Tempura (Shrimp and Vegetables) pictures (1 of 3)
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A few weeks ago, I tweeted about guest bloggers on Rasa Malaysia and Mable Tan—a fellow Malaysian who resides in Australia—responded and came to my rescue. Mable is a fantastic baker and a great cook; her blog “Happy Monkee” is beautiful and delicious. In her past life, Mable was a writer and stylist working with Seventeen, Marie Claire, Female (leading magazine in Malaysia and Singapore) and Going Places (inflight magazine of Malaysia Airlines). Please check out Mable’s guest post below and learn the secrets of making light and crispy tempura, a popular Japanese recipe. Please also pay a visit to her blog. Thank you!
Unlike Japanese breadcrumb (panko), tempura is a lighter, fluffier version. The idea is to keep the batter as cold as possible and also not over-mixing the batter. I’m so used to clump-free mixes that it takes ginormous willpower not to beat it till it’s smooth. Apparently, an over-mixed batter will result in activating the wheat gluten and causing the batter to be more chewy and dough-like when fried (great if you’re making doughnuts).
Now, what you might not know about tempura is that it was actually introduced to the Japanese by Portuguese missionaries and traders. The first shogun of Japan, Tokugawa Ieyasu, loved it so much it became widespread and adopted into the culture. If you go to Portugal today, there is a very similar dish called peixinhos da horta or “garden fishies…”
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Nabe (Yose Nabe/Japanese Hot Pot) pictures (1 of 7)
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(Attend hands-on hot pot workshop in Los Angeles by Harris Salat, the author of Japanese Hot Pots. Classes are available on November 14-15, 2009. Click here to learn more.)
Fall is in the air, even here in Southern California. Days are getting shorter and cooler. These past few days, the sky has been dull and wintry and this morning, it rained.
I start craving foods that keep me warm—soups, hearty stews, and hot pots. To me, nothing tastes quite as invigorating and uplifting than a meal of simmering hot soup or stew. I made nabe, or Japanese hot pot, a delicious medley of ingredients steeped in dashi broth and cooked inside a clay donabe, or nabe pot…(get nabe or Japanese hot pot recipe after the jump)
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Two years ago, about this time, Jaden was in Los Angeles. It was the second time we met in person, and she had just gotten an offer to write a cookbook from Tuttle Publishing. She was teaching a cooking class in LA and I was there to help (and also to learn from her about [...]
Inspired by my recent trip to Hawaii, I made garlic shrimp today. It’s not quite the shrimp scampi I had, but it’s a close cousin done in Chinese style and without too much grease.
Garlic and shrimp are two of my favorite ingredients and I love pairing them together whenever I feel like having a shrimp [...]
Aloha from Waikiki, O’ahu!
We stumbled upon the world-famous Giovanni’s White Shrimp truck at the north shore of O’ahu today, at Kahuku. Along the drive to the north shore, there are many shrimp trucks selling shrimp scampi, garlic shrimps or shrimp plates; there are also a few road site joints selling live shrimps caught from the [...]
How do you make shrimp crunchy? More precisely, how do you make shrimp Chinese-restaurant-crunchy?
I’ve been obsessed with this subject matter for the longest time–a topic that took me a while to research. If you’ve tried dim sum or shrimp dishes in Chinese restaurants, you know exactly what I mean–shrimp so crunchy they give a mouth [...]
When it comes to cooking or eating, I am very spontaneous. It’s about what comes to mind at the very moment when I am hungry–a recipe from a cookbook, a mouthwatering picture online, or a sudden craving. These shrimp and chive dumplings were a result of browsing two sinfully delicious posts: Use Real Butter’s chive [...]
There is no secret that I love dumplings–boiled, pan-fried, or steamed. Recently, a coworker from Japan is in town and we were discussing about going for a dim sum/dumpling lunch. All the dumpling talks triggered a sharp craving in me that I had to make my own steamed dumplings.
Making dumplings is really not so hard [...]
