Neighborhood Small Grants: Seniors Community Kitchen Workshop 2 [Recap]

This is the 2nd session of the Seniors Community Kitchen Cooking Workshop on September 21, 2015 (funded by Vancouver Foundation Neighbourhood Small Grants) and the final cooking workshop for the year. I've always love to see what people make in these cooking workshops. It smelled so good in the kitchen. 

Last week, we made some delicious Chinese food. This week's dishes are also similar (Asian dishes, but different recipes) where we had a veggie & meat dish, vegetarian dish, roast, and two kinds of desserts. The facilitators were well-organized and everything went so smoothly in the kitchen. The two men worked with the stove, pan-frying the food while the ladies rinsed, chopped and prepared the uncooked food.

Some of us may have seen some of the food at local Asian supermarkets, but did you know you can make them at home? Some of the recipes are very simple such as these Chinese Egg Tarts. I had someone translate the recipe for me. The mini tart shells can be bought in the frozen section at the supermarket (Superstore).

Recipe: Chinese Style Egg Tarts
(makes about a dozen)

INGREDIENTS:

3 large eggs
1/4 cup water
1/3 cup sugar
1/2 milk
frozen mini tart shells

PREPARATION:

1. Preheat over to 375F
2. Melt sugar with the warm water and let cool down.
3. Beat the eggs.
4. Add the eggs into sugar and water mixture.
5. Add milk into the mixture and stir until smooth and creamy.
6. Pour the creamy custard mixture over the sifter to separate the clumps in a separate container.
7. Pour the custard into the tart shells.
8. Bake for about 25 minutes.

Here's another easy to make dish: Chinese Roast Pork. After roasting in the oven, the top skin layer will have a nice, crunchy texture. The meat used is the pork belly. No pre-boiling is needed. Looks like the meat was rubbed on with salt and five spice powder.





Vegetarian dish stir fried with cabbage, julienne carrots, dried minute shrimp, and bean thread noodles. These noodles are the "transparent" noodles when it's cooked. The noodles are soaked in cold water for about 15 minutes before cooking.



Last dish was the Pig Feet With Lotus Root Stew. It's actually pretty tasty with sauce they used (mixture of ginger, garlic, dark soy, and fermented bean cured).




Oh, not to forget to mention about the savory sweet red bean soup dessert. A lot of people love this.


[Full gallery can be viewed on my Flickr album here: https://flic.kr/s/aHskhraXLF]