(logo whooshing) (audience applause) - I like to keep things very simple in the kitchen but sometimes I get this strong urge.

I would roll up my sleeves and really make something very special.

Remember those days when college kids used to have goldfish swallowing contests.

If they have time, my goldfish soup, I'm quite sure they'll be a lot happier today.

Now here, I want to show you how to do something truly, truly interesting and amazingly easy to do.

Even though it takes a little bit more time.

Here, I have some shrimp I'm going to take it over and I'm going to make it into a little shrimp mousse.

Okay.

And first I want to show you how easy it is to.

I cut it up one by one.

If you have the time, if you don't have time, once again I lined this all up, like this.

Line them all up and I just slice it in half like that.

Look at that.

See how I do it.

I'm going to put it right here.

See that.

Now after I do this, I stack them all up and I cut them up into little chunks like that.

And then I can either use two knives to chop it or I use one knife to do it.

Now you use one knife.

If you only have one knife, you can make a paste like this.

You see this piece right here.

Three, two, one paste done.

(audience laughing) Okay.

If you want to have more fun want to have some exercise.

You hold on to two knives, and you go like this.

(knives chopping) Great exercise.

After you finish this, you'll will put this right here, you see how you transfer.

You put this right here and if you spill some water make sure to clean it up.

I purposely do it and show you always clean up at all times (audience laughing) because I'm washing my cutting boar.. You see, I got some stuff over there.

And then, look at that.

I'm going to marinate this with a tiny bit of wine, okay.

And a tiny bit of corn starch.

And also a tiny bit off salt, a tiny bit of a white pepper, and a tiny bit of minced ginger or ginger juice.

And of course a teeny tiny bit of egg white, not much just enough.

And then I mixed them all up, and let it sit for a little while.

Okay.

I would like to let it sit for about a half an hour or so, up to two hours.

So let the flavor permeate, so it's nice and wonderful.

Let us set, set this aside for a little while, and set this aside.

And then I want to show you how to make this goldfish very easy to do.

Here, I have some shrimp paste which is already done, and marinated for about two hours.

And then I have some water over here, which I spill half of it to clean up my cutting board.

And then I'm going to show you how to shape it.

Okay.

Very interesting.

You use, you wet your hand first, okay?

You put approximately one heaping teaspoon of this.

Shrimp mousse, already marinated.

Put it right here, you can put a tiny, tiny bit more to put it right here.

Look at, easy to do.

And then you wet this a little spoon a little bit and then you can go like that.

Shape it into a little goldfish.

Can you see that?

I want to show everybody can see this.

Okay.

Otherwise we'll miss it.

Nice and smooth.

Okay, look at that.

It's very easy, very smooth.

And then after that you put this, the tail of the shrimp which you can use.

Put it right here.

Look at that.

And then you can put two green peas, put it right here.

Look at that.

And then you use a little ham, a piece of ham.

Cut it in this little jig saw, reach, and then you put it right in the middle.

You know what you have?

You have a goldfish, look at that.

It is very easy to do, everybody can do it.

Now, when this is all nice and ready we are going to put this on the side.

To make it easy, I'm going to show you another one because it's so easy to do.

Put one big piece of shrimp mousse.

Okay?

Make sure, now when you do this, make sure you do not rush.

When you rush, your gonna make very sloppy lousy looking goldfish.

So slow down and enjoy it.

When somebody rush you, you said: Slow down.

Okay, look at that.

Very easy to do one more time, everybody can do it.

Once again, the tail, put it right here.

And then two green peas, put it on the side.

And then a little of these ham, cut it into ridges.

Put it right here, you have another gold fish.

Look at that, that moves.

When this is done you put it all away, and then you are going to steam this, okay?

All it takes is a few minutes to steam.

We're going to steam it in this bamboo steamer One, two, three, four.

We're going to steam it for about three to four minutes.

And then while you're steaming this, you know what happened?

I'm going to build up the broth, to make the broth and make it look wonderful and nice with all these garnishings.

Okay.

I have a little knife here.

Let me show you.

In the meantime, I also have my broth boil.. and I cut a little piece of soft tofu.

Very carefully, lay them all down, lay another piece and you can cut another piece, put it right over here.

And then also cut up a couple pieces of snow pea, I'll show you how to do it, okay.

One, two, like that, another one two, like that.

This is already water blanched, hard boiled until they're nice and bright green.

Okay.

And then you lay them around one piece here, one piece here, and one piece here.

Now we're going to get the broth.

This is hot broth, very light broth, Asian broth.

Normally very, very light, very clear.

We'll put this right over here, not much.

Okay.

And then the next thing I want to show you is we're going to get the fish out, the fish.

Whew.

This is beautiful fish.

We have a goldfish right here and all we have to do is use a chopstick and move the fish and put it right over here.

The whole thing is a goldfish.

And then you garnish it, with this.

(audience clapping) Our next show stopper, beggars Cornish game hen, which is adapted from the traditional classical Chinese dish.

Call the beggars chicken.

This is a dish that you can always order in a Northern style Chinese restaurant.

When you go to visit all the wonderful restaurants in Hong Kong.

First, you got to make the dough and get the dough ready.

In China or in Hong Kong they use the mud or they use the clay.

Okay, here, I have eights cups of flour, eight cups of salt.

This is the easiest way to do, to make your own dough.

And then I put, mix them all up and I add four cups of water this way, give you a nice firm dough.

Give you that consistency as well as heat conductivity like a clay and easy to do, and also is cleaner.

You don't have to worry about all kinds of clay mix makes after you mix them all up.

I don't know why, I always need dough.

Look at this.

I love dough.

You see, it's already have a wonderful consistency.

You just keep moving, keep moving.

And after you mixed them all well, it doesn't take too long to do at all.

This is how you can look at this improvise.

The longer you knead the dough, the more it gets tough.

Oh, let it sit for a little while, okay.

We have done this and let it sit.

This way you get nice and even.

I'm going to let it sit here for a little while.

And then I'm going to wash my hands Ah, what a mess.

Ah, easy done.

Always make sure nice and clean.

And then we're going to get this dough ready.

This one has been resting for about half an hour to an hour.

And then I put a tiny bit of flour here, extra flour.

So when I turn it upside down it won't get stuck, okay.

Turn it upside down, like that.

Okay.

And then now you, you know, in Hong Kong you know what kind of door to use you can actually this is a piece of dough that I just actually ordered from Hong Kong, but I'm going to save it for you to send it to you.

And I'm going to use this for myself.

Okay.

Here.

I'm going to roll this out, make some noise and roll it out.

With a nice dough.

Okay.

Make sure you have enough flour, so you won't get stuck, okay.

Otherwise you're going to have a stuck dough.

Make sure it is big enough for our Cornish Game hen.

Now, as I said, traditionally, they do it with chicken.

It's very easy to do.

Just making, make sure there's enough dough to cover the entire Cornish Game hen.

Make it nice and perfect.

You can measure this, measure this, measure this, move, move, move, stretch your dough, okay.

In this kind of economy, it's great to learn how to stretch this dough.

Now this is done.

The next thing, let it sit right here.

The next thing you're going to do is get your chicken ready.

Get your Cornish game hen ready.

Here, look at that, I have little Cornish game hen.

I'm going to marinate this.

This is marinade, I have some soy sauce, wine, garlic, and ginger.

Marinate it, marinate it, marinate it, inside and outside, okay?

Because you're going to cover the whole chicken, dump the whole thing in there.

Then once again, massage.

(audience laughing) Make sure you do it properly massage.

Now the next thing you should, you should do is put all the wonderful ingredients right here.

I have some pickled vegetable, mix it all together.

Pickled vegetable, some celery, I use Chinese celery, very flavorful, chopped celery put some roast nut or chestnut, some green onion.

And you already have a lot of good ginger and garlic.

Okay?

And then you mix them all up.

Okay?

In fact, you can put anything in you want.

You can put black mushroom, you can put dong Choi.

You can put all kinds of things.

Or you can put, chai tan pickle, chop it up mix it.

This way, you can make your own, create your own recipe.

I want to show you how easy it is to just stuff it inside here.

Put it inside, put it inside.

Make sure you have enough stuff.

Okay?

Stuff, enough stuff inside here.

Then you can have a wonderful beggars Cornish game hen.

Now, when this is done, I have a nice Lotus leaf.

This is already, look at that is how it looks beautiful.

Piece of Lotus leaf, it's already soaked and we'll put it right here because we're going to close it.

One is not enough.

We going to do another one with tha.. Do another one like this.

And then now I want to show you when you buy the dry Lotus leaf, they come in a package like this.

And this normally is cause about $0.75 to $2.

It has about 15 small packages of the leaves.

And then you can keep it indefinitely in a cool dry place.

When this is done, we remove this whole thing.

Look at that, put it right here.

And then I am going to cover this whole thing with Lotus leaf.

Look at that.

Cover the whole thing if you're not quite sure, huh?

You know what do another one, some restaurants even finally cover it with a little piece of aluminum foil.

Okay.

You cover it again on this side.

So the mixture they won't open.

You open it up open it up, cover this up, cover this up.

And then the next thing you do is put it right over here.

Look at that.

And then you'll fold this over here.

Look at that.

And then you fold this over here, and then you just seal the whole thing like that.

Okay.

Seal the whole thing.

So the juice not come out, seal it, seal it.

Seal it.

Now of course you can make it very fancy, big mound but this is the easiest way to do it.

And after that you slide this whole thing and put it right over here with a little wax paper and you slide the whole thing.

like that, very, very careful.

And you put it right here, and then you can bake this for about two hours to two and a half hours.

Now I'm going to race to the oven.

Ah, look at that.

Put a right over here.

And of course, as usual, we always cook enough for our guests.

That means, wow.

It's kinda a little bit tough to [Inaudible], and put it right over here and slide the whole thing off because this is beautiful.

Slide the whole thing off like that.

Look at this.

And then now in the tradition of Chinese restaurant they use a big hammer for big chicken they use a big hammer.

(audience laughs) You've got to break this up, but for small chicken we use small and then we're going to serve this in this beautiful platter when it's done.

Okay.

Let me show you.

It's a lot of fun.

First, you need a lot of dough, now you try to break the dough.

When it's done, you can actually open up this whole thing.

Look at that.

Look how beautiful.

Oh, amazing.

Wow.

Showstopper, see.

And then you take this whole thing out.

Let me show you, we're going to use a little spatula, right here.

And then put the whole thing right in here.

Look at this.

So when you serve, all you have to do is open this up, open this up, open the whole thing up.

You know what you have?

You have a beautiful homemade beggars chicken Cornish game hen.

(audience applause) Now let me show you some showstopping creation make by two of the hottest and the most talented chefs in Asia.

Chef Alfred Mossa of the Conrad hotel in Hong Kong and chef Lung Chiyung of the Penn Pacific hotel in Singapore.

Each time I returned to Hong Kong I discovered talented new chefs making East West dishes.

Looking at this beautiful appetizer platter featuring dousing yellow eggs with salmon roe, seafood mousse tucked inside Rose seaweed.

Another appetizer features lamb satay with Rosemary and marinaded caramel served with white garlic chive.

This mixed green salad with sliced Lotus root is served with ginger flavor prawns, union ham and white fungus.

And chef Mossa makes fabulous looking entrees too.

This is grilled salmon with fried ginger Sesame leaves, served with an oniony citric sauce.

Look at this creation, by chef Yung.

Lamb chops with black pepper and his own special sauce.

And what about this incredible salmon roll omelet?

Filled with minced chicken, shiitake mushrooms, and fresh water chestnuts.

And finally, fresh prawns marinated and rice wine and deep fried shrimp heads.

This dish is so special.

That has to be guard by the 18 guards.

These really are two, very talented chefs.

(audience applause) It's unbelievable, if those dishes are the showstopper I wonder what they can do for an encore.

Now there is a dessert that can put the new spin on your fruit cake and I call it Chinese New Year pinwheels.

It's very easy to do.

Now, before I do anything one of the most important ingredient is ginger.

Okay, here.

Everybody knows this is the regular ginger you're buy in the market.

Okay.

Very nice.

You use it for flavoring, for seasoning it's a little bit fibrous because it's mature ginger.

And look at this.

This is young ginger.

You can tell the difference between the color.

And also there's a little shoot here, this a young ginger, this is what use to make all kinds of other gingers.

Pekoe ginger.

This is the sweet Pekoe.

This is the Salty Pekoe ginger.

This is the ginger flake, dry ginger flake slices.

This is ginger powder and this is pureed young ginger.

You have never seen this before.

And this of course is the wonderful candied ginger.

And this is new in the market candy ginger puree.

You can use it like a butter, apple butter and things like that.

In fact, most of these, the one the best ginger probably come from Australia.

They have all kinds of ginger and ginger products.

And I use them all in a lot of dishes.

Now, are you ready for the pinwheel?

First, I'm going to get all the fillings ready.

I have some candied ginger, mixed them all up.

And some candied, winter melon, put them all here, apricot.

And of course some menju date, put them out on a nice fresh date.

And also a tiny bit of five spice powder to make that get that unique flavor.

Some chopped roasted Walnut.

And of course some candied water Chestnut right here.

A lot of candy, Chinese candy, New Year candy.

Mix them all up and set it aside.

Okay.

Make sure they are evenly mixed.

And then you set it aside.

In the meantime, I will roll out our dough right here.

Make sure you roll out this dough, and use some egg white.

This way it will be easier to see.

And also all your filling would stay in there without coming out.

Okay.

This is nice and easy.

Now, all done.

And then we'll set it aside and we put all of this stuff right in here.

All of these ingredients always use the chops..

Okay.

Always use chopsticks.

Make sure roll it out, put it all over here.

And then you roll it up.

Make sure it's nice and even, this is going to be wonderful.

If you want, you can have some nice vanilla, okay.

Put a tiny bit, mix it with, okay.

You roll it up, roll it, roll it up, roll it.

Roll it tight, roll it tight, roll it tight, on both ends so nothing comes out, nothing goes in.

Now, they are done.

And you set this aside, and then you use a knife to push this and you cut this right in half trim, right in here.

Look at how beautiful the pinwheel.

Okay.

Press it.

One, put one right here.

Let me show you.

Let's put it right here so everybody can see better.

Put this right over here, and then put this one right over here press it down a little bit.

Okay.

And then put a teeny tiny bit of butter right here.

A piece here, a piece here.

And then all I have to do is go over to the oven and pick up the one that I have done for myself.

And this is for you, okay that one is done.

We are going to take this over there and we'll pick up another one right here.

When I said is hot is really hot.

When it's done, we'll put this over here.

And we'll serve this.

Look at this very, very careful, very, very careful.

And you put this right.

New Year pinwheel, you have it beautiful and delicious.

(audience applause) Speaking of showstoppers it's time for our show to come to a stop.

I hope I have inspired you to try a feel of your own showstopping recipe at home.

Till next time.

Be the star of your own show.

And remember, if Yan can cook, so can you!

“Goodbye!” (##!)