Liv, Author at Egg Wan's Food Odyssey

Green Papaya and Sirloin Salad

by Liv | Jul 12, 2016

Nothing is better on a hot summer day than a big delicious bowl of salad. This green papaya and sirloin steak salad isn’t exactly an authentic Chinese or Taiwanese dish but it’s more like an Asian inspired salad dish that I really like.

As I live in Scotland, we don’t really get any “summer”, at least not the kind of summer that I was used to when I lived in Taiwan or China. In China and Taiwan, the temperature can reach a sweltering 38 degrees or even hotter but in Scotland right now the temperature is around 16 degrees.

I’m still wearing long sleeves as for me it’s still a bit cold. Chris and I were talking about eating hot pot soon as recently it’s been raining quite a lot and every time it rains the temperature drops. Sometimes the temperature can be as low as 8 degrees in Edinburgh on a summer day.

For this you can replace the cucumber, onion and even green papaya for other vegetables such as carrots, tomatoes, peppers and celery. You can even try to add in apple or Asian pear if you wish. I improvise my cooking a lot of the time as there are so many ingredients from the East I simply can’t get hold of in the UK so after years of living in Edinburgh I have learnt to improvise and adapt my food to the ingredients I can get here.

Also, please feel free to adjust the seasonings for the marinade and sauce. If you want the sauce to be more sour then add more lemon but if you want to cut down the amount of salt you eat then leave the salt out of the sauce.

I garnished this dish with some chopped mint. Mint is hot a herb we usually use in Chinese cuisine but as explained earlier this is an Asian influenced dish so I added mint because I think the flavour of the mint compliments this dish perfectly.

If you are not a fan of red meat, you can use chargrill chicken or pork instead of the steak. You can also use prawn or fish to replace the steak and you can even use horseradish instead of wasabi to give the dish a different kind of flavour.

I didn’t use a lot of wasabi in this recipe because I worry maybe it’s too strong for some people’s tastes but I personally really enjoy that special kick the wasabi gives to this recipe so personally I put a lot of wasabi in this dish when I make it at home.

Green Papaya:

You can purchase green papaya in local Chinese/Asian supermarket or Amazon.

You can also use green papaya make a soup. Check out my recipe for green papaya soup on about.com.

To learn about all health benefits of papaya check out this article: http://www.well-beingsecrets.com/papaya-health-benefits/

Green Papaya and Sirloin Salad

Course Main Dish

Prep Time 1 hour

Total Time 1 hour

Servings 3 people

Ingredients

700 g sirloin steak
200 g green papaya julienne
70 g cucumber julienne
85 g onion julienne
1 chili remove seeds and julienne
Mint just for garnish

Marinade for sirloin steak

1.5 tbsp light soy sauce
1/2 tsp salt
2 pinches coarse black pepper
1/2 tbsp demerara sugar

Ingredients for sauce

1/4 tsp wasabi
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 tsp fish sauce
1 tbsp olive oil
1/2 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp light soy sauce

Instructions

Marinade the sirloin stead for 30 minutes. If you have time leave it to marinade longer.
Mix all the ingredients for the sauce evenly and leave aside.
Mix the julienned green papaya with a couple pinches of salt and leave it aside for at lease 10 minutes.
Chargrill the steak to how you like it then leave it aside to cool down.
Mix all the vegetables together and place on a serving plate.
Slice steak and put on top of the step 5.
You can pour the sauce on top of the steak or pour the sauce on top of the green papaya salad as you wish.
Garnish the dish with some chopped mint and grilled lemon. Ready to serve.

Shanghai Style Sweet and Sour Pork

by Liv | Jul 6, 2016

It’s very likely at some point in your life you’ve eaten something sweet and sour. If you’ve eaten sweet and sour you’ve almost certainly eaten Cantonese style sweet and sour and it had either pork or chicken. But have you ever tried “Shanghai Style Sweet and Sour Pork”?

Shanghai style sweet and sour pork is one of my all time favourite dishes and is a dish my grandfather used to cook for me when I was a child. My grandfather was a great cook and this combined with all of his love made me madly fall in love with this dish.

To be very honest with you I’m not really a fan of sweet and sour pork that is made with ketchup (Cantonese style). I just think ketchup based sweet and sour pork is too strong for me but I love this Shanghai style sweet and sour pork.

This dish uses “black vinegar” instead of rice vinegar and you can use any kind of sugar you want for this dish. I personally prefer to use demerara sugar or rock sugar for this dish because these two types of sugar have much more flavour than caster sugar.

You can use pork ribs cut into small cubes if you want to (I cooked this dish with pork ribs for my upcoming cookbook “Home-Style Chinese Cooking”) or you can use pork belly (my favourite), pork loin or shoulder roast. If you don’t like pork at all you can substitute pork with diced chicken breast.

As of June 2016 I’m finally finished with studying at university and my life over the last five years has been absolutely manic. My illustration business is really busy at the moment and it looks like I’m going to be very busy until next Spring at least. This is making me immensely happy and with my four year old daughter at nursery four whole days a week I’m now making time to update this food blog again. A lot of my illustration work and a lot of my work in general is because of food and I love updating this blog when I can so I’m back.

I also have a third cookbook which I’m going to have published soon. The title of the book is “Home-Style Chinese Cooking” and I have to admit it’s been bloody hard work combining working part time, working and studying as an illustrator as well as raising a four year old energizer bunny but I’m proud of what I’ve created and can’t wait to see the book. Please stay tuned!

Shanghai Style Sweet and Sour Pork

Ingredients

800 g pork belly (skinless and cut into cubes)
1.25 litres water (for cooking the pork belly)
2 slices ginger
750 ml oil (for deep frying the pork)

Ingredients for marinading the pork belly

1 tbsp light soy sauce
1 tbsp rice wine
1 tsp salt

Ingredients for batter

1 egg
1 tbsp water
1 tbsp corn flour
1 tbsp plain flour

Seasonings

3 tbsp water
3 tbsp demerara sugar (you can use caster or rock sugar instead)
2 tbsp light soy sauce
1/2 tbsp dark soy sauce
2 tbsp black vinegar

Marinade pork belly with marinade for couple hours.
Boil 1.25 litres water and 2 slices of ginger in a stock pot and add pork belly. Bring it to a boil first then simmer for 40 minutes. Drain the water.
Mix step 2 pork belly with all the ingredients for batter.
Heat up 750ml oil in a wok or deep saucepan. Deep fry the pork belly until it’s golden colour, take it out from the oil and drain the oil.
Heat up 3 tablespoon water and 3 tablespoon demerara sugar and cook until the water and sugar turn into thick syrup.
Turn the fire to medium temperature. Add pork belly in and keep stirring for a couple minutes until the syrup looks like it has coated the pork belly.
Add light soy sauce and keep stirring for 1-2 minutes.
Add black vinegar and keep stirring for 1 minutes. Ready to serve.

George Heriot’s School Chinese Cooking Class

by Liv | Feb 3, 2016

I had my first Chinese cooking class with George Heriot’s School yesterday and it was also my first proper teaching experience in a school.

Last week, I was contacted by Linsey Ballantyne, who is the teacher of health and food technology at George Heriot’s school regarding teaching her students how to make Chinese dumplings as these dumplings are a huge part of Chinese and Taiwanese traditions during the Chinese New Year period. I was really excited about this project as I have never taught in a school and George Heriot’s is one of the top schools in Edinburgh. Of course I’ve taught many people how to cook many things in professional kitchens and I have done a couple cooking classes outside of restaurants but this is my first school job.

If you follow my blog you will know I studied at Edinburgh College of Art so I have passed George Heriot’s school almost every day for the past three years. I’ve always been completely fascinated about this building because the building itself is breathtakingly beautiful, it’s 388 years old and it’s ranked as one of the very best independent schools in Edinburgh. This is another factor as to why I’m so interested in the school. My daughter Amelia will start school in Autumn 2017 so we’ve started looking at primary schools. Both myself and my husband Chris had indifferent experiences at our own schools and unfortunately our local school is ranked the worst in Edinburgh (87 out of 87) so we’re seriously thinking about going down the independent route.

But back to this blog post, you don’t always get a chance to visit a school like this so this teaching opportunity gave me a chance to visit this truly amazing school.