Quay Po Cooks: tea

Showing posts with label tea. Show all posts

Monday, June 3, 2013

Do you believe in "Destiny"?

"Yau Yuen Chin lay lang seong wui, Moe Yuen tui mien but seong foong" (A Chinese proverb with the meaning: If one is destined to meet another, they will even from afar, if not, they will not know each other even they are face to face."

This expains the belief in "Destiny" by example. Do you believe in destiny? I believe in destiny but I do not think it is pre-ordained. I think destiny is self created by choices we take in our lives. For example, how I got to know these two nice people, Fan and Treedson is through my choice to accept the invitation from the "nourish" team to be the judge for the baking competition "Think Out of the Shell" sponsored by Nutriplus last October.

During the whole duration of competition, I had fun with all the contestants...

Fan and I

(Photo courtesy from "nourish")

Kelly, Treedson, I and Fan

(Photo courtesy from "nourish")

.....and since then I have been keeping touch with a few on facebook. Fan and I have been talking for months about a get-together but just could not find a time where both of us were available. Finally we did it. Fan and Treedson came to my house to have tea with me. (This was before my trip to USA). Fan brought a lemon butter cake, carrot cake and her famous brownies while Treedson brought with him a box of yummy madeleines and a bottle of champagne to celebrate our friendship. As the host, I could not just serve coffee and tea, could I? So, I decided to introduced them to a new dessert which was recently introduced to me by my Quay Lo. Fried Pie but this time, I put in my own little twist. The original recipe did not call for lemongrass and pecans. I included these two ingredients because I wanted to use them up to clear space in my fridge. So I made a blueberry paste infused with lemongrass and added toasted pecan for the filling.

You will only know how good this dessert is when you try it. True enough, like me, Fan and Treedson loved the fried pie. Don't let the photo of this fried pie fool you. It tasted far better than it looks. This is a very difficult dessert to get a photo that can suggest its delicious flavour.

Fried pie with chopped apple & pecans in blueberry paste infused with lemongrass and anise.

Ingredients:
Enough oil to fry the pie
Pie Dough (Please click to get the recipe)
Filling (see recipe that follows)
1 egg beaten for egg wash

Ingredients for the filling:

1/2 cup toasted pecan, roughly chopped

1 apple, remove skin, cored and chopped

Blueberry lemon grass and anise paste

250gm frozen blueberries, thawed

8 tbs sugar

6 - 8 tbs water

2 stalks lemongrass (tender inner white parts only, smashed)

1/2 tsp ground anise or 1 whole anise

1 tbs flour (more when needed to thicken the paste)

Method:

To make the paste, place blueberries, sugar, water, lemongrass and ground anise in a saucepan over medium heat. Bring the mixture to a boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Add flour and let simmer until the paste thickens, about 10 minutes. Remove the pan from the heat and let the paste cool completely. Remove lemon grass. Pour mixture into blender and blend till smooth. In a bowl, mix blended mixture with chopped apple and toasted chopped pecan and mix well.

Assemble the pie:

Roll doll out in about 1/2 cm thick and cut out 4 inches circles. Spoon 1 heaping tbs of prepared filling onto the center of the dough and then seal it. Lightly brush with egg wash on both sides and then deep fry the pie in hot oil. Drain the oil in paper towel before serving with either whipped cream or vanilla ice cream.

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.