Multigrain Kiampong!

Been cooking this dish for quite a while now :) It's been a main stay in our menu for a while as well ^_^. Kiampong is a Filipino-Chinese dish very similar to Paella but in an Oriental setting. Usually, Kiampong is made from combination of sticky rice and long grain rice.. with this version, I used Greenmax's Chinese Yam with Multigrain rice (combination of oats, job's tears, brown rice, sorghum rice, barley, buckwheat, pearl rice, gordon euryale seeds, and wheat). Relatively easy to prepare but will take a bit of time to cook :)

Some snapshots of the ingredients used:

Ingredients: 

2 chinese sausages, cut into quarter inch thick slices

6 dried squid (1 dried squid is about 4 inches long, cut into strips) 

6 shitake mushroom (soaked in hot water, remove stem, cut into 4 pcs, set aside the water used in soaking the mushroom)

3 cups of multigrain rice

1 can 256grams of Gulong stewed sliced pork

3.5 cups of water

fried onions flakes

roasted or fried peanuts

green onions

Steps: 

1. wash multigrain rice once, then soak the multigrain rice for 30minutes in 3.5 cups water

2. Add squid strips, shitake mushroom, and braised pork in the multigrain rice. 

3. Stir fry sausages until fragrant, add into the multigrain rice as well.

4. Mix everything well together.

5. Set rice cooker to cook for 1 hour (My rice cooker has a setting where you can set what type of rice you are cooking, so in this case, I just indicated that I'm cooking brown rice,it takes my rice cooker 2 hours to cook brown rice, so cooking time might actually depend of the type of rice cooker, regular rice cooker would probably take 1 hour to cook)

6. Stir the rice every few minutes to make sure the toppings float on top :)

7. When rice is done, garnish it with peanuts, fried onions, and green onions on top. 

Fin :)

Niratama - stirfry chives with eggs

The husband took me on a date during the Halloween vacation to celebrate our many accomplishments for the month of October 2011.  We ate at our usual cozy Japanese resto, Isshin, of course! :) but this time, instead of our usual chicken terriyaki, ebi tempura, and gyoza, I decided to skip on the gyoza and instead tried something new - Niratama - good call haha. Niratama is Nira (chives) + Tamago (egg), chives looks a bit like green onions but doesn't taste one bit like green onion - it is way way way better. I learned about chives while browsing through some Korean recipes few months ago and realized that I've already crossed paths with Chives a lot of times, chives is also called Kuchay!! - fried siopao, kuchay pie and kuchay dumplings??am not a big fan of green onions or leeks, but chives I like, no, no, I love. So, inspired by Isshin's Niratama, I tried to come up with my own version of Niratama:

Ingredients: 

240 grams of chives

3-4 eggs

2 Tbsp. sesame oil

1 Tbsp. light soy sauce

1 Tbsp. mirin

Pinch of freshly ground black pepper

Steps: 

1. Wash chives, cut into 3cm pcs, discard the bottom 2cm end

2. Lightly beat eggs

3. Add sesame oil, light soy sauce, mirin, and black pepper into eggs. 

4. Heat up wok or frying pan, medium high heat and add 1 tsp oil. 

5. When oil is hot enough, add chives  and cook for about 30 - 45 seconds

6. Reduce heat to medium. Add eggs and scramble until done. 

Fin :)

Chinese Beef Stew with Shitake Mushroom and Radish

My camera ran out of battery, took this with my camera instead :P

I got lucky at the grocery last Sunday! :) I was able to get half kilo of kien-chi also called beef shin, woot! woot! :) usually, to get beef shin, you need to be really really early at the supermarket because they sell really fast! Originally, I was thinking of cooking beef soup with radish.. but then a better idea floated in my head when I was about to boil it for soup. so what I cooked was- Beef shin stew with shitake mushroom and radish: 

A bit tedious to prepare but soooo worth it, goes well with puto.

Ingredients:

500 grams of Beef shin, sliced into cubes (2 - 3 inch cubes)

1 pc. raddish. cut into pieces.

6 pcs shitake mushroom (soak in hot water to soften, remove stem and slice each of the mushroom into 4 pcs, you can set aside some of the water used to soften for added flavor)

5 tbsp.oil

2 tbsp. chopped garlic

5 cm. cube of ginger

1.5 star anise

2 large onions

10-12 whole black peppercorns

3 tbsp. dark soy sauce

3 tbsp. light soy sauce

2 tbsp. sugar (I use brown sugar, if you're like me, you want to increase the sugar to 4 tbsp. because I so love it sweet)

1 tsp. salt

2.5 cups of water

Steps:

1. Heat oil, medium heat

2. Add in Onion, garlic, and ginger, cook until onion is light brown

3. Add beef shin, stir fry for a few minutes, until beef is cooked and light brown.

4. Add 2.5 cups of water, shitake mushroom, star anise, peppercorns, soy sauce, sugar, and salt

5. Change to low heat when it boils and cook for 2 hours or more.

6. Add radish, cook for 15 more minutes.

Fin! :)