Hakka Fried Pork Belly with Fermented Red Beancurd & Easy Fried Chicken

This Hakka dish is a personal favorite of mine and I am sure it is amongst my family members as well. Mom made it so well that I am having a hard time replicating this dish from her. Could be the different brand of fermented beancurd used. Mom's slightly orangey in color whilst mine looks 'normal' in color. Haha.. nevertheless it is still yummy. Kieran, being a meatlover ate 3 pieces which is not bad for a 3 year old kid. Zach did not take any, he's a non-meat eater except for mince pork. Such hard brood to please.

When I was at the wet market, I was contemplating between using 'wu hua rou' or pork shoulder butt or 'san  zhen rou' or pork belly. Decided to go with pork belly cut as I remembered sinking into crunchy layers of fats when my mom made this dish.

Hakka Fried Pork Belly with Fermented Red Beancurd

500g pork belly or pork shoulder butt
2 cubes of fermented red beancurd
1/2 tbsp light soy sacue
1 tsp sesame oil
1/2 tsp sugar
2 tsp yellow glutinuous wine or shaoxing wine or hua tiao wine (I used hua tiao)
1/2 tsp of five spice powder
dash of white pepper
1 egg, beaten
2 tbsp corn flour
3 tbsp plain flour

How?
- Wash pork belly and pat dry. Cut into pieces about 1.5 inch wide
- Combine all the ingredients above with pork belly.
- Leave in fridge for at least 4 hours, preferably overnight.
- 30 minutes before frying, take out marinated meat from fridge to set it to room temperature.
- Combine cornflour and plain flour together.
- Heat oil in wok; I used just enough oil that covers half of the pork belly (not submerging them in oil)
- Put pieces of pork into beaten egg, coat well. Dredge pork in flour, dusting excess flour off.
- Fry until golden or when meat is cooked.
- Drain in oil-absorbent paper

Bon appetit!

The other day, I was craving for fried chicken and remembered I bought 4 pieces of quarter chicken from market. This is so simple to make with my Philips Air Fryer XL version. No oil splatters and no smokey kitchen! Just what is needed for a busy full time working mom like me.

Wash chicken and pat dry with kitchen towel. I skipped all seasoning because I am using Kentucky flour for this chicken. The seasoning in the flour is good enough.
Preheat air fryer to 160C. Coat chicken with Kentucky flour and dust off excess.
Air fry at 160C for 15 minutes before flipping and continue with 180C for 10 minutes (may be longer depending on the size of the chickens)

Meal Planning & Air Fried Pork Chop

Sorry for the lack of updates. Being a FTWM (Full Time Working Mum) is no mean feat! Now that my boys stopped going to my trusted babysitter's place, my MIL came to my house on a daily basis (weekdays) to help look see look see my boys as well as cook/monitor my helper to cook dinner. Planning what to cook on a daily basis falls on my shoulder. The first 2 weeks my MIL will lug daily groceries to my place and I guess it is pretty tiring for her to walk under the hot sun everyday lugging heavy stuff. So I will head to the wet market every Sunday and buy a week worth of groceries to store. So planning daily meal need to be done by Saturday evening. Eh.. it's no easy task hor. I have to make sure there are variety in the meals, my sons get balanced carbs, proteins and vitamins during dinner time. Not to mention, them being soup junkie, just like me, need to have different soup on a daily basis. I rotate the soup every 2 weeks so it is still okay.
Thankfully there is this website, NoobCook that is a great source of inspiration for me!

This is how my weekly meal planning looks like. I started updating the amount I spent per week on dinner. I find it really useful to track how much we actually spend on food. Hehe..

I bought some pork chop over the weekend from my trusted butcher at the wet market. I marinated it with the similar recipe my mom always used, maybe with some tweaks on my own.

Air Fried Pork Chops (serving size: 5)
Ingredients
10 slices of pork chop
1 egg
1 tablespoon of corn starch
1 tablespoon of Hua Tiao wine
1 tablespoon of oyster sauce
1 teaspoon of salt
dash of white pepper

How?
- Clean the chops and using the back of the cleaver, pound each chops to loosen up the meat. This is an alternative to using meat tenderizer.
- Marinade the pork chops with all the ingredients above for an hour, preferably overnight. I marinated mine since Sunday until Tuesday. Yummy..
- Preheat air fryer to 190C. I lined my air fryer with baking paper to collect the dripping marinade.
- Arrange the pork nicely on the basket. Set timer to 5 minutes.
- Flip the pork chop and air fry for another 5 minutes.
- To get charred edges, I increase the temperature to 200C, and air fry for 2 minutes

The result, yummy pork chop that is healthy too!

This dish takes less than 20 minutes to prepare and less than 30 minutes to cook and serve.

Littlest Baby turn 3

~ Edited ~
It is a big affair for Kieran turning 3! Weeks leading to his actual day he kept asking when is his birthday, where will we be going, he wanted a rainbow cake, will we sing to him etc etc etc...imagine me having to answer the same questions over and over again. At least a hundred times.. haha

I promised him that I will bake him a rainbow cake but since it is for kids at school, I rather they not eat too much food coloring. Instead, I baked him a Chocolate Fudge Cake - which kids do not like chocolates? So I set out to work with fondant, creating a rainbow, cutting out the letters on Wednesday so that it can dry up properly by Friday. I am quite satisfied with the outcome of the fondant this time round except when covering the cake. I never seem to be able to roll out a big piece of fondant to cover the cake properly. Boo..

Kieran is as usual very forgiving when it comes to mummy. The cake is not very satisfactory, the rainbow broke (my guess is that it is too big and thin), the covering of cake was messy, because of the humid weather, the buttercream melted faster than usual, creating a mess. Another boo boo

See how I have to 'pou' those area that cannot be covered fully by the fondant. And because the buttercream created such a mess at the bottom of the cake, I put in pearl pops (bought from Candylicious). Kids love it..haha 

My vision for the cake was like the above but but but the rainbow broke. So I had to improvise by placing the rainbow flat on the cake.. ok lar, still look good. I especially love the white clouds. Personally felt adding some tylose into fondant makes it so much easier to shape.

Joy to Kieran during birthday is the singing, blowing of candle and cake cutting. Poor rainbow was 'mutilated'. Well, as long as he is happy, what else matters?

I did not manage to capture a picture of the cake after it was cut. It was chaotic with the kids hoarding the balloonist. Special mention to Balloon Blasters for such awesome arrangement.
The cake was awesome, fudgy and moist. Yummy! Kieran ate them all.. which is pretty rare for him.

Chocolate Fudge Cake (recipe from Nigella's site)

400g plain flour
250g* golden castor sugar (I do not know what is this so I used white castor sugar)
100g light muscovado sugar
50g best-quality cocoa powder (Valrhona is the best imo)
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1/2 tsp salt
3 large eggs
142ml sour cream (I used light sour cream)
1 tbsp vanilla extract
175g unsalted butter (melted and cooled)
125g corn oil
300ml chilled water

How?
- Preheat oven to 180C, butter and line 2 8" round pan. I used 1 8" round pan and slice the cake into 3 layers. Whichever suit your preferences.
- In a large bowl, mix all the dry ingredients, flour, castor sugar, muscovado sugar, cocoa powder, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and salt. Set aside.
- Using a measuring jug, whisk together eggs, vanilla extract and sour cream until well mixed.
- Beat cooled melted butter with corn oil until blended. Add in chilled water. Give it a quick stir.
- Add in the dry ingredients all at once and mix at low speed. Finally, add in the egg mixture and mix until all combined.
- Pour into the prepared tin.
- Bake for 55 - 60 minutes or until skewers comes out clean.
- Once baked, cool the cake for 15 minutes before removing it to cool completely.
- Decorate as per your liking.

*I reduce sugar from 250g to 180g

p/s: I did not use mixer be it machine or handheld for this cake. Everything is done using a whisk which I felt is good enough. This prevents us from over mixing the batter. Also I am lazy in washing so I only used minimum utensils - 1 mixing bowl, 2 small bowls, whisk and a measuring scoop. Lazy me..

We continued Kieran's birthday celebration at USS - and this time round we make it a point to go for all rides which are applicable for the kids of course! The boys enjoyed themselves tremendously.

To celebrate with family members and close friends, we had a BBQ session on Saturday night. Food was great.. I ordered majority cooked food so that everyone get to eat quickly. Just heat it up and good to go. Chicken wings were good too. Yummy yummy..I must say this BBQ session is the best I had so far.

Using the same recipe above, I made them into cupcakes (original intention was rainbow cake but unfortunately the cake flopped big time). I used Sally's Baking Addiction's White Chocolate Buttercream as frosting. Yummilicious..

I find that using 1M tip for frosting really makes a lot of difference on the cupcakes. So beautiful..

This is the cake I made as a trial for Kieran's birthday. Spiderman themed which I think was really nice but Kieran insisted that he wanted a rainbow cake. Pretty adamant about it. Plan changed hence the cake shown above.