AS SINGAPOREANS WOULD SAY 'WAH LAU' : HERE IS OUR GLUTINOUS RICE

OK, we have to admit, we are not very professional at taking pictures of food. Either we are too busy enjoying ourselves in the kitchen or too busy eating the cooked food. As long as you guys get some kind of visual aid, we think we are allowed to enjoy ourselves isn't it. This isn't a blog that is money-making, so why take ourselves so seriously. 'Wah lau', in Singapore means 'gosh', 'omg'...etc. It is hokkien (a Chinese dialect) for 'oh my father'.

Anyway, we posted about glutinous rice that other day. It wasn't a full recipe or tried and tested and let alone fool-proof.

INGREDIENTS

• 500g of glutinous rice, some people call it sweet rice. What is 500g? We usually measure in cups. The whole bag of rice already read 1kg, how can we prepare half of it? It is far too much. We read a few sites and they said 500kg of rice is about 2 cups and slightly over. However, we did read somewhere that white rice and wild rice and sweet rice measures differently. We sticked to 2 cups for this experiment nonetheless. We soaked it in hot water for about 3 hours. It says 6 cups of hot water to 2 cups of rice. It didn't absorb everything in the end but at least it was covered. We did cover the pot with the soaking rice with the lid.
• A handful of dried shrimps, soaked in hot water again. To be minced later.
• A handful of dried mushrooms, soak in hot water too. To be sliced later.
• 3 cloves of garlic, minced.
• 1 small/medium red onion, minced. We do not have shallots.
• We do not have chinese sausages. We do not like it too much. It is far too oily for our liking. We added some fatty ham for some pork fat.

 So this is the portion roughly.

Surely you can tweak this to taste.

We pan fried all of these till fragrant. And then added the soaked rice.We tried to pour away most of the water but there is still a fair amount no doubt. We did take this into consideration that the rice will be cooked in this liquid in the pan, at least slightly.

After pouring in the rice, we added the seasoning and fried it some more until all absorbed. When we talk about tbsp here, it is referring to normal spoon we use for eating soups, rice...etc. This is usually considered dessert spoon on any instances.

• 1 tbsp oyster sauce
• 2 tbsp light soy sauce
• 4 tbsp soy sauce (normal kikoman)
• 2 tbsp ABC sweet soy sauce
• 1 tbsp shao xing wine
• 1/2 tbsp sesame
• pepper for seasoning

This is what it looked like after the pan. The rice grains are still hard and need to go into a steamer for 30-40minutes.

You are supposed to add liquid to it while steaming. We added our soaked mushroom liquid for more flavour. It looked a lot in the bowl but it did not anymore after we stirred it through. If you are not sure how much to add, always add only a few spoonfuls every 10 minutes of steaming.

This is our homemade steamer. All you need is a propped up stand for your bowl/dish to stand on top of so that it does not get direct heat from the boiling/steaming water.

Our glutinous rice is resting right now and can we say again, 'wah lau' it is nice. Try it yourself some day. This would be our dinner tonight. Yum-my!