My Weekend Breakfast & Baby Marcus' Food - Grass Carp & Choy Sum Congee

Now baby Marcus has started eating various solid food, we prepare it daily, super fresh, using ingredients which are normally organic and even better than what we normally eat every day. Ahhh...things we do for our kids...new parents syndrome.

Marcus would only eat a bit, so we get leftover ingredients which we sometimes used the next day. But since we want to use the freshest things, these days we try to consume the ingredients used for baby Marcus' food, just like what I saw in this wonderful blog, Yummies for your little one's bellies. I saw her making two different versions of dishes, one for the baby and one for the big kids, and I was truly inspired!

Last weekend, I was on congee making duty, and I made grass carp and choy sum congee for baby Marcus. I ate the same congee, mine was just cranked up with a lot more seasoning. Heheheheh

Recipe
- 1/4 cup rice
- water to rice ratio: 5 to 1
- 2 small stalk of organic choy sum, finely chopped
- a small slice of grass carp belly (about 3cm x 10 cm)
Cook rice in hot water until soften (to congee/porridge consistency). While rice is cooking, clean and steam the fish. Once the fish is done (it's done when a chopstick could go through it very easily), mash the fish and remove all the bones. Once the rice/congee is done, add the shredded choy sum, let cook for 1-2 minutes (we don't wanna cook it for too long, w, e want to retain as much nutrients as possible, that's why we chopped the choy sum so finely), add the mashed fish, remove from heat.

For the baby, pour congee into a food processor/blender, pulse for a couple of minute, serve warm. No seasoning necessary, the rice actually makes the congee pretty sweet.

For me, I surely didn't food-process the congee, added fish sauce, pepper, topped it with crispy shallot. A very comforting hot weekend breakfast for me.

Slurp~!

Ho Ho Congee & Noodle - Do You Fake It? - DoF Cheats

Are you a dedicated food paparazzi?
Do you always carry your giant DSLR around when dining out?

I must confess that I am not. The DSLR is too lazy to lug around to work along with my 1000001 items stuffed into my purse every day. I don't welcome the additional kilo of luggage.

Plus, I don't always document my meals, unless there's something special, i.e:
- It is not what I've been eating the same damn shit over and over for one month straight
- The meal is especially yummy
- The meal sucked big time, it is worth mentioning
- I haven't blogged about the said yummility/disastrous meal

However, I always carry my humble little point and shoot (Canon IXUS 870IS), just in case I desperately needed to document something. It works mighty fine. Most importantly, it has a magical slimming effect when I take pictures of my daily outfit (yes, I am that narcissistic!).

But taking photographs of food? Well, although it's nice...but it's not amazing.

Here comes another dirty little secret...

I like faking it.

Faking waa...t?
Oh, relax, sous chef.
I like faking the blurry effect of what we can get with DSLR camera to create Depth of Field, using an easy photoshop trick.

Please bear in mind that I am by no means a photoshop expert, nor an expert in photography....just sharin', okie? ^_*

1. Open the file in Photoshop (I am using Adobe Photoshop CS3)


2. Sharpen it.
If it looks too sharp/too harsh/too oily/too shiny, simply undo it.


3. Select blur tool


4. Select brush size, mode (normal/lighten/darken) and strength (100%)


5....and blur the heck outta that background.

Blur the parts which aren't supposed to be the star (focus) of the photograph.
There are other ways to blur it even more, but since I am to lazy to select parts, I chose this method.
Shaking my mouse vigorously to get a more blurry effect is (hopefully) a good exercise for my wrist.
Hehe *idiotic giggle*

6. Save the edited photograph

...and that's it!

Of course, you can pair this dummy trick with other photoshop magic tricks such as adjusting the lighting, colors, removing my eyebags or even adding Rob Pattinson as my dinner date ...we'll get into some of that next time, okie?

Now the food...what did I do to increase my dress size that night?

Jar Jeong Hor Fun (Spicy Meat Sauce on Rice Noodles)

This dish is normally served with egg noodles, but I love rice noodles. The sauce is a little on the sweet side, not exactly my favorite jar jeong noodle, but it's nothing that can't be fixed with a dash of soy sauce.

Beef Cake Steamed Rice with Egg

Imagine what you can do with that bowl of raw egg...(go all the way, this is not a PG-13 blog hehe)

Pour it over the beef rice...


Mix it nice...


Pour soy sauce on top...again, the soy sauce served with this rice is a little too sweet. Needed to add a regular soy sauce.


Ah! I remembered to save an original copy (the "before" version) of the above edited photo.

A bit dark and gloomy, don't you think? You can still see sous chef's striped shirt pretty clearly here.

Fragrant and springy beef cake...with satiny smooth, creamy egg...and a dash of soy....

Yum.
I was kinda jealous of sous chef's order.

Now, don't we always want a combination of textures?

We need something crunchy!
These deep fried wontons with a mayo dip were just what we needed.

...and of course I had to fool myself that I eat somehow healthily, by ordering a side of veggie.

The water spinach with preserved beancurd sauce was again...a little too sweet.
Anyway, all in all, it was a good dinner. I'd go back for the beef cake steamed rice and fried wontons for sure.

One good thing about eating in a mall is....I could buy a dress one size bigger right after dinner.

Ho Ho Congee & Noodle
Metroplaza, Kwai Fong (Kwai Fong MTR Station Exit E), 3rd floor
葵芳興芳路223號新都會廣場3樓370-374號
Tel: 2487 7668

**Power Porridge

Reading my blog posts, these are the things about me you might've learnt so far:
- One heck of an unhealthy food fanatic
- Suffering from severe baking disabilities
- A short cut addict, an acutely lazy bum

Hmm, all of the above are correct. But remembering those hospital days:

(yep, that's me on hospital bed, and that's Andrew Zimmern on the celeb gossip magazine I was reading hehe)

....now I wanna be a good girl for a change (if only you got a dollar for every time I wrote this sentence on my blogpost...)

This power porridge is just so bursting out with good things, maybe it can cancel out all of the bad things I had hehe? (to myself: dream on, you fool!)

The recipe is from our executive consulting chef, which we've tweaked by adding tofu and black beans. Deliciousness & health guaranteed, failure is own's (my) stupidity hehe.

Ingredients
(serves four)
- half cup of rice
- rice to water ratio = 1 to 5 (or you can use chicken stock)
- 1 pc tofu, slice into big chunks
- 1 teaspoon of fermented black beans
- HK$10 minced pork (it means just a little, you can add more if you wish), marinate with a bit of soy sauce and sugar
- 1 egg
- spring onion, chopped
- salt, pepper, sugar

Boil rice with water/chicken stock until reduced to thin congee, add minced pork, tofu, fermented black beans, spring onion, salt, pepper, sugar, cook until you get the desired thickness, crack eggs into it, mix well. Serve with Chinese fried donut sticks aka yau jar gwai (you can omit this, or just go easy on it ^_^)