Stir-fry Potato Bok-Choy Beef

I learned cooking this meal from my mommy, I've made it many times and my hubby loves it.
So in the practice of writing my foodblog, I decided to put this as my first recipe.
It's kind of a lot of work compared to the other recipes I planned to put on this blog, but we happened to have pictures ready for this, so here we go.

When I cook something, I'm not set on the idea that you have to put exactly this much of this and that to make the meal, I think everybody have different taste and preference on how much garlic, salt or sugar they want to put in their cooking.
So I'm pretty loose on describing the amount of ingredients. The recipe on this blog is aimed toward people who knows how to stir fry, and just like to experiment with the ingredients themselves.
I put pictures below showing how much ingredients I use, so you can get the idea.

Ok, let's get started

Ingredients:
garlics
shallots
gingers
meat (beef, chicken or pork, whichever you like)
bok-choy
potatoes
vegetable or corn oil (for deep frying)
sesame oil (minor contribution, not always necessary)
Oyster sauce (key sauce ingredient)
soya sauce (also necessary)
salt
sugar
black pepper

Start with pre-marinating the meat. I used beef for this one because beef is the meat my mom originally used on this meal.

cut the beef into small cubes, mix well with oyster sauce, salt and pepper (add a wee bit of sugar, soya sauce and sesame oil if you'd like), and let it marinate for at least 15 min.

Prepare the potatoes for deep frying.

I think I used about 3 or 4 medium sized potatoes and sliced them thin using food processor

Heat up the oil in the frying pan, and when it's ready, fry the potato.
We used about medium-hi heat usually, and potato takes a little while to cook

It's important to not dump all the sliced potato at once, unless you have big enough of a pan to cook 'em all at once.

Also, we're not frying crispy potato chips here. The potato is fried long enough only so that it's no longer raw. It should be a little bit mushy when it's done.

Put it in a strainer, so the oil drips down. Unless you like your food to be super oily hehe. But even I, the oilytasty, would rather strain my deep fried potato for this.

Ok, now that the potato is cooked and out of the way, prepare the rest of the ingredients.
We love garlics, so these are how much garlics, shallots and gingers we used.


Peel all the skins


and cut them all into tiny pieces, unless you like big chunk of garlic and shallots.

I used food processor to cut them all up, it makes things easier.

Move on to prepare the bok-choy


Slice the bok choy into 4, and separate the leaves and the stalks, since they are going to go into the frying pan at separate times.

The leaves will go in at later times, since the stalk will take longer to cook.


Since all the ingredients are ready to go, heat up the oil on medium-hi heat for final stir-fry.

I used about 5 tbs of leftover frying oil from the potato, and the brown streak you see in the pictures is a pinch of sesame oil.

When the heat is ready, toss in the garlic, shallots and gingers.


Keep stir frying so it doesn't stick and burned


when the garlic seems to have a little bit brown on the side, toss in the marinated meat


mix it well with the garlics and friends, and cover the pot so it cooks faster


Make sure its thoroughly cooked (you don't want raw meat in chinese food) and then toss in the bok-choy stalks

add a little bit of oyster sauce, soya sauce, a pinch of salt, pepper and sugar and mix well.
Qyster sauce have a little bit of that fishy taste, so you dont want to put too much of that.
Also, putting too much soy sauce here also will salten your food, so just a little bit is usually good enough.
cover it again, only for a little bit, to cook and soften the stalks

after the stalks is almost done, mix in the rest of the bok-choy leaves

cover it until they're done

and last, toss in the cooked potatoes, and mix well with the rest of them


It's quite a lot of food for two people.
I'm used to cook these much of ingredients, cos when I learned cooking this from my mom, she cooks this much for a whole family.

Also, this meal is always served with rice.
I personally think it's a bit too much to just eat it by itself.
The thing about chinese-indo food is that the meat or veggie meals is always treated as sides to be consumed with rice.

This picture doesn't show a correct proportion of how much rice is eaten compared to how much of the stir-fry meal is usually eaten as sides.
We usually get plenty of leftovers to take for lunch.
Read More......

Mie Sedaap - the best ramen noodle I've ever had

I feel like someone with too much time on her hand, blogging about some stupid ramen noodle =). Nevertheless, I decide to start my food blog with this one, cos even though I like fresh homemade food, this is one addiction to package food that I couldn't get over with.
I've had many kinds of varieties of packaged ramen noodles and this one is definitely my all time favorite. It's an indonesian soupless ramen noodle, with sweet and savory flavor.

Mie Sedaap is the brand, mie means noodle, and sedap means smells good or taste good.
They put an extra 'a' in sedaap to exaggerate that it's really taste or smell good, cos in indonesian when you stretch certain adjective when you say it, it means that you're adding 'very' to the word.

My favorite type is the mie goreng (goreng=fried), so this ramen is an instant packaged version of stir fried noodle. The javanese stir fried noodle I know have the similar sweet and savory flavor, and they use alot of the sweet soya sauce in cooking it, which is one of the key ingredient included in this ramen noodle.

The package came with 5 different spices you gotta mix, from left to right: fried onions, veggie oil, chilli paste, sweet soya sauce and seasoning powder (similar to msg, yumm... healthy!)
Instead of mixing these spices in the boiling water while boiling the noodle, you mix the oil, sweet soya sauce, msg and chilli paste separately in a bowl while you boil your noodle.
I personally like it non spicy, so I omitted the chili paste from the seasoning mix.
then after the noodles are boiled for about 3 min in boiling water, strain it, then mix it all together in the bowl with the seasonings and top it with the fried onion on top. I omitted the fried onion cos personally, I just like mine plain without it.

Hmm... look oily huh hehehehe, thats why it's included in this oily tasty blog

Not long after I finished eating it, I sometimes feel like crap, (probably because of the amount of msg mixed in this tiny portion of food) but unfortunately that doesn't stop me from insanely craving for it from time to time hehehe (they probably put some kind of addictive substance on the seasoning powder or somethin hehe)

I avoid eating it when I have a completely empty stomach and starving for something. I also avoid to have it for dinner, cos I would wake up the next morning starving and feel like crap lol.

Some of these mie sedaap I bought from the local supermarket in the US have a weird stale smell. Not sure if this is true or not, but someone told me that's because these ramens sit in the container in for too long on the way to the US. The packaging is so thin compared to one of those other imported ramen with a layer of alumunium on the inside part of the packaging to protect the ramen. So the thin pastic doesn't protect the ramen very well from the humid air or whatever it is on the way coming to america (eww... lol!)
That's why I don't buy them from the supermarket in the US anymore, I usually brought some of them in my luggage whenever I go back to indonesia to visit families. Read More......

welcome to my food blog!

I'll be posting some recipes and reviews of some restaurants that I consider worth investing my time blogging about. They could be good or superbad, although I doubt I'll spend my time blogging about lame food.
Most restaurants will be in San Gabriel Valley, California and most of 'em will be asian food. But I'm sure I'll review something different once in a while.

I cook indo-chinese food. Since my hubby likes fresh homemade food, I don't usually use package spices even though it's very convenient and tempting to do so.
But for my first review, I'm going to start with the lowest kind of convenient package food, which is: RAMEN NOODLES!!! hehehe (yeah, thats going to establish my food cred) Read More......