Fried Meatballs (炸蝦球）

Have you ever tried Chinese meat balls? We grew up having this meatballs on dinner table every so often. I might say that it is our most favorite of all the dishes we could have. It used to be all meat and shrimp balls, but as time passed and we ate out a lot, we tasted many different meatballs, so my mom modified the recipe a bit. Now we add water chestnut and spring onion in it. The modified recipe tastes much better and more crunchy than the old recipe.

We need: ground meat of your preference (I used ground pork), shrimps, water chestnuts, spring onion, an egg, few table-spoons corn starch and seasoning.

The ratio of meat and shrimp are 2:1. Peel shrimp skins and chopped. Peel the water chestnuts and chopped (please do not chop fine, as we want to have that crunchiness of it). chop spring onion. Blend all of those well and add an egg, few table spoons of corn starch and seasoning to taste. Use spoon to make balls of that blend mixture and fry it.

Extra:

Fried Wonton（蚱雲吞）

I had leftover spring roll skins and I did not want to throw away a perfectly good skins. So I decided to make fried wonton out of it with the ingredient above as well. But in wonton we need a ratio meat and shrimp of 1 and 1. We do not need egg, corn starch and spring onion. Just plain ground meat, shrimp, water chestnuts and seasoning blend together are enough. Cut four small squares of that spring roll skins and we have wonton skins ready to be used. Place a spoon full of that blend meat on the skin and fold it diagonally. Please do not forget to flatten the meat as it will fry faster and evenly. Well now we have two dishes out of one recipe. Bon Appetit and Happy Saturday !

Tom Yum Soup (冬蔭功湯 )

I have been asking around about tom yum soup recipe for quite sometime.  But to no avail, many just said use the already made tom yum paste available in the market.  They are good as well.  So I tried.  It is easy and very convenient.  It took only half an hour to have it done from cleaning, cutting and boiling water. We need tom yum paste, tofu, prawns, straw mushroom, lemon grass, lime, blue ginger (galangal).

In a boiling water add a couple of table spoons of tom yum paste (to your taste), a slice or two of galangal, lemon grass, tofu, mushroom, and half slice lime juice or more if you prefer a bit sour (some add bird-eye chilly to make it hot).  Let them boil for few minutes before adding prawns.  As soon as the prawns turn pink,  turn off the heat and it is ready to be served.  You may  garnish the soup with coriander too.  In this case, I didn’t have it at home, so I let my soup served without it.  Happy Saturday.

Happy Chinese New Year