Sweet Soy Braised Pork Belly 红烧五花肉

红烧肉

It took me hours to prepare this Sweet Soy Braised Pork Belly, I ate a few pieces when it was ready, gave a few more to the neighbour's cat and offered the rest (about 1 kg) to the cleaners working outside in the garden. It must have made their day because they usually do not get to eat much meat in their very poor and simple diets. Tant mieux.

Why this waste? The meat was delicious and I've been having such a craving for it. But it's fattening and I've been to quite a number of buffets lately with another one scheduled for tomorrow. Nobody else in the family likes to eat their meat sweet and this fat, so better it went to the poor folks' stomachs than mine.

五花肉fresh from the supermarket

I've been dying to buy the pork belly they were selling in my supermarket as I find the Chinese name 五花肉 (5-flower meat) so enticing. Then I've been reading Ken Hom's A Taste of China cook book and have been dying to try out his pork dishes. So I combined 2 different recipes and cooked this dish, using the method from recipe 1 (liangban rou) and the ingredients from recipe 2 (dongpo rou).

I didn't throw away the stock in which the pork had simmered for an hour and a half, using it to make a hot and sour soup the next day (after I've removed the fat, of course). Didn't answer Hub when he asked me why the soup was particularly tasty that evening, he probably would have had a heart attack if he had known.

Sweet Soy Braised Pork Belly (loosely adapted from Ken Hom's A Taste of China) :

1 kg pork belly

1 small onion or 6 whole spring onions

half a leek

a large piece of fresh ginger (sliced largely)

1 tbsp salt

peanut oil

3 cloves garlic (chopped)

one piece fresh ginger (chopped)

125g rock sugar

125ml dark soy sauce

2 tbsp light soy sauce

125ml rice wine

125ml water

Simmering in a pot of water

Bring a big pot of water to boil and put in the pork belly (either whole piece or sliced into large pieces), onion, leek, ginger and salt. Cover and simmer for an hour and a half. Remove the pork belly and set aside, allowing it to cool before slicing it into smaller pieces.

Cooked pork belly

In another pot, heat up a little peanut oil and fry the ginger and garlic till fragrant. Stir in the sugar and sauce ingredients and add the pork belly into the pan. Cover and simmer for another 30 minutes or more. Make sure that the meat doesn't dry out due to exposure to the air. It should be very tender, sweet, slightly salty and make you want to eat a lot of rice or mantous with it.

I wouldn't replace the rock sugar with normal sugar as the former gives a glaze to the meat that the latter wouldn't be able to.

Serve hot or at room temperature with the braising liquid over the meat. Goes really well with above-mentioned white rice or steamed buns.

Bruschetta and Tomato Tart

Tomato Tart

I have not read Amy Tan (e.g. "Joy Luck Club") for a number of years and decided all of a sudden to check her out again. Ordered two of her latest books ("Saving Fish from Drowning" and "The Opposite of Fate") one of which is an autobiography of sorts.

I am drawn to her writings because I am "western-educated" like the writer, but we also grew up in Chinese families with mothers who were superstitious and who often felt it necessary to warn us against all the dangers that could befall us if we do or do not do certain things; Mothers who believed in the supernatural and the afterlife; who believed in fate and yet had faith that we (the children) were destined for greater things.

As I was reading Tan, I shudder over her account of the Ouija board that she would use so often to help her mum obtain answers to certain dilemmas in life. To those who have not heard stories about the ouija from their mums, it would just be another board game from the Parker Brothers, but I still remember what mine had told me of the spirits who had been summoned and who wouldn't leave in peace. I am reasonably logical and I believe that everything in life could have a scientific explanation, but I also feel that there is room for the unexplained, my upbringing having planted more than the seed of doubt (in the absolute nature of the former).

Do you believe in premonitions and the afterlife? Tan's story about how her friend Pete dreamt of his own death before it happened was eerie, but unlike Hub who had been brought up to not believe in spirits and in the supernatural and who would without any doubt dismiss it as utter rubbish, I, not for the first time in my life, spent some time wondering about the mysteries of life and how one's belief is so shaped by one's upbringing. I also wonder why we see or at least feel spirits so easily where I came from, but wouldn't even think of it where I'm living in now. The only ghost in these parts as we know is the Holy Ghost.

Hub thinks that seeing is believing, but isn't it also true that if you don't believe you may not see?

Anyway that's what I've been up to lately, finding yet another excuse to not fold the mountain of clothes that I've washed and dried in the past 2 weeks. I read, I muse, I cook and I eat.

I've been having a love affair with something I usually refuse to eat i.e. raw tomatoes. I pick out tomatoes in my salad, I hate tomato ketchup and will only eat tomatoes in the form of home-made tomato sauce. But I love Bruschetta. And after our recent weekend in the Piedmont, I especially love my bruschetta when it's made with freshly baked foccacia.

Once I got started with the olive oil, garlic and herb-marinated tomatoes, I decided to marry them with my beloved puff pastry and so we had Tomato Tart for tea yesterday. Yum yum...

The Tomato Dip/Filling :

500g of ripe cherry tomatoes (halved or quartered according to their size)

good-quality extra virgin olive oil (enough to cover the tomatoes)

2 large garlic cloves (bashed)

fresh rosemary and basil leaves

a pinch of ground black pepper

salt to taste (only just before serving*)

freshly-baked foccacia

Put everything together in a bowl (except the salt - or it'll drain the juice out of the tomatoes) and marinate for a few hours before serving. Cover with clingwrap. Sprinkle in the salt just before serving. Goes really well with freshly toasted country bread or freshly-baked foccacia. I used Buitoni's ready-made foccacia dough and improved it with salt, olive oil and rosemary before baking it in a very hot oven for 10-12 minutes. My guests at my last class lunch seemed to love it.

For the tomato tart, heat the oven to 180°C and bake the puff pastry (bords rolled inwards and dough pricked all over with a fork) for 10 minutes. Remove from the oven and spread the tomato filling (minus the juice) on it. Return to the oven for another 10 minutes. Serve hot.

More Cook Books

The current stockpile, missing Ken Hom's Taste of China which is in the WC, like mum said, what goes in has to come out

I knew that I had bought a few cook books recently, though I only realised how many when they started arriving one after the other in the past 2 weeks and fill up the house with boxes and bubble envelopes. On last count, they were 12. Where am I going to find the space to store them and the time to read them?

Still sous cellophane

Steamed Crab Claw Hor Fun

Steamed Crab Claw Hor Fun

I made Vietnamese Pho yesterday and had some soup and flat rice noodles left over. That gave me the idea to put that hor fun in a steaming plate, top it with crab claws, ginger, garlic, the stock, some leafy greens, fresh chilli, and some sauce (e.g. light and dark soy, Chinese cooking wine, sugar, old vinegar, sesame oil, corn starch...) and steam everything for dinner.

I would have added fermented black beans if I hadn't used up my last batch. Anyway, it was a quick and nice Steamed Crab Claw Hor Fun for a weekday dinner. And will leave me some time to read this erotic bestseller written by an Italian teenager Melissa P. exposing her intense and shocking sexual experiences in "One Hundred Strokes of the Brush before Bed".

Grilled Scallops with Crema Balsamica

Grilled Scallops with Crema Balsamica

I'm tired after quite a long day and had to get dinner out quickly. Hub and the Teenager were at the Golf Club all afternoon sitting for their golf test and I have started reading a new book - James Salant's "Leaving Dirty Jersey : A Crystal Meth Memoir". Time flies when you are reading a book...

Made the Babies Spaghetti alla Carbonara, a Potato and Leek Soup for the Teenager and then quickly churned out a few half-shell Grilled Scallops with Crema Balsamica for Hub and myself. They were simple and delicious.

Hub ate his scallops and suddenly said that we should have dinner en amoureux this weekend at a good restaurant. :-)

New Cookbooks

The Complete Robuchon (in English)

Every now and then, I feel the need to buy a cook book - though in reality I hardly ever read one. It's like my collection of high heels, just in case I need one, I prefer to have them in the waiting.

And sometimes I buy a cook book because I like its pictures, sometimes because I fantasize about cooking its dishes (e.g. my African collection of recipes). And ça m'est arrivé to buy a cook book because it was written by a big name - as if he's not rich enough already and I had to contribute to his wealth.

Recently I bought a Chinese cook book written by Huang Ching-He because 1) she's pretty 2) BBC endorsed her and 3) the photos were nice. Though after discovering that her roots were Taiwanese and therefore Fukianese, I lost a little of my enthusiasm. If you go by my Fukianese mom's culinary skills, you'll understand why (Dad, don't you go snitch on me!). I only swear by Cantonese cuisine, I'm afraid.

But I'm sure that my "The Complete Robuchon" had to be a good buy. If the dishes at L'Atelier in Paris were any indication, the man's a genius in the kitchen. The cook book doesn't have any pictures, but from the quick glimpse I had of it, it contains most of the French dishes that one would need to know how to make - sort of a deluxe version of Hub's favourite Ginette Mathiot ("Je sais cuisiner").

I would have preferred the French version, but the English version was cheaper (well it's the crisis, I have to save where I can...). In my experience (e.g. after Ducasse in English), French would be more comprehensible when the cooking's from a French chef. With regard to the ingredients and the cooking techniques, of course. Now I have to find some space in the bookshelf for the books, the DVDs have taken up most of the space...

Ducasse and Other Reads

Country living makes you look forward to receiving mail (parcels, not bills, of course) with manic joy. And one of the ways of keeping said joy flowing is to spend quite a bit of time on the Net and zapping the credit card liberally while you're at it.

One should be on pretty friendly terms with one's postman in such a situation, but of course not only I've never met mine, I'm sure he or she only comes by once a week since if there's mail in the box they always seem to come all at the same time - once a week. In any case, here in Italy most parcels seem to be delivered separately from the letters and since I'm digressing I might as well mention that the parcel delivery guys all seem to chain-smoke in the van and like to drive into one of those big rocks in my courtyard while they are backing out.

The last objects of my joy included a 15ft trampoline, an Intex pool of similar dimensions, the complete works of Shakespeare and J. Austen, a Flower Drum Song DVD, another Wodehouse book and ta-da - Ducasse's Culinary Encyclopedia.

Only mistake I've made was having bought the English version of the gem. French cuisine, like Frenchmen, is still best savoured in French.

More Cook Books

Thought I'd take a break from my Singapore Chronicles to mention that I've finally received my huge book order from Amazon.co.uk. Among them, 2 books from P.G. Wodehouse, the last Harry Potter and notably 3 cookbooks - Reinventing French Cuisine by Pierre Gagnaire, Recipes from a 3 Star Chef by Gordon Ramsay and Wok & Co : the very best of Ken Hom.

Unfortunately the book by Alain Ducasse was out of stock AFTER I've ordered it and I'll have to find it somewhere else now.

I'm not one to follow any recipe religiously, but like Eldest Son I like to look at books with pictures and hopefully find inspiration from them. So what should I cook for dinner tonight?

Thank you for the book

I drove out of the house yesterday and saw that there was a packet sticking out of my letter box. Yippee - mail! I'm a sucker for mail, used to have 40 penpals from all over the world when I was a teenager so that there would always be a letter waiting for me in the letter box.

It was from Amazon. Hmm...didn't order anything from them lately and in any case it was addressed to both Hubby and myself. Had to be a present.

And as I've guessed it right, it was from the Schwarzs. To thank us for our sans-serviette hospitality the week before. It was a book by Hervé THIS : Casseroles & Éprouvettes, about the Science of Food.

When they were around, I had mentioned that cooking is not just an art, but also a science, that I'm still trying to figure out the latter and how it could help me better understand my food and cook it better. They knew of this book, so voilà the book aussitôt mentionné aussitôt reçu. Time for some heavy reading.

Thank you very much B and F for the book and the next time you visit us, I'll work on making sure that I receive an equally interesting gift :-).

Somaly Mam's Le Silence de l'Innocence

I've recently read this book “Le Silence de l’Innocence” written by Somaly Mam. Former teen prostitute (raped at 12, forced into a loveless marriage, later sold to a brothel etc) in Cambodia, she managed to get out of her hell by marrying a French man with whom she was to set up AFESIP, an organisation that aims to rescue young girls from human trafficking and sexual slavery.*

It is very sad to read about the way young girls and women in general are treated in this country. This is just so inhumane and exasperating. Fancy girls as young as 8 or 9 being sold into prostitution by their own mothers or sisters and then raped, abused, drugged every day of their lives. Many would catch AIDS, STDs, Tuberculosis etc and suffer all the way to their early deaths. Why is there no justice for these poor souls?

And just as exasperating is the physical lack of justice in these countries. The corruption among the judiciary, the Police etc is rampant and the work of associations like Afesip is often ineffective because of that. And the culture of having sex with virgins and young children is sick and to think that those culprits often consider themselves Buddhists or Muslims and lived as righteous individuals in their societies. And not to forget all the men from developed countries like Japan, Germany, the UK etc making their way to Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos etc by the planeloads to abuse young girls, may they grill slowly and painfully in Hell for that.

I know that I sound like a broken record, but please let us not accept the belief that prostitution has to be tolerated because it is the world's oldest profession. Please pressurise Governments into punishing all the pimps and owners of brothels and especially their policemen and soldiers for their part in the trade. Please let us give hell to all the Johns who abuse these women and girls often forced into the trade. Please tell anybody whether they want to listen or not that it is inadmissible to close an eye to sexual abuse in any form and on anybody. And please start in our own homes by educating our own sons and husbands to what it means to respect another person, women in this case.

By the sad state of the world economy, many has been forced and will be forced to sell themselves. But if demand can be reduced if not eliminated, surely the attractiveness of using women in such inhumane ways would also see some decline. It will be a very long and tedious battle, but we have succeeded in warming up the globe in a few generations, I don't see why we can't deal with human slavery and trafficking.

*PS : www.afesip.org : "AFESIP exists to combat trafficking in women and children for sex slavery; to care for and rehabilitate those rescued from sex slavery; to provide occupational skills and to reintegrate those rescued into the community in a sustainable and innovative manner. AFESIP also seeks to combat the causes and effects of trafficking and sex slavery through outreach work in AIDS prevention; through advocacy and campaigning; through representation and participation in women’s issues at national, regional and international forums."