Kitchen Trails - Vegetarian Choy Keok (Spicy and sour mix chinese mustard green stew)

This is a Asian chinese dish, traditionally made after a festive season or big occasion as the name Choy Keok literally mean the end of a dish in Cantonese. So the leftovers like roast meat, mushrooms, abalone, basically whatever that was served for the feast are dumped in to flavour the stew/soup (though I very much doubt that there will be abalone leftover in any feast). Chinese mustard green (Gai Choy in Cantonese), chillies and tamarind skin is a must for this dish. The rest of the stuff are pretty much up to you.

This version is not made with leftover, I purposely went to get the ingredients for this dish, and I made it a vegetarian one. This time I used:

Chinese mustard green, I bought 2 big huge heads because they cook down quite a lot. Cut and thoroughly washed as there's normally a lot of soil trapped between the gigantic leaves. I cut the leafy part into maybe 3 per leaf, and the harder stem part into chunks

Dried chillies, cut off the stalk and washed, soak in hot water for 15 mins to soften

Cilipadi (birds eye chilly), washed and stalk cut off (deseed or totally omit if you want because some of these little beauties' spiciness level can go nuclear)

Red chillies, washed, cut off the stalk and then cut into 3s

Tamarind skin, washed

Vegetarian mock drumstick, discard the stick (it's basically beancurd sheet wrapped around a stick and seasoned)

Dried shiitake mushroom, soaked overnight or at least 4 hours. cut off the stems and cut into 2, or more if the mushrooms are big and thick

Light soy sauce

Salt to taste

Garlic, 1 whole head, skinned

Fill a stock pot or a big pot with water, dump in the garlic, all the chillies, the tamarind skin. Bring to boil and then turn down the heat and boil for 30 min. Add the mock drumstick, mushroom, the light soy sauce and salt and the harder stem chunks of the mustard green. Let it cook for 1 hour, topping up water if need be.Check for taste, if it's not sour enough, add more tamarind skin, and if it's not spicy enough, add more cilipadi, not salty enough, add salt, of course. Add the leafy part of the mustard green and cook for another 30 mins. 

I normally cook this and and once it's done, I turn off the flame and leave the cover on without opening and eat the next day. I leave it overnight to let the flavours infuse further