Tau Ew Bak (豆油肉)

Otherwise known as stewed pork with soy sauce, this is one of my favourite (albeit a little unhealthy) dishes. I've recently made it with some of the more authentic ingredients, but am modifying it here to accommodate ingredients only found in Tesco.

I think this was what a senior of mine from university tried to do, it was otherwise known as Coca-Cola chicken, but the result tasted nearly exactly like tau ew bak anyway.

Ingredients:
250g chicken or pork (pork belly meat preferred but rather unhealthy)
1 teaspoon soy sauce
2 teaspoons sugar
200ml water
1 can Coca-Cola, full sugar, not diet Coke
1 teaspoon chopped ginger (Tesco sells this pre-cooked)
1 teaspoon chopped garlic (Tesco sells this pre-cooked)
1 teaspoon chopped red onion or 1/4 red onion, chopped
Salt to taste

Method:
Marinade meat with soy sauce, sugar and 1/2 can of coke. Leave to stand for 30 minutes to allow coke to flavour through and lose the bubbles.

In a heated pot, fry ginger, garlic and red onion until fragrant. Throw in the marinated meat including the liquid from the coke. Bring to a boil then add water and allow to simmer for 1-2 hours to soften the meat and reduce sauce until it is a sticky gravy. Add salt to taste if required.

Comments:
The original recipe calls for dark soy sauce, which is incredibly difficult to find here, even from an Asian supermarket. Another recipe I found called for sambal belachan which unless personally imported by friends/family from Singapore or Malaysia, is nigh impossible to get.

Watercress Soup

I'm starting a compilation of recipes for Asian cooking using non-Asian specific ingredients, or ingredients readily available in this very challenging place - UK. I reckon, if you can cook with ingredients from the local UK supermarket without resorting to an Asian supermarket, it would suffice anywhere else in the world including the US and Australia, since those stock far more Asian supplies than a regular UK supermarket.

My standard of a regular UK supermarket is a Tesco Extra right next to my house, so it may stock more than most metropolitan supermarkets, but I try to use as common ingredients as possible.

Nobody's made "The Diaspora Cookbook" just as yet - so don't steal that idea, it'll be wonderful if someone can beat me to it and come up with one, I'd definitely buy it, but in the meantime, this will have to suffice.

Watercress Soup (西阳菜汤)

Ingredients:
200g (a bunch) salad watercress - pick the kind that doesn't just contain leaves and long and stringy if possible
500ml water
2 pieces pork ribs or 2-3 chicken wings
pinch of salt

Method:
In a pot or slow cooker, bring pork ribs and water to a boil. Season with salt. Add salad watercress after soup has come to a boil and simmer on medium heat for 30 minutes.

Serve with rice or on it's own.

Apparently, the Tesco's spaghetti overcooked by 5 minutes tastes nearly exactly like thick vermicelli (粗米粉). No guarantees with any other brand but the Tesco's one seems to work nicely.

Things Other People Accomplished when they were my age...

If you are running short of things to write in your next birthday card, try this.

By my age in years, other people had already accomplished scores of the following things...

1. Ernest Hemingway published his first novel, The Sun Also Rises.
2. Charles Lindbergh became the first person to fly alone across the Atlantic, thus winning a $25,000 prize.
3. By this age, Charles Chaplin had appeared in 35 films.
4. Dr. Ludwig Zamenhof of Warsaw invented the artificial language Esperanto.
5. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. dropped out from his job at General Electric to become a full-time writer.
6. Sarah Bernhardt scored her first triumph, being asked to repeat her theatrical performance before Napoleon III.
7. Albert Einstein published five major research papers in a German physics jornal, fundamentally changing man's view of the universe and leading to such inventions as television and the atomic bomb.
8. Benjamin Franklin published the first edition of Poor Richard's Almanac, which was to play a large role in molding the diverse American character.
9. College dropout Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple Computer.
10. Napoleon Bonaparte conquered Italy.

So you see, it could potentially, with some measure of imagination, be really inspiring as the blog account might have it. Either the next few years of your life are the defining moments of your life, or it falls into becoming just another one of those humdrum times.

Too bad for me that I mark the passage of my time and my life with people. I don't think I'm the only one either. Too many of us have our lives and times defined by the people we meet, or the people that we date. From the people we hang out with, to the people we're in love with at the time. Too many times, I've heard, "No, it must have been at least xx years because I was still with so-and-so at the time." I do that too, but strange how pathetic that seems at the moment. Only one phrase is coming to mind at this time, from Avenue Q... "there is a fine, fine line. Between love, and a waste of time." And it's making me laugh.