Home-cooked dinner: Bok choy with garlic and dried shrimp, pan-fried mackeral cutlets with minced chilli, garlic and shallots, salted vegetable pork rib soup

Bok choy stirfried with garlic and dried shrimp.  It is not very often that we see bok choy at the supermarket that is not squished up and/or dried up, so whenever we come across fresh-looking springy ones, we snap it up for dinner.


Stirfried is one of the easiest ways to cook Chinese veggies. All you have to do is to chop a few cloves of fresh garlic, heat up some oil in a wok, throw the garlic in with a pinch of salt and let it fry till it is golden brown. Here, mom added dried shrimp for extra taste. Another ingredient you can add is a sprinkle of light soya sauce. Chinese vegetables in restaurants are often cooked with some oyster sauce, but I would not recommend that as it probably contains wheat as a thickener. If you like your food spicy, you can slice up some red thai chillies and throw them in to fry with the garlic.

Once the garlic is done, drop the vegetables in and toss them around the wok so that the leaves are all coated with oil, and wait for them to cook.

Pan-fried mackeral cutlets with minced chilli, garlic and shallots.  Besides the selar fish and pomfret, this is another great fish to pan-fry.

To make the spicy chilli toppings, put some cloves of garlic, thai red chillies and shallots in a food processor and get them chopped and blended a little till you get a chunky mixture. Then, fry the mixture with a pinch of salt in hot oil till the shallots are caramelised.

You can, then, either throw in the mackeral cutlets to cook with the toppings, or scoop out the cooked chilli toppings into a temporary dish before frying the cutlets. I prefer the latter so that the toppings do not burn while the fish is frying.

Cook the cutlets for 2-3 minutes on medium flame, then go high flame for about 1 minute to make it extra crispy and a little charred. Flip the cultlets to their other sides and repeat. When they are done, scoop them out onto a plate and pour the fried chilli-garlic-shallots mixture on top.

Salted vegetable pork rib soup. You can find the preserved salted vegetable in oriental supermarkets. Best to first soak it for 1-3 hours in a bowl of water to reduce its saltiness. When it is ready, put it in a pot with your pork ribs and three halved tomatoes, and fill the pot with cold water. Then heat it up on low flame to a boil, and let it boil for about an hour.