Another version of Mie Ayam using Japanese green tea soba.

Ingredients (for 1 portion)

Noodles

• 100 gr green tea soba (boil according to package instructions)
  
• 1 tbs pork oil*
• 1 tbs fish sauce
• 1 tbs oyster sauce
• 1/4 tbs sweet soy sauce
• Pepper

Savoury ground pork

• 100 gr ground pork
• 50 gr sliced champignon mushrooms
  
• 1 tbs pork oil
• 1 tbs cooking wine
  
• 1 tbs oyster sauce
• 1 tbs fish sauce
• 1 tbs sweet soy sauce
• Chopped spring onions
• Pepper

Pork Oil

• Heat some pork fat until oil comes out from the lard.
  

New China Town is my favourite yum cha restaurant in Frankfurt - not that there are many in Frankfurt...! It has a quite big selection of dim sum and the taste is very authentic. It's of course not comparable to real yum cha restaurants in Hong Kong, Sydney or Jakarta where you can see unfriendly waiters and waitresses walking around with their dim sum carts, but for the yum cha deprived me, having a small yum cha restaurant (quite) nearby, even though it's served a la carte, is like heaven... (because I am a real yum cha fanatic!).

Jiaozi - boiled dumplings - €7.30

Har gao - €4.30

Chee cheong fun with dried shrimps and green onions, €3.40

Chee cheong fun with prawns - €4.00

Char Siu Bao- BBQ pork bun - €3.20

Char leong - rice rolls with Chinese bread stick - €3.50

Glutinous fried dumplings with pork - €3.20

Fried squid cake - € 4.20

Besides serving dim sum, New China-Town also serves normal Chinese food (I would say, Cantonese style food, as the Chinese food there reminds me of the Chinese food in Sydney which is often run by Cantonese).

Fried rice noodles with beef - €10.30

New China Town is the only Asian restaurant I know which serves fresh rice noodles...! To be honest, I can make better fried rice noodles than the one served in this restaurant, but I just couldn't resist ordering FRESH rice noodles in a restaurant (in Germany that is, because it's almost non-existent).

Overall, I love this restaurant :)!

New China Town
Münchner Straße 52
60329 Frankfurt Am Main

Literally Nasi Goreng Belanda means Dutch fried rice. There's nothing Dutch about this fried rice actually, I simply call it this way because my Dad likes to call his version of fried rice Dutch fried rice - perhaps because Indonesia used to be colonised by the Dutch? I have to clarify this with my Dad...! I don't know why I never really asked him!

My Dad never cooks. It's always my Mum, or our house-maid. He's normally too busy to be in the kitchen. But I still remember, when I was really young, my Dad went to the kitchen once and whipped up real delicious red-coloured fried rice. I asked him for the recipe and afterwards I started to experiment making my Dad's version of red hot fried rice. I've never really managed to make my fried rice so bright red. I guess it's because I always use sambal oelek (which can be very hot if you use too much of it) instead of loads of seeded fresh red chilies. Anyway, I like my Dad's version of fried rice. I've modified the recipe a bit here and there to my own liking, but the flavour of my Dad's Nasi Goreng Belanda is still there...

Ingredients

• 2 plates of cooked long-grained rice (from the day before)
• 3 tbs oil/margarine
  
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
  
• 10-15 cloves French shallot, minced (substitute with 2-3 spanish onions if you cannot find any French shallots)
  
• 10 seeded large red chilies, minced (or 2-3 tbs sambal oelek)
• 2 tbs fish sauce
  
• 2 tbs oyster sauce
• 2 tbs sweet soy sauce
• 1 tbs terasi (shrimp paste)
  
• 200 g seafood (prawns, squids, mussels) or substitute with any toppings you like
• 3 tbs sliced green onions (optional)

Garnish

• Tomatoes
• Cucumbers
• Scrambled eggs

Water spinach was my childhood favourite vegetable, especially when it's stir fried with prawns. When I was young my parents liked to bring me to Bogor (a city about an hour away from Jakarta, Indonesia) every weekend. There we often visited a Chinese restaurant that served stir-fried water spinach with beef strips and quail eggs. I was absolutely in love with this dish and it's been ages ago since I ate it. I thought about recreating this dish when I saw a bunch of water spinach in my local Asian grocery store. And here it is...

Ingredients

• 400 g water spinach
• 100 g prawns/ beef strips
• 14 - 16 boiled quail eggs
• 5 button mushrooms, sliced (optional)
• 1 tbs oil
• 1 tbs minced garlic
• 2 tbs fish sauce
• 2 tbs cooking wine
• 1 - 2 tbs chili bean paste
• 1 tbs sambal oelek
• 1 tbs oyster sauce

What to do

Heat the oil in wok. Add in the minced garlic, stir and followed by prawns, cooking wine and fish sauce. When the prawns change colour, add the water spinach, chili bean paste, sambal oelek and oyster sauce.

Serve your water spinach with hot piping rice!

I thought that pasta would only taste good with meat, that's why I never dared to cook meatless pasta. But, last week I challenged myself to make pasta with seafood, especially after I saw some mouthwatering crab linguine pictures in some websites. However, since I didn't have crab, I used prawns instead. I was amazed by how good the pasta turned out. The pictures below might not do justice to how well the linguine actually really tasted.

Ingredients

• 250 g linguine, boiled till al dente

Creamy Mushroom Sauce with Prawns

• 2 tbs olive oil
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 tomato, chopped
• 2 tbs tomato paste/concentrate
• 250 ml cream
  
• 1-2 tbs Sambal oelek
• 100 ml white wine
  
• 100 g prawns
• 200 g champignon
• Dried oregano
  
• Maggi/Knorr chicken granule to taste
• Sugar and black pepper to taste

Garnish

• Boiled water spinach
• Parmesan cheese
• Sun-dried tomatoes
  

Serve the linguine with the sauce. Garnish with parmesan cheese, boiled water spinach and sun-dried tomatoes.

Another dumpling post... Well, I haven't posted any dumpling posts for a quite long time anyway, so I think it's about time to drool over some yummy dumpling shots again ;-).

Ingredients

Dumpling skins

• 2 cups all purpose flour
• 1/2 cup boiling water
• Extra flour for kneading and dusting

Filling

• 200 gr minced pork
• 100 gr chopped prawns
• 1 tbs minced ginger
• 100 gr chopped Chinese chives
  
• 3 tbs oyster sauce
• 1 tbs sesame oil
• Salt, pepper, sugar to taste

Please refer to my guo tie post if you want to know how to make the dough.

Sushi Hongsam is a small Japanese restaurant located in Wiesbaden. The sushi chef, Hongsam An, used to work in Marriot Hotel in Frankfurt, before he opened his own restaurant. It is the only restaurant I know which offers really high quality sushi (at least in the Wiesbaden area). I am actually not very fond of eating raw fish, but the fish offered in Sushi Hongsam melts in your mouth and doesn't have a fishy smell.

Hongsam Sushi Set - € 8.90
Sushi set, salad, fried fishballs, green pickles, orange, miso soup

During lunch time (11:30 - 14:30), they offer Mittagsmenu (Lunch Menu) with very reasonable price - €12.50 is the most expensive in the menu which is Udon and Sushi set menu where you get a bowl of udon soup, a sushi set (6 hosomaki, 7 nigiri and a slice of tamagoyaki), a small portion of fried fishcakes, a small portion of Japanese pickles, salad and a slice of orange/honeydew.

Udon and Sushi Set - € 12.50

In the evening (17:30 - 23:00) the prices are higher but I think it's worth it if you think of the quality this restaurant offers. You can also order some Korean dishes here, albeit very expensive and the variety is rather small.

Beef Teriyaki Set

Stir-fried Salmon Set

Prawn Tempura maki - € 6.00

Unfortunately, if you come rather late during the lunch hour (say, 30 minutes before it closes down for the afternoon), you wouldn't be completely welcomed here. At least that's what happened to us the last two times we were there half an hour before it closed. They looked at us funny when we came in, without any greetings whatsoever and they started to clean up everything around us, making us feel that we had to quickly bolt down our food and bugger off. As a working woman, I know that having your free time is very precious, but I think in the restaurant business where customer service is very important, they should at least wait until it's time to close down before they start cleaning up the whole restaurant - if they really want to, at any rate in the closed kitchen, not right in front of our nose.

Sushi Hongsam
Friedenstraße 15
65189 Wiesbaden

Since two days ago I have been crazily in love with my new pasta/noodle machine ;-). I got it last Christmas from my MIL, but hadn't had the chance to use it until now. I made two different types of noodles - wide and thin noodles. The taste of the noodles was super good, I was impressed with myself ;-)!

I had tried making noodles on my own before I have this cool pasta machine. It was okay, but my hands were just not skillful enough in cutting the dough into equal length and width, which I think is important in noodle making. Well, now I have this machine the problem is solved...:).

Ingredients (for 2-3 people)
Source: http://cikciks.multiply.com/recipes/item/35/Mie_Telor_Mentega

• 300 gr flour
• 2 eggs
• 1 tbs butter/margarine
• 50 ml water

You can change the eggs with water only if you want to make wheat based noodles. The trick is the dough needs to be pliable but not sticky. You have to adjust the amount of water and flour yourself until you find this pliable/non-sticky consistency.

I used the noodles to make Mie Ayam but the more modest version - simply noodles with savoury ground pork and boiled Rucola.

Another German dish that I like is Schweinebraten or German roast pork. I don't eat this dish very often, and to be true I had also never made Schweinebraten myself till today. It turned out it's not very hard at all to make.

I looked up the recipe from Die echte deutsche Küche (The real German Cooking) cooking book given by my mother-in-law, but I added a few more ingredients to my liking.

Ingredients

• 600 gr pork shoulder
• 1 onion, sliced
• 2 tsp paprika powder
• 1 tsp garlic powder
• 2 tbs chicken stock powder
  
• Salt and pepper
  
• 1.5 cup white wine (or beer)
  
• 1 tbs plum mousse (optional)

What to do

• Rub the pork all over with paprika powder, chicken stock powder, garlic powder, salt, pepper and plum mousse.
• Place the onion slices at the bottom of the roasting pan.
  
• Add 1.5 cup white wine.
• Place the pork on top of the onion slices.
• Cover pan with foil and roast the pork for 1.5 hours.
• The gravy: Remove the roasted pork after 1 hour. Strain the pan juices from the roasting pan. Add stock, pepper, sugar and white wine to taste. I used Saucenbinder to thicken the gravy - Saucenbinder is like flour, so if you don't have it, just mix a bit of flour with water then pour it in the gravy.
  

Slice the roast pork and serve with anything that you like, e.g. potato dumplings, green beans, Sauerkraut, etc. You can also eat Schweinebraten slices with bread or rolls for breakfast. Very yummy!

I just would like to post some pictures of the Weihnachtsmarkt (Christmas Market) in Wiesbaden. Christmas markets are one of the things I like most about Christmas in Germany, they always look so festive and merry, even though I have to say I almost never buy anything there. The foods and products they sell in Christmas markets tend to be more expensive than they're supposed to be. But I guess people still go there anyway to enjoy the Christmasy atmosphere.

Merry-go-round! (This pic is from a Weihnachtsmarkt in Frankfurt taken last year)


Christmas markets are usually always packed with people....


and more people...


You will often find booths selling sweets...


Christmas decorations...



more Christmas decorations...



and of course Lebkuchen or gingerbreads!


And what is Christmas without a nice Christmas dinner? German Roast Duck, that is for me :)!



And loads of chocolate...?? Thanks my lovely mother-in-law, who still loves to bestow us - me, my husband and my brother-in-law with bags of sweets even though we're not children anymore...


Look at our Christmas sweet-platters from 2007!!

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR, EVERYONE!