Steamed Chicken with Dried Lily Flowers, Shiitake Mushrooms and Chinese sausage

My mum works at my dad’s restaurant only during the day. She worked both day and night when the restaurant first opened but now that things have settled and enough staff have been hired, she’s home after lunch service to do household chores etc. and more importantly cook dinner for my younger brother and sister. While my dad is a chef, my mum does most of the cooking at home. The food we have at home is different from the food served at the restaurant, flavours are often simpler but just as tasty, and it’s more wholesome with large quantities for sharing and leftovers.

However, my mum often gets sick of cooking and gets quite lazy about it. It can feel like more of a chore to her. I guess this is what happens when you work at a restaurant all day, when you come home the last thing you want to be doing is cooking, especially when you have been doing it all your life out of necessity (ie: to feed a family) rather than as a passion. Unlike me, where I get to experiment with my cooking and try new dishes all the time, and find it a gratifying endeavour. When my mum cooks for the family, it is an act of compromise where she tries to reconcile the different food preferences within the family, make sure we have a healthy and balanced diet, as well as cooking within limited timeframes and trying to be economical.

So my mum has quite a few go to recipes that she rotates around, which she knows us kids like to eat and are easy to cook. Her go to recipes are ones that make a lot of food, can be prepared ahead of time, requires little effort and tastes great. It’s food that has leftovers you wouldn’t be sick of eating the next day and would be happy to eat more often.

Everyone has go to recipes, what are yours?

This is one of my mum’s go to recipe. It's a delicious, comforting and homey dish.

 BEFORE

AFTER

This dish is very easy to make, all you have to do is chunk everything into a pot, marinate it overnight and then steam it the next day so it’s great for weeknights after work. I love this dish because there is a lot packed into it and it contains some of my favourite foods – chicken, shiitake mushrooms and Chinese sausage (lap cheong). I like being able to pick out different goodies to eat. It’s a dish that reminds me of living at home because it would frequently feature on the dinner table, and I remember fighting over with my younger brother and sister for the last bit lap cheong, because no matter how much lap cheong my mum would put in, there would never be enough. This is also quite a delicately flavoured dish in that you’ll find the seasonings are not overpowering but are there to lift the natural flavours of the other ingredients.

Steamed Chicken with Dried Lily Flowers, Shiitake Mushrooms and Chinese sausage

(An original recipe Blue Apocalypse learnt from her mum)

(serves a 4-6)

Ingredients

•    600-700g of chicken (mix of chicken wings and chicken thigh chopped into bite sized pieces)
•    6 shiitake mushrooms, rehydrated (ie: soaked in water till softened, about 30 minutes), stalks removed and sliced
•    ½ cup of black fungus, rehydrated, trimmed and chopped into smaller pieces
•    30g of dried lily flowers, rehydrated, remove any hard stems (end bits) and tie into a knot (this prevents it from breaking apart)
•    3 sprig spring onions, cut into 3-4cm lengths
•    2 Chinese sausages, sliced
•    few slices of ginger
Seasonings
•    1 tablespoon Shaoxing wine
•    1 tablespoon oyster sauce
•    2 teaspoons fish sauce
•    1 teaspoon cornflour
•    1 ½ teaspoon light soy sauce
•    pinch of salt and pepper

Method

Combine everything together with the seasonings in a pot/large bowl and marinate overnight.

Steam over medium-high heat for about 20-25 minutes until the chicken is cooked through. 

Serve with steamed rice.

Notes:
•    See my steamed fish post for more details on how I steam dishes.
•    It’s a large quantity so you may have to divide the steaming into two batches or you can steam half one night, refrigerate the rest to steam the night after.
•    Dish can be reheated in the microwave or resteamed for about 10 minutes.
•    You can marinate the ingredients and then freeze it in containers. Take out to defrost and steam when you want a meal.

The Bastardisation of Stir Fries

I have a bone to pick….it’s on peoples conception of a stir fry.

I often get people telling me that they are cooking a stir fry and asking if I have any tips for them. I would ask what they are having in their stir fry and then I get a whole list of every vegetable they have in their fridge and some meat.

I think that stir fries suffer from the idea that it’s the kind of dish where you can chuck anything into a wok, give it a fry, season with some oyster sauce/soy sauce or chilli sauce and whola…

So I try to explain my view of how a good stir fry should be and I begin talking about pasta sauces and pizza.

A simple and basic pasta sauce made with only a few ingredients is very satisfying. One of the pasta sauces I love cooking from Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking contains just tomatoes, onion, carrot, celery, some extra virgin olive oil and a little salt, sautéed and simmered on a low heat until it thickens.

The key to a good pizza is one that is not overloaded with too many toppings, 2-3 different toppings, some cheese and sauce is a good guide.

I think that cooking a stir fry should be approached in the same manner as cooking pasta sauces and making pizza. Think about what ingredients you are including and less can be much more satisfying.

Using too many ingredients can complicate and overcrowd a dish. Each vegetable has its own distinctive flavours and the type of meat used changes the taste of the dish.

Just because you can put anything that you want into a stir fry doesn’t mean that you should!

This is a simple stir fry that I cook regularly containing only a few ingredients - snowpeas (or sugar snap peas), prawns and shiitake mushrooms, with some crushed garlic, sliced ginger, and flavoured with some oyster sauce, fish sauce and salt.

Ingredients

• 300-400g snowpeas or sugar snap peas
• 3 shittake mushrooms, soaked till softened and sliced
• 8 prawns, shelled and deveined and sliced in half lengthways
• 2-3 cloves crushed garlic
• 2 pieces of ginger, sliced
• 1 cup of water
• ½ teaspoon of salt
• ½ tablespoon of fish sauce
• 2 tablespoons of oyster sauce
• 1 teaspoon of cornflour

(Measurements are a rough guide only as I have cooked this dish so much that I don't need to measure anything, I just add each bit in and then taste to correct the flavour. So feel free to play around with the ingredients to your desired tastes.)

Method

• Heat up a wok, add a little vegetable oil and cook the shiitake mushrooms and prawns first. Set aside.
• Then fry the garlic and ginger with the snowpeas in the wok, add in some water, cover and cook for 2-3 minutes until the snowpeas change colour and turn a dark green (uncover and stir from time to time).
• Then add back in the shiitake mushrooms and prawns, add in a pinch of salt, some oyster sauce and fish sauce (add in a little more water if necessary).
• In a small bowl mix a little cornflour with water and add into wok to thicken the sauce.

Be careful not to overcook the prawns or snowpeas. When you bite into the prawns they should be soft and tender (not rubbery) and the snowpeas should still have a crunch.

































You may note that in the photo there is no sauce but around 1 cup of water was added. The cornflour thickened the sauce so that it coats all the ingredients.

Only add enough water to cook with, adding too much water will dilute the flavours of the ingredients resulting in more seasoning required which will affect the taste of the dish.

You are making a stir fry and not a soup, the meats and veges should not be drowning in their own sauce.

I love this dish because it’s simple to make and tastes amazing!

We are known to have four basic tastes - sweet, salty, sour, and bitter. Some argue that there is a fifth taste called ‘umami’. Umami is best described as savoury and is found in amino acid rich foods that give a sense of lingering mouth-feel. Umami is not a strongly detectable taste of itself, but it tends to accentuate and embolden other tastes. Umami intensifies sweet and salty, and rounds out sour and bitter.

Shiitake mushrooms and fish sauce are high in umami!

Umami is also found in MSG (surprise!)

So next time when you want to make a stir fry, stop and think about what you are putting into it….don’t bastardise it!