Quay Po Cooks: indian cuisine

Showing posts with label indian cuisine. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Happy Deepavali

Today is Deepavali and I would like to wish all who celebrate the festival of lights a Very Happy Deepavali. May this special day brings you all lots of peace, love, happiness and good health throughout your life.

Today reminds me of our visit with our family in the USA last year. We brought with us many packets of roti canai and several varieties of ready curry mix. My step daughter and her husband learned to love roti canai when they came to visit us in Malaysia a few years ago.

More recently, when we were there, we decided to have a roti canai and curry feast night. I cooked beef rendang, korma curry prawns and dhall.

It was great cooking for family and seeing them enjoy the food. I wish I could cook this meal for them again soon.

The next time I return to USA we will not need to bring with us the frozen roti canai and ready made curry mix. During the last trip we found all of the packets of ingredients and the roti in the supermarkets there. They have all. Look! LOL!

Packet roti canai and curry done with the ready mix may not be as delicious as doing from it scratch but they are quite authentic and good enough in my opinion, especially for an amateur in cooking Indian cuisine like me.

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.