သၾကၤန္ဆုေတာင္း၊ Happy Burmese New Year

Courtesy of Google Image

ႏွစ္တစ္ႏွစ္ရဲ႔ အခ်ိန္က်ေရာက္လုိ႔လာပါၿပီ။ အားလံုးပဲေပ်ာ္စရာႏွစ္သစ္ အခါသမယမွာ စိတ္၏ခ်မ္းသာၿခင္း ကုိယ္၏က်န္းမာၿခင္းနဲ႔ ၿပည္႔စံုပါေစလုိ႔ ဆုေတာင္းေပးလုိက္ပါတယ္။ လြမ္းလုိ႔ေကာင္းေအာင္ ပန္းေတာက္ခက္ေလးပါ လက္ေဆာင္ထည္႔ေပးလုိက္ပါတယ္။  (ပံုေတြအားလံုးကို Google မွကူးပါသည္).

Courtesy of Google Image - The Padauk (Blossom only in April during festive time)

ငါးေၿခာက္ထမင္းေၾကာ္/ Fried rice with salted fish

လြယ္လြယ္ကူကူ ငါးေၿခာက္ထမင္းေၾကာ္ေလးပါ။ ေၾကာ္နည္းကေတာ႔ လြယ္လြန္းလုိ႔ ေရးရမွာေတာင္ အားနာမိပါရဲ႔။  ဒါေပမယ္႔ကြ်န္မကလည္း ခ်က္သမွ်ေလးေတြ မွတ္တမ္းတင္ထားခ်င္ေတာ႔လည္း မေနႏိုင္ပဲ ဘေလာ႔ထဲတင္မိၿပန္ပါတယ္။

တစ္ေယာက္စာဆိုေတာ႔လည္း ထမင္းလဲ ပန္းကန္လံုး တစ္၀က္ေလာက္ပဲသံုးပါတယ္။ ပထမဆံုး ငါးေၿခာက္လက္တစ္ဆစ္စာေလာက္ကို ေသးေသးေလးေတြလွီးထားၿပီး အရင္ဆီပူပူမွာေၾကာ္ပါတယ္။ ေနာက္ အသီးအရြက္ကိုေရာထည္႔ၿပီး ၂ မိနစ္ေလာက္ေၾကာ္ပါတယ္။ ေနာက္ေတာ႔ ၾကက္ဥကိုထည္႔ေမႊလုိက္ၿပီး ထမင္းကိုေနာက္ဆံုးမွ ထည္႔ပါတယ္။ ပဲငံပ်ာရည္အၾကည္၊ ၾကက္သားမွဳန္႔အနဲငယ္ထည္႔ၿပီး ၂ မိနစ္ေလာက္ေနရင္ ရပါၿပီ။ ငါးေၿခာက္ပါေနေတာ႔ သိပ္ငံသြားမွာစိုးလုိ႔ ဆားမထည္႔ေတာ႔ပါဘူး။ စားလုိ႔ေတာ႔ အရမ္းေကာင္းပါတယ္။

It was a simple dish that I cooked for my weekend lunch. Not many ingredients were used, but the taste was so good that I am going to make it again very soon. Besides, it took me only 10mins to complete this dish. I used only 1/2 cup of cooked rice ( obviously 1 serving ), some mixed veggies (frozen), an egg and finally a small amount of salted fish. The best thing about the dish is the salted fish, which make the fried rice even tastier than ever.

My simple preparation steps as follows:  First, cut the fish into small pieces (sorry I cant remember the exact weight of the fish that I've used). Then heat a table spoon of oil in wok and fry those fish till fragrant. Then add mix veggie and stir fry it for about 2 min with the lid on. Next, add the egg and continue to fry until they are fully cooked (about 1 min). Finally add in rice together with 1/2 Tbsp of light soy sauce as well as 1/2 tsp of seasoning powder and fry for about another 2 mins. Dish out and ready to serve.

ၿပည္ၾကီးငါးဆီၿပန္၊ Squid Si Pyan

ၾကာလွပါၿပီ တစ္ေလာက သူငယ္ခ်င္းတစ္ေယာက္အိမ္ အလွဳသြားေတာ႔ ဒီဟင္းမ်ိဳးပါတယ္။ စားေကာင္းလြန္းလုိ႔ အိမ္မွာၿပန္ခ်က္စားၿပီး ဘေလာ႔ေပၚတင္လုိက္တာပါ။ ဘုန္းၾကီးဆြမ္းကပ္ဆိုေတာ႔လည္း ဟင္းေတြက အမယ္စံု အမ်ိဳးမ်ိဳးေပါ႔။ သူငယ္ခ်င္းအေမက ဟင္းခ်က္အရမ္းေကာင္းတာ ခုမွသိတယ္။ ခါတိုင္းလဲ သြားေနတာပါပဲ ဒါေပမယ္႔ မသိခဲ႔ဘူး။ ဒီေလာက္ဟင္းအမယ္မ်ားမ်ားကို အကုန္လက္ရာေကာင္းေအာင္ ခ်က္ႏိုင္တယ္ ဆိုတာ မနည္းဘူးေလ။ ဒီၿပည္ၾကီးငါးဟင္းကေတာ႔ သူငယ္ခ်င္းကိုယ္တုိင္ခ်က္တာဆိုပဲ။ ေတာ္ေတာ္ေကာင္းလုိ႔ ၿပည္ၾကီးငါးတစ္မ်ိဳးထဲကို ထပ္ကာထပ္ကာယူမိတယ္။ ဟင္းေတြမ်ားလြန္းေတာ႔ ဟင္းခြက္အကုန္မႏုိက္ႏိုင္ပါဘူး။ သူ႔ကို ခ်က္နည္းေမးၾကည္႔ေတာ႔လည္း ရိုးရိုးဆီၿပန္ပဲ အဲဒါကိုက စားလုိ႔ေကာင္းေနတာ။ ဗမာဆီၿပန္ဟင္းကေတာ႔ ေတာ္ေတာ္မ်ားမ်ား ခ်က္တတ္မယ္ထင္ပါတယ္ေနာ္။

လုပ္နည္းလည္း အထူးတလယ္မေရးေတာ႔ပါဘူးေနာ္။ ၿပည္ၾကီးငါးကို သန္႔ရွင္းေရးလုပ္ ေသးေသးေလးေတြလွီး။ ၾကက္သြန္ၿဖဴ၊နီ၊ ခရမ္းခ်ဥ္သီး ဆီသတ္၊ နံနံပင္ထည္႔၊ ၿပည္ၾကီးငါးထည္႔ ခဏေနဆိုရၿပီ။ ေအာက္မွာေတာ႔ ဘေလာ႔လာလည္တဲ႔ ဗမာမဟုတ္တဲ႔ သူငယ္ခ်င္းေတြ စမ္းခ်င္ရင္စမ္းႏိုင္ေအာင္ အဂၤလိပ္လုိေရးေပးထားလုိက္တယ္။ ၿပည္ၾကီးငါးဆီၿပန္မခ်က္ၾကည္႔ေသးရင္ ခ်က္ၾကည္႔ေစခ်င္တယ္။ အရမ္းကိုစားလုိ႔ေကာင္းပါတယ္။























Here is the recipe

• 2 medium size squid (clean and cut into small pieces and season with salt and pepper)
• 1 big tomato (thinly sliced)
• 2 onions (chopped or you can use food processor)
• 3 cloves of garlic
• some coriander (chopped)
• some red chili
• about 10 Tbsp of vegetable oil
• 1 Tbsp of chili powder
• 1 tsp of seasoning powder 
• some fish sauce to taste

Method

1. Heat oil in work and fry onions and garlic until they become soft.
2. Add tomato, chopped coriander, red chili , seasoning powder, 1Tbs of chili powder and some fish sauce (adjust to your taste).
3. Cook for about 5 to 7 mins or until the tomatoes are fully cooked ( you should see some clear oil by then - that is called "Si Pyan")
4. Finally, add the seasoned squids and cook for a few minutes only. Note, don't over cook as it will make the texture of the squid rubbery instead of just soft.
5. Dish out and  garnish with some fresh coriander. Enjoy.