No-Frills Recipes ... cooking, baking & excerpts on travel

F or this year's Winter Solstice festival aka 'Dong Zhi', which is today,  I've churned out a slightly different version of 'Tong Yuen'.  Yes, the tong yuen ~ glutinous rice balls are the same but the sweet soup base is different.  Instead of clear syrup, I made a red bean sweet soup to go with the rice balls. To those of you who are celebrating this festival, have a wonderful and joyous Winter Solstice!

M ango Trifle ~ a light and refreshing dessert to round up a sumptuous X'mas dinner.  Basically, there's no recipe for this, no hard and fast rule, you just load on what you have at hand, layer by layer, sponge cake or any leftover cake, custard, jam, fruits, whipped cream, whatever you can think of.  Drench it with more alcohol if you want to be intoxicated during this festive season! 

I've heard of rhubarb many a time and I was thrilled when I spotted them in the supermarket during my recent vacation.  Rhubarb is a vegetable, a perennial plant growing from short, thick rhizome with large triangular leaves.  Mind you, the leaves are toxic and they are discarded from the stems before they are cooked.  Without much hesitation I grabbed a bunch, googled for recipes, tweaked a bit, plus and minus the ingredients and came up with this 'Almond crusted rhubarb cake'.

T is the festive season again and the all-time favourite for X'mas is undoubtedly the ubiquitous fruit cake.  This Yoghurt Fruitcake caught my eye when I was browsing through a Food and Travel magazine.  As I've never baked a fruit cake with yoghurt before, I was very eager to try. 

Of late, I notice that various salted egg dishes have surfaced on the menu of restaurants and eateries.  Most popular of all is the salted egg with crabs with both the wet and dry versions.  I've also recently tasted salted egg with pumpkin and salted egg with beancurd and lately some bloggers have posted fried rice with salted egg.  I  have recently coined this dish ....... 'Salted egg steamed Chicken' and would like to share it with you.