Homemade burger bun and meat patty
I have tried a few recipes for burger buns, moving into the direction of making whole wheat buns. The first batch I made was too dense and wasn't at all good. Then recently, I found a recipe that I thought was quite good.
Ingredients
1 cup warm water
1 teaspoon sugar
1 tablespoon dry yeast
3/4 cup warm whole milk
3 tablespoons sugar
1/4 cup melted Crisco shortening
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
3 1/2 cups flour or bread flour (I used 2 cups all-purpose flour and 1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour)
1 egg white
1 teaspoon water
1 tablespoon sesame seed
Method
- Proof the yeast in 1 cup warm water with 1 teaspoon sugar. Leave it for about 10 mins.
- In a heavy duty stand mixer, fitted with a kneader hook, add in the flour, 3 tablespoons sugar, melted Crisco, warm milk and salt.
- Add in the proofed yeast. Mix to create a soft semi-sticky dough that holds around the blade, adding in more flour as needed (do not add in too much as it will create a heavy bun, dough should be semi-sticky).
- Knead dough for 7-8 minutes.
- Remove dough, and let rest on the counter, covered with a clean dish towel for 10 minutes (this is an important step!).
- Knead the dough gently for 30 seconds with hands.
- Place dough in a large well-greased/oiled bowl.
- Cover, let rise til double in size. (I followed the tip in the original recipe and used the oven instead. I set the oven to a little less than 200 degrees for about 2 or 3 mins then turned it off and put the dough, still in the mixer bowl covered with a kitchen towel)
- Punch down dough.
- Shape into large balls, and place on a tray lined with parchment paper or large greased cookie sheet (for a good sized bun, you can divide the dough into 12 pieces).
- Cover with a light clean tea towel, and let rise in a warm place for 30-40 minutes, or until almost doubled (warm oven rise should take 30 minutes).
- Set oven to 375 degrees.
- In a small bowl, mix together 1 egg white with 1 tsp water; whisk/mix well.
- Carefully brush the tops and sides of the buns with the egg/water mixture.
- Sprinkle with sesame seeds. Bake for approx.22 minutes, or until golden brown.
The original recipe can be found here: Kittencal's Hamburger/Burger Buns
For the meat patty, I used:
ground buffalo meat
medium onion, chopped
ketchup
worchestershire sauce
pepper
dried oregano
dried sage
hot pepper sauce (Death Sauce or whatever is your fancy)
salt
some garlic, minced
dry mustard
I can't really remember the measurements for the ingredients as it depends on your taste.
Katanka Burger…
A little tribute to my late Yankton Sioux grandmother, Maria "Running Moccasins" Pearson, who adopted me as her grandson back in my university days in Ames, Iowa in 1995. Which reminds me. I still have to write on my experience traveling around with her. Anyway, buffalo meat,... yummy. Found two packs of ground buffalo meat at Buy Low Foods near my place on major offer. How did it end up? Well, check out the pics below. Wifey made a nice little patty with... err... well, wifey, you reading this, I let ya continue the talking, aye? 
Buffalo meat drenched with home-made mayonaise.
A fully assembled buffalo burger. Excellent!
Hot stuff!
Hubby and I are crazy about super spicy stuff. We are always on the lookout for really hot chillies. We used to get our little red hot chillies from Save On but one day, they just disappeared never to be seen again. Then while shopping at Chong Lee, we saw these lil pickled red chillies. It wasn't enough because somehow it didn't taste quite right to me when chopped and mixed with a little light soy sauce but that didn't bother Hubby, he could eat anything
I did some reading up on how to store these chillies and decided that once I get a batch of these hot chillies, I was going to freeze them. We were on a shopping trip to Sidhu's when we saw these green chillies. There were green chillies, thai chillies and some other chillies. The thai turned out to be really hot. They froze really well. So now we have frozen chillies in the freezer ready to be chopped and eaten.
The dip for the szechuan hot pot consisted of chopped chillies mixed with chopped garlic and light soy sauce. It goes really well with a lot of stuff.
We had heard so much about the szechuan peppercorns and thought that we had bought some some time ago in Chinatown. Before the hot pot session below, we had another in which I threw a handful of szechuan peppercorns. It didn't seem to be much of a big deal until we came across Lee Kum Kee's Szechuan Hot Pot Soup Base. It's really good. We found it in the Dollar Store in New Westminster on 6th St.
Update to mini yau char kwai
Yau Char Kwai, yau tiew or whatever you call them are very common in my 'kampung'. Every morning, if you get up early enough, you can run out to the nearby morning market and get them fresh. If you are late, then I'm sorry, they are all sold out. When Hubby visited my Melaka home, that was what he precisely did, went out early and bought quite a few of them. He could eat out the whole store if he had a mind too seeing as how it was hard to get in Burnaby.
Since he loved eating them so much, I had been trying to find a really simple and easy recipe that wouldn't require ingredients that I have not even heard of, since I didn't do much cooking back home in Malaysia. I finally found two recipes, one by Amy Beh and the other Lily Ng. I settled for Amy's. There were about two ingredients I substituted:
(A) Sift:
300 g high protein flour (settled for just normal all-purpose flour)
50 g flour (all-purpose flour)
1/2 tsp baking powder
(B) 1/2 tsp sugar
2 tbsp lukewarm water
2 tsp yeast
(C) Combine:
250 ml water
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda (big name for baking soda )
1/2 tsp alum aka pak fun ( substituted with cream of tartar)
1/2 tsp ammonia powder aka chow fun (substituted with 1/2 tsp baking soda and 1 tsp baking powder)
1 tsp salt
Method:
- Put A in mixer (used KitchenAid), mix B and leave aside for 10 mins.
- Pour B in A and mix well. Add in C, beat for 5 mins until soft dough is formed. Cover, let rise until double original size. (I used the oven - heated oven at about 180 degrees then switch off - so waiting time is shorter)
- Roll out, knead til smooth. Roll dough into a rectangle, cut them into strips. (rolled mine into 1'' wide and about 4'' in length)
- Place 2 strips on top of each other, before that I painted a wet trail down the middle of the bottom strip so they would sort of adhere to each other. I found that if I didn't, probability that they would come apart while frying would be very high. Let rest for 5 - 10 mins.
- Heat wok with oil. Press down lightly lengthwise down the middle of the strips with a satay stick or a dough cutter or a bread knife, whichever works for you or is available. Pull on the ends of the strip and stretch it as long as you want without pulling it apart and drop it in the oil. How brown you want it to be is up to you but usually just until it is golden brown. Of course Hubby would love it if it was just a little more brown.
My yau tiews were varied in length according to how long I stretched them but they tasted good though. We ate the whole batch in one day.
You can find the original recipe here:
Yau Char Kwai (Chinese Crullers) by Amy Beh
or you can try out Lily's recipe:
Yau Char Kway aka Yau Tiew
Mini Yau Char Kwai’s
I have always loved Yau Char Kwai's. Well, I guess I just love anything DEEP FRIED! Westerners refer to it as Chinese doughnuts. Usually goes great with porridge and black coffee.
Yau Char Kwai a.k.a. Yau Tiu a.k.a. Chinese doughnut made by wifey.
You can usually find it at some select Chinese restaurants and places like T&T Supermarket. Problem with some of these places, like T&T especially, is that they are usually pre-fried in large volumes, so God knows how long those doughnuts have been sitting there! Which also means they end up being soft and soggy. Not cool! In short, if it ain't crispy/crunchy, it's been sitting around too long! The best time to get them are of course if you see the cook bringing 'em up straight from the fryer. I have also had better luck with the medium-sized yau char kwai's, so you may wanna try those instead... if you can get them. 
Szechuan Hot Pot
Ahhhh... spicy hot pot mania! Lamb, beef, tripe, artificial crab meat, enoki mushrooms, shiitake mushrooms, pork balls, fish balls, octopus balls, cuttlefish+calamari balls... man, that's a helluva lotta BALLS! Spicy as the soup is, the real killer still lies in the condiments. Wifey chopped up some Thai chili and raw garlic, and mixed 'em up for dipping into. Spicy and pungent. YUM! I was sweating buckets by the end of the meal!
A feast fit for a... spicy couple.
Yummy soup... and equally yummy fingers... yummm!
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Wifey writes: What?? Not by the end of the meal but within the first few minutes, Hubby was already sweating buckets!!
VirtualDubMod – Cannot Append Segment Solution
Just recently acquired a few VHS tapes from my Sifu on Lion Dances and Choy Lee Fut Kung Fu performances which I had offered to help transfer to DVD. Still have me good ol' Pinnacle Studio DC10+ Capture Card after all these years. Fired up Pinnacle Studio 8.1, captured at 640x480, outputted them using the Ligos Indeo XP Video 5.2 Codec to a 1/2 D1 352x480 AVI video, attempted to join some of the videos together via VirtualDubMod 1.5.10.2, and VOILA... I get the following attitude:
Cannot append segment blah blah blah: The segment has a different set of streams.
After various experimentations, and researching on the Internet, I am pleased to say that I have come up with a tried-and-tested solution. Here are the following steps, and let's call the two videos "Video X" and "Video Y". I know, some of you guys are thinking "Hey, why not 'Video A' and 'Video B', or 'Video 1' and 'Video 2'?" Well, because I am in an X and Y mood, so as far as I am concerned, it's Video X and Video Y. Thank you very much.
1. Fire up VirtualDubMod.
2. In the menu bar, click File, click Open video file, look for Video X and press the Open button.
3. In the menu bar, click Video, and make sure Direct Stream Copy is selected.
4. In the menu bar again, click Streams followed by Stream List. Right-click on the video entitled "Source: Input AVI file", and make sure Direct Stream Copy is selected too.
5. In the menu bar yet again, click Video, then Frame Rate, and select No change.
6. Then click File followed by Save As, assign your desired video output a name, and then click the Save button.
7. Repeat for Video Y.
7. Once both videos have been processed, they should join fine (as long as BOTH share the same frame rate!).
