In Singapore

No photos in this post because they are all in the camera, undownloaded, and I don't know how to download them onto this laptop we're using. But wanted to check in and say we've arrived, and we've made headway in our (OK, my) massive list of Things To Eat, and I've practised my traditional few foreign language sentences with the hawker vendors ("Ada mee rebus? Dua riggit, satu bungkus, terimah kasih*" and the usual smattering of random chinese words with English, Hokkien, Teochew and Malay added in when my memory failed). Already I've been insulted twice with regards to being Chinese - the first by one of my favorite hawker food vendors - the food is my favorite, not the vendor - who asked me if E, J and K spoke Chinese, to which I said, "no", to which she replied that I should teach them, even though I explained that there was no one to speak Chinese with back in MN, to which she still insisted that I should teach them. It is stunning how people so easily assume that because I am Chinese, the language is part of my culture. There are so many aspects of me that are Chinese, but the language isn't one of them, simply because we never spoke it in our family - only in school as as an academic subject. I feel as much affiliated with the Chinese language as a typical American person would, learning it as a foreign language "for interest". Sure, I speak it and write it, but with unnaturalness. I think of it as a skill I am glad I have, but which I did not enjoy the learning of, and of which I'm not especially proud, and that I wish people wouldn't make a big deal of. Like being licensed to drive a powered pleasure boat according to nautical rules, another bizarre skill I picked up while living in Singapore. 

Interestingly, when I first arrived in the US years ago and patronized my favorite oriental grocery store, I asked for some herbal thingy and the store clerk asked me why I was speaking English and not Chinese. "Because I'm in the US?" I wanted to reply, but instead I got all haughty and told her, with my nose in the air, "Because I. Do. Not. Speak. Chinese." I no longer retaliate in such a juvenile manner now - or lie about my inability to speak the language- but I still do roll my eyes when other Chinese folks make assumptions about how much value I place on the Chinese language as part of my personal culture.

The second insult was by one of our favorite stationery store vendors (again, the store is our favorite, not the vendor) who asked Emily to stay in Singapore and not return to the US because Singapore was better. Emily stared at her and didn't know what to say. Neither did I. How does one even respond without just passing on the insult? All very odd. Have the people of my country always been like this? 

Anyway, we're here, and the weather has been lovely. We've been to Changi Beach, Parkway Parade to meet a friend, swimming at the pool, on bus rides (which Kate, especially, loved, and said so loudly to everyone), and to the market and playgrounds countless times. I've eaten prata, roti tisu, mee hoon goreng, mee rebus, mee siam, vegetarian bee hook, chwee kueh, chee cheong fun, you tiaos, Mum's a char and I don't remember what else. Tonight, Mum is cooking her excellent beef rending for dinner. Tomorrow we're venturing out to get some administrative matters dealt with, and then some sightseeing. The worst of our jet lag is over, as is my cold. Hurrah! 

*Translation = Got mee rebus? $2, 1 packet. Thank you.

Another New Year

Happy New Year, everyone!

Yesterday was Day #1 of the Chinese New Year, and it went by in a flash. Because we're cleaning house and packing to go to Singapore this weekend, we had no decorations, no pineapple tarts, no red packets, no firecrackers, no xinyao music and no lions or dragons.

We did have clementines, though. 

An abundance of them, which is wonderfully auspicious.

While we had zero celebrations (of the noisy, jubilant, red-everywhere sort) at home, we brought the festivities to the schools! I visited Kate's, Emily's and Jenna's classes and talked to the kids about new year traditions. The respective daughter whose class it was, sat up front with me and demonstrated different lanterns and distributed clementines. It was a lot of fun, and I am always a little heartsick when I have to leave classrooms, particularly where the students are older, as in the case of Emily's class. I miss the classroom environment so much! 

That took the whole day, though, and we were all tired at the end of it. When we got home, Emily asked to please put up a little bit of decoration, so we hung up the lovely banner in the first photo that her auntie Joy made us last year. And also one red plastic lantern.

Uncle James came to have supper with us, though! So we had a kind of a reunion dinner - one entire day late - with meatloaf and brownies. Not exactly longevity noodles, but anything with chocolate in it is auspicious in my book. 

And that was the sum total of our observation of the Year of the Dragon. We arrive in Singapore on Day #6, so there will be plenty of time to catch the spirt of the new year and celebrate! 

Kateism

To Dad at the supper table: "You know, we had pancakes for breakfast and there was one left and we called it the forlorn pancake. And Emily took a picture of it!"

Cupcakes Are Messy But Fun

I wanted to avoid sewing today, so we made cupcakes. Jenna was very excited, because she adores cupcakes but Emily and Kate also joined in with gusto. And we got to use the new Kitchenaid mixer to make the cake part and the frosting.

I continue to be amazed at the girls' skill in piping. I did the white part of this cupcake, and Emily did the pink rosettes.

The most exciting part of today's baking adventure, though, was the fondant. The girls have been wanting to try (eating as well as making) fondant icing ever since they heard about it on a TV show. Kate even told me, when we asked her some months back what sort of cake she wanted for her next birthday, "A fondant cake" (I'd expected her to say "Princess" or "Fairy" or "Pink").

We made marshmallow fondant because we'd heard that it was tastier than regular fondant.

After sampling it, though, I'm convinced that if regular fondant is less tasty than this, I never want to try it. Still, the girls enjoyed eating it and playing with it. Kate wanted to collect small fondant shapes - she wasn't interested in actually using them for decoration. Here is a picture she wanted me to take of her fondant shape stash.

Here is where the fondant shapes were supposed to go - and, happily, most of them succeeded.

All in, we had a lot of fun designing cupcake toppings.

And after making them, we had a tea party and ate some.

There was an awful mess to clean up after.

We don't mind - it is evidence of children having swept, like small whirlwinds, through the kitchen one winter's day, laughing, loving, and learning, leaving good stuff in their wake.

Sesame Chicken

Something Chinese today. Not Singaporean Chinese, but Chinese nonetheless. I still remember asking Mom if she could make this. "What's sesame chicken?" was her response - she (and probably everyone else in Singapore) had never heard of it. It falls in the same category as Singapore Noodles, another interesting item on the menu of almost every Chinese restaurant here in the US, but which doesn't actually exist in Singapore. It took me the longest time to deduce what Singaporean dish it was supposed to be interpreting: depending on what sort of Chinese restaurant it is, it could be char kway teow (in the Malaysian-Chinese restaurants), fried hokkien mee (Cantonese-Chinese restaurants), curry mee (Vietnamese-Chinese restaurants) or The Thing They Teach Us To Fry Up In Homec Class (all other Chinese restaurants).

All that said, we do like sesame chicken - at least the version made by The Yellow Place, our nickname for a Vietnamese-Chinese eatery on campus. Not all sesame chickens are equal - some are so uninterestingly candy-like and flavorless that they could well be leftovers of their sweet-and-sour or lemon/orange/citrus cousins, refried and re-doused in whatever generic sauce was lying around at the time. The version we cook at home is our interpretation of Camdi's (real name of The Yellow Place) - less plum-saucey and more spicy than the typical. This recipe serves 4 -8 adults. 


Note that the picture above is the base chicken without the sauce (or sesame seeds) all over it. The most important part of this dish (at least according to us) is how the chicken is made, with its crunchy cornstarch coating. The sauce is almost an afterthought (and can be substituted with other sauces)!

MARINADE


Ingredients:

• 4 chicken breasts
• 1 egg
• 2 Tbsp light soy sauce
• 1 tsp ground black pepper
• 1/4 tsp Chinese five-spice powder
• 1 tsp rice wine
• 5-10 drops sesame oil
• 1/2tsp cornstarch + more for coating (1 cup++)

Method

1. Cut chicken against the grain, into bite-sized pieces.
2. Marinate with the above ingredients for 15 minutes (or more).
3. Coat chicken with cornstarch, shake off excess. I dump the chicken pieces in a big ziploc bag with cornstarch, seal and shake to coat.
4. Heat oil in a wok and fry (deep fry is most authentic, but I shallow-fry and turn the pieces halfway through) the chicken till golden.
5. Drain on paper towels, set aside.

SAUCE
Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup - 3/4 cup sugar (start with 1/2 cup)
• 1/5 cup white vinegar
• 1/4 cup light soy sauce
• 2 tsp oyster sauce
• 4 small cloves of garlic, minced or chopped finely
• 1 can chicken broth
• 1 tsp sesame oil
• 1/2 - 1 tsp red pepper (chilli) flakes
• 1/2 tsp ginger powder
• 1 Tbsp lightly-toasted sesame seeds
• 2-3 tsp cornstarch, dissolved in a little cool water

Method:

1. In a saucepan, fry garlic in a little oil till fragrant.
2. Mix all the other ingredients, except cornstarch, in a separate bowl and pour into saucepan. Bring to a boil. Taste and season according to preference. 
3. Dissolve cornstarch in a little water and pour into sauce. Lower heat and allow to thicken. Remove from heat.
4. When ready to serve, pour sauce on chicken and sprinkle with more sesame seeds.
5. Serve with jasmine rice. 

Note: The cornstarch coating is a very common technique in Asian cooking to keep the chicken crunchy underneath a sauce. The kids like eating just the fried chicken sauce-less (but with ketchup - !!!!!!!), so we usually only mix a small portion of the chicken with the sauce for the adults each time we serve this for a meal. Adding the sauce only when ready to serve also keeps the chicken from becoming soggy.

Lemon Pie

Most of the pies I've baked in years past are meat pies or savory pastry things that serve as the main course in a meal. Occasionally, though, I make a sweet dessert pie because the change is nice. And especially now that we live in the US, where pies are synonymous with sweet rather than savory. Also, dessert pies are about a hundred times easier to make than meat pies.

Recently, I made a lovely lemon curd from a bag of Meyer lemons I found at the supermarket. The recipe made a LOT of curd, and I didn't imagine we'd be able to eat it as a spread before it went bad, so we filled a pre baked pie crust (thank you, Karen!) and made a lemon pie. 

If I'd been bothered to, I'd have whipped real cream for the topping, but we had a tub of Cool Whip sitting in the fridge so I used that.

Emily helped me pipe the stars.

Quite good, the whole combination. It is now one of our favorites!

Tobogganing

We finally got some snow a few days ago. Not snow like we are used to in January in Minnesota, but at least it's something to play in. Today was bright and sunny and warmish so we pulled a sled out to our backyard after lunch.

Jenna did all the sledding, or tobogganing, as I grew up calling it. My experience with it growing up, I must clarify, was entirely from Enid Blyton stories, since we had zero snow in Singapore.

Kate was not interested in sledding. I think she's still young enough to be frightened of speed and high slides and other similar things out of her control. She helped pull the sled uphill and she enjoyed watching Jenna in action.

And she ate snow.

Jenna got some really good runs down our back slope. I actually became slightly worried she might slide right out to the road. She didn't, though. Here's a video of her. 

Random Scenes from December

At Kate's preschool Christmas concert, waiting to go onstage

Figuring out their new camera/videocam/game device

Coloring at the kitchen table. 100 barely-used coloring books later, we've finally learned that their favorite things to color are the bookmarks Mum draws. We got smart and scanned them so we can print them out over and over again.

30th December, 2011:

Q: What is wrong with this picture?

A:

1 I am not wearing a sweater

2 I am standing out on our deck

3 I have no shoes on (not that you can see)

4 Part of my arms are exposed

5 There is no snow on the deck

6 The grill is operational

7 All of the above

Q: What is right about this picture?

A: The awesome ribs Dave cooked in the not-quite-so-bleak midwinter. It was practically January! In Minnesota!!!!!

The Family That Chops Vegetables Together....

....will have vast quantities of soup to show for it.

Last week we made soup. Making soup is comfort cooking for me, because soup can be mass-produced not just in quantity but also in variety. My cooking philosophy is that if I have to cry while chopping onions, it might as well be for 10 as for 1. So I like to make several soups simultaneously. It's efficient, and I'm Singaporean, and Singaporeans are efficient (it's what I've heard).

The girls all wanted to help. So everyone got a cutting board and a knife befitting their skill level, and we chopped away. 

This took all of one day (but we started in the afternoon). The vegetables (and wild rice) were ziploc-ed and refrigerated for Day #2, when we cooked. 

We did the usual three soups - chilli, cream of chicken and wild rice, cream of broccoli and cauliflower, and a new recipe - beef and vegetable soup. I'd never even eaten this last variety of soup, but Dave requested it, so I found a recipe that looked tasty (i.e. has more than 10 ingredients) and tried that. Karen, Arne and Dave did the final taste test since - as I said- I had never had it, so I didn't know what it should taste like. 

Here is the recipe we used - final tasting by experienced beef-vegetable soup eaters is recommended, to finish off the seasoning at the end.

Beef Vegetable Soup 
adapted from Paula Deen's recipe here:


Ingredients

• Water (4 quarts = 16 cups)
• 1 can (14.5 oz) petite diced tomatoes
• 1.5 - 2 cups diced onion
• 3 Tbsp dried parsley
• 2 Tbsp beef bouillon (I used 3 ++ small cubes)
• 1 Tbsp Italian seasoning
• 1 Tbsp salt
• 1 Tbsp seasoned salt
• 1 Tbsp Worchestershire sauce
• 0.5 Tbsp black pepper
• 0.5 Tbsp garlic powder
• 1 tsp celery salt
• 2 bay leaves
• 2-2.5 lb beef short ribs* OR 2 -2.5 lb short ribs and stew meat, diced to 0.5"
• 1 cup thinly sliced carrots
• 1 cup diced celery
• 1 cup french beans, cut to 0.5"
• 1 cup (I used the whole can) black eyed peas
• 1 cup corn
• 1 cup butter beans
• 1 cup okra
• 1 cup diced potatoes, cooked but not soft/soggy

* The short ribs don't give as much meat and are troublesome to strip later in the cooking process, but they give a good flavour.


Method:

1. If using any stew meat at all, dice and marinate with soy sauce, pepper and dust in flour, then brown in pan to seal.
2. Put all the ingredients in the list up to and including the meat into a dutch oven and bring to a boil. Do not add in the vegetables if they are already cooked/soft. If they are fresh, they can be added into the pot at this stage.
3. Simmer for 1.5 - 2 hours, then remove the ribs, strip the meat and return to the pot, discarding the fat and bones.
4. Add in the remaining vegetables and simmer for another hour or until they are tender. Note: I put the soup in the fridge overnight for the flavors to blend, then filled a crock pot the next day and cooked for about 6 hours, seasoning to taste at the end.

I love the tip about swirling a lettuce leaf at the surface to remove oil and surplus floating herbs. Having the soup in the fridge also solidified the fat around the walls of the containers and made it easier to remove it.

I don't think I've shared our chilli recipe, so here it is. It's very subjective, and this is the first time I've ever written it down. I also make it far less spicy than I personally like, for the majority of the chilli eaters in our family. The most important things I've learned, when making chilli are

• You must not eat it on the day you make it. Leave it in the fridge overnight, or two nights before heating it up again.
• You must use cumin. Lots of it. Coriander, too.
• You must not cook it (for the first mixing, I mean - reheating is fine) in a crock pot. You must cook it over the stove and it must bubble and reduce (and evaporate), to deepen and concentrate the flavors. It is even OK if it gets a teeny bit burnt at the bottom. 

Beef and Bean Chilli 
(adapted from here):


Ingredients 

• 3 lb ground beef
• 2 large onions, diced
• 2-3 cloves of garlic, minced
• 4  14-oz cans of petite diced tomatoes (either regular or chilli-varieties), with liquid
• 2 large red peppers, diced
• 1 rib of celery
• 1 can dark red kidney beans
• 1 can black beans
• 1 can white beans
• 1 can any other beans
• Beef bouillon, to taste
• Ground/powdered cumin, to taste (start with 2Tbsp, and add generously, 1 tsp at a time)
• Chilli powder, to taste (start with 1-2 tsp)
• Ground/powdered coriander (1 tsp)
• Fresh cilantro (about 2 Tbsp)
• Salt, pepper to taste

Method

1. Brown beef and onions, drain fat.
2. Put beef and onions in dutch oven/stock pot, with other ingredients except cilantro. Do not add water yet.
3. Boil, then reduce heat to simmer for 1-2 hours, uncovered. 
4. Taste and season. Add water and bouillon if necessary.
5. In the last 20 minutes before turning heat off, add in cilantro.
6. Cool and refrigerate overnight (or longer).

The times they are a changin'

This is the scene from my kitchen sink. 


Last year there was one orchid plant (named Orchid) and I was holding my breath in case he* died. 


This year, there are five others.


From left to right, they are (and these are their real names)

• Orchid
• Stem Cutting 1 (Emily's school project)
• Stem Cutting 2 (Emily's school project)
• Grass (Emily's school project)
• Pink Flowers (from the dentist)
• African Violets (Emily's)
• Other Orchid

I would never have guessed the day would come when I'd have potted plants sitting long-term on my window ledge. Sure, I talk to them. But we don't discuss politics or anything personal like that. 






*Could be "she". We don't discuss sex**, either.
** And I mean "gender". 

Jennaism - The Currency of Dessert

We have a sort of barter system in our house with dessert. When the kids ask for dessert, we usually have them first eat fruit and vegetables. Often, the conversation goes like this:


Child: Mom/Dad, I'm done! Can I have dessert now?
Parent: Did you eat fruit?
Child: Not yet.
Parent: Well, first have a slice of apple or pear or several grapes.
Child: OK!


Tonight after supper, Jenna decided aloud, "I'll spend my pear on a cookie and my apple on a brownie."