Krop Knao aka Med Kanoon - Dec. 24, 2009

I found this while cleaning out my external hard drive. I totally forgot that we didn't blog about this, even though we blogged about the hot pot dinner. So continuing with the random tidbits, here's the third one.

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Krop Knao is a Thai dessert, made of mung beans, sugar, coconut milk and egg yolk. In Thai, the dessert is called med kanoon, whereas the Cambodians call it krop knao. It doesn't look the best. Okay, so they look like yellow turds - sweet and sticky yellow turds. Mmm.. very appetizing. Hahaa!

This is another dish my mom makes without a recipe. When she cooks and bakes, she doesn’t necessarily know the exact ingredients and measurements, but she does know how it’s supposed to look and feel before/when she cooks and bakes.

The recipe is taken from Thai Sweet Taste, since my mom doesn’t know how much she put. I asked my mom to look at the recipe on the blog and confirm the measurements. “I don’t know. Depends on how much you want to make,” she answered. I added two additional ingredients to the recipe and changed the steps up a bit because that’s the way my mom did it.

For the mung bean:

450g Yellow Mung Beans

200g Sugar

400g Coconut Milk           

½ Teaspoon Salt

2 Drops of Rose Extract/Water

5 Egg Yolks

For the syrup:

3 cups Sugar

2 cups Water

To prepare the mung beans, soak it in water for 2 hours. Then steam the mung beans until cooked. While the mung beans steam, boil some of the coconut milk with the sugar until it becomes as sticky and thick as liquid honey. Cool the coconut syrup for a few minutes.

Once the mung beans are cooked, mash (or blend it in a blender) and then mix them with the coconut syrup, the remaining coconut milk, salt, and rose extract. If you like the mung beans smoother, mash it more. You can add more or less drops of rose extract, depending on how fragrant you like it. Same thing applies to sugar. If you like it a bit sweeter, or less, just adjust the amount – but remember, this is a dessert. 

Separate the egg yolks from the egg whites and scramble it. Set the scrambled yolks aside.

Prepare the syrup by simmering the sugar and water in a deep pot on medium-high heat until its consistency is a bit thicker than syrup. My mom says that she tests the syrup by adding a drop of yolk. If the drop of yolk spreads out and doesn’t cook quick enough, then the syrup is not thick and/or hot enough.

You’re ready to start dipping and cooking the mung bean pellets when the drop of yolk holds it’s shape and cooks.

While the syrup gently simmers to the right consistency, you can form the mung beans into small pellets. Then when the syrup is ready, take the mung bean pellets, dip it in the egg yolk and then drop them into the simmering syrup. They should float up pretty quickly. Once the yolk-dipped mung bean pellets start floating, give it an extra 30 seconds before taking them out. You can serve them right away or throw them in the fridge to enjoy later.

Sometimes my mom takes some syrup and mixes it with a few drops of rose extract/water, then pours some of the rose scented syrup onto the cooked pellets.

Black Bean Spareribs - Nov. 8th, 2010

Leftovers. I don’t mind them – especially when we get to take home leftovers from dim sum. But for some reason, there are certain dishes that is never left over at the end of the meal. For myself, one of the dishes is the black bean spare ribs. Our family rarely orders steamed black bean spareribs (aka pai gwat), which is sad because I really like the dish. The main reason we rarely order the dish is because my mom claims that it’s easy to make. Damn!

Well, pork ribs were on sale a few weeks ago, so we bought it, searched up a recipe online and then began to make it. My mom used the recipe as a guideline. This is my mom’s made up recipe.

2 pounds pork spareribs

2 tablespoons fermented black beans

A few garlic cloves, minced

1 teaspoon minced ginger

2 tablespoons dark soy sauce

2 teaspoons light soy sauce

1 tablespoon oyster sauce

1½ teaspoon sugar

1 tablespoon Chinese cooking wine

A few drops of sesame oil

1½ tablespoon baking powder 

A small chili pepper, finely minced (we used half of one of my dad’s bird eye chili) 

My mom chopped up the pork spareribs into smaller chunks, minced the garlic, soaked, drained and minced the black beans. It was all thrown into a large container.

The rest of the ingredients, except the baking powder, were mixed into the spareribs in the container. Since we didn’t want to eat it that night, the spareribs were thrown into the fridge to marinate over night. Alternately, you can marinate the spareribs (including the baking powder) for 3 hours before cooking. In our case, the baking powder was mixed into the marinated spareribs and thrown back into the fridge.

My mom stir fried the marinated black bean spareribs with some vegetable oil and then served with steamed rice. Because we didn’t exactly follow the recipe, a few things tasted off. My mom added too much ginger so the ginger overpowered the stink of the garlic. Also, I thought that there wasn’t enough sesame oil. Something was missing from the dish though. I can't put my finger on it. Anyway, it was pretty good. Meh.

Random Tidbits: Part 2 - Quick and Easy Meals

When you don’t have bread to make sandwiches, crackers to eat with the cheese in the fridge, and instant noodles other quick snack/meal options, what would you do – other than ordering pizza or going out to eat? The solution? Pancakes! Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there are other answers but I was craving pancakes that day.

Lucy can whip up batches of pancakes in her sleep. She’s always been able to do it since we were kids. I, on the other hand, need a recipe to follow. I’m not sure where this recipe came from, but we’ve been using it for years!

I’ve met some people who, for some reason, can’t and don’t know how to make pancakes. Even when they use the pancake mixes and follow the instructions, they still don’t know how to cook it properly. I love my pancakes with a crispy crust (which is essentially fried in butter), so I always add a bit more butter than I need. On a medium-high heated griddle, cook it until bubbles start popping and the edges start cooking and no longer look like a liquid batter. You can check the bottoms of the pancakes to make sure you have the right heat. The pancakes should be ready to flip after about 5 minutes.

I made the pancakes for lunch and ate them with peanut butter, ripe bananas and a butter-flavoured syrup. I was too hungry to take a picture of the yummy mess. Chasing it down with milk or HK-style milk tea is a perfect ending to the quick meal. Pancakes make a really quick and cheap dinner, too!

Another cheap and quick meal option is a Cambodian dish called Loc Lac. Lucy wrote about this before. I’ve read that it’s actually a Vietnamese dish, but at this point, the origins of the dish are not important.

This is a summer dish in our family, because that’s when vegetables are fresh and abundant. Loc lac (or lok lak) is usually made by stir frying slices of beef and onions in oyster sauce and a bit of dark soy sauce. It’s served with lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, fried eggs, and a dipping sauce made of white vinegar and (black or white) pepper. For some reason, the beef was cubed this time. This dish can usually be made within 20 minutes. Nice and easy, right?

If you like seafood instead, try some fried fish in ginger sauce. My grandpa really likes this and often brings over fish for my parents to make for lunch. I think the fish we usually use is turbot.

Once defrosted, the fish was rinsed and then patted dry with a paper towel. It was then dunked in cornstarch or flour before being shallow fried. Once it the fish was nice and golden brown on both sides, my parents took the fish out and set it aside. Most of the oil was drained out before sliced ginger was briefly fried until aromatic. Then garlic is added along with a slurry of oyster sauce, sugar, water and cornstarch. At the end, green onion gets thrown into the sauce. The ginger and green onion sauce was hen added on top of the fried fish and is served with plain steamed rice. If you decide to make this, be warned that it makes the house smelly.

Random Tidbits: Part 1 - Two Sweet

There are a bunch of random meals that we haven’t written about yet, so I’ll write about them all in a few parts called Random Tidbits.

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A few weeks ago, most of our extended family gathered at my aunt’s house for a dinner of steamed crabs. What I want to focus on, though, is what we had for dessert. Firstly, we had sesame balls filled with red bean paste. Yup, the same stuff you can find during dim sum. These are like the fried versions of tangyuan.



My mom has always wanted to try making these. I was hoping this would be a home run right off the bat.



For the red bean filling, we soaked the red beans for a bit before boiling it in a pot. Once cooked, they were drained and mashed up with sugar and water. The dough was made from glutinous rice flour, sugar, and both boiling and warm water. The dough was hard to handle because it broke when you tried to stretch and form it around the filling.



We tried to fry up a few small ones to see how they turned out. The filling was too dry and was hardly a paste, but rather a dry mash of sweet red beans. The dough came out hard because the dough wasn’t thick enough.



Adjustments to both the filling and the way the sesame balls were made, then deep fried. In the end, we had a two plates piled high with sesame balls that were so-so. We still couldn’t achieve the thickness to the dough and get the soft cooked sweet glutinous rice flour. The filling wasn’t moist enough either. Next time, we will definitely have to look up a recipe online.



The funny thing was that we made these sesame balls before our steamed crab dinner. No one ruined their appetite for dinner though, cause let's face it, the sesame balls were disappointing.



Once all the mess from dinner was cleaned up, a chocolate cake from T&T was brought out. The cake was for Jimmy’s belated birthday. Lucy said that the cake was a chocolate ganache cake, but the cake was actually chocolate mousse.



The chocolate mousse cake wasn’t overly sweet. In fact, the chocolate cake base was probably sweeter than the mousse itself. At first, the cake felt pretty light. The airy mousse was in a perfect balance with the light chocolate cake base.



The chocolate mousse cake felt like an anvil in my stomach after a few minutes, though. Milk would’ve helped, but we had something better: tea. Hot Oolong tea, that was pretty strong, helped cut the heaviness of the mousse.



At the end of the night, I probably ended up drinking a full pot of tea and ate three slices of cake. No wonder I felt so sluggish afterwards. Oops.