Selena partnered with Betty to demonstrate in the Caring Place Community Kitchen. In this way, the participants will not feel too pressured to come out with two dishes at a meeting.

Selena made a finger food called the Oyster Jade Boat. This is a great finger food which can be served on Japanese cucumber, celery or iceberg lettuce or any kind of vegetable which can be eaten raw and has the shape which can hold some filings.

The Japanese cucumber which was used here gives this finger food a very nice crunch. This dish is perfectly name as the green in the cucumber is as green as a piece of jade and its shape is like a boat.

Ingredients

• 8 Japanese cucumbers
• 3 dried shiitake mushroom, reconstituted
• 3 button mushrooms
• 1/2 carrot
• 2 pieces of savoury pressed tofu
• 3 cloves of garlic, minced
• 1/3 lb ground pork
• 2 tablespoons rice wine
• 1 teaspoon sesame oil
• 3 tablespoons oyster sauce
• white pepper
• tomato and cilantro for garnishing

If you would like to serve this as a vegetarian dish, omit the pork and use vegetarian oyster sauce instead.

Click on the link below for the instructions.

continue reading "Oyster Jade Boat"

Vanessa and Ming, once again, demonstrated in the South Arm Community Kitchen. Vanessa made Mah Poh Tofu while Ming made some hand made noodle from scratch to be eaten with the Mah Poh Tofu.

For dessert, Vanessa made some Hong Kong style Tang Yuan, something sweet for the coming Valentine’s day which is way past by now due to our posting delays.

Mah Poh Tofu or Mapo Toufu is a szechuan cuisine which is famous for spiciness. It’s main ingredients are pork and tofu which are cooked in a spicy sauce made from szechuan pepper corns. The szechuan pepper corn is a so spicy that it will numb your mouth, hence the word “ma” in Mah Poh is taken from. There is also a legend that the name came from the lady who made famous this dish. She is an old woman with pock-marked face. You can read more about the legend from wikipedia.

Ingredients

• 1 package traditional tofu (or any hard or medium tofu)
• 1/2 lb ground pork
• 2 shallots, sliced
• 2 green onions, chopped
• Oyster sauce
• Soy sauce
• Salt
• Pepper
• Sugar
• Corn starch
• Chili Bean Sauce

Click on the link below for the instructions.

continue reading "Mah Poh Tofu"

Lan is a young Korean lady who is relatively new to our Richmond Cooking Club. She made two Korean dishes in the recent cooking club meeting. She made a Korean Tofu Pancake and a Korean Spicy Pork. It is great to learn from other cultures. We had a marvelous time.

The Korean Tofu Pancake is a vegetarian dish. It is loaded with oyster mushrooms, chives and green onions.

Ingredients

• a package of firm tofu, mashed and drain
• a package of fresh oyster mushroom, cut into small pieces.
• a bunch of chives, finely chopped
• half of a sweet red pepper, finely diced
• 1 egg, beaten
• flour for coating

Just ignore the carrots as there is a mix up while I photographed the ingredients for the dish.

Click on the link below for the instructions.

continue reading "Korean Tofu Pancake"

This is a very, very simple dish and yet is a favourite in the family.  I first learnt it on a show on the TV called Spicy Steve.  I liked that show a lot but I have not seen the show for sometime already.  Spicy Steve is a Vancouver based cook whose show focused on food from South East Asia.

I really don’t know what to call this dish.  So since this dish is so simple, I will call it by a simple name — Cold Tofu.

The ingredients are very basic — stuff an Asian kitchen will almost always have.  The Tofu has to be the smooth, soft type.  For sauce, I used a combination of the light soy sauce and sweet soy sauce.  You may substitute the sweet soy sauce with hoisin sauce or oyster sauce if you don’t have sweet soy sauce on hand. For garnishing, I used chopped green onions and fried shallot.

The two sauces goes on top first.  I suggest that you use equally amount of both sauces.

Then sprinkle the chopped onions on it …

And finally, top it with the fried shallot.  You can prepare the fried shallot yourself but I just use those that I bought pre-made from the stores.

There you go … a very simple dish.