On Sunday I felt motivated to do some cooking. So I talked Hannah into making cheese-cake with me. Hannah helped me crush the biscuits for the base...
I chose 'Montana Moms Dynamite Cheesecake', a favourite recipe of mine from my first real cookbook, Mollie Katzen's 'Moosewood Cookbook' (recipe). I have kept my (2nd) copy of this book (complete with extensive food stains) through all our moves.
Perhaps this recipe was perhaps a poor choice do do with Hannah as it takes at least 24 hours to set and we couldn't eat any on the day.
But Hannah did good job mixing the base and then the two cheese-cake and sour-cream filling mixtures.
I also decided to try cooking Maccanese African Chicken (Galinha à Africana). On the web I found the African Chicken recipe from Henri's Galley (recipe link) a famous restaurant very close to the hotel we'd stayed at.
As I started cooking I realized that my favorite cast-iron Le Creuset marmite needed to be replaced! Another sad mile-stone! After almost 20-years use (including couple of months with our former helper, Auntie Jasmine) the enamel at the bottom was lifting-off. So I tearfully laid it in the trash, and went to Shatin to buy a Staub for about HKD 4,000.
African Chicken is an interesting and rather complicated recipe invented in Macau that involves marinating the chicken in a mix of herbs including cayenne, paprika and Chinese 5-spice, and then baking it with potatoes in a sauce of paprika, coconut cream and peanut butter.
This recipe was a big hit. I think it was nicer than most of the versions we had tried in Macau. Although Hannah didn't like the hot spices.
