More of Mom's cooking@Home

Demona: My brother made a trip down to KL, and brought along some food cooked by mom.
One of my mom's trademark dishes is the Red Bean Jelly! I am an enormous fan of red bean-ANYTHING (bun, dumpling, dorayaki, ice cream, glutinous balls, jelly! etc). The key ingredient which makes her jelly a success is the red bean paste.

It takes hours to make the paste! (She stirs it by hand in the double broil pot, using a wooden stirrer) It resulted in a mixture of some chewable chunky red bean bits in between the smooth paste. She does not save on the red beans usage, unlike commercial red bean products which are usually packed with sugar, preservatives, colouring and flavouring. She knows how to control the amount of sugar in order not to make it too sweet.

The jelly itself also had red bean flavour in it, using the water which was boiled along with the hardened beans. Santan (coconut milk) was also added into the water to create the opaque colour appearance on the jelly.

The jellies had to be eaten within a day as the presence of the coconut milk without addition of preservatives will cause the jellies to spoil if left for more than a day. Nevertheless, it was not a tough job! The jellies were too.. too... FINGER LICKING GOOD!



Demona: Mom also cooked some stewed pork knuckles. This dish, by far, deserved my full brownie points. She knows that I do not eat the fatty parts of the pork, thus she always made sure that the dish had an equivalent portion of lean meat. The meat... Melts in your mouth! The meat was extremely tender, and flavourful. The long stewing hours locked all the flavours in the meat. SLURPS!

She also added a lot of mushrooms too. Mushrooms which had been stewed and soaked with the salty, vinegar and soy sauce for a long while, causing them to bloat, absorbing all the deliciousness in!

This is an extremely porky tasting dish. It left me with dragon breaths after eating, until I went to bed. POWERFUL! For mom's stewed pork knuckles, it is worth all the smelly air which I BURP-ed out. BURPSSSSS. Oops. :)