In Cantonese, it is called choy keok (菜脚); in Hokkien, it is called cai buey (菜尾). Both choy keok and cai buey means leftovers. It used to be cooked after festivals e.g. wedding or Chinese New Year dinners. During one of the weddings dinners I attended, a relative requested to takeaway roast meat from 2 of our tables. More than half of the roast meat was left and was likely to be discarded.
Kai Choy, chilli, asam gelugur are added to the leftover roast meats. It helps to reduce wastage and create a tasty dish. It used to be known as a ‘poor man’s food’. Piglet refers it as ‘poor man’s food’.
It is actually Piglets favourite so it is served often at his family’s dinner. We had a few round of it recently as there were leftover duck meat from celebrations and festivals.
And I wanted to learn to make it. I was told to just add these 4 ingredients: kai choy, dried chilli, asam gelugur, roast pork meat. During my last trip to my local supermarket, they were selling roast pork bones so I bought it.
Spicy Sour Mustard Greens Stew (Choy Keok/Cai buey/ 酸辣菜尾) Recipe
Ingredients
600g-1.2kg kai choy (Chinese Mustard green)
2-4 dried chilli
9 pieces of asam gelugur
400g roast pork bones
Method
Stew all ingredients above for 1-2 hours. Add salt to taste.
How was it?
It was tasty. I used 5 dried chilli and it was too spicy. 600g of kai choy was just nice for 1 meal.
Piglet suggested to stew it longer (stewed it for 1 hour) and to keep the stew the following day to add more kai choy.
I stewed it for another hour the following day and added more vegetables.