Walking the Dao

24th August 2009

Evolution of the Plum Chicken

Being that now I'm living on my own and need to 1) eat, 2) save money, 3) explore cooking - the natural conclusion is that I should start cooking on my own. Another concern of mine is that I don't want to waste anything... the Evolution of the Plum Chicken is a very good example of what usually happens with my food...

When my housemate brought home some plums, both of us knew that they would all be in the garbage within 3 days since neither of us can possibly eat so many and she didn''t even touch them because she had too many already. So on the second day, I decided to do something about it so that the plums don't go to waste. The way I wanted to do it was to cook them. Since I didn't have the equipment to make jam, I decided to make plum compote.

1) There was still some rock sugar left from my Red Bean Soup so I decided to melt that for my sauce instead of using regular sugar (which I never bought).
2) I washed and cut the plums. The put them in the sugar water to cook.
3) The skin of the plums come off very easily after a few minutes in the bath of hot water. I picked out all the skins with chopsticks.
4) The finished products, which I split into two containers, were: plum meat and plum sugar water, which I stored in my gogo no koucha (yum) bottle.
5) Ok, so this wasn't really what I had in mind and was far from what the recipe instructed... but... at least now the plums won't go bad.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="576" caption="Plums, oatmeal, sugar plum sauce"]

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6) The plum meat I used for oatmeal topping - extremely delicious. I wolfed down the oatmeal (ok so I was hungry too).
7) I couldn't figure out what to do with the sugar plum sauce until I just figured I might as well try to make sweet and sour chicken with it.
8) I had some chicken breast meat that I removed from the chicken I bought 2 weeks ago, which I marinated with small amounts of salt, soy sauce, and corn starch and put away in the fridge. I stir fried it until about 80% cooked. (may need to add water in the duration)
9) I poured the plum sauce and stir fried some more, then finally added a bit of corn starch so the sauce would thicken.
10 ) And finally, the result:

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="320" caption="Plum Chicken"]

[/caption]

Amazing what a Chinese mind (Don't be wasteful! Be creative and you can put EVERYTHING to good use.) can do, right?

The remaining plum sauce became:

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="360" caption="Yummy Sweet & Sour spare ribs"]

[/caption]

24th August 2009

Evolution of the Plum Chicken

Sze K. Aka Chan's Posterous

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