Wat Dan simply means smooth egg (滑蛋).  This is done by pouring egg into the gravy in the last cooking step and turning off the flame immediately before the egg is fully cook, hence remain as soft cook.  This goes particularly well with Hor Fun (flat rice noodles).  See earlier post on how to prepare the hor fun.

Ingredients (2 servings)

1. 8 slices of Pork slices (aprox)
2. 8 slices Grouper or Toman Fish slices (aprox)
3. 6 Prawn (aprox)
4. 1 Squid
5. 2 brunch of Chinese flowering cabbage (菜心, Cai Xin, Choy Sum), or any other vegetables of your choice.
6. 4 table spoon Light Soya Sauce
7. 1 table spoon oyster sauce
8. ½ teaspoon Sugar
9. 2 cup Water or stock
10. 1/2 teaspoon Salt
11. 4 teaspoon Corn Flour
12. 1 egg
13. 4 tablespoon cooking oil. (optional you can use lard although it is not healthy)
14. 2 garlic.

Method

1. Wash and slice pork and fish.  Remove shell of prawn except the tail portion. 
2. Wash and remove the skin of the squid (the purple color thin layer), cut into strips.  Optionally you may cut “flower” but doing diagonal crisscross scores (do not cut through) on the inner side so that when cook will flip and present a nice pattern.
3. Wash and cut the cabbage into sections.
4. Minced garlic
5. Mix corn flour with ¼ cup water.
6. Beat eggs with 1 tablespoon of the corn flour solution in step 5.
7. Heat up wok, add oil and garlic and stir till fragrant.
8. Add in pork, fish, prawn, squid and stir fry till almost cook.  Add in vegetable and water.  Leave it to boil and keep boiling for 3 minutes.  Add in salt, sugar, soya sauce and oyster sauce.  Add more salt if you like it saltier. 
9. Slowly pour in the corn flour solution until the required thickness (when you lift up the stirrer, a thin layer will cling on the stirrer like glue. (discard the rest, don’t add all when the thickness is reached, otherwise the gravy is too thick)
10. Bring it to boil, pour in the egg and stir the gravy at the same time to prevent the egg from cooking into a lump. It should flow nicely into soft egg strips.  Turn off flame immediately, and do not let it boil again.
11. Pour over the pre-cooked Hor fun and serve.

This dish is best with salted fish head, especially threadfin (午鱼).  Fish head produce the gummy consistency of the gravy, and make the pork smoother.  However, it is ok even you are using salted fish fillet.  This is very easy to cook, although the instruction looks lengthy.

Ingredients

1. 50-100 grams salted fish head (approximate)
2. 600 grams pork belly with skin.
3. 4 tablespoon dark soya sauce
4. 1 tablespoon sugar
5. 5 cm section of ginger
6. 3-4 garlic
7. 3 tablespoon cooking oil
8. 4 cups water

Method

1. Scrape off the skin of the ginger, cut into slices. Peel garlic and chop into small pieces
2. Rinse the pork and drain dry, and cut into thick strips, about 2 cm wide, and the length is the thickness of the belly meat.  Each piece will has the skin, fats, and the lean meat in layers (that is why another name for pork belly is 3-layer meat 三层肉)
3. Heat up a wok or pot. Add in cooking oil, ginger, garlic and salted fish, and fry till fragrance aroma of ginger and salted fish can be smelled.
4. Add in pork, and allow the surface to be scalded by stirring around (or tossing).  Add in dark soya sauce and continue the scalding process.
5. When the soy sauce aroma fragrance is smelled (a little burning smell is ok, but do not over burn), pour in water, stir to even out and allow contents to be in contact with water.  Cover and allow to simmer in low heat for 1-2 hours.  Check occasionally, and if gravy dries up, add water (preferably you should not need to, and if you do, it means the fire to too big and cause high rate of evaporation.)
6. After 1 hour, check the tenderness of the pork is what you like, if not continue cooking and check every 15 mins.  I prefer to cook till the fat is really soft and will almost melt in the mouth.
7. When done, this is the tricky part.  Remember we do not add any light soya sauce or salt, and how salty is the gravy depends only on the salted fish.  Taste the gravy and check the gravy consistency (it should be a bit thick and sticky). If the gravy is too salty for you, you have no choice but to add water.  If not, and the gravy is too watery, you can up the flame and do not cover, let it boil and evaporate to increase the thickness.  If the saltiness is right, and the gravy is too watery, you can dissolve some corn flour in water in a bowl, and stir in slowly a little at a time and stop when the consistency is just right.  If consistency is right, and not salty enough, add some salt. If you are using fish head, you should not have this problem of consistency, as the gravy should be quite sticky already. 
8. Serve.

Ingredients (serve 4)

1. 2 cm section of ginger
2. 1-2 stalk spring onion
3. 400 grams Spanish Mackerel (马交) fish fillet (or Grouper,石斑) (or Snakehead,  Ikan Toman, 生鱼)
4. 1 cup rice
5. 6 bowls water
6. salt
7. fish bone (optinal)
8. 1 tablespoon sesame oil
9. 1 tablespoon soya sauce
10. dash of pepper

Method

1. Wash the fish fillet. Slice the fish fillet into ½ to 1 cm thick slices against the grain.
2. Marinate with soya sauce and sesame oil and set aside.
3. Peel ginger and cut into thin strips <1mm thick.  Wash spring onion and cut thinly.
4. Rinse rice thoroughly, put into pot with 6 bowls water. Bring it to boil and then lower flame till extremely low flame (for my burner, I have to turn the gas knob as if I am turning it off, but just stopping when the flame is about to go off) and let it simmer with cover on for 1 hour,  This make the porridge base very soft (Cantonese style), but if you prefer the porridge to be grainy, then you can stop when the right consistency is obtained.
5. If you have fish bone, make a fish stock by boiling 1 bowl water with the bones for 30 mins with low flame.  (the purpose of cooking this separately instead of putting the bones into the porridge is that there might be small bone dislodge and get mixed with the porridge).  When done, sieve and mixed into the porridge.
6. When the porridge done, add salt to taste.
7. While the porridge is boiling, pour in the fish, stir and allow to boil for 1 min, turn off flame and cover for another 10 mins.
8. Serve hot in bowl, with ginger strips and cut spring onion. Optional, dash of pepper, soya sauce and sesame oil.

You can also serve with cut you tiao 油条, or century egg 皮蛋

This is another dish that goes well with plain porridge as a very simple meal.  You can keep them in air tight containers for about up to 2 weeks. Very convenient.

Most people cook ikan billis with sambal chilli, or just simply deep frying.  This recipe uses garlic and soya sauce to give it a very nice taste and sweeten with caramelized sugar.

Ingredients

1. 300 grams Ikan Bilis
2. Cooking oil for deep frying
3. 3 table spoon light soya sauce
4. 6 table spoon sugar
5. 1/5 cup water
6. 3 cloves garlic
7. 2 table spoon cooking oil

Method

1. Optional, for hygiene, you may wipe the ikan billis with a clean damp cloth (advise not to wash)
2. Sun dry the fish, especially if you have wiped it with damp cloth.  Alternatively, put into oven at low heat to dry them, or heat it on a dry pan or wok without oil and stirring continuously.  The purpose is to make sure there is little moisture in the fish, and it will be crispy when you deep fry them.
3. Deep fry the ikan billis in low to medium heat, until brown.  Important not to use high heat.  You need patience here.
4. Drain and leave them on a kitchen paper towel to absorb all the oil.
5. Minced or chop finely the garlic
6. Heat up a wok, add 2 table spoon oil and garlic, fry till fragrance.
7. Lower heat, add in sugar and allow it to start to melt (caramelizes)  and pour in soya sauce and water (prepare the soya sauce and water in a cup before hand, so that you can just pour it in quickly, speed is important to prevent sugar from burning). Stir to dissolve all sugar.
8. Turn up heat and allow it to bubble furiously and a little thickens (we don’t need it to be sticky like caramel, but still watery with some consistency),  and then pour in the pre-fried ikan bilis and using the stirrer toss them around so that we coat the ikan bilis as evenly as possible while it is very hot (when it cools down the caramelize sugar will hardens and harder to mix).
9. Scoop on a flat metal plate and allow to air and cool down to room temperature. 
10. Serve, or keep them in air tight container for serving days later.

Even the thoughts of this dish make me hungry.  Salted fish is very nice either by itself, or cooked with other ingredients, and also very nice in clay pot rice too! Yum! (However, don’t eat it too much for health sake.)  

Ingredients

1. 1 small piece Salted Fish Mui Heong (梅香)
2. 300 grams Lean pork (optional with little fats attached)
3. 1 table spoon sesame oil
4. ½ table spoon soya sauce (adjust accordingly with amount of salted fish used)
5. ½ teaspoon sugar
6. 1 teaspoon corn flour
7. 1 cm section of ginger
8. 1 teaspoon rice wine (hua tiao, 花雕 optional)
9. dash of ground white pepper

Method

1. Wash, drain, and slice the pork thinly.
2. Cut the pork into small pieces of thin slices.
3. Remove the skin of ginger, and cut into very fine stands of less than 1 mm thick.
4. Marinate sliced pork with sesame oil, soya sauce, sugar, corn flour, pepper and ginger. Optional, add the rice wine.
5. Lay on the marinated pork on steaming plate. And on top of the pork lay the salted fish.
6. Steam over high heat for 15 mins.
7. Serve hot.