A Hot Cocktail

Note: I made this hot cocktail in December, 2006. During that month and January, I lived a horrible period only Stephen King's fiction can describe. This drink warmed up my blood to resist the virus.

Add:
Peach juice
Orange juice
Honey
Pineapple jam
Dried white wine
Olives
Hot water

Great with Homemade Pizza.

A warm herb meal

Note: This post was written at December 15, 2006. I decided to put it here to organize my posts.

It is getting colder and colder. I felt sick today. After a rest, I got the energy to make a bowl of warm meal. I felt much better afterward. And took a long walk near my place. The clear blue night sky looked strangely like alien space with big airplanes flying through constantly. Mars Attack, I made up a funny brief science fiction while wandering in the cold wind. I even imaged a life under the sea as a mermaid in the weekdays while bathing sun on the beach as human in the weekends. Isn't it good? :D

Ingredients:
one chopped tomato
8-12 dried fruit of bartery
3 dried red dates
3-4 square cubic pork bones
a bit green onion and ginger
1/4 cup of wine
salt, pepper, sugar, oil, soy sauce
8 Chinese Dumplings (Or no if you only want soup)

Cooking Instruction:
Put dried fruit of bartery, red dates, pork bones into a big bowl of cold water. Let stand for 20-40 minutes.Wash the stuffs in the bowl and put them into a pan. Add tomato, green onion, ginger, water, wine, sugar and soy sauce. Turn on heat til boiling. Cook on low heat for 15-30 minutes.Add Dumplings. Boil for 5-10 minutes (add 2 times spoonful water in between). Add salt, pepper and oil.

Enjoy:
Turn off the light and put on candle. Turn on the music. Open all your senses to enjoy food which is life at the moment.

Chinese Salad I : Lianban Cucumber

Chinese has many recipes for lianban or salad. There are many sauces for different kind of food: vegetable, noodle, cooked meat or chicken, nuts etc. One can mix them all together to create your own favorite dishes. (Imagine that it contains all the stuffs you like with your favorite sauce!)

Different people have different tastes although as a human being, we all share a fundamental similar taste. The differences can be subtle(?) or huge. (such as some like spicy and heavy tastes while others like light and sweet).

Here I introduce one simple Chinese Lianban or Salad:

Material:
One Cucumber

Sauce:
Soy sauce: one spoon
Sesame Oil: half spoon
Rice Vinegar: one spoon
Garlic: one or two pieces
Salt: 1/4 spoon
Hot pepper sauce (optional): a few drops or many many drops!
Sugar(optional): a wee bit

Experiment: (Food Alchemy Experiment 1)

Wash the cucumber and peel out the skin(optional). Cut it into thin stick or square. (whatever shape you like. Thin is the key word). Add the chopped garlic and salt. Mixed well and put aside for 15 minutes.

--Tip: to get the best taste, cut the top of the cucumber (about 3cm from the top), press the two pieces together and circle the top piece about one minute until the bubble white cream no longer pops out. wash away the bubble white cream--

Take a small bow, add in Soy sauce and sesame oil together and microwave 20 seconds. Add vinegar. (or hot pepper sauce/sugar). Mix well together.

Add the sauce into the salted cucumber. Mix well. And enjoy! :)
(Shape it into a beautiful dish for your eyes and your guest eyes too! Now we have: For your taste and for your eyes, what esle more can we ask?!)

This Chinese salad is quite common in the restaurants as an open(?) dish before the main dishes. It helps to stimulate the stomach while keeping the waiting period delicious. :D

If you add in cooked noodle, it becomes a simple yet delicious meal(for those who like cool meal, put it into fridge and let it cool sometimes)! If you put in cooked spaghetti, it is now becoming a Chinese-Italian Spaghetti! I bet you haven't tried it yet!

________________
My elemental school was beside a food market. While at the class break, me and my friends loved to crawl through a hole in the wall to the food market. We walked around to find a suitable cucumber seller. After much negociated, we normal can buy one cucumber for one cent or two. (we are good negociators. Negociation in local market is part of the deal) Then we ate it with salt and hot peper sauce. It was like: take a bite into the cucumber, lick a wee bit salt and hot pepper sauce from the palm. Repeated until the cucumber was gone. Satisfied as free birds, we hurry craw back to class.)
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Once upon a time.....

Somewhere in a tropical island in south asian sea, a girl graw up at a home where her grandmother and mother cooked most of the time. She shared her house duties to wash vegetable, fish, chicken and dishes. Sometimes, she cooked rice. Secretly, she thought that she was the best cook of rice. The cooked rice was just perfectly soft yet firm. If anyone of you ever cooked a big wok of rice for eight in a hot summer with wood, you must have some respect for her now. It required half hour~one hour to sit in front of the stone oven and threw in the thin wood constantly. It was boring and hot yet required full attention.

At 14, she began to stay at school and eat at high school cafeteria. At 16, she went to university and eat at university cafeterias. She ate there seven years until she finished her bachelor and master degree. Then she taught chemistry at another university and ate at cafeterias too. That became her life style. She felt fine despite the food were not in great quality (Imagine how tough it can be for the cafeteria offered meals to thousands hungry students all at the rush hours). Yet life was simple this way. Price was cheap. With so many students, lots of choices.

If one can continue to eat at cafeteria like that, she would still stick with it. How simple!

Until one day, she came to Canada and she gotta learn to cook!

She bought 10 cooking books! She began her journey of cooking!

How hard!

She can't understand the books. They filled with all the unknown mysterious materials. It was tougher than to solve toughest chemistry equations.

Yet, fearlessly, she jumped into this cooking quest! How tough it can be!

So she opened the books, picked one look delicious. She took the book to the food stores. She walked around and around until found all the mysterious materials and went back home. She put the book right in front of her at the tiny kitchen and began the whole new cooking experiments............

So from then on, sometimes, she stayed at home and enjoyed the wonderful meals after a hard work. And sometimes, she rushed out to eat to satisfy her hungry. After that, she got the energy to go back to discard the unsuccessful results.

Until now, she has experienced so many and more may still to come. With time, this beautiful cooking blog will begin to contain many colorful moments of joy or pain and many recipes direct or indirect from her own cooking journey!

When life offers apple, take and eat it. When life offers lemon, take and make it into a lemon cake!