A Treasured Terengganu dish - Kay Hong

When I first come across this dish, it was at Mr W(then my boyfriend)'s sister's place. This is one of Mr W 's favourite Terengganu Nyonya dish. The name of this dish when I first got to know was "Hong". After 5 years, I got to learn that the name of this dish is Kay Hong. This is a very popular dish for the Nyonya to serve for prayers or Chinese New Year. It keeps well and needs no refrigeration. The more you reheat it, the better the dish becomes.

I am not crazy over this dish but I won't mind eating it. As for Mr W, I can say he is crazy over this dish. He can go for round two when I cook this. He loves having the sauce over his rice and the hard boiled eggs. One thing I have to admit is that this savoury sweet sauce tends to be pretty addictive.

By the way, Mr W said no one except his mom cooks the best dishes, even his sister can't replicate them. My mom-in-law ever told me that she would love to teach me all the dishes she used to cook and all the kueh kueh she used to prepare. But at her age of 94, she doesn't enter the kitchen anymore. Despite her age, she is still very alert and healthy. She will tell me the ingredients for the dish but the rest is all dependent on me. *Stress*

Yesterday was my first trial to cook this dish and I was very pressurized. I need to cook this dish to suit the very picky Mr W's taste. Before I prepare all the ingredients, I gave my mom-in-law a call to confirm the ingredients.

Now let's start with the Ingredients
4 chicken thighs
200g of pork belly
4 hardboiled eggs, peeled
1 pieces of gula melaka, to taste
2-3 tbsp preserved bean paste aka tau cheo
70g shallots
30g garlic
2 cups of water
1 tbsp dark soy sauce, depends on your colour preference
3 tbsp of kicap manis

Method
1. Pound the shallots and garlic. Set aside.
2. Parboil the whole piece of pork belly and chicken thighs. Remove the meat pieces and discard the water.
3. Heat 1 tbsp oil in wok. Fry the pounded shallots and garlic until fragrant.
4. Add in the gula melaka and tau cheo and stir fry for a few minutes.

5. Add the pork belly and chicken pieces and stir fry.

6. Pour in 2 cups of water and allow it to simmer.

7. Add the dark soy sauce and kicap manis, give it a stir. Put the hardboiled eggs in and let it simmer until the pork and chicken are cooked.
8. Dish up the pork belly and slice them into 1 cm thick. Put them back into the wok or you can dish up the chicken and egg with the delicious sauce and serve with a plate of steam white rice. Enjoy!

Do note that the sweetness of this sauce tends to overpower the saltiness, hence there is a need to balance both. Can't be too sweet, can't be too salty. Adjust the proportion to your taste. 

Mom in Law's Kueh Bangkit

In my earlier post, I mentioned about the CNY goodies known as Khnuat Khnuat.

Now its time for me to type down step by step directions for the Kueh Bangkit that is so popular with many and they don't mind buying from my in laws. But well, this was the past...maybe more than 20 years ago.

So now I am learning from my mom-in-law. Again, she uses agar agar...so I have to perfect the proportion which is very difficult in her recipe. So I hope you guys understand what I will be writing down.

The typical Nyonya Kueh Bangkit calls for purely tapioca flour and remember no pandan leaves are to be added into the traditional recipe.

Mom in law's Kueh Bangkit

Ingredients
1 kg Tapioca Flour
2 grated coconuts
Caster sugar
*Note: 1 bowl of coconut milk = 1 bowl of sugar
6 eggs yolks

1. Fry the flour till its light. You can fry it on high or low heat. But remember if you are using high heat, your hands must keep frying. Don't stop or it will char. When you first fry the flour, you can feel the weight of the flour. The more you fry it, the lighter it will become. The flour will literally fly and that's the time to turn off the heat and scoop them out to cool down. This flour needs to be completely cool. Thus I will advise to fry the flour a few days in advance and also fry more. Because this flour can be kept in air tight containers and be used again.
2. Roll the grated coconuts into a ball and squeeze it using a muslin cloth. Let the coconut milk be contained in a bowl (any bowl in the household).
3. Important: if you obtain a bowl of coconut milk, you have to use exactly a bowl of sugar. For those who doesn't like sweet stuff, you can reduce it to 3/4 bowl of sugar.
4. Combine the coconut milk and sugar in a pot and boil it till the sugar has melted. Make sure to keep stirring. Once the sugar is melted, off the heat and set aside to cool. 
5. Beat the eggs.
6. Once the coconut sugar mixture is cool, pour in the eggs and combine them using your hand. 
7. Now add in the flour (I used a ladle). Scoop by scoop...and knead it. There is no hard and fast rule on the flour to use. So add the flour and knead till the dough is pliable.
8. Once done, cover it and let it "rest" for 20 minutes or so.
9. Flour the table or baking mat. Scoop a small dough and add some flour to it and knead. 
10. Roll the dough out to 0.5cm thickness and use the kueh bangkit cutter or cookie cutter to cut the dough. 
11. As this will not expand, you can lay them pretty close to each other. As I lined all my baking trays with baking sheets. There is no need to sprinkle flour on to the tray. 
12. Preheat oven at 160 Degrees Celsius. 
13. Bake the trays of dough in the oven for 20 minutes or until the sides of the bangkit is cream in colour.  Take them out. 
14. Leave the kueh bangkit to cool and keep them in air tight containers. 

A Traitional CNY Snack in my Husband's Family - Khnaut Khnaut

It is the time of the year when everyone gets busy baking all the Chinese New Year goodies & I can't escape it either. I love to cook and bake, so this year I took on the task to bake Pineapple Tarts, Kueh Bangkit & Khnaut Khnaut.

Well the last CNY goodie - Khnaut Khnaut is an unknown snack in Singapore. It is a snack the old folks back in Terengganu made for Chinese New Year.

A little background, my in laws are Nyonya from Terengganu. Thus they have cooked dishes that are unknown or hardly found in Singapore. I am starting to learn one by one from her.

My in laws have migrated to Singapore for more than 5 decades and now my mom in law is in her 90s. So she cannot show me how to prepare the dishes, she can only tell me what ingredients to put and do this and that. But never the proportion of the ingredient *sobsob*, so I have to trial and error to have the taste right. Plus I don't quite understand her dialect, sometimes I need my husband to translate certain words she used.

Back in the old days, people in Terengganu were not exposed to much external influence and thus the Nyonya created this snack. No one truly know the origins. Maybe I should ask my mom in law this weekend.

This CNY goodie is harder and crispy in nature and has an acquired taste which not many appreciate.
So don't worry when yours turn out to be harder than biscuits cos it is meant to be hard and crispy to chew!

So now for the mysterious Khnaut Khnaut,

Ingredients

• 800g Flour
• 200g Glutinous Rice Flour
• 10 eggs
• 6 to 8 Tbsp of Icing Sugar (depends on your sweetness level)
• 1 tsp of salt

Directions

1. Sieve the flour and glutinous rice four together. Mix well. Set aside.
2. Add the icing sugar into the eggs and beat well.
3. Combine the egg mixture into the flour mixture. Knead.
4. Knead till the dough doesn't stick to the hands. 
5. Let the dough rest for 10 minutes.
6. Roll out the dough till as thin as possible. *We rolled the dough to a thickness of 0.01mm. 
7. Flour the dough and cut the rolled out dough into irregular shapes using a knife. *My husband & I used kueh bangkit mould to cut. 

8. Deep fry them in a wok of oil. Once they turn gold, sieve them out and leave them on the grease paper.
9. Once cool, store them in air tight containers. 

Notes:

1. We used self raising flour instead of flour and we had a hard time knead the dough. So we advise all to use normal flour.
2. Back in those days, they cooked a sugar syrup to coat the Khnaut Khnaut.