Our new friends, Z&J are returning to Singapore and J&J are spending the holidays in London. So we had an early gathering at our place, and the girls offered to cook.  Lucky us, right ? Authentic home style asian dishes prepared in our kitchen – what a treat.  Not only I can enjoy the dishes, I get to steal the recipe and learn how to make it the proper way.  To start, we had chawanmushi (茶碗蒸し) and 2 soups – a vegetable soup and a miso soup made with freshly prepared dashi (starting with bonito flakes and kombu). The main course consisted of Hainanese chicken rice (海南雞飯 – a Singaporean specialty), Sambal fish, and chinese sausages (steamed).  We even had two kinds of rice – of course the rice specially flavored for 海南雞飯 – but also steamed white rice in which were steamed the chinese sausages.

Chawanmushi (shrimp, scallop, enoki, and deboned chicken dark meat).

Dashi under preparation.  I froze the remaining soup base as dashi cubes for future culinary experiments.

The egg custard was just perfect !  Not runny, no skin.

Flavored rice made in a pot – no electric rice cooker was used !

Cooked chicken that was just about to be “shocked”  in cold water.  There were plenty of snow outside on that day.

Fish sambal

Chinese sausages – steamed in situ with the rice (and I bet you cannot buy these from KaDeWe – see my earlier posts about German sausages:  part 1 and part 2).

I only have 4 electric rings – but the girls managed to cook the chicken, the flavored rice, the steamed rice with sausage, the fish, the chawanmushi (6 bowls individually steamed), the miso soup, and the vegetable soup.  Everything were ready at about the same time.  Amazing organization and use of cooking time and space.  Hats off to the two chefs.  Here are some action shots.

Voila – here is my place at the dining table.  It was a feast, a special evening, and we thank you again ladies.