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We attended a wedding dinner at Oriental Pavilion some months ago. The restaurant is not very big and it’s tucked away on the first floor of Jaya33.

At any rate, we were pretty impressed with the food at the wedding dinner. One night, we happened to be in the area and decided to stop by.

We were lucky we managed to secure one of only two tables left that night. Wedding receptions usually take up the whole restaurant and you may get turned away.

That night, there was no wedding as it was the seventh month of the Chinese calendar, not an auspicious month for weddings, but still the restaurant was full.

We rarely get to eat this Crispy Chicken except at wedding dinners but it’s one of our favorites except this order didn’t come with the lovely prawn crackers.

Gotta love that crispy skin though. Guess it’s okay to eat the skin once in a while . The chicken dipped in wa yeem, or flavored salt is the way I prefer it to dipping it in plum sauce.

We also ordered the Steamed Cod Fish which came with too much a heap of dried black fungus and fresh coriander. Tastewise, it was okay, a bit bland and not as vivid as some others I’ve tasted.

This Stirfried Kailan was exceptionally good that day. Because of the simplicity of this dish, you need to use kailan so fresh you can taste the freshness and be able to distinguish that from the fragrance of the garlic. Well, we got lucky.

Of course, we had to have our favorite Claypot Seafood Tofu which turned out to be very tasty. They used the extra large, extra soft tofu which I suspect could be made inhouse.

Look at that, the colors really jump out at you, don’t they?

The thing I really like about their food is that the taste is just right, not too salty. Pricewise, let’s just say we can’t eat there too often but the food is pretty good so yeah, we plan on going back.

I bought some taupok, or tofu puffs from the market because I was thinking of trying my hand at making my own vegetarian curry. But I changed my mind when my neighbor said she’d get me a tub of vegetarian curry from the temple.

So I decided to stuff the taupok with some meat and fry it. I think some restaurants serve this as an appetizer or hors d’oeuvres. Taupok is a roughly 2-inch square tofu puff that’s hollow inside.

So what you need is:

• 10-15 taupok, cut into half
• 100 grams of ground pork
• 2 cups of cooking oil
• salt and pepper to taste

The first thing I do is to season the ground pork with some salt and pepper, and leave aside while I cut the tofu puffs into halves.

Using a teaspoon, I stuff the ground pork into the hollow of each taupok half. Then I heat up the cooking oil on high heat and drop the taupok in, one by one.

I kept my stuffed taupok very basic as I was in a bit of a rush. But if you’re planning to serve these as hors d’oeuvres, you can pretty up the stuffing with shredded carrots and green (spring) onions.

I serve these hot from the wok with chilli sauce and ketchup right out of the bottle, provided there’s still any left after the kids are done pinching .

Most of the time, I use ladies’ fingers in my chicken curry but I like them stir-fried as well. Ladies’ fingers, also called okra, is one of the more versatile vegetables and lend themselves well to a variety of cooking methods.

The ingredients you’ll need for this very simple yet tasty dish are:

• 12-15 ladies’ fingers, sliced thinly at an angle
• 1 large red chili, sliced thinly with seeds removed
• 1 clove of garlic, chopped
• cooking oil
• soy sauce
• salt and pepper to taste

I normally cut off the pointed tips of the okra to keep the slices consistent. That’s just me. You can keep them if you want to, no biggie .

I drizzle a bit of oil into my wok on high heat and throw in the garlic to flavor the oil for a few minutes. Since I’m working with high heat, I have to be quick.

In go the chili followed by the ladies’ fingers. I give it a few quick stirs and add a wee bit of water and a drizzle of soy sauce to help the cooking process and so the veggies won’t burn.

Season with salt and pepper and it’s ready to serve. Goes great with rice. It couldn’t get any easier than that!

Happy Mid-Autumn Festival!

Yes, it’s today, the fifteenth day of the eighth moon of the Chinese calendar. Tonight the children in the neighborhood will walk around with lighted lanterns (hence its other name, Lantern Festival) while their elders sit around a table and eat mooncakes (hence it’s also called Mooncake Festival) while admiring the full moon above.

I have treasured childhood memories of playing lanterns with my neighborhood friends on this moonlit night every year when I was growing up. My grandmother used to prepare a small feast to celebrate the Mid-Autumn although technically it’s always summer here.

We’ve kept up the tradition of celebrating on a small scale since my kids are too old for lanterns and we’re not big fans of mooncakes. Nothing special for dinner tonight except for this yeem kok kai, or salted herbal chicken which a friend brought us from Ipoh as a gift.

It looks like ordinary pak cham kai, or steamed chicken but this had been marinated in salt and steamed in aluminium foil with dong gui and some other Chinese herbs. It smelt really good when I opened up the package. The chicken itself is salty with a strong herbal flavor. Yumm.

Well, I wished for rain and I got rain. So I have to cook some rainy weather food to warm up our tummies and to chase away the sniffles caused by the alternating cool and hot weather.

Chicken curry is the best thing ever and my kids love it. They’ve been trained to eat spicy food from young. It’s a gradual process. Just expose them to spicy food and pretty soon, their tastebuds will be conditioned.

It’s not too difficult to cook chicken curry at home. The end-result is really worth the effort. You need:

• 1 large chicken about 1.5kg, chopped
• 6 ladies’ fingers, cut into half lengths
• 4 large potatoes, quartered

• 3 teaspoons mixed spices, usually consisting of fennel and mustard seeds, coriander
• 4 tablespoons curry powder mix (use the prepacked mix for meat)
• santan, or coconut milk from 1 coconut
• 4 stalks lemon grass, crushed
• 4 stalks curry leaves

• 6-8 cups water
• cooking oil
• salt to taste

First thing I do is to heat up some oil in the wok, or pan. Throw in the mixed spices and leave to pop for a few minutes to flavor the oil.

Add the curry powder mix, then the stalks of lemon grass and curry leaves. Fry all together till the spicy fragrance fills your kitchen and gets your neighbors drooling with envy .

Add chicken pieces, then the potatoes. Fry for a few minutes before adding water to the mixture. Season with salt to taste. Cover the wok and allow to simmer till the chicken and potatoes are softened.

Add the ladies’ fingers followed by the coconut milk. Simmer till ladies’ fingers are softened. Use medium heat throughout the cooking process.

Chicken curry can be a one-dish meal if you’re in a rush, We typically eat it with rice and papadam. Papadams are round crackers made from chickpea flour and Indian spices. Very tasty, I tell ya!

They’re sold in packaged sheets at the Indian store and I fry them myself at home. They make a delicious accompaniment to any meal of curry. My kids sometimes eat it on its own as a snack or with a topping, sort of like a nacho.

Some of my Australian friends have developed a routine of eating Indian curry rice on Fridays. They would run to the nearby Indian restaurant to buy back a mountain of Indian curry and rice.

When they come to KL, they will insist I take them out for spicy Indian food. Who says Caucasians can’t take the heat? Some of them are even better than me and I’m supposed to be the resident Chili Queen!

I’ve been eating kuay teow (or flat rice noodles) soup with fishballs almost every other weekend. Of all the hawker food, I guess I could call this my all-time favorite.

Most weekends, my neighbor will very kindly help me buy from the coffee shop near the market that she goes to. It’s quite tasty and the soup is not too salty unlike some where the soup is like salt water with practically no flavor at all.

Of course, nothing beats the fishball soup I make at home. Just look at this - it’s got tons more ingredients than the hawker version so much so you can’t even see the rice noodles .

I brew the soup overnight and I add 2, sometimes 3 different types of fishball - the white comma-shaped ones, the round white ones and the large fried ones. I’ve also added some foopay, or flat beancurd sheets, and a generous helping of shredded chicken, chopped cilantro and Chinese lettuce (you can’t see it because it’s at the bottom of the bowl).

The hawker only gives you 3 or 4 fishballs, a few shreds of chicken meat and if you’re lucky, a few strands of Chinese lettuce and cilantro. That’s all you get and its taste is nothing compared to the homemade version. I prefer to homecook my own hawker food because the coffee shops and hawker stalls are generally quite dirty. I’m spoilt that way .

I fell in love with tienchi tea when I tried it at an expensive restaurant recently. It has an intense bitterness to it that just keeps me wanting to drink more.

I’ve been looking around for tienchi tea leaves ever since. Either I haven’t been looking hard enough or it’s not easily available. So I ended up buying this packet of tienchi floral tea pellets from a Chinese medical shop.

As you can see, the color of the resulting tea is very dark and it even stained the side of my mug. When I drank it, I got another shock because the tea tastes sweet. I checked the contents listing and it says it contains cane sugar. No wonder!

I’m not used to Chinese tea being sweet. I can understand if it’s English tea and it’s meant to have sugar added to it. So I’m wondering what to do with so many packets of this tienchi floral tea left .

Sometimes it’s hard to get everyone to agree on where to eat. But somehow Esquire Kitchen is one place we can always agree on when we run out of options.

They serve some pretty mean Shanghainese noodles which was what got me started going back again and again in the days before my kids were even born.

These days when I go with my kids, we usually have the ala carte dishes because “I want to have the wo tip“, or pot stickers.

These oval-shaped dumplings are filled with ground pork and chives, and fried in a shallow pan on the bottom side only, hence the name pot stickers.

The top of the Wo Tip is cooked by the steam of the water that’s gradually added to the pan. That’s why they’re only blackened on one side.

Scrumptuous when eaten with a coarse chili dip consisting of shredded ginger, vinegar and soy sauce!

Stir-Fried Fish Slices with Ginger and Spring Onion is a new favorite with the kids simply because the fish is boneless.

I think this is the Shanghainese style of preparing Stir-Fried French Beans. The beans are left long and cooked with ground pork till softened.

This Lemon Chicken is our perennial favorite. The chicken is practically boneless and deepfried to a crisp. The lemon sauce featuring finely shredded lemon rind comes in a separate bowl, so the chicken retains its crispness till the last minute.

The Claypot Tofu is also a regular dish that we order. In fact, we like this so much I even have my own copycat recipe for it and cook this at home every so often.

Tong Po Meat is one of their popular Shanghainese dishes which goes with the man tou, or flower dumpling. The 3-layer pork of alternating layers of lean meat and fat is braised in a sweet soy sauce till it melts in the mouth.

This is one dish we rarely order though because of the fat. After we throw out the fat, it seems there’s hardly half the dish left.

There are people who love the fat and would gobble down every last bit, and here we are throwing half the pot away . So I’d rather not order it. I hate to waste food.

I confess yeen choy, or Chinese spinach, soup was not one of my favorites when I was growing up. You know how kids balk at veggies, I was one of them. Wouldn’t touch this stuff with a ten-foot pole !

This is one of my favorite soups now. I couldn’t resist buying this beautifully fresh bunch of yeen choy the other day. We had this soup at an expensive restaurant recently and I’ve been craving for more ever since.

You just need:

• a large bunch of yeen choy, or Chinese spinach
• a handful of dried anchovies
• a clove of garlic, sliced thinly
• 5-6 cups of water
• salt and pepper to taste

Yeen choy is not expensive and you need to buy a fairly big bunch as the tender leaves tend to shrink when cooked. You also have to be sure and do a thorough job of rinsing out the hidden sand and dirt in the yeen choy.

First thing, you need to chop the woody stems off the top of your bunch of spinach, leaving the tender leaves and stems. Then just hold the bunch lengthwise and twist to break the long stems into two.

My grandmother taught me that vegetables retain their sweetness and taste better when broken by hand than if you chop them up with a knife. I don’t have any scientific evidence to prove this but in my books, my grandmother is da best darned cook so I follow her advice .

Heat up your saucepan with a drizzle of cooking oil. Saute the garlic slices for 1-2 minutes to flavor the oil. Then add the anchovies and saute for another few minutes.

Add 5 cups of water, cover the pan and bring to a boil on medium heat. Next turn the heat to high, add in the Chinese spinach and boil for a few minutes.

You can add a few slices of century egg at this point. But personally I find they don’t add much flavor to the soup so I leave them out altogether.

Be careful not to overboil the soup as you don’t want your beautiful spinach to turn yellow. Season to taste. I remove the anchovies before serving. They’re completely tasteless after you’ve boiled the calcium goodness out of them (bleh!) so I just chuck them.

Restaurants tend to leave the anchovies and century egg in to make the soup appear less plain.

My kids tell me this soup looks like a bunch of grass floating in muddy water and it’s something a cow might want to drink, but certainly not them!!!

Looks aside, Chinese spinach is a rich source of protein, mineral and Vitamin C so this is very healthy soup we’re talking about. The soup is pure protein, calcium and mineral sweetness with very little fat.

I bought a pack of prepacked ham chips (or ham bits, or ham cubes) at my deli. I decided to freeze them because I wasn’t going to use them the same day. You can still see the ice in the photo below.

Ham chips come from the odds and ends of slabs of ham, so they’re priced very cheaply compared to your regular ham slices. I like the fact that they’re cubed and ready to use. When I have leftover ham slices, I cut them up into cubes too so it makes sense.

I chucked all of my ham chips into this gorgeous fried rice. Yummy. They’re such a change from the Chinese sausages I usually use in my yummiest fried rice or spicy fried rice recipes.

There are so many other ways you can use ham chips - in pizzas, pastas, salads, toppings. How else would you use them?