Month: June 2010

Recipes15 June
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Crispy roast pork belly

siuyuk

When my svelte and sexy wife S and I first started dating, one of her friends described me (behind my back) as a “very porky person”. I’m not sure if she was talking about my ever-growing mid-section or the fact that my favourite meat was and still is pork. I’m hoping that it is the latter.

Maybe it’s a Chinese thing — to love pork so much — but for whatever reason, it’s the one meat I don’t think I’d be able to live without. Take me off beef? No problem. No lamb? Wouldn’t miss it. Even chicken I could leave behind, but pork? No way. And, of course, I have a few favourite preparations. Top of the list are xiao long bao and siu yuk. I don’t think I’ll be making xiao long bao any time soon. That said, I do keep hoping (aloud and as often as possible) that S will one day master the technique of preparing these delicious soupy dumplings. But siu yuk, or crispy roast pork belly, didn’t seem too complex. I mean, if I could make pretty decent char siu, surely I could roast me some pig belly too.

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Recipes4 June

Hainanese Chicken Curry

For the past few months, my darling wife S and I have been taking turns writing a rather short column for the Asian edition of Reader’s Digest. For this month’s piece (June 2010), S wrote about how she and I often prepare some of our favourite foods on weekends, freeze them in small portions and then consume them over the following week. It’s our own little way of ensuring that even when we need a fast meal, we can have something wholesome and homemade.

One of our all-time favourite freezer foods is Hainanese Chicken Curry. This is a variation of chicken curry preferred (or most often prepared) by Chinese-Singaporeans. The taste is quite different from most Indian curries or even Malay, Indonesian or Thai versions. And while I said it was wholesome, it’s not really all that healthy. A lot of the flavour in the curry comes from copious amounts of coconut milk. Nonetheless, it’s really delicious and very, very comforting. Which is exactly what one wants after a long day of work.

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