Soon Kueh Part 2

Continuing with Soon Kueh making!

Before we dive into the actual cooking, I should probably explain what Soon Kueh(s) are, since I seemed to have left that out in Part 1. I'm Chinese, but more specifically, I'm Teochew. This is just the dialect group I belong to. The Chinese people (in Singapore and wherever) are roughly subdivided according to their specific ancestry. Another way of saying this is that some Chinese people originated from certain provinces/villages in China and some from others. Unless I remembered it wrong, the Teochew people are supposed to have come from Swatow, although I don't know the exact village my grandparents hailed from. 

One of the outward characteristics of that division into dialect groups is speaking slightly different dialects of the same written Chinese language (i.e. all the dialect groups read the same Chinese characters but pronounce them differently). Another is cuisine. Teochew cuisine is quite different from Cantonese cuisine, which is quite different from Hokkien cuisine or Shanghainese cuisine or Hainanese cuisine. As a child, I associated the different Chinese cuisines with certain (over)generalized features. Cantonese soups were very good. Hokkien food was often fried and very dark because they used dark soy sauce in their dishes. Hakka people made excellent yong tau fu (soy-based patties mixed with meat). Szechuan dishes were very spicy. The only chicken rice worth eating was made by the Hainanese. And - so what if it was healthy- Teochew food was tasteless, colourless, always steamed and please can I have mee siam or anything made by the Malay community instead?

Fast forward several decades and Teochew cuisine, even while I was still living in Singapore, really grew on me. And now, one of the girls' favourite lunch choices is Teochew rice porridge with peanuts. I didn't even make them like it - they watched me eat it, and started pilfering mouthfuls from my bowl. So I began cooking enough to ladle some out into three smaller bowls each time I had that for lunch.

Soon Kueh is a dumpling with a translucent skin made with rice flour and tapioca flour. It is one variant of a family of rice dumplings with similar skin wrappers, but filled with different things. Soon (meaning bamboo shoot)  Kueh (meaning cake) contains - among other things- bamboo shoots. Png (rice) Kueh, contains glutinous rice and peanuts. Koo-chye (chives) Kueh contains, well, chives. Tau (bean) Kueh contains mung beans. And on it goes. Soon Kueh is Teochew, it's steamed, it's healthy, and it is far from tasteless. What enlightenment one receives upon leaving the idiocy of childhood stereotypes.

And now let's return to the kitchen.

We made the filling for the Soon Kueh in Part 1. Step 2 is the making of the chilli dipping sauce.

There are many different chilli dipping sauces for even this specific Soon Kueh dish, but this is the recipe  we like. This chilli sauce is so versatile that it can be used for other dishes, including noodle stir fries. The only other chilli dipping sauce with a wider repertoire is sambal belaccan.

Step 3 was making the skin within which the filling was enclosed.

First we boiled, in a pot, 840 ml water, 100g tapioca starch, 450g rice flour and 3 Tbsp sesame oil. We stirred this a la homemade playdough, until a smooth dough formed. This was then kneaded on a mat dusted with copious amounts of tapioca flour.

Small portions were pulled off the big mound of dough and flattened into circles.

Proper circles were cut out (we used a small pot cover),

topped with filling,

folded over and the edges sealed with water.

A pastry roller cut away the excess

and the soon kueh was ready to be steamed.

I found this stage of the making to be much easier than I'd heard. It was exactly like making pasties, which meant that it was more baking than cooking. I also found it funny that we were making very traditional Asian delicacies using very modern Western equipment - Tefal pans, silicone baking mats, silicone spatulas, our Target-bought pastry roller, and my Joseph-Joseph adjustable rolling pin. Hee!

Each Soon Kueh was laid on its own little square of parchment paper greased with sesame oil, and steamed for about 5 minutes, or until the skin turned translucent.

We made almost 30 of these, along with the accompanying chilli sauce and the sweet soy sauce. Twenty of them got sent to the freezer for a rainy day (or ten). Three of them were immediately eaten and judged to be very good. 

While we were making the Soon Kueh, Mum also roasted char siew in the oven. Char siew is the roast pork we eat a lot of in Singapore. Its basting sauce contains, among other things, Hoisin sauce and Chinese five-spice.

Today we unearthed a four-year-old bag of frozen prawns from Costco, in the basement freezer. Mum was appalled as it was even older than the usual expired Asian food I regularly eat. I wasn't saving it for anything - I just hadn't the motivation to cook and eat 80 prawns all by myself. Today we fried it up with garlic, spring onions and hua-tiao jiu (the Chinese equivalent of white wine) and ate it with that Soon Kueh chilli sauce. Not bad, for four-year-old frozen seafood.

And that brings us to the end of this week's culinary adventures! Tune it next week for possibly Sugee Cake Take 2 (we bought European butter) and -dare I promise it - photos of us actually leaving the house and going to botanical places and ballparks!

Portraits of Summer

Here's another series of summer portraits from June. I'd let them sit on my dashboard and forgotten all about them till now. Everyone's bangs have grown out since then and have various hair accessories to hold them out of their respective eyes, so the kids look quite different now.

Hah! No one wears sweaters now. It feels like Singapore here, on any given day. 

No one wears leggings now, either.

Self-Therapy

There usually comes a time in one's life when childhood fears must be reckoned with. Sometimes this happens when one realizes one is no longer a child and, therefore, childhood fears are no longer relevant, let alone fashionable. Sometimes this happens because one enters therapy and, pained by the financial commitment this entails, quickly resolves to leave childish ways behind one. Sometimes (and this happens to those towards whom Fate is particularly unfeeling) those childhood fears repeatedly run up to and slap one in the face. In such cases, one might be forgiven for swearing loudly or rolling one's eyes or relocating to a different country or choosing some other avoidant sort of response.

And then there are those who grab their cameras and select, against their better judgement, what is known in psychological circles, as The Flooding Technique.

Observe:

One large green caterpillar turns up in the yard. Children rush in, screaming excitedly that Greenybig has returned. More children rush out, plus one grandmother. Subject follows in shock (what- must we play host to these things every summer? Is nowhere sacred?), lip curled in a leery, teeth-showing sneer of the kind commonly reserved for responding to pungent odors or 1980s fashion.

Eldest child says, "Can I take a photo with my (disposable) camera?"

Subject, not to be outdone by courage of six-year-old, decides to do the same. 

There. 

Now I will see it every time I log on to this blog. 

$#@#$%^&##$$!!  *

* I decline to translate.

Soon Kueh Part 1

My apologies - it seems this is turning out to be a food blog of sorts this summer. I blame it on Singaporeans getting together in the same house. Someone once said that if a Singaporean away from home claims he misses family more than food, he's lying. There is some truth to that.

When Mum and Dad began planning their trip here, Mum asked me what food I craved from home. It was hard to make a list- even a short one - because on a typical day, I don't really crave anything. I sink into valleys of sambal-belaccan* and assam** withdrawal every now and then, but on most days here, I like what I eat, and I lack for nothing. Often, just the thought of attempting to procure the ingredients to recreate some local dish I've loved in years past, is sufficient to nip any dangerous craving in the bud. But Mum's question opened possibilities. So I thought hard, and told her

• Soon Kueh
• Bak Zhang
• Popiah

Now these are all dishes with very long lists of ingredients and terribly involved processes of preparation. Everything is made from scratch, which is the way with Asian food, and there is much chopping, and wrapping, and different spices to mix in special ratios, and several stages of cooking. 

Bak Zhang, for instance, which is a glutinous rice dumping, contains cooked pork, mushrooms, chestnuts, dried shrimp, salted egg, among other things. This filling has to be cooked, stuffed into a layer of glutinous rice, packed into a pyramid made from woven banana leaves, and steamed (or is it boiled? I disremember). Takes days to make. 

And popiah, or spring roll, whose distant relative is the American egg roll, consists of a main filling of turnip (jicama), bamboo shoots, shrimp and other things that again escape my memory. It is served as a buffet of various other ingredients like sauces, vegetables, hardboiled eggs, Chinese sausages and fried fish, and people spread all these fillings on an egg roll wrapper and roll it up. It is not fried the way egg rolls are here in the US, and it is moist, dripping with sauces, and one of the most enjoyable DIY-meals to serve at a family get-together.

Much as it would have been delightful to eat those, they were far too much work. I'll wait till I get to Singapore next winter.

Now soon kueh is another dumpling-like thing I used to eat a lot of. It has a translucent skin made from rice flour and tapioca flour, and a filling containing bamboo shoots and turnip (jicama). The skin has to be made from scratch along with the filling, and the chilli dipping sauce that accompanies it. Yesterday, we began the process of making the filling.

We used (left to right): shredded jicama, bamboo shoots, dried shrimp (and the water it was soaked in to soften it), sugar, salt, pepper, boiled shitake mushrooms. We also used oyster sauce, chicken stock, and garlic.

First the garlic was fried in oil 

and then the mushrooms tossed in.

Then the drained dried shrimp was added

and then the bamboo shoots

and the jicama.

Then various seasonings were added - the water from soaking the shrimp, oyster sauce, pepper, salt, chicken stock - and left to simmer till tender.

Then it was cooled and refrigerated. 

Step two will be the making of the chilli dipping sauce - very important to get this right, or the dumplings won't be worth eating. We're doing that tomorrow. One of the ingredients is Szechuan peppercorns:

which were ground to powder

and which reminded me of another funny culinary difference in our cultures. See, I love pepper. I add it to everything I eat that isn't dessert. Dave never adds pepper to anything he eats except corn on the cob. He eats his with butter, salt and pepper. I eat mine as is. He finds it extremely odd that the only thing he adds pepper to is the one thing I don't. When Mum and Dad ate corn a few days ago, they ate theirs bare, too. I suspect many Singaporeans do, as well. After several days, it dawned on me - in Singapore, sweet corn is both a vegetable and an ingredient in desserts. We use it on shaved ice, we eat sweet corn ice cream (and yam and red beans, also) and we make all sorts of puddings with sweet corn and coconut milk and palm sugar. It's so versatile, and therefore impossible to think of as just a side vegetable, that I never associated pepper with it. Just as I don't add pepper to my desserts.

* stinky fermented shrimp-paste based chilli dipping sauce, seasoned with lime juice.

** tamarind, used in some of my favorite Malay and Indonesian dishes.

Photo of the Weekend

Penny Fifty bucks for your thoughts, Kate.

Chin Chow and Longans

Q What do Singaporeans eat on a swelteringly hot day?


A Chin Chow*. Some eat it with longans and some don't. Some drink it. Some mix it with soy milk. Some eat it in cubes, some eat it in strands and some scoop it out of a smooth mound. Some buy it from the market and some make it at home, boiled with a knot of pandan leaves** and served in a sweet syrup and ice cubes. 

In Singapore, we say it is very "cheng", like all light foods that are the antidotes to the curries and meats and other rich dishes, including ice cream (which we also eat on swelteringly hot days). 




* Grass jelly. No, it doesn't taste of grass.
** Screwpine leaves.
*** clear

Sugee Cake

Alright, so yesterday was my birthday. This is my birthday cake:

Mum baked it. This is that very, extremely, finicky, dreadfully difficult cake that is only attempted by people who like living dangerously. And only eaten by people who have good taste. It is part-wheat, part semolina, has ground almonds, millions of eggs and only the tinest bit of rising aids (excluding the eggs, I mean). The oven has to be well-behaved, the ingredients have to be "right", and you have to have an extraordinarily high amount of luck on any particular day to get it right. When it's done right, it is eaten as is, and is never sullied by frosting or icing it. It is the perfect coffee cake - buttery, almondy, smooth and yet crumbly, and so, so moist.

We knew we were setting ourselves up for a fall the minute we decided to attempt it here in Minnesota. So many things against us at the outset - wrong butter being one. If you've eaten (and baked with) butter from Europe or Australia like we have in Singapore, you'll know that this "sweet cream" thingy we've got in the US is bizarre at best. It's pale, it's heavy, it isn't good for pie crusts, it isn't as fattening (which is not a bad thing), it doesn't melt at as low a temperature and it doesn't taste anything like the lovely, smooth, tasty golden stuff we've grown up with.

When we began whipping the butter, we realized it was going to take a small miracle to get this cake anywhere close to Chin Mee Chin's (best store-bought), let alone Mum's version when she baked it back home. "Will it get any fluffier?" Mum asked me hopefully. "Nope. This is as good as this butter gets."

Fast forward half an hour and we're staring at the cake through the oven door.

"Look, Ma! It rose a bit!"

Mum said, "It's not what the outside looks like. It's the inside that matters."

Cryptic, until you cut into it and see the dense layer of semolina/almonds sinking to the bottom.

Back in Singapore, it is not unusual for this to happen, particularly if one's oven is not quite seasoned. In those cases, at least the cake still tastes gorgeous.

Today's, though, tasted like eggs. And smelt like eggs. Not a whiff of the buttery, almondy scent that we loved so much as kids. Utterly and completely different.

"Hm." said Mum, succinctly. "Not quite right, and yet not quite wrong."

That's what culinary cultural differences looks like, people. Same recipe, totally different interpretation. We still like it, though, because sugee cake is sugee cake. Yum. 

Swimming Lessons

The girls finished their fortnight's course of swimming lessons last week. Each morning from 9 to 10 am, we were at the pool. On one of those mornings, I brought our camera and took some photos.

Here is Emily swimming on her front. This was halfway though the course and she still had on her floats. By the end of the course, she'd taken them off.

Here she is on her back.

And here she is, resting.

Here's Jenna (in light pink, facing the camera), bouncing on the platform.

You can also see Kate, towards the bottom of this picture, being coaxed from the wall by her teacher.

Jenna is winning her races! That's her with the purple noodle swimming away

and back again.

And here's Kate, who protested vehemently at being made to join her class, five out of the seven sessions. She loved to recount the fun she had when we got home each morning, but was never quite happy at the moment of actual separation at the pool's edge. 

Here she is jumping in.

She's doing the Monkey-

Tree-

Soldier (and look, there's Mum on the gallery!) routine

and swimming with the noodle.

And smiling.

Not sure whether to have them continue in the fall, given that everyone is starting some form of new school experience then. I, of course, had to endure the misery of watching them swim while being made to sit in the gallery, fully-clothed and deeply jealous. I don't know if I can do this again quite so soon,  sitting so close to the object of my covetousness. Especially now that we're in the middle of a most delightful heat wave, the likes of which even Singapore has not experienced. And no, it isn't "just dry heat". We're walking around drenched in sweat. Mum and Dad said, "Wah, worse than Singapore." So you Singaporean readers who are unhappy about the heat back home - sorry, but you've lost your bragging rights. We win. Only the middle of the sun could be hotter than here right now.