Ginger Garlic Chicken & Broccoli 'Flower'

Cooking time...

Broccoli 'flowers' with carrot. This is so easy. Boil the broccoli & carrot and arrange them in a 'floral' manner. Mince a clove of garlic. Heat up a ½ tablespoon of oil and stir fried the garlic. Then add in a mixture of half a teaspoon of oyster sauce, ½tablespoon of soy sauce, 2 tablespoon of water, some sugar to taste (if you like). Bring to boil (actually nothing much to boil, just make sure it's hot) and pour it over the broccoli 'flowers'. Finally drizzle some drops of sesame oil on top & voila :)


The ginger garlic recipe was adapted from http://onceuponaplate.blogspot.com/2008/10/crispy-garlic-ginger-chicken-asian.html. I do not know what I did wrong but the result is absolutely different from the originator's picture. Mine become the 'dried' version of ginger garlic chicken but it still taste good :s

Anyway, here's my single dinner :)

Funny side note is, because the ginger that I'm using was moldy (I recall mom's saying to just cut off the moldy part & the good portion is ok to be used), I was having stomach ache the next day. Poor me.... When I spoke to my mom over Skype, she scolded me saying that if a ginger went moldy, shouldn't consume it :(

Penang Prawn Noodle

Penang prawn noodle, also known as Hokkien Mee or Hae Mee to the local is one of my favourite noodle variety back home. It is a dish of egg noodles and rice noodles in a spicy stock, which is made from both fresh shrimp (maybe also dried prawns) and pork (or chicken). Typically, water spinach (kangkung in Malay), slices of egg, shripms, crisp deep-fried shallots & small cubes of fried pork fat are added to the noodle soup. Would be best if some steamed pork ribs can be added.

Unfortunately, I'm half a globe away from the place where I can get the most authentic Hokkien Mee & I don't have the skill & knowledge to make the soup stock, so I have to come up with a down-graded modified version when I missed it a lot. Luckily, I was well prepared before I come to Denmark. I brought 10packs of Hokkien Mee instant noodles which taste very much like the real ones with me :)

So, a hard boiled egg, some shripms and 3 minutes instant noodle cooking yielded my down-graded version of Penang Hokkien Mee...I know it's 'cheating' in cooking but that, I had a very satisfying lunch, yum yum

Team Building

End of last month, I had a department team building (I can't explain the delinquency of this blog other than blame it to my laziness :p). Part of the program is where our whole team is sent out to Frederickberg Have (Frederickberg garden) with some of the products that we produce & trying to experience them as end user.

When I was in home town, the team building mode that I'm familiar with is where everyone will stay over-night at a hotel & usually a team building training company will be engaged for activities planning. Even though I don't see how going to a park & do some testing will enhanced team spirit but it was really fun being out of the office on a working day ;)

The weather was lovely (we're really lucky) and the park is absolutely gorgeous in autumn time. Pictures say a thousand words. See below.


I've always seen my colleagues in the office but apparently they can 'disguise' as other professions pretty well outside of office with their attire. Potential target occupation to be considered: police, reporters / paparazzis, police man (El Pacino & Robert De Niro type, age wise :p) and also spy o.o


We were walking for about an hour in the park where mild wnd gently blowed and the weather was just beautiful. Well, no group picture before we go off (not like we often have chance to gather everyone) so we took like n-th tries to take a good one. This is by far the best of all I've got & the camera is challengingly placed on a rock ;)

The subsequent activity is -- bowling! I asked my boss if he's good at bowling, he said 'no'; but when it comes to the bowling activity, he scored an average of 143 for 3 games. I wouldn't call that 'no good' so I interrogated him. It was funny to hear him said that he didn't even know he's good at bowling until then, lol...

Another female colleague has a very special way of bowling. She'd walk to the front, put one foot on the fowl line, squart a little bit down & start swinging the ball to the front and back. After 2 cycles of swinging, she then released the ball. I was almost laughing rolling on the floor when I see this. At one point, I thought she'd be furious when I laughed at her but she took it well.

The team 'spy' actually took a video of both me & her bowling but I haven't got hold of the video yet. If I ever get it (he's saying he wants to make it a Christmas present by posting it to YouTube because I was pretty embarrassing too), then I'll upload it to share.

After 3 games, the last activity is dinner :). Due to budget constraint, we can only go for 2 course dinner (starter + main course). When main course was finished, one of the colleague turned to me and tell me: 'You can bring out the dessert now. What type of cake did you bake this time?' I almost fainted on the spot. Of course he's pulling my leg but I think I may have pampered them too much with my cake.

Anyway, it was a nice day out with the whole group. Some colleagues whom we seldom spoke felt closer after the day. The only downside is, due to my childish behaviour in the park & bowling center, they now treat me like a little girl & named me 'the department pet' :s

Numbering

Danes have a funny way with numbering system (as if the language is not difficult enough :p).

The first one:
When mentioning twenty eight, for example, they'll say eight-twenty instead of twenty eight. Always start with digit that has less value (8 is less than 20, so). When I first got to know about 1-10 in Danish, one of my colleague told me he's 54 years old. I thought he was 45 & he's thrilled that I think he's younger. I'm sorry, but it's just a 'numbering' mistake :p

The second one:
A billionaire in Denmark is definitely richer than a billionaire in US. Why? Because in Denmark, a billion = a million millions while in the states, a billion = a thousand of millions. Well, honestly, I couldn't care much. I'm more concern about how to make my first million, billion is too far away, lol...

The third one:
Danish clock system. There are no 'half-past' in the clock system, instead 'to' or 'over' is used. For example, half pass 6 (6.30) is regard as half-seven in Denmark. A Danish friend used to have an appointment with his Irish friend in a pub. Meeting time is fixed to be half-six. The Dane arrived at 5.30 & the Irish arrived at 6.30 >o< The most tricky one is the from the 21st until 34th minutes of an hour because one has to say how many minutes pass or to half of the hour. Confused (maybe also because of my poor explanation)? Here's an example: 5.25 should be expressed as 5minutes to half six (I almost kill myself when I started learning it).

Complicated? Wait till you see this. The fourth & most illogical one:
I love discounts but Danish dicounts confused me. Look at pictures below...original price divide by 50%, isn't that a price increase instead? A lot of advertisement brochures usually only print 'spar DKKxx' (save DKKxx) but there are some advertisement still use the 'divide by percentage' form which is absolutely wrong, if I must say.

Pics: Confusing 'discounts'

So, I've been living in a country with complicated language (with the super ultra difficult 'R' pronunciation) & confusing number / clock system for 5 months and still surviving strong, woo~hoo~

Practicing Danish

My Danish proficiency level hasn't improve much despite I've been in the class for 2 months. I learnt more vocabularies & short sentences but when I put them into actual usage, my colleagues will look at me with a very puzzled face and ask: 'say what?' or 'are you trying to speak Danish?'...absolutely ruins my confident.

However, there are also times when I get it right especially if I only mention a single word. For example, lunch = frokost, I got that absolutely right & when I said that, my colleagues understand me ;)

There are of course failed single word usage too. I learnt about dejligt, which means nice / lovely. So I go to work & tell my colleagues I am dejligt (in Danish: Jeg er dejligt). They understand me but corrected me, saying that dejligt is more of an adjective used to describe weather (at least in Copenhagen).

It is only Jutlander that will use dejligt to describe people. (Note. Jutland is one of the 3 lands of Denmark which remains more dependent on traditional industries and agriculture). One of my colleague strongly advice me to stop describing myself as dejligt. He said: 'Others might think you're a farmer's daughter from Jutland'...how mean is that? :s

Then today, we have new trash recycle system where all non-paper waste is to be consolidated into single metal trash bin. In front of the metal trash bin, there's a remark saying: 'dagligt affald' (which means daily waste). Unfortunately in my very limited Danish dictionary & my lousy memory in spelling, I mistakenly pronounce it as 'dejligt'...yeah, you can sort of guess what comes out of it. Daily trash becomes nice/lovely trash.

My colleauges was laughing uncontrollably. One of my colleague told me: 'You know what? It's fun having you here.'. Yeah yeah..I provide all the free entertainment & daily jokes. Another colleague said I can pick whichever trash I like since I find them dejligt. Isshh...they are not encouraging me to progress in Danish in a constructive way at all!!!

Hearing this & trying to console me, another colleague of mine told me a story about how lousy Danes can be in English. There was a car explosion in Glostrup (near where we work) 2 years ago. One of the police officer on duty was interviewed by BBC (it was a big hoo-haa back then because of all the 'terrorism' heat).

So this police officer, when asked what he thinks is the reason behind the car explosion, he replied: 'Cars in Denmark don't explode by themselves, they usually don't do that.' Oh...I didn't know cars in other countries will explode by themselves, lol... I think he meant to say car explosion is not a usual happening in Denmark but he has a funny (wrong) way of putting it for sure.

So that it, entry 1 on my funny Danish usage. I hope there's no more to come for that will mean I have to embarrassed myself again :-

Have fun reading though, I hope :)

Rasa Malaysia

Suddenly miss Malaysian food. With all the instant paste & mom home made chili paste, I fixed myself a Malaysian culinary day for the whole Saturday. Lunch was a quick & easy seafood tomyam rice vermicelli.

2 tbsp of tomyam paste, 600ml of chicken stock (I like soup), some shrimps & crab filament (I can't find squid, sob sob), 1/2 onion (I like onion) and tada...I'm not writing out the recipe & preparation method because it's too easy. If you buy the paste in a bottle, the instruction will be on the bottle itself. The only trick is to soak vermicelli in water prior to cooking & they are cooked pretty fast. Don't keep it in the soup too long else it doesn't taste so good.


As for dinner, mom's 'love' is bring to good use. She fried me a bottle of home made chili paste (which I love, yum yum) before I travel to Denmark. The paste can sustain very long in proper storage (a.k.a. fridge).

Heat a tablespoon of oil, add in a clove of finely chopped garlic & 1/4 thinly sliced onion. Slightly stir fry, add in a tablespoon full of moms chili paste and fry together till fragrant, then add in pork slices. Stir fry until pork is cooked. Nothing more is needed :)

Pic: (top) chili fried pork; (bot) lettuce with garlic oyster sauce

To balance my meal, vegetable that answer today's calling is lettuce. I simply boil a kettle of hot water, wash them over a few (well, more than a few) leaves of lettuce and it's basically cooked. Over-cooking lettuce will yield lousy taste, lost of vitamins & the vege turn brownish... :(.
Set the lettuce aside, heat up a shallow pan with a tablespoon of oil. Add in a clove of finely chopped garlic, 1/2 tablespoon oyster sauce, 1 tablespoon soy sauce, salt & sugar to taste (actually the sauce can be premixed in a small bowl but I'm too lazy to wash another bowl, so...) As soon as the sauce is well heated, remove from pan & pour on top of lettuce. I added a few drops of sesame oil to make it tasted exactly like mom's ;)

And so, that is my Malaysian culinary day :D

Easy Teriyaki Salmon

Saturday...weather's cold outside, so what better than cooking myself a nice dinner? I already forget about the fact that I gain weight & am on my best effort to continue gain weight :p

Fixed the menu to be teriyaki salmon. After struggling through what to go with the salmon, I decided to have rice. Problem is, I'm never good in cooking rice until I stumble upon this website http://happyburp.blogspot.com/2006/05/cooking-rice-in-microwave-oven.html. It's so easy and requires no attention at all with microwave oven. Only 1 small note: in cold weathered country like Denmark, don't cook the rice too early ahead, else it'll turn hard & cold very quick (learnt my lesson, obviously :$)

Teriyaki salmon is even easier. I still have some teriyaki sauce from the last round I made them. The sauce can basically last forever & taste really good, so in my opinion, it's always good to prepare more for future use (provided you'll be cooking). If you missed my previous blog on teriyaki sauce, here it is again:

Ingredient:-
1 cup or 200ml mirin
1/2 cup or 100ml soy sauce (try to use Japanese soy sauce, gives richer taste)
1-2 tbsp caster sugar

Method:-
Heat mirin over low heat (gas mark 2) for 1-2minutes then add soy sauce & sugar. Simmer for another 1-2 minutes and voila :)

Teriyaki sauce are good with almost everything: pork, beef, chicken, salmon, even burger...a very versatile sauce when you run out of idea what to cook and want less hassle. Whatever it is that you decided to 'teriyaki' with, just slightly marinate the ingredient with a sprinkle of salt & pepper for 2 minutes.

For salmon, I did the same thing, then slightly browned (pan fry until brown) them in a frying pan, not cooked though, else the fish will be over-cooked. Add the teriyaki sauce and continue to cook until it has glazed the salmon. I even roast some sesame (okay, I roasted a little too much than just 'some') to sprinkle on top of the teriyaki salmon, both to enhance the taste & garnish.

Even though I've seen my Danish colleagues eating raw brocoli & cauliflower in canteen, I cannot adapt to that eating habit. So I bring a small pot of water to boil & throw in the brocoli. Brought it out in less than a minute so it's still crunchy but not raw. I then sprinkle some salt on the brocoli & serve it on top of rice together with the teriyaki salmon.