YOGAYUGA

Yes, I made it!! My dad taught me. This is so complicated to cook. Well, certainly, I am not good enough for it but at least I tried. We bought the Chinese abalones last week, and prepared it for a whole week. I had them dried under the sun for several times during the past week. It’s very important that you have to be sure that they are absolutely dry before you keep them in a proper container. It has to be soaked in the water for few days before you cook it. This is how I did it:

After the abalones being soaked in the water, it became soft. I made soup with it together with chicken and dry scallops, then its flavour will be brought into the soup. After the soup has been cooked for more than an hour, I took the abalones away from the soup and cooked it separately. The abalones were still not ready on this stage, because they were not soft enough to eat. I cooked it with dry scallops again in another pot for almost another three hours. I served it on a plate without any sauce. It tastes good though I knew there was something missing. I didn’t prepare sauce for it. It’s better to eat it with Chinese mushroom in seafood sauce. It doesn’t look good without sauce, but it’s good to taste its pure flavour. I cooked four, so we had one each. It’s much economical to have your self made abalones at home because the same standard of abalones as what we had in the restaurant usually costs around HKD300.00 each. Anyway, I will make it even better next time.

We went for a quite expensive food shopping last Sat. We bought Chinese abalone, lots of them. There is so much to do before we actually cook them. I placed all the abalones under the sun today before I stored them properly. It’s a necessary process.

I plan to cook some chicken soup with abalones and scallopes during this weekend. It’s a long process as I need to have the abalones soaked in water for more than a day before I cook them. I have already bought some chicken tenderloin for the soup. I will prepare dry scallopes to cook with it. Can you imagine how tasty it will be? I bet you do! Winter is the best season of having chicken soup with abalone and scallope. It’s healthy and definitely yummy! It’s my favourite winter soup.

I learned to cook this dish from the cook book of Cat Cora. I have read through her book, but found most of the ingredients can’t be found easily in here, so I can’t try many. I only can choose some dishes with simple ingredients such as Spiro’s Brisket.

I followed to use most of ingredients from the book apart from the sauce and the herb. I used Lee & Perrin sauce instead of Worcestershire sauce for marinating. I think they are actually the same things, as they taste the same. I didn’t use any fresh oregano at all, as I don’t know what it exactly is. I only know it’s a type of herb. I doubt I can find it here easily anyway. I didn’t use charcoal grill as we only have oven at home. I bet the taste of grill is much better. I used mushroom for major vegetable, which is not included in the original recipe. The book suggested marinating the beef for at least 30 minutes or up to 24 hours, but I marinated it for 1 hour. It also suggested cooking for 2 hours, but I did it for 45 minutes.

Anyway, I am happy with what I cooked tonight though I did have a bit of stomach pain this morning. It couldn’t stop me cooking delicious food at all.