Garlic Prawn Recipe (Fresh Prawn)

Welcome to garlic prawn recipe version 2, the fresh prawn episode! If you remember our previous garlic prawn recipe, we used cheap grey prawns but today we have very fresh sea prawns. So we decided to do a different garlic prawn recipe.

Today's main ingredient, our prawns are crazily fresh from the sea bought from a fishing village. Hugo Wolf and NICI Monkey are both extremely excited for the garlic prawns.

Prawns in love! This version of garlic prawn recipe is very very simple. Because our prawns are so fresh, we are not even gonna trim the prawn head or remove the prawn intestine because there isn't any dirty intestine in the prawns anyway. We just sprayed a teaspoon of salt over the prawns.

Let us deal with the garlic first. We dice up a whole bulb of garlic finely, then fry the garlic in oil under medium fire. Keep stirring the garlic non stop, it will take about 5-7 minutes until the garlic start turning slightly golden-brown like what you see in the picture. Turn off the fire.

With the fire turned off, it will take a minute or so and the garlic will all turn golden brown like this. Frying garlic is an art, you have to be patient go slow and stir with the flow. Garlic needs time to be fried thoroughly to be crispy and fragrant, thats why we only use medium fire.

Nicely fried garlic in oil. The most difficult part of our garlic prawn recipe is done, the rest is just a stroll in the park. Next we prepare one stalk of spring onion and chop them up nicely.

Prepare a pot to steam the prawns. Heat up the pot and bring the water inside the pot to boil. Be warned!! Prawns get cooked very easily within 3 minutes in the steamer, to get the best cooked prawns, preheat a plate (to put the fresh prawn) into the steamer first. Plates take the most time to heat up during steaming. Hence with a preheated plate, your fresh prawns will be cooked in the most perfect timing.

3 minutes has passed and our prawns are cooked. We did not add any additional water but look at the amount of fresh prawn juice that our prawns made by itself! Quickly spread the spring onions over the prawns and close the steamer lid for another 30 seconds. Heating the spring onions for a while releases its aroma.

Are you wondering what happened to the garlic in our garlic prawn recipe? 

Garlic goes last into our garlic prawns. We only poured half the fried garlic in oil over the prawns, you can add your one whole bulb of fried garlic into the prawns but that would be too luxurious! We conservatively kept half of our fried garlic in oil for future use.

This pure prawn sauce from our garlic prawn is so full of prawn sweetness with a hint of spring onion and a strong garlic aroma. It taste so good only because we used fresh prawns from the sea.

Yum yum, Hugo Wolf wants a bite of the garlic prawns too! The freshness of the prawn is just unbelievable and the prawn meat's texture is almost like crab's meat! Of course for those who live near the sea, you've been eating fresh prawns and fish everyday and won't feel our excitement.

Hope you enjoyed today's simple garlic prawn recipe with fresh prawns brought to you by Hugo Wolf and NICI Monkey!

Garlic Prawn recipe

Ingredients for 2 pax

- 7 huge fresh prawns from the sea

- 1 stalk of spring onion

- 1 bulb of garlic

- 1 teaspoon of salt and some oil

How simple than this can a recipe get? Go buy some fresh prawns and cook garlic prawns now.

Century Egg Porridge Recipe

Sorry for the long break, NICI-Mania is back! Today we are introducing the Century egg porridge recipe! In dialect, century egg porridge is called "pi dan zhok".

Whats unique about century egg porridge is this! Century egg is a type of preserved duck egg, the color is brownish-greyish. Nowadays century eggs are made with chicken eggs too because of the cheaper cost. Notice the little snow flake or pine branch shape on the egg, that is one of the special features of the century egg.

Unpeeled century egg on the left and peeled century egg on the right. The most distinctive thing about century egg is the smelly ammonia odor, which is probably the reason why we grew up hearing urban legends that century eggs are made by preserving it in horse urine! We prefer duck century egg because the smelly odor is much stronger and the yolk texture is creamier.

Century egg was once featured in Fear Factor in the exotic food segment. Can you imagine how surprised we were when we saw it on Fear Factor and how funny it was looking at the contestants eating the century egg like it was some worms or cockroaches. We like to call this, the blue cheese of eggs! And frankly speaking, if you love blue cheese like us, century egg's odor is much easier to accept than blue cheese.

Cooking century egg porridge is not as easy as cooking normal porridge. This is a type of Cantonese porridge and the special thing about Cantonese porridge is that the rice should be cooked until you don't see grains of rice in the porridge anymore and the porridge must be real smooth and buttery.

This is our grandmother's authentic century egg porridge recipe. Very troublesome to cook but the taste is much better than anywhere else we have eaten. 

First and foremost, the rice must be prepared the night before. Wash 2 cups of rice, then drain away most of the water and pour in about 2 tablespoons of cooking oil, stir evenly. Soak pot overnight. Soaking in oil is to enhance the smoothness and buttery texture of the porridge.

Next day morning, prepare 2 salted eggs. Salted eggs are BFF (best friends forever) with century eggs. Wash it thoroughly, you can even scrub the salted egg, just make sure the shell is immaculate.

Prepare about 200 grams of minced meat. Marinate it with 2 tablespoons of soy sauce, 1 teaspoon of sesame oil, some pepper and some corn flour to make the minced meat more tender.

While your pot of porridge is brought to boil, chop 2 thick slices of ginger and add it into the pot. As soon as the porridge starts to boil, switch to low fire and keep stirring every few minutes.

Add in the 2 salted eggs with shell on into the pot to cook together with the porridge. That's why we reminded you to wash the salted eggs clean earlier. You may boil the salted eggs in another pot but this is our grandmother's style of cooking the salted eggs.

The continuous stirring is what makes cooking the century egg porridge quite a tedious task as you have to remind yourself to keep stirring the porridge while you prepare the ingredients. This process takes about 45 minutes while cooking normal porridge only takes 5 minutes of boiling. You should remove the salted eggs after 10 minutes of boiling. If you find the porridge is too creamy, it is advisable to add more water.

Notice our pot of century egg porridge has nothing in it after cooking for so long but look how smooth and creamy our porridge has become! Now when the porridge is ready, its time to start adding ingredients for example the minced meat first.

Chop the salted eggs into half with a knife, its much easier than peeling the shell. Take one of the salted eggs, dig it out from half the shell in cubes and add them into the porridge.

Finally we add one century egg into the porridge. You don't need to cook the century eggs, they are eaten raw. Now you can start adding salt and any seasoning you want into the porridge. You may use some chicken stock power to give it more flavor but our grandmother uses MSG.

Slice up the other century egg and salted egg. Dice some spring onions, chinese coriander leaves and cut the ginger in long thin shreds. Set these ingredients all in one plate, they are to be used to dressing and toppings for the century egg porridge.

Chop up the garlic and fry them in oil to make crispy garlic oil. This is a mandatory as it makes the century egg porridge so much tastier.

Scoop a bowl of century egg porridge from the pot, top it with spring onion, coriander, ginger, garlic oil, more century egg, salted eggs, some soy sauce, sesame oil and pepper. Your century egg porridge is done.

Century Egg Porridge

Ingredients List (for 4 to 5 pax)

2 cups of rice 200 grams mince meat 2 century eggs 2 salted eggs 1 bulb of garlic 1 piece of ginger 2 stalks of spring onion 2 stalks of chinese coriander leaves

Salt Pepper Soy Sauce Sesame Oil Optional: MSG seasoning Chicken stock powder

Hope you liked our century egg porridge recipe today!

Sweet and Sour Pork (咕嚕肉)

NICI-Mania presents Sweet and Sour Pork recipe! Sweet and Sour Pork often known locally as 咕嚕肉 "goo-lok-yok" is one of the most classic Chinese dish ever.

Sweet and Sour Pork, the name says it all about this classic dish. It is fried pork in sweet and sour sauce together with vegetables like cucumber, pineapple, onion, green capsicum, etc..

The vegetables in the Sweet and Sour Pork dish can vary up to personal likes but it must always have cucumber in it. Our sweet and sour pork recipe today uses tomato, cucumber and onions.

Sweet and Sour Pork is always cooked with the ingredients in cube shape, cut the tomato, onions and cucumber into cube shape but cut the lean pork meat into 1 inch slice and half inch thick.

Marinate the lean pork meat with 4 tablespoons of soy sauce, 1 teaspoon of sugar, some pepper, half a fully beaten egg, and a lot of corn starch that is enough to cover all the meat evenly.

Add copious amount of oil into a hot pan and deep fry the lean pork meat in about 150-160°C of hot oil. Even though the lean pork meat is quite thick, it will be cooked in 40 seconds flat.

The lean pork meat will be browned like this after deep frying it in hot oil. Restaurants do not serve such a big piece of meat for sweet and sour pork. But since we are cooking it ourselves, the cost is lower so its alright to be spoilt sometimes :)

The lean pork meat is going to be tender-licious because the egg and corn starch protects the juiciness of the meat and the high temperature of deep frying locks all the juice within.

The Sweet and Sour Sauce

The sauce is the most important factor that decides the success or failure of this dish.

Prepare the sweet and sour sauce for the Sweet and Sour Pork in advance. 

6 tablespoons  of plain water
6 tablespoons of tomato sauce
3 tablespoons of vinegar
3 tablespoons of sugar
1/2 teaspoon of salt. 

Mix the sauce well. You can up or lower the ratio accordingly to the size of your dish.

The perfect ratio is the key to make any tasty sauce.

Now we can start frying our Sweet and Sour Pork. Remove all the oil from the pan earlier and leave about 4 tablespoons of oil in the pan. Start frying the onions and tomatoes first until fragrant. Then add in the well mixed sweet and sour sauce.

Add the deep fried pork into the pan and stir it well. When it is almost ready, add in the cucumber last and serve. Because of the sugar in the sweet and sour sauce, it will turn sticky and wrap around the lean pork meat.

Home made Sweet and Sour Pork is done! It is a very simple recipe and it taste very good! You can use the same recipe to cook sweet and sour fish or sweet and sour chicken.

Sweet and Sour Pork is a very popular dish you can easily impress your friends or family with it.

A1 Bak Kut Teh

NICI-Mania's Jolly Mah will be showing you A1 Bak Kut Teh in this post. Special guest appearance by NICI snow reindeer!

Bak Kut Teh is pork ribs soup with a distinctive taste of local spices. Bak Kut Teh is the most famous classic dish here, a must eat delicacy if you ever visit Malaysia.

A1 Bak Kut Teh combines all the important spices for the unique Bak Kut Teh taste and puts it in a convenient pack so you can easily cook your own Bak Kut Teh at the comfort of your own home.

A1 Bak Kut Teh comes in two packets of spices as you can see above. Put both into one pot of soup.

The most important ingredient for Bak Kut Teh is the pork ribs (Bak Kut in hokkien language)

Prime pork ribs is the preferred type of ribs for Bak Kut Teh. They are very soft and tender when cooked. The instruction says 2kg of meat but 8 pieces of prime pork ribs would be enough.

Garlic is the next most important ingredient for the Bak Kut Teh soup taste. We put 2 generous bulbs of garlic (unpeeled) into the soup and chop up 1 extra bulb for condiments later.

Button mushrooms are optional but we love to have them in our Bak Kut Teh.

Fried bean curd skin is also optional here.

Fried tofu puff is also optional here. Some popular extra ingredients Bak Kut Teh stall owners like to put here is pork liver and pork intestine.

Always boil the pork ribs in a separate small pot first as you can boil away all the dirty blood in the ribs. Very important so that your soup won't be tarnished.

We used about 1 litre of water here and then we dump the ribs, garlic, button mushrooms and A1 Bak Kut Teh pack into the soup all at once.

The optional bean curd skin and tofu puff can be added anytime but we add it almost when its ready.

After boiling for 1.5hours, the A1 Bak Kut Teh soup is done! All you need to do is add salt to taste and MSG (food flavoring to enhance the flavor), but we used chicken stock cubes to replace MSG. We also added lots of pepper, it is not mandatory to add all the dark/light soy sauce and oyster sauce as mentioned in the instructions.

The garlic is well soaked with all the A1 Bak Kut Teh spices and pork ribs taste.

The button mushrooms are also very tasty.

The most important condiment to go with Bak Kut Teh is this chopped fresh garlic with red chilli in dark soy sauce + light soy sauce. This goes very very well with the pork ribs in the Bak Kut Teh soup. Not compulsory but most shops selling Bak Kut Teh gives this.

How do you know when the prime pork ribs is well cooked? As long as the meat tears away from the bone easily means the ribs are tender and succulent.

Hope our dear friend Leona from plueschtierkinder enjoys the A1 Bak Kut Teh at Germany! ^_^