the like. The creativity is up to you really. A note for non-vegetarians - most, if not all vegetarians do not include garlic in their cooking. Shallots are used instead. So, where shallots are mentioned, you can substitute it with garlic. And yes, where oyster-flavoured vegetarian sauce is mentioned, you can use the real oyster sauce instead if you are non-vegetarian. In the picture above, the dish was cooked with garlic.

This is the recipe for Vegetarian Mixed Vegetables with Wheat Gluten Read the rest of this entry »

Wheat Gluten or called miàn jīn in Chinese (traditional : 麵筋, simplified : 面筋, literally “noodle/dough tendon”; also spelled mien chin or mien ching) is one of my favourite “vegetarian” ingredients. My mum was taught how to make wheat gluten (we call it mee kun in hokkien or meen kan in cantonese) by a neighbour in Kuching many years back. It is not as easy to get this in the market compared to tofu-based products and it is usually associated with vegetarian dishes. I will come up with a vegetarian recipe in the next post.

Upon discovering the simplicity of making the wheat gluten, I realised how much profit the manufacturers would be making. All you need is flour to knead into a dough, water to wash the dough and oil to fry the gluten. I must encourage you to make this on your own because it is absolutely easy, not to mention healthy as you are making it from your own kitchen. Moreover, it is quite an experience to make it for the first time as you will be amazed (just like me) on how the dough transforms into a rubbery texture (gluten) after washing it in running water.

This is the recipe for Wheat Dough or Mien Chin Read the rest of this entry »