A super-simple, savory steamed dish that you can whip up in a snap.

Remember a while back I blogged about how egg tofu was just such an amazing thing and if you could find it at your Asian grocery store you should nab yourself at least 4 tubes? I even shared a very simple recipe on how you could cook it. Well, after eating loads of that stuff these days (over here, it’s very easy to find and I cook it at least once every two weeks), I found that we could make this simple tofu ourselves. So for those of you out there without access to an Asian grocery store (or if your store just doesn’t carry these things), you can TOTALLY make it yourself.

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Updated 31 August 2010
Originally posted 28 September 2008

Popiah (also spelled poh piah, poh pia, baobing (薄饼)), is an Asian dish popular in Malaysia and Singapore that’s like a fat spring roll, only not fried. Think of it as kind of an Asian burrito. Except that the popiah filling itself is much more complicated and contains so many more ingredients than a regular burrito.

Mum’s popiah are the best. It’s a perfect combination of sweetness from the flour sauce, the savoriness of pork and prawns, the spiciness of chili and garlic, and the crunch of cooling vegetables. It’s so yummy, you will gobble it down and hurriedly make another without even thinking about it. I have had popiah from hawker stalls in Singapore and Malaysia, even in Penang, where you will find the best food in the world. Mum’s popiah beats them all.

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Elizabeth and I have been friends since high school. Our friendship was not the most immediate—she is naturally more suspicious and takes a long time to warm up to people. I, on the other hand, will talk to just about anyone who is near me. So the first time we met, I had come up to her to say hello and ask her name only to be met with a suspicious, “why do you want to know?” At least, this is what Elizabeth tells me. I don’t remember that at all. I only know that we’ve been good friends for a long time. We’ve been through years of sitting next to each other through high school, work (graduate school for me), and of course, FOOD.

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What Japanese meal would be complete without miso soup? Sure, you could make it from prepackaged stock but it’s more fun to do it from scratch!

Miso Soup From Scratch

Updated 3 Dec 2009
Originally posted 10 March 2007

My son loves miso soup almost as much as he loves Mac and Cheese. Whenever we are at a Japanese restaurant, it’s so easy to feed him. Get him a bowl of miso soup and a bowl of rice. He would take that bowl of rice and proceed to dunk it all into the bowl of miso soup, treating it almost like rice soup! Then, in less than 10 minutes, he would’ve slurped up the whole bowl and many times, would ask us to get him another one. We always watched in bemusement because it’s so simple and so cheap (compared to our love for sushi which costs a gazillion times more!) to make. Happily I’ve learned to recreate miso soup at home for him.

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