Tuna crunch roll and Sardine roll

 

Sardine roll

 

Tuna crunch roll

What to eat on a Friday?  No meat.  Somehow I decided to make tuna crunch roll (can tuna) and sardine roll.  Sounds weird right?  Well, it turned out good.  Here is the video that I worked on.  I'm still experiencing how to show people to cook on video.  Please bear with me and I will try to improve my video.  

 

Chinese Mustard green

Nothing fancy today,  I just want to make Chinese Mustard green (Gai Choy).  CMG is another vegetable that I enjoy eating.  All you need is 5 cloves of garlic, salt, sugar, chicken stock from the soup I made and CMG.  It's that simple.  Drizzle some EVOO and garlic on high heat, once the garlic slightly turn brown add in the CMG.  Add salt and sugar and stir it.  Then add in some chicken stock and cover with lid for a minute.  Then stir until done.  Yes! It's that simple.  I served this with rice, caramelized chicken with ginger, and CMG soup with ginger.

 

 

 

Yes! With chicken and CMG, I ended up making 3 dishes.  Having soup, salty dish, and veggie dish is a Vietnamese tradition.  It's about balance.

Pea sprouts

Pea sprout is one of my favorite vegetable.  It's inexpensive and easy to make.  All you need is pea sprouts, 3 cloves of garlic, salt and oyster sauce (mushroom is optional).  Yep, it's that easy.

Tofu soup

 

 

 

 

 

Stuffed squid with pineapple glazed

Squids were stuffed with pineapple, squid head, tomato, sausage, onion and celery.  I've also seasoned my rice with parsley, smoke paprika and nutmeg in the rice cooker.

 

Thit bo luc lac

The direct translation of "thit bo luc lac" is shaking beef.  It might sound funny but it sure tastes good.  I attempted my first short video to demonstrate how to "shake" the beef.  It's not that easy to cook in front of a camera so I hope you will enjoy it and give me some feedback to better my videos in the future.

Ingredients:
-1 lb of beef tenderloin
-3/4 tbs soy sauce
-1/4 tbs fish sauce
-1/4 tsp black pepper
-1 tsp sugar
-2 cloves of garlic
-1/4 chili pepper (optional)
-shot glass of bourbon

Directions:
I recommend using beef tenderloin if you like your beef soft.  Cut the beef into cubes about 3/4 inch.  In a bowl, mash some cloves of garlic and add in soy sauce, fish sauce, black pepper, sugar, and chili pepper.  Mix the sauce, add in the beef and let it marinate for 5 minutes.  Using a wok on very high heat (try not to burn your home) add in cooking oil.  When you feel that the wok is hot, add the beef and start shaking.  Once all corner of the beef are nice and brown, add in the bourbon.  When the flame is out then the beef is cooked medium rare.  If you like your beef well-done, cook it a little longer and reduce the heat.  Have fun shaking!!

Bitter melon noodles

I was never a fan of bitter melon until recently.  When I was a child,  my mom would make bitter melon soup with meat and shrimp stuffing.  It wasn't tasty at all because it was so bitter.  My taste buds have definitely evolved over the years.  Now, not only can I eat bitter melon, I actually enjoy the bitter taste.  For tonight's dinner, I added some egg noodles to the bitter melon soup.

I first mixed the following for the stuffing: ground pork, chopped shrimp, dried fungus, shredded carrot, vermicelli, 1 egg yolk, chopped fresh onion, soy sauce, fish sauce, salt, sugar, black pepper and garlic powder.

 

With the bitter melon, cut it into 2 to 3 pieces.  Then take out seeds so that you can stuff the stuffing in.  Then  placed the bitter melon in a large pot and cooked it in my homemade shrimp and chicken stock for 1 hour on medium heat.  I seasoned it with sugar candy and onion.
While the soup is almost done, I cooked some egg noodle and placed it in a bowl.  Once the soup is done, cut the melon and place it in the bowl.  Here comes the tricky part:  In another bowl, put some soup that was just made, premium soy sauce, sugar, baby ginger and starch for the noodle sauce.  Heat up a pan on medium heat and pour the sauce until it lightly thickens.  Then last but not least, pour the sauce in the bowl that you prepared.

I garnished it with chopped cilantro and mint/cilantro oil.  Don't let the bitterness stop you from eating good food.  Happy eating!

Bibimbap

If you never heard of Daiso, you might want to go check it out because they sell lots of plates/bowls/cups for such a cheap price.  The clay pot featured above was $2 each.  I brought it not too long ago and wasn't sure what to do with it until today.  I wanted to make this Korean dish with rice and adding Korean bbq short ribs, cucumber, carrot, bean sprout, and my egg cooked sunny side up.  My uncle in-law threw a birthday party for his son and there was short ribs to take home.  I used the leftover short rib for my clay pot.

First off, I put EVOO in the clay pot and rice.  Then I placed it on the stove and set the heat on medium for 5 to 8 minutes.  I want the bottom of the rice to be lightly burnt and crunchy when you take that first bite.  Remember to not burn your rice!

The following are some veggies that I put together.  For the bean sprouts, I steamed it and season it with teriyaki sauce, sugar and sesame oil.

 

Once you prepare these ingredients, start your plating.  One of my key ingredient is the eel sauce. When you are done plating, drizzle some eel sauce and poke the egg yolk and enjoy that first bite.

At first, I called the dish clay pot because I didn't know what it was called.  Thanks to my friend Jimmy, I realized I was trying to recreate bibimbap.

Deep fried tilapia and sweet mild garlicger sauce

No meat on Fridays! No problem.  I present to you my deep fried tilapia.  There was a couple of times I bought fried fish at the Asian market home for dinner.  It was a bad idea because my car smelt oily for a week and half of the fish was soggy.  Looking back, I'm glad that I invested in a deep fryer.  It's pretty big and easy to use.  So please don't try to fry your fish in the house, invest in a deep fryer because it is so convenient and fry it outdoors.
I had the butcher clean just the stomach but keep the scales.  The scales turn very crispy once they are deep fried.  I set my deep fryer to the max at 375 degrees.  I fried the fish for about 10 to 15 minutes and placed it on a paper towel to soak the grease.  Now, the most important of this dish is the fish sauce used to dip the fish with.  Mix together the following: 1 clove of garlic and 1 ginger (same size as the garlic) mashed, 1/2 lime, 1tbs fish sauce, 3/4 tbs sugar (you can always add more sugar if you like it more sweet), and 1/4 tbs chili garlic sauce.  I would call this sauce sweet mild garlicger sauce. I hope you enjoy it.

Recreating chicken confit

I was at SaveMart and found out that chicken legs was only 47 cents lbs.  I went ahead and got 10 lbs because it was cheap.  I decided to recreate my chicken confit because I didn't like the presentation from my previous dish.  I also put extra ingredients to bring out more flavor of the chicken.  I added carrot, celery, smoked paprika and fish sauce.  I know it sounds weird with the fish sauce, but it tasted pretty good.  I also made my own gravy for my mashed potato and cilontro/mint oil for freshness.

 

 

 

Nice, tender, soft and tasty my friends....