Quay Po Cooks: post natal confinement

Showing posts with label post natal confinement. Show all posts

Friday, June 10, 2011

Post natal confinement should be an enjoyable time not a drag

I am sure most of you already knew that our friend Wendy of Table for two or more has a new addition to her family. Hi Wendy, I made this card specially for you. Hope you like it.

For those of you who just got this good news, do hop over to her blog and congratulate her. She is now on confinement and I am sure she is enjoying her time with her new baby boy. This reminds me of my own confinement back in 1988. Here is a very old photo of "the happy me" feeding my baby. Nick was only 2 weeks old. He was the flawless baby to me. Don't we mothers always see our babies that way?

Did anyone of you had problem following the confinement practice like, avoiding bath, not washing hair, covered with thick clothings and stay indoor for the whole confinement period of thirty days? I did not because I told my mum I won't do that and knowing that her daughter is stubborn, she did not insist so as to keep the peace. I think we should not follow primitive practice blindly. As long as we know we are doing the right thing, we should be fine. Furthermore, confinement period should be an enjoyable time for the mother and the new born, not a drag. One thing I did not mind following was the diet because my mum is the best confinement lady. She had a wide variety of confinement healthy soups and dishes up her sleeve. I had different dishes and soups everyday and almost every one of them was delicious. One of my favorites was braised pork trotters in vinegar with lots of ginger. I LOVE it so much that I requested for it every week during my confinement! Here is her recipe, try it and I am very sure you will love it as much as I do.

Braised pork trotters in vinegar

Ingredient:

1.5 kg pork trotters

1 ½ bottle of 625ml sweetened vinegar

½ bottle 625ml black vinegar

250gm rock sugar

220gm old or young ginger

3 tbs sesame oil

Method:

Put pork hocks in a large pan. Peel ginger and cut it into 2 cm pieces. Pour Sweetened vinegar ad black vinegar and rock sugar into the pot. Par boil the pork hocks and then rinse with cold water. Drop ginger in sesame oil and fry till fragrant and slightly brown. Add pork hock and stir fry till pork hocks looks opague. Heat up the vinegar to boil. Add the pork hocks and ginger into the pot of vinegar and simmer in low heat for 1 ½ to 2 hours till pork hocks are tender. Taste and see if more rock sugar need to be added. This is rather subjective because some people prefer more sour but other prefer it more sweet. Adjust the taste to your liking.

This dish taste even better the next day.

A LITTLE ABOUT THIS QUAY PO

Before I was married to my "Quay Lo" (Guaylo) husband, I did not know how to bake or cook. Subsequently I learned some baking and cooking Western cuisine from him, and providing his food for him launched an interest in cooking in general. Many of my Chinese friends and family told me that "Quay" is the wrong spelling for devil in Cantonese. The right spelling should be "Kwai" or "Guay". Well, somehow I like the spelling "Quay" better although I have to agree that it does not sound very Cantonese. Try asking a Westerner to pronounce "Kwai" and you will probably hear "Quay" haha. Whether is "Quay" or "Kwai" or "Guay, just know the devil woman is me when you see Quay Po Cooks. My hubby said if people pronounce "Quay" as "Key" is even better because I am the key to his heart. LOL!

Only now, have I started to learn the traditional Cantonese cuisine of my Mum. She cooks fabulously and all her specialties are divine. These two interests, my husband's Western food, and my mother's traditional food, prompted me to document them so they will not be lost.

Here, I wish to share my cooking and baking experience with my readers. I also hope to inspire those who do not know how to cook or bake to do so because, trust me, if I can, you can too.

Something I'd like to mention is that I find that many people are rather unwilling to share their recipes. However, for me, I think differently. I think good recipes should be shared thus allowing as many people to enjoy it as possible. Unless those recipes are for doing business, I don't see why we want to keep them all to ourselves. So if you are generous in sharing your recipes, you are welcome to share on my blog. Send the recipes to me and better still with pictures of the final products and I will be very happy to post them them with credits to you of course.

Our cuisine is a deeply embedded part of our culture. When two cultures come together under the same roof the results in the kitchen can sometimes be comedic, sometimes confrontational, but more often it is a journey full of surprises and discovery. There is joy in our food. If we think upon this, it is intuitively obvious. This blog is a journey of joy and sharing, reflecting what the French like to call "joie de vivre" (joy of living). No one could be more different from one another then my husband and my mother. Yet one thing they share in common is knowing intuitively that food, cooking, and sharing can be avenues of joy in life itself. So herein, help yourself, to a little joy and , if you like it, share it with your own family and friends. Joy is something that should be shared.