Home Cooked Birthday Dinner

The month of September and October this year would be rather busy months of all of us here in Beijing. There will also be several rather significant changes in our daily routine.

For one, my mother in law who has so graciously came to help taking care of the children when we first came to Beijing will be going back to Malaysia after helping us for almost a year. We have also engaged a full time Chinese helper (ahyi) for 8 hours daily to help clean and cooked dinner. Ryan is already going back to school and Chenya is due to start  her first pre-school in November.

Wife has a rather full travelling schedule for the next 3 weeks of so, starting with travelling  back to Malaysia and then to Singapore for some training, after which she would be flying off to Seattle for another week or so. And I will be staying in Beijing to handle to the two super hyper active `monsters’ during this entire period. Lucky me.

Until Chenya goes to school in November, there would be no more early morning coffee or breakfast alone like I used to. Chenya would definitely be tagging along and with her around, there would be no more updating of Facebook or my blogs during my routine early morning breakfast.

With wife being away during her birthday, we had a simple pre-birthday celebration for her at home and as promised, I arranged to cook some simple dishes for her on Sunday.

On Saturday, we made arrangements to visit our favourite market at Sin Yuen Lee, where we could look for the ingredients and items I need. And the following are what was laid on the dinner table last night with some help from my local ahyi who I must said, was a little taken aback with me, teaching her to cook.

I prepared two appetizers for the night.

To start with, we have oven grilled Tiger Prawns marinated simply with some salt, black pepper, sugar and olive oil, served with Mango Salsa, a combination of ripe mangoes, red capsicum  and finely chopped mint leaves with lemon zest, lemon juice and salt and black pepper to taste. I must said that the Tiger Prawns are definitely much cheaper here in Beijing as compared to getting them back home in PJ. We had 7 tiger prawns measuring over 6 inches end to end that only cost us less than RMB50 (RM25).

The next appetizer was something that I did not expect to do but when she saw these life scallops at the market, she said that that would be nice to have. I have always worked with frozen scallops back home in Malaysia and have never work with life ones before. 1kg of these (numbering 8 scallops with shell) was RMB45 (RM22.50) which sounded rather reasonable to us. Instead of my normal oven baked scallops with Japanese mayonnaise, and since I don’t know where exactly to get them, I was thinking about a different cooking method.

And this is what we have. Oven baked life scallops, marinated with some salt and black pepper and Chinese cooking wine, baked with olive oil and finely chopped garlic. My ahyi gave an excellent proposal which I will definitely try and that is top the baked scallops with some glass noodles.

The soup is simply one of our all time favourite, especially my mother in law and Ryan, a creamy broccoli soup.

I had originally wanted to grill some beef steak as the main course but I have done that quite a couple of times and I am getting bored with that. Instead, I thought of doing a beef kebab with BBQ sauce. Hence, I bought some Australian sirloin beef from April Gourmet (a chain of small supermarkets catering for the expat market in Beijing, the other two being Jenny Wang and Jenny Lou). I also bought some green and yellow capsicum and large onions from the local wet market not far from our apartment.

The sirloin beef was cut into smaller cubes, marinated with salt, black pepper and BBQ sauce and left in the refrigerator for about 4 hours. Before grilling them, the beef cubes were pan seared with some olive oil till the sides were slightly browned before they were put into some wooden skewers alternated with pieces of yellow, green capsicums and large onions. The wooden skewers have been soaked in water for a good one hour prior to this to ensure that they don’t get burnt in the process of grilling. They were then put into the oven and grilled at 250 degrees for approximately 5 minutes before they were served.

We had a good dinner at home and I washed the food down with a glass of Shiraz Cabernet from Jacobs Creek Winemakers Selection.

Now that the pre-birthday dinner is over, my wife is now hinting that she would love to have lobster next because the life lobsters at the Sin Yuen Lee wet market was simply too tempting to resist. And that is something that I have never attempted before and it is going to be interesting.