Braised Fish Slices with Garlic

I love garlic! I add in garlic to almost every dish which I cook. When I see this dish featured in my favourite Taiwan cooking show "吃饭皇帝大", I immediately remember all the ingredients and steps in cooking this dish. The original recipe uses fish head, but my husband don't like to eat that because there are too many bones. Therefore I decided to use frozen swai fillets which I can find in the supermart here. I think I will experiment with other types of fish like fresh snapper when I cook next time. At least it is not frozen so should be fresher and sweeter.

If you like garlic like me, you should add more. I regretted not adding more if not it will have a more fragrant garlic taste. One thing to note is that you cannot heat up the oil too hot when frying the garlic if not it gets burnt easily. So a bit of patience is needed in frying the garlic. I am basically an "aga aga" cook. That means the amount of seasoning and ingredients I used is all based on estimation. Therefore do feel free to change to your liking ;)

Ingredients:

1) Fish Slices (around 10 to 15 small slices)

2) 10 cloves of garlic (you can add or reduce according to your liking of garlic)

3) 3 mushrooms cut into strips (do not throw away the water for soaking the mushrooms)

4) Half big onion cut into strips

5) 1 tablespoon of Dark soya sauce

6) 1 tablespoon of Oyster sauce

7) 1 tablespoon of Shaoxing wine

8) Pepper

9) Sesames seed oil

10) Half a tablespoon of sugar

11) Flour

Direction:

1) Season the fish slices with some salt and pepper. Coat the fish slices with some flour. Pour some oil into the pan and shallow fry (煎) the fish slices. You can also deep fry if you want. But shallow fry is more healthy since we do not need to add a lot of oil for shallow fry. When it is slightly golden brown we can scoop it up and set aside.

2) Pour some oil into the wok and slowly fry the garlic till golden brown. The oil cannot be too hot if not the garlic will be burnt. When it is done set it aside.

3) Using some of the oil used for frying the garlic, add in the big onion slices and ginger slices. Stir fry it until the onion sweats. Than add in the mushrooms and stir fry until the fragrant of the mushrooms come out.

4) Add in the garlic and fish slices. Stir fry for a minute.

5) Add in dark soya sauce, oyster sauce, Shaoxing wine and sugar. Stir fry until you can smell the fragrance of the sauces.

6) Add in some of the mushroom water. Stir well with the sauces. Cover the pot and let it simmer for 5 to 8 minutes.

7) Open the lid and let it simmer for 2 to 3 minutes until the sauce thickens a bit. If it is still watery, you can add in corn starch water. If you like it to be slightly watery than you can don't add the corn starch water.

8) Add in a few dashes of pepper and sesames seed oil and it is ready to be served!