Pork Rips with DIY Salted Turnip and beans
by Jason Lam

DIY Salted Turnip

How to make:
1) Wash the turnip and salt it.
2) Put the turnip into a glass
container for 2 to 3 weeks.







Pork Rips with DIY Salted Turnip and beans










How to make:
1) Sauce the pork rips with soy bean sauce, sugar and salt.
2) Cut salted turnips into slice.
3) Simmer the sauced rips in sand pot(?) for half an hour.
4) Put salted turnips and beans into the pot and then simmer for another 30 to 40mins.

Story behind this dish:
I once said to my mum after we moved to Hong Kong. “Why you're still making salted turnip. It’s rustic and its odor is bad. Why don’t you just buy it from the market? My mum simply replied, “I don't care where I am now, village or Hong Kong. Anyways, it is good food and you like it, don't you? I laughed and agreed with it. My mother was born and lived in hometown for almost two decades, before moving to Shenzhen and then to Hong Kong. Since my grandfather was a farmer, she knew the most efficient and easiest way to preserve food is salting. Mum learnt it from grandmother as she needed to help in domestic work when grandparents were working in farms. Almost every girl in the village knew how to make salted turnips because vegetables easily ruin. Although she has already migrated to Hong Kong for over 15 years, there is still something from the village for her to feel glad with, and that is making salted cabbage.

The ritual of meals at my home
by Edmond

After some serious thinking about my family history, regrettably, I could not come up with a dish that bears a particular meaning for my family. Instead, what we do to food may have more to tell than what we eat in specific. My mum was from the Chiu Chow (潮州) of Guangdong Province, but now she does not cook any special dish from the region anymore, since she has long accustomed to the Hong Kong society and learned to cook local family dishes. My mum is arguably the only one who is in charge of all the meals in the family. Every time when a dish that requires much effort is done, it will not be put on the dining table right away. Rather, it has got to be ‘eaten’ by the gods whom our family believes in.

What she, or sometimes we the children, do is to place the dish in front of the worship cabinet, light up a thin bundle of incense and say our prayers in a soft voice, hoping that we will be rewarded good luck, health, wealth and things like that. The children don’t do it on their own initiative, so the prayers, for most of the time, are empty. What is even more interesting is that, there is a hierarchy of assigning different dishes to different gods. Usually the ancestors of our Chan family are served with the best ones, for example, fried chicken wings and steamed fish; the God of the Earth has the more common food. However, don’t ask me about how the allocation system exactly works. It only makes sense to my mum’s mind.

Another peculiarity to note is that my mum says the prayers only in the Chiu Chow dialect, never in Cantonese although she is fluent in it. Maybe there are some ideas or wishes that can only be communicated perfectly through the dialect, or the local gods do not understand Cantonese? Now I learn that while some religions like Christianity are global, some are still local and bound to other cultural customs such as language.

Without any doubt, Chiu Chow has a lot of food that can stimulate your appetite to offer, just that my family has moved to Hong Kong for a long time and abandoned cooking most of the traditional dishes due to the time and space constraint of cooking them. Only essential parts of the original rituals are kept and practiced. I suspect that it is a common phenomenon for most of the families that moved to Hong Kong from mainland a long time ago. And that makes the important local gods of their original places emigrate with the people!

Caption: A bunch of banana is dedicated to the local god of Chiu Chow (伯公)

EID DESSERT
"SHEER KHURMA"(Milk Vermicelli)
by Saleena Ji

Introduction:
Sheer korma or Sheer Khurma is a festival vermicelli pudding prepared by Muslims on Eid ul-Fitr in South Asian Countires. It is a traditional Muslim festive breakfast, and a dessert for celebrations. Sheer means sweetened milk and khurma is made from dried dates. This special dish is served on the morning of Eid day in the family after the Eid prayer as breakfast, and throughout the day to all the visiting guests.It is very popular in Hyderabad in India, Pakistan, Arab countries and Asia.This is a traditional Pakistani dessert served at Eid time.It is good served cold or warm.

Sheer khurma & My Family:
This dish is usually cooked by my grandma in our family on every Eid festival.She lived in a village, she woke up in the morning around 4am and milked the cows.After that she soaked all the nuts in warm water to remove the skin and used the wood to make fire because in our village there are no gas stoves.She poured milk into a large pan and boiled it for about an hour on slow fire .After that she added fried Vermicelli(which is also hand-made by my grandma with fresh wheat flour) into the milk and also some slices of nuts and brown suger which is also home-made .She boiled all the ingredients for 15 more minutes and served it warm or cold .I learnt this Recipe from my Grandma before my marrige and when I got married, I cooked this dish as my first cooking at my inlaws family as "Bridals first dish custome".Everyone like it ,nowadays I cook this dish at my home and teach my daughters to carry on with the family and cultural roots.My children and husband like this dish a lot and whenever I cook this this I also share it with my neighbours and they like to very much ,too.

Recipes:
Sheer Khurma: Milk Vermicelli Pakistani Eid Dessert

Ingredients:
1 gal 2% milk
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup almonds, blanched, skin removed and sliced thin
1/4 cup pistachios, blanched, skin removed and sliced thin
1/4 teaspoon saffron
1 cup fine roasted vermicelli, broken up (found in Indo-Pak grocery stores)
1 teaspoon rose water
1/2 cup raisins
5 dried dates, soaked and cut in four

Method:
Place milk in heavy pot and bring to boil on medium heat. Turn heat to low and continue to boil. Add sugar and boil for 5 minutes. Add dates and raisins, cook 5 minutes. Add rest of ingredients, except rose water. Cook 15 minutes, turn heat off and add rose water. Cover and let sit for an hour. Garnish with toasted almond slices.