Black Glutinous Rice dessert 黑糯米

I've tried making this dessert about 3 weeks ago and it turned out to be unsatisfactory. Not giving up, I gave it a go last week and hooray! It tasted sooo much better. I have to confess that I'm getting lazier in preparing good food for my hubby, so he started 'complaining' last week... oops. :D So I decided to do something special.


I can't believe that this dessert is so easy to prepare. Getting a pack of black glutinous rice is extremely easy in Den Hague. I've also added red dates and longan into the dessert. These are optional. If you want to try this recipe out (enough for 2 person to have 2 big bowls), here is what I've done:


1) Soak a bowl full of black glutinous rice to soften it (size of a normal rice bowl will do). I soaked it for about 20 hours.

2) Wash the rice and pour the soaked rice into my cooking pot, together with approx 3 bowls of water

3) Then cook the ingredients with high heat till it boils and then switch to low heat.

4) I add in red dates, longan, and rock sugars (add and taste. Adjust the amount to your liking)

5) Continue to cook them for about 1 hour.

6) After 1 hour, switch off your cooker and leave the pot for another 1 hour. Do not open the cover of the pot. You want the heat of the pot to continue to warm the ingredient to get a smokey taste. In mandarin we call it 焗.

7) Impatiently, I waited for 1 hour and tada! It turned out so much better than my first attempt. The rice is thick and have the texture that I wanted for the dessert.

8) I did add a bit of coconut milk. Yum yum, I love it!

Confinement food 坐月餐

Hubby volunteered to cook confinement food for me... haha! So I promised him that we can do some trial run before that. Start with something easy like ginger chicken 姜葱鸡.

One of the confinement food that I look forward to is the Pig trotters with vinegar 猪脚醋! Some people like it some people don't. My dad cooked it once long time ago, and I loved it! However, the correct one, according to him, is with lots of gravy. The one that he cooked was dry. So he said it was a failure. But I thought it was a nice mistake.

The only problem now is, where can I find pig trotters in The Hague? I haven't seen one yet...

Lo Mai Kai 糯米鸡

I have this craving of wanting to eat Lo Mai Kai 糯米鸡 these few days. If you like dim sum, you will probably know what I am talking about. It is a dim sum that has soy sauce marinated chicken/pork with sausage and chinese mushrooms all compacted into a bowl of glutinous rice and steamed. In KL, you will get them in a metal bowl. We turned the bowl upside down to loosen the rice and eat it with chili sauce. It is a very popular dim sum that you can buy from any coffee shop that sells pau (steamed buns). I remembered my dad and I used to share one big lo mai kai early morning with coffee as breakfast.

Lo Mai Kai sold in the HK restaurant in The Hague is different from what we have in KL. Here they wrapped them up in pandan leaves and there isn't much ingredients inside.

So I decided to look up on the net and found a long and detailed lo mai kai recipe which I am very tempted to try. It seems that it takes lots of effort to make one. I have all the ingredients, except the glutinous rice... so that goes into my Chinatown shopping list next round.

Bak Chang 粽子

When my hubby came back from KL 2 weeks ago, I specially reminded him to buy me bak chang. Bak chang - the hokkien saying of glutinous rice wrapped in the bamboo leaves, a must-have food when the Chinese celebrates the Dragon Boat festival in June. Yes, it's my craving, and I wanted it bad because I couldn't find a good one here.

Thanks to my mother-in-law, she went to the pasar to buy me 5 big bak changs from a famous aunty who has been selling there for, don't know how many years. She carefully wrapped them with layer and layer of newspapers and put them into plastic bag and hid them under the clothes. Hubby checked it in through his checked-in luggage. When he arrived home, I grabbed the luggage and dug them out!

The first bite was sooo delicious that I can now forever remember the taste. I am no pork fat lover, but just this once, that bite is heavenly to me!

So I guess I have to learn to make bak chang myself since getting a good one is almost impossible here. I can't ask my mother in law to courier them to me. So I found this good, well-written bak chang recipe here!

Butter Prawn 奶油虾

I wanted to try this dish out because I miss it very much. So I went about in the market to look for all the ingredients. I can find all, except curry leaves. I should have get it when I was in the Grote Markt few days ago. But, I'll do without it. Yes I'm desperate...

I always wonder what are the granules in the dish. They are actually garlic. When the garlic is cooked together with evaporated milk long enough, they dried up and became the granules which are very crunchy. I personally think that it is the main ingredient that makes or breaks the dish.

So I attempted.

Hubby likes it! Hooray!!

If you would like to try this dish out, point your browser to My Kitchen's Snippet - Butter Prawn.