Hasselback Potatoes

Hasselback potatoes

I was searching for a recipe for Chinese steamed muffins (fatt koh) when I stumbled upon this beautiful site. I sifted through some pages and the photos for Swedish 'accordian' potatoes, also called Hasselback potatoes, caught my fancy and I made them straightaway.

How did I like them? I thought they were good but I prefer crashed hot potatoes. Still, give them a try. Don't stop at using garlic, salt and pepper.  Vary the seasonings with herbs (rosemary, chives), bacon, cheese, sour cream, whatever. I think they are better if they are put under the grill for the last 5 to 10 minutes to crisp their edges up. Mine weren't grilled long enough because hungry people were waiting at the table. I've made slight changes to the recipe but you get the drift; this is just baked potatoes by a different shape.



Hasselback Potatoes
6 large potatoes, skin on & preferably longish and tapered at the ends
2 T melted butter and/or olive oil
sea salt (Maldon, if you can find it)
freshly ground black pepper
4-5 garlic cloves, sliced very thinly, or even garlic powder
herbs if like

1. Oven at 220 C. Scrub potatoes, turn them until they sit well and then slice thinly almost through (about 3/4 down).

2. Insert the garlic randomly among the potato slices, brush with the butter/oil/ both, season with salt and pepper. You can do all that with the potatoes on a baking tray or you can put them on the oven rack.

3. Bake 40 to 60 minutes (depending on the size of the potatoes), finishing them to a golden brown in the last 5 to 10 minutes under the grill. If you like some cheese on them, add it just before grilling. Fan the potatoes out a bit by running a fork across their tops. Brushing more oil on pretty them up too. Serve hot.

Insalata Caprese

I really wasn't sure if I should post this recipe because this salad is so easy it's not necessary to even have a recipe. But I guess the truth is I just wanted to show off the buffalo mozzarella (mozzarella de bufala campana) and tomatoes that Yo carried all the way from Milan. I am truly blessed with friends like Yo who carry such presents across the seas for me. Then there's Su too, who gave me excellent parma ham from her recent Med cruise. I got the message: they wanted an Italian meal. And so Yo, Su and their families came over for a Sunday lunch of insalata caprese, pizzas (I only make two types now, rocket parma ham pizzas and olives, mushrooms, peppers and anchovies pizzas), veal sausages, a rose chiffon cake that turned out even better than the first one I made, green tea konyakku jelly and sweet, crunchy nangka from my garden (K, all the fruits from my tree were tons better than the one you had when you were here).




Su said my pizzas were "better than Little Italy's"  (to which I protested, arrogantly) so she upped the accolade to "pizzas I ate in Florence". I love my friends. But if you try out my recipe, you'll know if Su told the truth.


Note the rings on her fingers ("At our age, bigger is better").

Yo's insalata caprese is an elegant restaurant-style version of overlapping layers of cheese, basil leaves (plucked screaming from my garden) and tomatoes (which were not ripe enough), doused with EVOO and sprinkled with sea salt and freshly ground black pepper. It was such a hit! I was hoping that the kids wouldn't want their share but no such luck with our bunch of kids. Wey, who had never had buffalo mozz before (hotel buffet mozz don't count), is now crazy about it.

Yo left a single ball of mozz for me which became my lunch the next day. My version is like me, random and a little crazy: carelessly cut tomatoes, torn basil leaves and mozz flavored with lots of EVOO and freshly ground black pepper. However, next time I will snip the mozz into thick chunks because tearing them makes them stripey and thin. There's nothing like biting into a chunky piece of springy milk-flavored buffalo mozz soaked with milky liquid.

We had a great time, and I look forward to more Sunday lunches such as that. Which really means I hope Yo reads this and gets the hint.

Insalata Caprese
buffalo mozzarella
fresh basil leaves
ripe sweet tomatoes (I prefer the big cherry tomatoes)
sea salt & freshly ground pepper
lots of extra virgin olive oil

--either slice or cut mozz into chunks, same with the tomatoes. Put everything on a plate and sprinkle lightly with the sea salt and pepper and drizzle with lots of EVOO.

Spicy Joint, Shanghai

7th Uncle on my MIL's side of the family is a gourmet and a great cook. He used to cook elaborate dinners that gave the best restaurants a run for their money. Now that he's older, he prefers to take his guests out for dinner and not surprisingly, he knows the best restaurants. 

Spicy Joint is a trendy Sichuan restaurant on Hua Hai Lu (there are other locations too) where we had one of the best meals of our Shanghai trip. Spicy Joint meets the criteria of a great restaurant. The food is fantastic, portions are big, the menu is extensive, the prices are ridiculously cheap and the service is good. Even the place is purposely decorated in sleek black, which attracts the trendy young crowd.  If you visit Shanghai, make sure you eat at least one meal in a Spicy Joint, preferably the one on Hua Hai Lu. I was told that reservations are required at least a week ahead (tel: 021-64702777, WWW. SPICY-JOINT.COM).

After six days of Shanghainese food, Sichuan food was a big welcome to our palates. I find the aromatic and thrilling mala (numbing hot) of Sichuan food addictive. I think next to Cantonese food, Sichuan food is my favorite Chinese food. And I must thank my Sichuan friend Leila for helping me appreciate this cuisine even though I did fall in love with it the first time I tasted it in Singapore's Goodwood Park Hotel decades ago. A visit to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan about 4 years ago, confirmed my love for the cuisine which not only stresses on smell/flavor and taste but also on sensation. If you've never felt the numbing tingling and effervescent bubbling of a Sichuan peppercorn on your lips, you must try it. Don't limit your culinary experience to tastes only. Sensation too should be explored, and the Japanese know that too, since eating poisonous fugu also gives a tingling sensation.

In Spicy Joint, set lunches for four dishes and one soup are only RMB68/RM34/USD11, probably the cheapest set meals anywhere! 7th Uncle ordered a lunch set and several a la carte dishes for the five of us and the bill came to just over RMB300/RM150/USD48 only. With a membership card, you can get another 10% off. It's incredible. Crazy.

Remember to take the nice monthly restaurant magazine on your table which doubles as a menu. I brought my copy home so that I can drool over the photos once in a while.

Chicken bone kebabs

This was SO tasty. The hot chili sauce was intense with flavors and a sour-sweet-xien (savory sweetness) taste and the chicken giblets and soft tail bones were crunchy. 

Water-cooked fish

This was the best 'water-cooked fish' because the fish had a beautiful flavor unlike the other water-cooked fish dishes we had which had mala flavor but no flavor in the fish.

Spicy 'peasant-style' cauliflower 

Good, good.

Veal with chillies and big bean sprouts

Another excellent dish.

Stir-fried cabbage with vinegar (check out my recipe for this dish here)

Simple, refreshing and delicious.

Chilies and chicken stir-fry

Another delicious one. In fact, there was not a dish that didn't impress us.

Chicken and pork stomach soup

Except for this one. I found it too rich.

Smoked duck

Excellent.

Braised gluten balls

Spicy prawns and Shanghainese glutinous rice slices

By the time this came, I could hardly eat anymore. I ate a piece of the rice slices; it tasted yummy but greasy. RMB58/29/USD9.40 for such a generously-sized dish.

Glutinous tang yuan with black sesame seed paste filling in jiu niang soup

It's strange how every meal with our relatives end with this dessert even though there were so many other desserts to try.

Again, if you're in Shanghai, I urge you to have your Sichuan fix in Spicy Joint. It surpasses any Sichuan restaurant I've been to. I found myself wishing that they'll open a branch in my home town so that I can try every dish on their menu. 

Filipino Crispy Pata

Crispy pata: lots of sticky gelatinous collagen and ligament.

The Filipino crispy pata (pork knuckle) costs RM50 each in the restaurants but a pork leg (knuckle plus trotters) from the butcher costs only RM13 to 15 so I did the math and thought I'd save RM111/RM105 if I cooked three pata myself.

The first two pata that I fried didn't turn out crispy. To add injury to insult, the hot oil splattered on my face, making it even more mottled. The third pata which I cooked the next day however turned out rather successful. The knuckle skin was crispy enough to crackle as I cut it but not as crispy as roasted pork crackling or siu yuk skin. But still, my son Wey was excited and happy ("Oh boy oh boy!") as he ate the whole pata himself. Two bites of the greasy stuff were enough for me although I did like the sticky gelatinous collagen and ligament.

The first two knuckles were left to dry in the fridge for about 6 hours but the third knuckle was left in the fridge overnight. That made a lot of difference to the crisping of the skin. The other important thing is to fry the knuckle at high heat so that the oil inside will sputter out, breaking the skin and making it easier to crisp. I couldn't do a good job of that because it really was scary to fry a voracious piece of meat that sputtered and splattered hot oil. I didn't cover the wok the first time, but the second time I did, raising it now and then, facing away from me, to release the moisture from the lid which would otherwise cause more oil to sputter. Covering the wok during frying also prevents accidents such as oil burns but you still have to be very careful because the knuckle can sputter unexpectedly. When you hear the sputter, you know the skin is breaking out and crisping up. My pata sputtered so hard that the lid of the wok jumped. When the sputtering dies down, you know the skin is done.

There are two versions of Filipino pata recipes on the Net. One version calls for a can of fizzy drink like 7-up or Sprite, baking soda and a whole tablespoon of msg. I dismissed this recipe because it appears in food websites and I've learnt from experience that such sites just publish recipes taken from other sites without testing the recipes. I suspect that the reviews are drummed up to make the recipes appear authentic. The other recipe didn't call for fizzy water or baking soda and is published by bloggers who, like me, test and write about their attempts. You can tell by their photos which are not perfect unlike those in food websites.

I don't know. I found it such a waste to boil the knuckle and throw the water out. It's not worthwhile to cook one knuckle; saves more time and energy to order it. Frying pata is really dangerous  too--look at my face. I think that restaurants make crispier pata because they are able to use a lot of oil (I used enough oil to cover the knuckle halfway only; seemed such a waste of oil to cover it fully because I don't keep hydrogenated oil) and fry at a very high temperature. A better way to cook the pata would be to bake it like siu yuk, I think, and the skin'll probably crisp better because unboiled pork skin is thicker. 

Crispy pata is delicious but it is a greasy dish. The vinegar dip helped to cut the grease, so make sure you serve plenty of that. And beer.

 Next time I'll eat pata at restaurants.

This recipe makes delicious pata that's better than the restaurants, according to my family and my niece. The skin is crispy-sticky and the meat tasty and moist.

Crispy Pata

2 pork legs

1 heaped T salt

1 heaped t black peppercorns

3 bay leaves

3 T fish sauce

1. Get the butcher to shave the legs clean. Joint the knuckle from the trotters. Wash well and put knuckles and trotters into a pot of boiling water for a minute to get ride of any unpleasant smell and dirt. Drain.

2. Put the knuckles and trotters into a pot and add all the above ingredients and enough water to cover the knuckles. Simmer for 1 1/2 hours or until the skin is soft but the meat and skin is still sticking to the bone. If using a pressure cooker, cooking time is 25 minutes from the time the pot hisses, not from the time it boils. Keep the legs in the pot covered until  it's safe to open. The skin will be quite soft (but firms up upon chilling) but the whole thing is still intact and not falling off the bone. Remove carefully. Leave the trotters aside. Chop into small pieces. Add salt and Shaoxing Hua Tiao wine, chilling them overnight. You have another dish to chew: drunken pork trotters.

3. When cool enough to handle, dab the oil and liquid off the knuckles with kitchen paper. Prick the skin all over with a fork. Season with about 1 T fish sauce and a few dashes of msg each. Place knuckles on a wire rack and chill in the fridge for 24 hours.

4. Do a final dab-drying on the knuckles with kitchen paper. Heat enough oil in a deep pot or wok to deep-fry. You can fry both knuckles at once or one by one. You can add some flour but I found it unnecessary because the flour falls off during frying. When the oil starts to sputter, cover the pot/wok loosely, leaving some gap for the steam to escape. When the sputtering stops and the knuckles are golden brown, they are done. Carefully remove (hot oil!) and drain on a rack.

The Pata Dip

1 small red onion, chopped or sliced

1 red hot chili, chopped or sliced

1/4 cup white rice vinegar (adjust to taste)

1/4 cup light soy sauce (adjust to taste)

1 T garlic, finely chopped

note:  To make Chinese crispy pata, just rub 5-spice powder or Season's flavored salt mix on the boiled knuckle.

Yut Kee, KL

Let me jump to Kuala Lumpur now, because I am tired of the posts on the banquet meals in Shanghai.

By the time we got to KL, we were dying for Malaysian food, especially KL food. But my friend C, who lives in San Francisco and comes back twice a year to visit her mom, was not familiar with the city. Each time we went out,  we drove round and round in the grid less city. Paris even on a first visit is easy to get around in but KL, where I've been countless of times, is totally unnavigable to me. The roads are a maze and always jammed, the drivers are selfish and the taxi drivers are still pulling the same trick of not going anywhere inconvenient to them. In the city center, roads are built as an afterthought, as and when required, so that they wind around the buildings (e.g. behind Pavilion) and if you take a wrong turn, sorry lah. KL takes the cake for being an example of a badly-planned city. The LRT (an inefficient above-ground metro constructed as an easy way out of the complicated planning and work required for a good underground metro) doesn't connect station to station, forcing passengers to go up and down and in and out of stations several times to complete one journey. Then there's the poor security, the many toll booths and the low standards of public transport, to name a few.  A terrible road accident happened while I was in KL. A dozen bus commuters were killed and some guy in the relevant authority defended the driver--who died too-- by blaming the road divider (!) and the commuters, who, according to him, were responsible for stopping the bus driver if he was speeding. That's just ridiculously outrageous and the lesson is not learnt. The newspaper headlines screamed "Answers need to be found why this  happens". Is it not apparent that it's the low standards of drivers and failure to enforce? The driver of the bus I took from LCCT to KLIA was on his mobile all the way, one hand on the wheel. I bet that happens all the time and the authorities know it but are they doing anything about it? One morning, while waiting for C by the road of a high rise apartment in Mont Kiara, a mineral bottle filled with cigarette ash, water and sand fell about 1.5 meters behind me, splashing Hub with the contents. I had been standing at the very spot but had just walked away seconds before the bottle fell. I would've been seriously hurt, even killed, if it fell on me, given the weight of the bottle and the impact it made when it crashed onto the ground. All we got from the management of the building was that some kids were responsible. No action taken, no lesson learnt. Try throwing anything from a high rise in Singapore or Hong Kong.

At one point, totally flustered, hot (KL was 34 C, Shanghai 24 C) and lost driving around, I asked C: "Tell me just one thing good about KL!" Without hesitation, she said "The food". I guess when nothing's going right, food's the only way to redeem a city.

But you know what, if you don't know where to eat, the food in KL can be pretty crappy too. Since C's mom lives in Kepong, we hung around the area because that's where C is most familiar with. The first night, we ended up in a hawker stall center because I wanted hawker food. The food was bad.

C's list of restaurants is confined to places she used to eat in when she lived in KL so that includes Madam Kwan which I was rather fond of too. However, this time I was disappointed. I think while the food was very good ten years ago when they were most popular, Mdm Kwan has not kept up with the competition and standards have dropped after they opened more outlets. Or maybe it's just the Mdm Kwan in Bangsar that doesn't measure up.

Yut Kee is another of C's haunt. Some of the food are good, but some are just okay. The place is popular with office workers who roll up their sleeves in the unairconditioned restaurant. I loved their soft-boiled egg because it was full of fresh egg flavor. Days later we were at another restaurant and I ordered soft boiled egg and it was bland. I think Yut Kee's eggs can pass the Spaniard or Portuguese test. I'm told that the eggs in these two countries are incomparable, much like how the tomatoes in Italy have no match.


Yut Kee's menu is quite wide, from western food to rice to noodles and bread. The third generation of the founder now runs the coffee shop.


Soft boiled egg (known as half boiled egg here because the Chinese term for it is "Half raw half done") so good that it didn't matter if the plate was chipped. The toasted bread was ordinary and kaya dry and grainy but the coffee was thick.


Salty chicken rice, a nice change from Hainan chicken rice. I used to disdain 'albino' chicken but now I think they have their place, especially in chicken rice.


Lam mee, Yut Kee's specialty, is not my kind of noodles. I found it just okay.


Hokkien mee. Pretty good with lots of dried flounder floss, something we don't get in our Hokkien mee in KK, but I was disappointed that the pork fat crackling was missing.


The Swiss roll was warm and the texture was unusual; I liked it. The butter cake was touted as 100% pure butter cake but I detected margarine (you can't fool this mama), specifically Planta, and I asked a young man who looked like he could be the grandson of the founder if margarine was in the cake.  He was honest (brownie points) and said they do mix in some margarine but not much. Hmm. What does 100% mean? I tasted more margarine than butter.  


The marble tables and mismatched chairs tell that the restaurant is old.