Flog & Rosbif

Paris, boulevard des bouleversés

2011-01-24T18:47:00.003+01:00

Oh dear, suddenly remembering this blog that I so lovingly created 4 years ago and coldheartedly neglected once its novelty wore off, I feel like Urashima Taro coming back after what seems like mere weeks that magnified into months! :P :P

For that, I have Paris to blame - for giving me so many splendid reasons and occasions to be away from my PC in the more than 8 months since I landed! That includes the reacquisition of a kitchen to call my own (revival of food posts!!!!), traipses through countless museums and quaint cobblestoned streets with Boy Scout, a newfangled social life, and err - how do I put this nicely? - a spineless cave-in to that social network I so vehemently rejected for years, arrrgh!!!!

Paris made me do it.

I would never have had to eat my vinegared words if I didn't give myself just 3 weeks between the end of my holiday in Japan and my move to Paris and then predictably run out of catch-up time during my last few weeks in Singapore with existing and reappearing old friends. :P

Nevertheless, despite the axe falling on my insouciant tax-free existence, I love Paris!!! I cannot understand how in the world Parisians earned their surly reputation because I find people here simply pleasant and helpful!

And that has made me want to emulate them by helping the lost tourist with his dog-eared map or the flummoxed French lass trying to decipher Asian ingredients in the ethnic supermarkets, in fact, I'm flattered to be asked for help if that makes me look like I've lived here long enough ! :)

More to come...

Bar None

2010-04-27T19:43:00.013+02:00

The unthinkable has happened... ;-)

Two years ago, when I'd packed my bags for Singapore, before Boy Scout trooped deftly into the picture, I was dead certain that it was for good!

With a nascent nous to deal with across continents and without the foggiest idea where it would take off, never in my wildest dreams would I have foreseen the combination of circumstances that has seen me packing my boxes over the past few weeks to move to... PARIS!

Paris was a constant wonder to me at each turn during past day trips from Lille, but the thought of living there seemed intimidating and therefore never lingered in my mind, mainly due to the third-hand horror stories I'd heard about the sky-high rents, stressful pace of life, minuscule living spaces and rude people. But then I realised, the same can safely be said of Singapore!!! So what's the problem??? :)

How could I fret now that I'll soon be living just some subway stations away from the bar that inspired it all? ;-)

The iconic Frog & Rosbif bar, which I'd heard of even before my first visit to France, which preceded even any ability on my part to speak French, and which I'd continue to hear about from various foreign persons living here, who would return over the years for an "Inseine" choice of beers, haha:

So, now I have a new set of sniffy goodbyes to say - to my mom and relatives I'd started to bond with, to new friends I have made, to friends who'd been there all along, to "lost" friends that I'd managed to track down through sheer luck and perseverance (and I'm not even on Facebook!), and most of all, to a region I have come to love dearly, which I had greatly misunderstood in my youthful ignorance.

Oh yes, and to my favourite bars:

No. 5 Emerald Hill, where I've sipped many a glass from the time I was of legal drinking age and where I've probably had a drink with EVERY SINGLE ONE of my friends who drink, heh heh!

Raffles Hotel's Long Bar, where I only go with foreign visitors, ie, tourists.

Rupee Room, even though they have a cover charge and an attitude...

Khazana, whose band is great, but whose patrons aren't exactly in my age group!

Mr Punch, a late discovery! Decent prices and music soft enough that nattering is possible, but loud enough to not be eavesdropped on :)

(There are tons more of which I do not have photos :( )

But the most painful part of it all has to be the timing, damn!

A little more than a month ago, just before I'd left to visit my sister in Osaka, I'd decided to purchase my ticket to Paris, opting for Thai Airways so that I could stop over for a week in Bangkok and catch a connecting flight to Paris. What a difference a month makes!

Now see what has happened to my beloved Bangkok! :( :( Not one to be easily daunted, unfortunately, the prospect of going there for a week and not being able to take the public transport to go to my favourite places and getting trapped in my hotel room did not make sense to me. To think that over the past few months, knowing I would be moving to Paris and deciding to do so via Bangkok, I had dedicated hours and hours to attempting to recognise Thai characters and memorising Thai words and phrases I was hoping to use and had bookmarked zillions of sites with info on the places I planned to see... sigh sigh sigh...

So now all I have are photos from past trips, particularly one from the infamous Patpong by day, of bars I did not go to, and probably won't consider:

Hanami season

2010-04-14T13:49:00.004+02:00

Byodoin Temple, Kyoto

This is not a postcard. This is not a postcard. :)

Gotta love those ephemeral cherry blossoms, I'm just grateful I made it to Japan at the right time!

Behold Youkali

2009-10-25T13:58:00.007+01:00

Datai Bay, Langkawi

I might never succeed in surpassing this holiday experience!

Monkey attack!

2009-08-02T22:54:00.001+02:00

On my most recent trip - to Bali - I underestimated the lure of a simple plastic bag containing postcards and stamps!

This took place in Ubud. My hotel was just mere paces away from Jalan Monkey Forest, and disregarding the advice of my dear pal S, I climbed up a short flight of stairs to get a better look at the little monkeys, and was tempted to stroke some of them, but after getting pounced at and gradually surrounded in the assumption I came in peace with edible supplies, ulp, I had to make a slow and tactful retreat...

Gasping for breath

2009-06-30T22:29:00.008+02:00

Outrageous! Did a very eventful half-year just whoosh by without my being able to exhale???

Granted, barely 8 hours into the new year, I'd set off on a 9-day impromptu shoestring adventure to Krabi by land with a long-lost gal pal and survived one of the most harrowing bus rides in my life, to be greeted by a welcome pile of work upon my return to terra firma (anything is firmer than the land upon which the scary Krabi bus trundled!), before getting ready for a long-awaited never-long-enough visit from Boy Scout, before holing up for weeks on end to plough through yet another dense pile of work, before scurrying off for 2 whole months to see my son (and Boy Scout) in Lille, before returning to Singapore again to find my sister, brother-in-law and precocious little nephew who were visiting from Japan, before succumbing to the lure of another budget (not!) trek to Bali just 2 weeks ago.

Whew! That made for some decent blogging fodder, or at least a slideshow, but if I had 48 hours in a day at my disposal, all this would have already been old news here! And this doesn't even include everything that happened LAST YEAR!! I don't even know how to backtrack anymore but I am determined to post all the nice photos I took, and soon!! :)

I'll sign off for now with a colourful pretty picture I took in Bali that ruffled my feathers but I had to take it anyway.

Malaysia, Truly Asia!!!

2008-12-17T19:56:00.000+01:00

I am not proud of taking this long to post these pictures, especially since I am closer to the anniversary of my maiden voyage to KL than the voyage itself, in late February this year. :P

This delay is particularly unforgivable as I had the honour of meeting someone I consider blogger royalty - the charming Lyrical Lemongrass who so kindly took the time out to come to my hotel with her usual makan kakis to pick me up and give me exactly the kind of meal I was looking for - roadside hawker fare that places taste over hygiene! :) (Thanks, babe! I owe you one!!!)

Hawkers on Peel Road, Kuala Lumpur

In no particular order: Mixed satays, pork noodles, BBQ chicken wings, sugarcane juice,
stir-fried noodles, popiah, minced beef noodles

There were only 4 of us, but as you can see, this was enough for 6! My only regret was that I couldn't stay hungry longer! :(

Nonetheless, if I couldn't fit more food into my belly, I remained thirsty, and so after dropping off the friendly folks from her Makan Club, Lyrical Lemongrass and I headed for Palate Palette, a quaint little bar where we waited for Bald Eagle.. :)

What we drank - too bad it was so long ago I don't remember their fancy names!

This being my first time to KL and my first trip to Malaysia in possibly a decade, Lyrical Lemongrass and Bald Eagle really made me feel completely at ease, that it was sad having to say goodbye even though we're not at all far from each other... :(

To backtrack from my meeting with these wonderful folks, a couple of pictures in chronological order...

The comfy coach I took from Singapore to KL

Saw this on my way out of the coach:

fortunately I was travelling alone :)

The inescapable Petronas Towers by night:

On Day Two of my stay, after waking up too late for breakfast at my hotel, I wandered across the street into a traditional Malay restaurant that has permanently raised my expectations of buffets and Malay food in general!

Seri Melayu

Gateway to rempah heaven!

Laksa Utara - nothing like the nonya laksa as I know it!

A trolley offering some curries that I shouldn't be finding exotic, but did...

Spread of other traditional Malay dishes

Surprisingly, fewer than 5 tables were occupied when I was there, which I have difficulty explaining off. The buffet cost 38 ringgit (SGD 16) before taxes, was in a central location and by its variety and quality alone, offered something for all preferences...

I'm bad at buffets since I always tend to discover the better things too late, but as I was led to my table, I did not fail to see the dessert spread, for which I tried my best to save some stomach space:

Little wonder why weight loss is such an uphill task!!!

What Wat? - Part 3

2008-08-08T20:27:00.000+02:00

I come from a family that habitually makes strange requests of their kin travelling abroad and if such a thing could be measured, has possibly the most eclectic baggage contents as far as I know.

No longer contented with just Duty Free liquor, my mom took the cake months ago when I first hinted at a trip to Bangkok with Boy Scout! When her eyes started to sparkle, mine rolled, in preparation for her request for unreasonable quantities of something edible. I wasn't completely off course of course, but this time her primary desire from Bangkok was something she saw but didn't dare buy last year when we went to Bangkok together for fear of trouble with customs.

Oh, right, so I get it, it's OK for Boy Scout and me to get slapped with a fine or jail term if worse came to worst, but it's not OK if it was her! Neat, what a great mom! ;-)

This said, I minded much less potential trouble with customs (she'd promised to pay the fine if there was one to be paid) than I minded the complications behind transporting AN ASSORTMENT OF CACTI, which is what my mom asked for from Chatuchak Market!

Boy Scout had seen a horizon-widening documentary on TV about Chatuchak and I was intending to show him the little I'd seen of it anyway, so for the last leg of our Bangkok trip, I chose a neat little hotel in the Sukhumvit area, by the name of Citi Chic, which pretty much looked like what it did in the photos on their site. Good start!

What a relief upon check-in to see that this wouldn't be a hotel I'd have to endure like the previous one! :) Furthermore, it was a scenic 10 minutes or so from the BTS line that would take us to Chatuchak and the famous MBK Center, so bye bye transport touts! :) It also had free internet that I never managed to use, not only because there were always other guests hogging both terminals, but also for one intimidating little detail:

Since there were only two room types - with or without terrace - I decided the 200-baht difference wasn't much to scrimp on, so we had a small cozy terrace that we found so conducive to relaxation we spontaneously reverted to our indolent ways and decided to order room service (which both previous hotels didn't have) practically as soon as our eyes fell on the room service menu, in part to satisfy a joint craving for something NOT Thai:

When we were done, we didn't know what to do with the tray, as leaving it outside our room would have meant our neighbour tripping over our dirty dishes, so when Boy Scout dutifully took the tray back to the restaurant, the hotel manager happened to be on duty and was so embarrassed his eyes nearly popped out, haha! It turned out we were supposed to call for someone to pick up the tray.. ;-)

It is easy to get accustomed to being on holiday, so when we finally found an iota of will to step outdoors, we failed to realise it would be rush hour for most other mortals, hee hee...

We'd only managed a tour of MBK Center, which was sufficiently fatiguing:

It wasn't only until the next day that we trudged to Chatuchak for the cacti, but with all the lanes looking alike and most of the shops closed, our tour didn't last long and it didn't quite fit what Boy Scout saw on TV:

Unbelievably, I found myself squatting compliantly before the various troughs in the plant section looking for species I'd expect my mom to nod at approvingly, and got pricked and shed a few drops of blood in the process.

Besides shopping, I'd circled a number of parks to visit on my maps, in particular Lumphini, but with the oppressive heat as an excuse, we never made it there... ;-) Due to Boy Scout's development of a strange unwavering dependence on Starbucks' iced caffe mocha, though, we found ourselves sipping in various parts of town.

When our time in Bangkok was up, I thought we'd successfully managed to escape getting ripped off this time around, but our final taxi ride to the airport made me question the real motives behind the "I love farang" stickers seen on taxi windows:

When we'd checked out, the sweet porter helped us get a "Taxi-Meter", which has to charge according to the meter, and indeed, the jerk of a driver had his meter running when the porter was with us. But the moment we were alone with him and turned the street corner, he claimed that his meter wasn't working properly and asked us what we'd intended to pay him.

Oh boy. I should have seen it coming! I was in an irritable mood and didn't want to miss our plane, so I asked the creep what he wanted. He said 400 baht, and I said no more than 300. He said OK, but 300 excluding toll charges. I knew that was still rather generous, but I quickly realised I could beat him at his game. ;-)

With a wink, I showed Boy Scout in the backseat a couple of bills that amounted to 250 baht that I'd give the driver (which I know is still more than what the meter would have displayed), and made him agree that if the driver made a fuss, we'd tell him that's all the baht we had left. :)

So when I slipped the driver the folded bills and he trustingly slipped them into his breast pocket without checking, I felt a minor pang of guilt, but well, if he'd just been honest in the first place, I'd have gladly given him what I really had left in baht! ;-)

What Wat? - Part 2

2008-07-25T10:54:00.003+02:00

If there were a few qualities I had to laud about the second hotel we stayed in (Boonsiri Place) during our week in Bangkok, it would be their imaginative photography that concealed their otherwise modest capacity for enticement.

A pretty telling indicator of my discomfort with this hotel was the speed with which I snapped out of our collective Park 9 lethargy, and the constant desire to go out and see lots of attractions! :) That we managed to wake up in time for breakfast for both mornings we were there, was further proof! I know I'm just being harsh, as there were really lots of other factors for us finally doing some sightseeing - proximity to seeable sights, milder weather, guilt and urgency over the rapidly diminishing time left in Bangkok, etc...

First, it must be said that all the late nights I'd spent studying, comparing and superimposing my 3 maps of Bangkok prior to the trip (errr, there must be some kind of international cabby code about all foreigners being easy prey, that I'd aimed to thwart) weren't in vain, although some minor roads not being reflected on the maps created a few tiny headaches at certain intersections. Fortunately it soon became apparent that I was in the company of a former Boy Scout with an innate compass, and he ended up being more reliable than my maps and me combined! :)

On my list: The Forensic Museum at the Siriraj Hospital on the other bank of the Chao Phraya, Khao San Road, a dinner cruise, the Giant Swing and several of the legendary temples you'd see on postcards, such as Wat Arun, Wat Traimit and Wat Phra Kaew.

Giant Swing - check!

Khao San Road - check!

Finally, for the first time in my trips to Bangkok, I'm seeing the fabled fried winged things!

I wasn't game enough to try any of those, but managed to coax Boy Scout into sharing a box of pad thai with me even though neither of us was really hungry :

I was truly delighted that he was willing to try lots of foreign (to him!) stuff in Singapore and in Bangkok, but like me, he could not ignore the inviting smells! I was also swayed by the sight of the different mounds of noodles (my favourite form of carbs!) and the dexterity of the pad thai peddlers! Taste-wise, the noodles turned out to be fantastic, and at 25 baht (SGD 1), if I remember correctly, little wonder why I want to live there!

We had to call it a night after our tour of Khao San Road, as I was bent on waking up early to make it to the Forensic Museum the next morning! What a bummer, though, upon arrival, to learn that photography was not allowed! :(

What I did get to snap, though, was Wat Arun from the ferry that took us across the Chao Phraya:

Never did enter it or even venture close to it, though! How embarrassing! Same goes for Wat Traimit and its general vicinity (Chinatown/Yaowarat).

As for Wat Phra Kaew, as Boy Scout and I were about to cross the street to peer in, well-worn map in hand, a genial geriatric came up to offer us help to get to our destination. We could pretty well see it from where we were, but he was insistent, and when he started suggesting other temples to visit and a certain type of tuk-tuk to take at a certain price, I knew it was time to get dismissive, heh heh, something Boy Scout was reluctant to be. :) With a sweeping "It's almost 5pm, I'll see all those temples tomorrow", I managed to send Genial Geriatric on his way. I felt bad about it, but I'd been taken for an idiot tourist enough times in Bangkok and I was just too tired to entertain anymore of it.

Thanks to Genial Geriatric's history lesson in decent English, I could better appreciate these pictures I managed to take over the wall surrounding the temple:

How sad, really. I'd certainly have enjoyed going in and taking pictures of its interior, but I feared the worst - more touts with more convincing causes, and the idiot in me parting with my life savings out of sympathy.

Dinner cruise - almost didn't make it! Whew! What an adventure! I'd noted down from this site the addresses and operating hours of several dinner cruise operators and opted for the Khanam Nab Restaurant. When we'd left our hotel, we decided to take a tuk-tuk for a change to the Krung Thon bridge, but less than a kilometre away from the hotel, our tuk-tuk broke down! The poor driver kept telling us to take another one while he sought help, but it was hard telling him we weren't in a hurry and so we stuck around until another tuk-tuk driver came by and helped him restart his vehicle.

I'd been telling Boy Scout for ages about my awe of the Thai art of driving (he used to work diagonally across from me when I lived in France and so was familiar with my driving perils), part of the reason I wanted us to take a tuk-tuk, but no acrobatics were to be witnessed that day. :( The driver seemed versed in the Highway Code and not once swerved or took the lane for oncoming traffic to overtake other motorists, that I actually was quite disappointed with all that courtesy and road safety! ;-)

What did annoy me slightly, though, was his repeated advice about there being "nothing to see" at Krung Thon, followed by a suggestion to take us to the Rama IX bridge instead. When in doubt, ignore.

Ignore we did and we got to our destination, but we were on the wrong side of the bridge and as we crossed it, we could only marvel at the majestic Rama IX bridge that the tuk-tuk driver kept wanting us to see:

As it turned out, Khanab Nam no longer did dinner cruises and so we almost sprinted to Riverside Hotel, whose cruises started at 8, and were in the nick of time! We boarded so quickly neither of us managed to take a picture of the cruise ship, but what we did manage to make up for what we missed because of the touts:

Wat Phra Kaew by night

Wat Arun by night

In between casting admiring glances at Boy Scout and at the monuments, there was not much left for me to do... nonetheless, a parting shot from him, what he thinks would make the perfect Thai postcard:

part 3 to be written soon

What Wat? - Part 1

2008-07-17T22:48:00.014+02:00

What can I say? I have this growing belief that I could seriously live in Bangkok! (and I'm willing - abillity to be determined at some indeterminate future date - to learn Thai just to fit in)

It is dangerously naïve to equate a holiday experience with the sinister unknown of actually living in another country, and one whose language I can hardly decipher, but it's only 2 hours from here (make that 48 by rail via Malaysia!)! So I can run home anytime, can't I? ;-)

Still on a high from my recent trip there - my third and longest there in more years than I care to admit - I still have that nagging sehnsucht I don't seem to get with other holiday destinations! All this despite the clingy touts, mosquitoes, incomplete sidewalks and lack of good Bloody Marys!

Maybe it was the company I had this time, or the places we managed to visit, but definitely no small part of it was thanks to the fortunate choice of hotels!!! :) My back (and upper arms) are still sore from all the self-congratulatory motions, but it was well worth it!

The weeks leading up to the Bangkok trip were packed with lots of work, tension, excitement and fatigue, so checking into The Park 9 upon arrival was just such a treat...

Tough decision between shopping and lounging around in the hotel pool and jacuzzi!

It was far from central Bangkok and the main touristy attractions, and indeed, not even close to the nearest BTS station, so that just added to our list of excuses to not step out before sundown, heh heh..

Our sloth was further encouraged by the little hotel buggy that would take us to the nearest mall for free:

For someone whose only capacity for a green thumb is a gangrenous one, the lush greenery absolutely helped me forget the concept of "work"... how soothing to watch koi being fed!

Suffice it to say that when we had to check out 4 short days after our arrival in Bangkok, we realised that we'd only seen the interior of 2 shopping malls and a few random streets, not even a single wat!

Everything was to change with the next hotel, though... an abundance of wats and the removal of luxury, that's what!

to be continued...

So near and yet so far...

2008-05-09T20:39:00.007+02:00

My luck positively sucks, I'm fully convinced of it right now.. :(

When I saw this about a month back, very soon after I became friends with the owner of a travel agency who told me she could get me great deals to Bangkok, I was jumping for joy and already looking at flights and hotels:

And indeed, everything seemed to fall in place, until today... :( I'd been expecting another visit from France for the month of June, but I learned today that apparently the visit wouldn't be before the middle of June when all my favourite stars would already have left and gotten over the awards!!! :(

Bangkok is a definite destination with my June visitor, but going there twice within the same month is indulgence, despite the profound affection I have for Bangkok, so a very tough choice had to be made - that of foregoing the IIFAs despite their proximity.. :( :( :(

My only consolation is that if my beloved Sonu had not been nominated for a single song, then the awards had to be flawed... ;-)

Sigh sigh...

Ack, it's happening AGAIN!!!

2008-04-06T19:22:00.004+02:00

I'm not officially holding a full-time job at the moment, but with my hands full the way they are right now with assorted tasks expected of a major readjustment, in between dinners with long-lost friends (and a week-long visit from one I hadn't lost sight of that long ago), I dread to think how little "me" time I'd get once I start leafing through the classifieds!

I'd been meaning to and will eventually write about my enchanting encounter with the lovely Lyrical Lemongrass way back in late February when I made a short trek to Kuala Lumpur, so forgive me, gal, if you're reading this. :)

Thanks to my "clan" back in France, who I had yet to thank publicly for their generous farewell gift of a Lumix digital camera, the pictures in the last post were made possible, and permitted me to take many more fabulous ones since. In fact, I'd been taking so many, choosing just a handful for each post becomes a challenge! ;-)

So I'll sign off for now with this one I took from inside my capsule when I went up the Singapore Flyer 2 weeks ago. I am now pretty certain that I do not suffer from acrophobia! ;-)

Tussles with mussels

2008-03-17T18:27:00.000+01:00

Island life has its privileges!

Right, right, so I'm probably stretching it by associating the image of an idyllic hammock and coconut-sipping existence with the teeming concrete jungle more Singaporeans are familiar with, but no matter where you are on this island, you're never more than 30km from the sea. With some imagination and some very useful friends, remembering that we're living on an island is rather easy! :)

A childhood friend of my mom's, formerly a sailor and living less than a 100 metres away from us now, recently retired, and thus indulges regularly in one of his favourite hobbies - fishing. Upon interrogation when I saw him yesterday, I'd found out that he wasn't dabbling in some wimpy tentative fishing from a jetty, but actual braving of waves on a flimsy canoe with real nets and all! Impressive! On top of that, he catches enough for his own family and even has lots to spare for ours (there are 4 of us now - my mom, her mom, her caretaker and myself)!

And so it was 2 weeks ago when he came knocking on our door with his catch of the day - severely barnacle-crusted mussels. The last time I'd seen him prior to the mussel delivery must've been when I was 12, so we of course did not recognise each other, and I was particularly wary about opening the gate to some strange guy foisting free mussels on us (what's the catch? mwahaha, sorry for the lousy pun!). It almost took a comical turn when I was about to look for my wallet and pay him for them until T, my grandmother's caretaker came by and told me that he's safe, heh heh! ;-)

My, my, he had practically a whole BUCKET of fresh lovely mussels to give, and I gladly accepted what looked like 2 1/2 kilos of them, which T said could be split with our next-door neighbour if necessary. Of course, if I'd known then that I had to assume the consumption of more than a kilo of mussels on my own, I would have given more to my neighbour... (eye roll)

my share of the mussels, after removing the barnacles

T and I immediately got down to splitting our share and chiselling off the barnacles with knives of various sizes and it got kinda fun when my mom also joined in the chiselling. Mussels were practically a staple where I'd lived in France, and I took them for granted without ever having bought any to cook at home, having as a result only theoretical knowledge of how to clean and prepare them. When it got down to actually handling them, ulp, I fumbled more than anything.

After having gotten rid of the barnacles, T asked me how I intended to cook them, and I realised, ugh, these poor mussels were still alive and that I'd be personally responsible for their slow steamy death. Maybe due to the fact that they don't have eyes that would stare back at me accusingly, I was able to go on with the "deed", but after seeing all the work involved, I doubt I'd accept live mussels again anytime soon!

I remembered seeing a chapter on mussels when reading one of my cookbooks by Joel Robuchon, so went and dug it out from my boxes which had just arrived two days earlier. Nice. I immediately went out to get ingredients for these herby breadcrumbed baked mussels:

I had more mussels than this trayful!

How to: (for about 1kg of mussels) Heat mussels until the shells are ajar, remove upper shell (do not overcook).
Fry 5-6 chopped cloves of garlic in butter and olive oil, add 150g of breadcrumbs until golden brown, set aside to cool. Add salt and pepper to taste, 3 tbsp of grated parmesan, and 2tbps each of several chopped fresh herbs (I used thyme, parsley and chives). Top each mussel with a spoonful of breadcrumb mixture, bake for about 20 mins at 180°C. Serve with a wedge of lemon.

I'd initially intended to prepare all the mussels in this way, but after realising they wouldn't fit onto a single tray, I was too tired with heating them and struggling to pry them open and wiping up all the drool (despite T being such great help, without whom I might've ended up eating at midnight), so chopped up some mange-tout, asparagus and garlic chives and stir-fried the remaining mussels with them and some garlic and oyster sauce.

Pardesi no more

2008-02-23T12:40:00.003+01:00

The degree of Pardesi-ness is really arguable... :) I am finally back in the place where I was born, but does that really make me feel finally at home?

After having lived for more than 6 years in Lille, in Northern France, my most common sentiment was that of being misunderstood or plain anonymous. But in the fashion typical of the way true happiness often escapes me (the Sonu Nigam concert is a perfect example), towards the end of my stay in Lille, I found new reasons to appreciate France and was showered with so much love, attention and affection from the people I least expected to that it broke my heart to leave them behind. Sigh.

Nonetheless, I have a whole life ahead of me and aspire to make the best of it... right now, I am only planning on taking it easy (take it easy, Urvasi, as I used to say to another friend... ;-) ) for a while until I get my cards in order...

New Year, old habits

2008-01-04T00:51:00.001+01:00

What a year it has been for me and my blog, which turns 1 today!

When I exclaim "Times flies!" I usually mean it with a healthy dose of incredulity, but in looking through some of my older posts yesterday, I was compelled to reflect upon the milestones (and millstones) that have dotted the past year of my life, and for once, it seemed to me realistic that a whole year had gone by, and indeed, for so much to have taken place, unreal that only a year had gone by!

Many a lesson I have learnt in such a short time, for which I am thankful, and short of being brainwashed, my mindset has undergone several transformations, for the better, at least to me. I have emerged from the chrysalis that was my youthful lack of confidence, I have strove to denounce negativity, I have learned that no matter how cheesy or clichéd the adage, there is much truth and wisdom to be milked from it. Most of all, I have resolved to live life on my terms. Of course, few things happen overnight and there are still teething problems, but as this new year unfurls, I am filled with an inexorable sense of hope and optimism, and I hope the same goes for you, too.

I'm tempted to expand on my inner growth and all but it's hard to do so without mentioning names, so I'll save it.. in a nutshell, a new "me" is in the making, but at the same time, my comfort foods remain constant:

Match the word to the ingredient:
Sale, pepe, aglio, olio

Where's the salt? you may wonder. OK, that was a tricky one, but it was the green mound of powder, matcha salt to be exact, by Mariage Frères. I'd bought it some time back for its snob appeal but never quite knew what to do with it until I'd equated green tea with a herb.

How to: Coarsely crush or mill mixed peppercorns, crush several cloves of garlic, stir in a few generous pinches of matcha salt and cover with good quality olive oil. Let steep for about an hour. Good as a variation of the typical aglio-olio pasta dressing, or simply mopped up with fresh soft warm bread, the only way I know how to enjoy it.

Just look at that gorgeous deep green!

The best things in life are so cheap, abuse is inevitable

2007-12-17T16:48:00.000+01:00

The things a woman would do for vanity's sake... Three weeks ago, I took a leap of faith and went for a laser operation that essentially stripped my cheeks of their skin. Yowch! I shan't go into detail about the dead skin flakes I saw floating in the air during the op or how they clung on to the laser gun and threatened to invade my nostrils and lungs each time I inhaled, or the SMELL of burnt flesh! And the searing PAIN (which I think I took like a man)! Oh, the horror! Not that that's enough to deter me from doing it again! :)

Whetted your appetite yet? ;-)

Because I knew it'd be unethical for me to be outdoors while my skin grew back (I didn't want to be held responsible for others' nightmares, haha) my company allowed me to work from home for 2 weeks. Aww.. For the first whole week, I was cooped up at home and forced to rely on the provisions at hand and had to make my cooking as low-risk and splashless as possible (ie, no frying, stir-frying, deep-frying, shallow-frying - you get the drift). The recovery of my skin was speedier than I'd feared, to such an extent that a few times I'd wondered if I'd be able to watch it heal in real time if I looked hard enough!

The hideous post-op face obviously distorted my perception of the "after" face in that I felt much more attractive than I must have been to the unknowing eye. ;-) On the first day I finally felt presentable enough to go out for groceries (without makeup at that!), to my utter delight and dismay, I saw one of my favourite actors Jean Réno in the flesh! No way! What are the odds?!?! On the one hand, I wish I had a camera on me, but at the same time, I'd caught a glimpse of my own reflection and realised that I certainly wasn't photogenic as yet, ack!!! Fortunately, I was at a bookshop and had access to ample writing material and was able to get an autograph! Wheeee!! :)

Anyhow, grocery shopping after a week of home imprisonment was so liberating it got ridiculous, and on perhaps the fourth day in a row I felt the "need" (yeah, right) to shop, all I had in my bag when checking out were chips and Cherry Coke, which I ordinarily don't even drink much of. :) Deprivation can be such a powerful thing!

Of course, I never seemed to buy everything I "needed" on each shopping trip during my convalescence, so on my first day back in the office, after lunch with my pals, I was itching to enter a different supermarket again. A colleague who had to be back at her desk on time asked me what I needed, and when I told her I needed to scarf down some crêpe dentelle, she gasped. Not only at the absurdity of the need, but the lucky coincidence - her guy's mother happens to work in a factory that manufactures them, and told me if I didn't mind broken ones, she'd have a whole bag of crumbs to give me the next day if I could wait. :) It suited me fine since I usually crush them before eating anyway, so gleefully accepted the bag of crumbs she gave me, which came up to more than a kilo:

Hardcore indulgence, if you ask me

Initially, I ate the crumbs by the cupful, but by Saturday, I was craving a more intense caramel flavour and to make nougatine with crêpe dentelle flakes instead of the usual almond bits. I didn't succeed since I've never made nougatine before and was in experimenting mode, but was pretty pleased to end up with this:

Basically, I just dumped some sugar (possibly 300g) in a saucepan and made it melt and darken into a golden brown caramel, then removed the saucepan from the stove and dumped in a generous cube of butter (50g? 75g? no idea) and sprang back in haste while it sizzled. Proceeded to stir until the butter blended evenly into the sugar and drizzled discs and grid patterns on wax paper.

The grid patterns were a joy to eat, but the discs, well.. keeping in mind my dental travails, I didn't want to risk any unnecessary chipping and new fillings, and since they were so rock solid and too big to fit into my mouth without being broken or bitten, I ultimately had to dump them back into the saucepan and add crème fraîche (an instinctive move, really) to bring them back to a molten state, taking special care not to burn the caramel. Not surprisingly, they didn't set an hour after I'd made new discs on wax paper, so ended up with these roses des sables, really just a fancy name for cornflakes coated in caramel:

Not the ideal daily way to consume cereal!

They were too darned good I already feel them creeping onto my hips! But now that they've all been downed, I realise all the stuff that went into making them hardly cost a Euro dollar! I'm not complaining but they're definitely coming back in my kitchen! Yikes

Main hoon kaun? main hoon con...

2007-12-13T09:55:00.000+01:00

I was lamenting last week to a friend my flagging will and inspiration with regards to blogging due to my current preoccupations, and he kindly and rightly pointed out that blogging was supposed to be fun and should not become a "chore or service to others". Without wanting it to, I did let it become a chore, losing sight of my real reason for starting a blog in the first place (err, venting! Just kidding!) and most of all, tried too hard. Idiot.

It shouldn't have come as a surprise, really. My blog is hardly a year old and I didn't want it to die in its infancy, but by dint of flaunting it left and right to everyone I knew who would take a look, I didn't want them to come by for nothing. What happened as a result were insane behind-the-scene efforts to impress that ended up in me not posting about my time-consuming disasters at all. Dummy.

A few pals aware of my fidgetiness in the professional arena right now have suggested that I made my cooking profitable, to which I often responded with my usual "if it became a chore, I'd no longer enjoy it" (there's also my inability to stick to a theme in my cooking!). Now, why didn't I see that I was doing precisely that with my blog? :)

In less than a week from now, my wedded status is slated to undergo a major change, and in a few months (weeks?), so will my location. When my location changes, that will mean I will no longer have my own kitchen to get sloppy in, and along with that, no more digital camera and a more basic computer. To make up for it, I will be so surrounded by cheap and good food in my "new" location, in all likelihood it will be ages before I cook or even buy groceries again!

The impact of all that on what I initially intended to be a food blog is that it will impair my ability to blog about stuff I made myself, and worse, will limit the possibility of me uploading pictures since a new camera will not be in my list of priorities (a trip to Bombay is!).

Bottomline - it will no longer be just about food... By the way, "con" in French isn't what it is in English (the last word of the first two paragraphs provides an idea), but both apply to my former approach to blogging. :)

This said, I recently managed to get my hands on the 1978 version of Don, and have been whiling away lots of time on the music videos.. :) maybe it's time I got myself some Banaraswala paan! :)

CTK chronicles

2007-09-30T23:13:00.000+02:00

Thank you everyone for checking on me throughout the past 2 unintentionally silent months (someone pinch me, did they really go by like that?)! To be perfectly honest without trying to sound like I'm feeling sorry for myself, things hadn't been easy on me on many fronts, and will not get better for another couple of months, so blogging just had to take a backseat.

(It was unfortunate that I had to be so bogged down because I definitely had lots to say, in particular with regards to Emon Chatterjee being ousted from Indian Idol!!! No way! The injustice!! The kid is GIFTED! And anyone who sounds like Sonu has an immediate place in my heart! :) So yes, if I'd already been too down to blog, this slid yet another gin tonic between my helpless fingers! Poor Emon! :( )

Of course, I could have kept you entertained with pictures of the "ugly" food I had been cooking during my absence, but none of them are quite as worthy as what I have prepared for this post! :) I cannot think of any other dish in my repertoire that surpasses this one in mindboggling simplicity (ahem, for some! ;-) ), affordability and Singaporeanness, but I can bet my bottom Singdollar that few of my Singaporean readers would have attempted making this at home and succeeded, and by that, I mean, while living in Singapore. :) Why would they when it can be procured around the clock in less than half an hour with at most, a few oily forks to wash?

It's no myth that few Singaporeans bother to learn how to cook until they become exiles like me, and I help to perpetuate that stereotype, but the things an exile would do for survival when frequent trips back aren't feasible. :)

There is nothing inherently exquisite about carrot cake aka chai tow kway but this post is dedicated to my sister (I know you're reading this!) who has attempted and failed it all of 4 times, and mean as it is to snigger, it has been one of my favourite subjects of teasing.. ;-) She lives in Japan, so maybe getting the right ingredients are tricky, or is she just not looking in the right places? ;-) I've tried to help, but my last resort - sending a bag of rice flour - sounds ridiculous, so I'll be contented with letting her savour it only on trips back to Singapore! :) heh heh...

What you need:

How to: Mix 400g rice flour with 200g tapioca starch. Add 1 grated radish (I added a grated carrot) and about 500ml of water or stock at room temperature. Add another 500ml - 800ml of boiling water or stock and stir until there are no more lumps. Pour mixture into a casserole and cook until all liquid is absorbed (it gets very thick, so the spoon will get stuck) and transfer to a steamer. Steam for about half an hour. It should have a slightly springy consistency because of the tapioca starch. Cut into small cubes when it has completely cooled.

This recipe makes enough for 8 - 10, so this plateful of cubes shows only a quarter of the final product.

Preserved salted radish (yes, again!) strips, aka chai por.

You'll also need fish sauce and crushed garlic, but my bottle of fish sauce is quite a mess, so I'd prefer to keep your appetites intact by not showing it! :)

About 3 or 4 of these guys for 2...

Not entirely necessary, but to glam up this humble dish, I sometimes add prawns.

Lastly, shallot chives for garnish.

How to: Heat about 2tbps of oil (purists would recommend lard, but I'm happy enough with sunflower oil) in a wok on high heat and throw in the cubes of carrot cake. Fry until the surfaces are slightly toasted and crisp, then splash 1 - 2 tbsp of fish sauce and add the preserved radish strips. Add garlic now if you don't like it too strong, and fry for about a minute, then add lightly-beaten eggs. When eggs are fully cooked, remove from heat, sprinkle shallot chives and serve with chilli paste.

I was too impatient to let mine brown and crisp, so it could have been darker and better. :)

Variations: This is the "white" version, which is the only version I like. The "black" version includes a dark sweet sauce which I've never learned to make and can't seem to find ready-made here, but who's asking for any? :)

Body count: About 15 prawns.

It's about time!

2007-08-03T22:51:00.000+02:00

Never has a single word made such a difference in my life! Whew!

After what seemed like an infinite and ignominious number of hours, kilometres and euros, I have finally been given free rein to DRIVE as of Wednesday!

Few people have understood why my "ordeal" lasted as long as it did or why it even took such a toll on me, but an ordeal it was, enough to warrant the only prescriptions I've ever had in my whole life for calmants! Yeah, me, the cool-headed one who most people associate with always taking things TOO easy! Unbelievable! :)

It's not that I had a fear of driving! Far from it, I just tended to lose "it" every time I had to prove I knew how to drive!

To say my self-confidence took a beating while being instructed by some of the most condescending human specimens allowed to roam the earth barely scratches the itch my knuckles feel to meet the gums of a particularly discouraging instructor who told me about a month back, inter alia, that I wouldn't be able to get that license within the year and who wondered aloud why someone who's chalked up the number of hours I had just couldn't drive better.

Now, now, if that was some mind game intended to spur me on to pull up my socks, I definitely didn't take it that way at the time I heard it, and went on to specifically request that I attended NO MORE lessons with him. I'd have loved to attend his funeral, or even contribute to its materialisation, but paying him to insult my intelligence for an hour at the wheel is pure insanity!

So it's a relief that I can put it all behind me now, but what is this effusion doing on a food blog? Well, if you've noticed over the past few weeks, my cooking has been erratic, and it's really all driving-stress-related. :) When I'm stressed out, I just don't get very hungry and woe to those around me 'cos without warning, I'll just end up not cooking! :)

But on the topic of procrastination, I had been wanting to make these theplas since I saw them on Trupti's blog way back in January, but only managed to the night before the exam in a bout of stress! :)

I hope to be back in fine form real real soon!

Cheers!
S

One in the oven

2007-07-26T20:34:00.000+02:00

Thank you all for your enthusiasm in my previous post, and I hate to be discouraging, but nobody got it right. :)

However, the closest answers I got were from Kajal, who guessed that I was preparing Gujarati dhokla, and Poonam who guessed it was polenta.. :) Not bad!

This was, in fact, my third attempt, and first successful one, at making panelle al forno, which like dhokla, is made mainly of chickpea flour, and where method of preparation is concerned, is just like polenta.

Believe it or not, people do get paid to write crummy recipes in bad faith with the intention of throwing off eager learners like me, which explains my 2 earlier failed attempts. For one, chickpea flour CAN and WILL get lumpy when you toss it into boiling water, no matter how thin the "stream" of flour, and I had to learn that the hard way the first time.

On the second attempt, I learned to stir part of the required amount of water (at room temperature) into the chickpea flour and to boil the rest, but guess what? The quantity of water stated in the recipe was so excessive, it was impossible to cut out pretty shapes from the ensuing quivering glob, lumpless though it may have been!

I could easily have given up, but I do enjoy my besan and have been fascinated with its use in non-Desi, non-Middle Eastern recipes, thus the perseverence.

Nonetheless, success tends to place a cap on that perseverence, so, satisfied with the successful panelle I had in hand, I thought I'd might as well make the best of it and pair it with several different flavours!

With parmesan and dried tomatoes:

with slices of sausage:

or simply with garlic, butter and parsley -

I'm not particularly good at recommending wines for particular dishes, but ever since Arles, I have been drinking more wine than I really should, with or without my meals. For this meal, I feel the need to let you in on my latest discovery, haha:

The choice was not mine, but my husband's, not only because of the funny label, but because one of the names on the label happens to be his. I'll let you draw your own conclusions! :)

Guess who?

2007-07-22T17:38:00.000+02:00

Hee hee, doesn't this look like a caterpillar-ravaged lunch? Any guesses what this is?

Hint: This is just the "base" for another preparation.. answers in the next post!

South-bound and spell-bound!

2007-07-19T02:39:00.000+02:00

Ca y est. Saturday, Bastille Day (14/7/07) marked 6 years that I have lived in France and was also the day I got back from a 2-week break to the furthest south I've ever been in France since I arrived - Arles, home to some breathtaking UNESCO World Heritage sites and beneficiary of some serious lovely weather!

Although Vincent van Gogh only lived there for a year (1888- 1889) and a long long time ago, much has been touted in his name for the tourist dollar. Oh alright, so most of his better-known paintings were inspired by the Arlesian landscape (for very good reason!) and he lost an ear there, but if you didn't know better, some of the van Gogh "attractions" and souvenirs were clear-cut rip-offs!

My irreverence was short-lived, however, the moment I patronised the local markets! Take for example the biggest, baddest cherries money can buy, the tenderest of figs and up until now, what remained the stuff of cookbook legend to me - zucchini blossoms!

The violet-tinged Ail de Garonne (a delicate garlic variety cultivated in the region around the Garonne river), though seasonally available in the North, was something I felt the need to stock up on, and eventually abuse (if you must know what garlic abuse is, it's the violent exfoliation of all mucous membranes in my oral cavity, tastebuds included) before its possible extinction. Woe woe!!

Olives were abound as far as the eye could see - preserved, in tapenades (a spread), as a motif on tablecloths and napkins... I wasn't really looking to buy any, but was fascinated by the choice!

Tomatoes were a close second in omnipresence. These freaky-looking ones are called coeur de boeuf, meaning "ox heart". One is enough for 2 persons, so I took a yellow and a red one. It's a pity my hands were too full to take pictures of some other equally spectacular dwarf varieties!

There were many other fruits and vegetables in my basket, but let me backtrack a bit and deliver a micro geography lesson. I live in Lille (50.38N, 03.03E) and Arles (43.41N, 04.40E), without traffic jams and pee breaks, is at least 10 solid hours away by car at an average speed of 90 km southward all the way. That translates to a constant upward difference of 10°C on average in the afternoons, a main factor in the difference between wan and tan! In lingua culinaria, that also meant redder, juicier tomatoes and just-plucked fruit at a steal as well as greens too fragile to make that 10-hour trip.

Different weather, different vegetation, different accent but same language, and even different species of mosquito (their stings were baldly more vicious and insidious) - I was almost sure I'd landed in a different country! Why, even the strangers were chattier and the pigeons less meek!

Sigh... in the shade of the majestic Roman-era arena - the view from the house where we'd stayed not far from here - a mustachioed serenader with a wee little violin would not have been out of place... :)

Forgive me for not cutting to the chase (ie, ready-to-eat stuff), but I'm getting there!! When I left Lille in a hurry and after a harrowing week at work, I took with me all my perishables and a few cans of preserves. With that, I'd drafted a couple of my lists to give me an idea of what to cook while in Arles, but the lists proved to be sorely inappropriate given that they were adapted for Lille's cold weather!

So here is the array of finger food I ended up improvising throughout my 2 weeks there, using local ingredients where I could:

Tartines with green olive & garlic tapenade with carpaccio of baby zucchinis and cherry halves, ribboned with stalks of chives.

Tartines with black olive & tomato tapenade, egg, parsley and cherry tomato slices.

Mini bruschettas with goat's cheese and cherry tomato slices.

Tartines with soft St Félicien cheese, Corsican cured ham and fig wedges.

Cubes of onion, herb & zucchini blossom frittata.

I prepared some of these bites when we had company one evening, and served them with glasses of rosé. I had to hint to my guests that I had nothing else lined up for dinner (these were largely enough for me), so they had to eat the rest of their dinner elsewhere, haha... :)

There are so many other lovely pictures I took and much much more to babble about, but I shall keep them for the next post...

Coming up next: a brush with Nostradamus, an enjoyable day meeting up with a terribly sweet gal I got to know through this blog, the astounding Baux de Provence valley and what happens to food when you have time on your hands!

Mere sapnon ki... maharani!

2007-06-29T00:24:00.000+02:00

Someone who sort of owns a pressure cooker but is too paranoid about explosions plastering her walls with lentils and regaining consciousness a few weeks later in some hospital bed with molten aluminium shrapnel wedged between her eyes (it can happen, right?), thus letting said cooker gather spider carcasses in the cellar, should not be pitied and should not be allowed to whine about settling for semi-firm microwaved lentils.

See, I had one of these cravings for rajma (kidney beans) last week that I could ignore no more and proceeded to attempt replicating the excellent Maharani Dal I had at the Riverwalk Tandoor last month.

OK, "replicate" may be slightly arrogant and furthermore, with the passage of time, tastebuds tend to be assaulted with a pliable memory, so on an absolute scale, I'll be most immodest and admit I was thoroughly pleased with my version, firm dal notwithstanding. On a relative scale, well, it looks like I'll have to go back and eat there some day soon to remind me what theirs was like! And of course, overcome my fear of the pressure cooker!

How to (for 8, don't ask me why I am incapable of downsizing): Soak 1 cup each of rajma, channa dal (split chick peas) and urad dal (black gram) for a few hours or even overnight, then pressure cook them and lightly mash them.

Dice about 3 medium onions, skin and chop 4 large ripe tomatoes and chop 6 green chillis. Grate 1 to 1.5 inches of ginger and crush 6 cloves of garlic. Heat 50g of butter or ghee, and when it starts to sizzle, add 1 tsp each of cumin and mustard seeds and fry until they stop popping.

Add ginger and chilli and fry for a minute, then add onions and tomatoes and cook until soft. Mash tomatoes to get a paste. Add cooked beans with 1.5 tsp each of salt and turmeric, stir well. Add water if necessary to get a thick soupy consistency and boil for about 10 minutes. Before serving, add a splash of cream and sprinkle with some chopped fresh coriander. Best with hot naan, which I was too lazy to make! :)

Variations: Stir cream into gravy for a richer result. Sprinkle a mixture of mint and coriander. Omit kidney beans to get Amritsari dal.

Body Count: 0

I apologize for the recent dearth of posts but I have been biting off more than I can chew these past few weeks and it looks set to continue for another month 'cos believe it or not, I will be away on holiday AGAIN for 2 weeks starting this weekend! This time I'll be drifting off to the other extreme end of France - Arles. Hopefully, that means sunshine guaranteed!

To make up for my long absence, here's something I made a few weeks back but had no time to blog about - Beef Empanadas:

How to - filling: Boil and chop 4 eggs and 2 large potatoes, chop up about 20 black olives and crush several cloves of garlic. Heat some olive oil in a pan and fry 500g of minced beef. Add 1 tsp each of oregano, salt, cumin and paprika. When beef is cooked through, add potatoes, eggs and olives. Remove from heat and stir in the garlic. Let it cool.

Cut out circles in a sheet of flaky pastry and put enough of the above mixture to cover a third to half of the surface of each circle. Fold over and pinch sides to create half-moons. Brush with egg (optional) and bake until pastry is golden brown.

Variations: I don't see why this can't be made into a dry pie (less work, heh heh)!

Body Count: 500g beef mince

Jo bhi bane gobhi...

2007-06-12T22:05:00.000+02:00

(subzi subtitle: whatever becomes of the cauliflower.)

Actually, it's "phool-gobhi" ( फूलगोभी), quite literally "cabbage (gobhi) flower (phool)" but if you keep the "phool" and mention just "gobhi" in Indian cuisine, most of the time, people will assume you're talking about cauliflower instead of cabbage.

Months back, Aloo Gobhi (potatoes & cauliflower) reared its pretty little head here, but I didn't provide a decent description or recipe then, and am back to remedy that. I'm no authority, but there are loads of ways to prepare cauliflower with potatoes and they will still be legitimately named "aloo gobhi", but I'll just concentrate on the recipe that I like best, based on this one, with a few tips and tweaks.

How to (for 4): Break up half a cauliflower into evenly-sized florets and boil for about 4 minutes. Flush cauliflower with cold water so that the florets don't oxydise and darken.

I stuck to the first ingredient list, but my spice paste varied according to what I had in the fridge, and goes like this:

several tbsp of desiccated coconut
1/2 cup chopped coriander
1/2 cup chopped green onion
4 green chillis
1/2 tsp grated ginger
4 plump cloves of garlic
about 4 - 5 small spring onions
50ml water

The rest of the steps are just as in the recipe. Notice how they didn't mention salt? Yeah, I always get tricked in this way when making curries! With so many ingredients to juggle, who ever remembers the salt?

Variations: I see the same spice paste working well with cabbage or peas but the name will not be the same...

Body Count: 0

---

I've never been to Calcutta but by the grace of Google, could not remain ignorant of this intriguing fusion dish called Gobhi Manchurian... I gathered from various sources that seeking an authentic recipe for this will merely set one up for major disappointment, and that the gist of it is to marry Indian and Chinese flavours, so here's my own contribution to the mass of recipes out there:

How to (for 4): Break up half a cauliflower into evenly-sized florets and boil for about 4 minutes. Flush cauliflower with cold water so that the florets don't oxydise and darken (sounds familiar? heh heh).

Make a thick batter with wheat & rice flours (3 parts to one?), salt, turmeric, baking soda and water to get preferred consistency. Heat oil for deep-frying, dip florets in batter and deep fry. Set aside.

Sauce - Finely chop 1 onion, 2 green + 2 red chillis and 4 cloves of garlic, grate ginger to get 1/2 a tsp and snip some green onions to get half a cup. Heat 2 tbsps each of sesame oil and corn oil and fry onion, garlic and ginger until the onion softens and the raw smell of the ginger fades. Add 1/2 cup of ketchup and a few splashes of soya sauce and stir well. Add in green onions.

These cauliflower fritters mollify very quickly, so it's best to eat them fast. I did, however, bake them after deep-frying them, and they stayed crispy though only for a very brief while...

You can serve gobhi manchurian either with the sauce as a chunky dip on the side:

or mix everything together - soggy satisfaction guaranteed!

Variations: Batter - add chilli powder for more zing, cumin for more fragrance, corn flour and/or besan instead of rice flour for more bite. Sauce - fish sauce instead of soya, peanut oil instead of sesame, chopped coriander instead of green onions.

Body Count: 0

Holiday round-up - Krung Thep

2007-06-08T23:08:00.000+02:00

..or Bangkok. Why, it could even be called "Landfill" and I'd still be equally smitten with it... sigh.

What is it with Thais? I haven't had the opportunity of getting to know many personally so far but the conclusion I drew from their driving habits is that they're extremely tolerant and trusting and just for that, I'm impressed. Thai readers, please don't try to dispel a myth if this is one! :) In my 3 fleeting days there, so many times I was sure a potential mangled wreck was craving for my attention, but without fail the driver would slow down enough to let the pedestrian or other motorist pass, without really coming to a complete halt or even honking. What's their secret to keeping so cool?!?

Those of you who have been following me from the start would be familiar with my lack of success with driving, or at least with proving that I can drive... my instructors keep telling me to "ANTICIPATE" and Thai drivers must constantly be anticipating the worst of their fellow road users to be the pros that they are at avoiding accidents! :)

But enough for now about how Thais use their roads... funny that it left such an impression on me, especially because I took the Skytrain most of the time! Shame on me, but I completely neglected the touristy things like the floating markets, museums and temples. I'd seen them on my first trip there way back in 2001 with my company at the time, but this time I was alone with my mom and it was her first trip to Thailand. Since she fully relied on me to get from point to point, we ended up doing nothing but shopping and eating - things I wanted to do. :)

Having the upper hand, I made it a point to eat mainly street food. I saw my mom go pale at some of my suggestions (haha) until we chanced upon a vendor selling something she's had before and could not resist - khanom buang:

We revisited this mister on our last night with an empty doughnut box and told him to fill it up, which is why he was practically laughing at us. :)

Thereafter my mom saw what I meant about good food and filth going hand in hand! :) Too bad I was too eager to eat some of my purchases that I forgot to take more pictures, but there are still these to go by:

A lady selling bai toey-flavoured glutinous rice with shredded fresh coconut..

it was a filling snack, but I didn't find it particularly remarkable.

Another lady with her huge array of log chub:

aren't they just so pretty to look at? Theoretically, I know how to make these things, but at the price this lady was selling them, I wonder why anyone goes to all that trouble! For the uninitiated, these little guys are made of balls of mung bean paste shaped to look like fruits, impaled on a skewer, then pricked (if necessary, for texture, e.g. to look like strawberries) and painted with food colouring to resemble said fruits, and finally dipped into agar-agar to get the glazed look. I picture myself losing my temper after painting the 10th, so I wonder how many people were involved in manufacturing all these!

I saw these khanom krok being made, but by the time I managed to find a good angle, they'd put most of them into boxes, so only have this picture of the cavities to account for it:

By the way, these are things we ate in addition to meals, so on our last night after we'd packed our bags, we realised there were lots of things that wouldn't fit into our bags and that we had to eat. That included 4 apples. Ulp. I told my mom to deal with them since it was her idea to buy them in the first place, but then felt sorry for her and knew she couldn't do it alone, so promised to eat 2 on the condition she cut them into quarters for me. :) Already I had to cram 3 jam-filled doughnuts and a can of Calpis, so by the time I tried to down the third quarter of an apple, I thought of the new knives I'd bought for fruit carving and bought time for my oesophagus by doing this:

I could not bear to eat the leaf I carved, but I eventually did.

:) The following picture was not taken in Bangkok, but is related to the above. Party at my mom's place for her birthday and I used the same knives from Bangkok to carve a watermelon and fill it up with melon balls, dragonfruit and starfruit.

It could have been better, but I console myself about this being my first attempt and that I'd got home only an hour before the guests - the Japanese extension to my rather international family - were to arrive. :)

Holiday round-up - Singapore

2007-06-04T00:15:00.000+02:00

In my previous post, I mentioned having met 4 bloggers in Singapore, and shall proceed to IDENTIFY them, COMPROMISING PHOTOS INCLUDED!!!!! :)

Heh heh, got you there, didn't I, Keropokman? ;-) This cheerful enthusiastic guy wants neither his name nor face to be known, which is just as well because the only photo I took of him was also with him, and I don't intend to "come out" as yet, so I shall have to respect that. :) I met Keropok together with EastCoastLife, whose face we know but not the name, and ditto about the photos I took of/with her. That leaves me with a picture of what we ate - Nasi Padang:

Errr, for details on what the individual dishes are called, better to rely on Keropok's post. Like the bhel puri in my previous post, I do not know how to make any of the above dishes.

The 3rd blogger I managed to catch specifically told me not to publish his picture, and I'd be more than happy to oblige as he was terribly nice to help take lots of pictures of old buildings for this homesick nostalgic chick and record them on CDs, awww. Unfortunately, I did not take pictures of the food we ate.

I almost did not get to meet No. 4 since he travels often for work, but am glad I did, exactly 12 hours before I was supposed to catch my plane back! It completely slipped my mind to send him a photo of myself beforehand and likewise, I didn't know what he looked like, so when I went to Jaan Toofan -- a small bhangra bar on Boat Quay I practically camped at during this trip, with a waiter only I seemed to think was a dead ringer for Aamir Khan -- looking for someone in a green t-shirt of a less than flattering description (his own, not mine), I did not find him (he either changed his t-shirt or his idea of green is different from mine), but he instantly recognised me, heh heh.. was it because of the kurta churidar I wore? possibly... :)

Alas, even if he didn't mind his face being shown, I have to admit to using a film camera throughout my trip and have not finished the last roll of film. It is appalling how fast film has become obsolete! When taking my pictures, a lot of people asked me where the preview was, and I had to tell them shamefacedly to look into the eyehole, haha..

Although Jaan Toofan dethroned Khazana and Khushi - favourite haunts on my previous trip home in December 2005 - I cannot forgive the band for snubbing my repeated requests for my perennial favourite song (Hum Tumko Nigahon Mein from Garv) so I am taking it out on you by putting it as the first song in my player on the right, heh heh! Sorry!

Next post - I'll backtrack to my trip to Bangkok with my mom, which took place before I met a single blogger. Of course, I did no cooking while there, but I had so much to eat, you'll see what I did in a moment of apple surfeit... later, gators!

Chicken, goat and bag

2007-05-30T22:35:00.000+02:00

Hi everyone!! I'm back!! :)

As for the title, it is the punchline of an old Malaysian political joke I heard long ago which translates in Malay to "ayam, kambing, beg", and when said with the right accent, should sound like "I am coming back"! ;-)

To get to the point, I have been back since Sunday but have been completely incapable of lifting a finger to cook, so help me! I tried cooking when staying with my mom but you know what they say about cooks and their territory... My mom isn't as territorial as she used to be, but I lost my bearings in her kitchen and so was contented with just "directing", heh heh..

Not surprisingly, I am severely busy at work and have made several new friends I need to drop notes to (even the guy next to me on the plane swapped e-mail addresses), so if you don't see much food here for the next few weeks, please bear with me. In the meantime, I can't resist posting this shot of some bhel puri I had in Singapore. I pretty much drove my friends nuts by telling them to take me only to places that served stuff I didn't know how to make, so this was one of them! :)

Oh, I had the honour of meeting 4 bloggers, but forgot to ask if I could blog about them, so if you know who you are and want some fame, please identify yourselves! :)

I oughtta get going! *Hugs*!!

WFF 10 - On a bittersweet note...

2007-04-29T02:55:00.000+02:00

It's finally here, my long-awaited trip home!! I'll have a brand-new nephew to spoil rotten (and pinch), several bloggers to meet, lots of food to stuff my face with and lots of pictures to take! It goes without saying that I'm bursting with excitement, but life being as unfair as it is, something always has to mar my quest for happiness... Thus I have no choice but to start off this post with another mega-rant unrelated to food (well, there will be food at the end! :) ).

Ever since I booked my plane tickets, I had been counting down the days to the 29th - the date of my flight (but of course I only arrive in Singapore on the 30th). Last Sunday, I thought I'd check out Sistic's website (Singapore's entertainment ticketing booth) to see if any interesting concerts were in store... Hoping against hope, I typed "Sonu" (for Sonu Nigam) in the search field. My heart raced when there actually was a result!! I started shrieking when I saw the date and was gushing to myself in excitement that I'm going to rush from the airport, dump my bags, freshen up, and dart off to the concert in a yet-to-be-acquired hot pink sari. I was already looking at seating arrangements and trying to decide where I wanted to sit when I looked at the search result again and it sank in - 29th April, 7.30pm. Wait a minute, that would be 1.30pm in France, Sunday, when I'd still be languishing in the boarding area at CDG instead of touching down! I briefly failed to realise that I'd only arrive the day AFTER the concert! Aaaaarggghhh!!!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

My hubby was suitably puzzled when the excited shrieking segued into head-banging (and not in a classy heavy metal way), and took a look at the screen. Long uneasy silence. He promptly reminded me that I'd already seen Sonu 6 months earlier and even managed to grab his hand when I crept up to the stage. I was even seated close enough to the stage to take such pictures:

So what? Even though I can watch snatches of his concerts on Youtube, and even if he sang exactly the same songs (which I'm sure he will), something like that is frustrating enough to justify a hunger strike!! To say that I'm really and truly pissed is tantamount to saying I only "like" Sonu Nigam. Sigh. All I'm hoping for now is that he will do some sight-seeing and that I'll bump into him in the streets of Singapore, haha... (3 years ago, on another trip home, the IIFA Awards happened to be held there, and I saw Sanjay Dutt in the flesh, entering his hotel! I was lucky that the year after, it was held in Amsterdam, just 3 hours away from where I am, so got my fill of all my favourite stars!)

Other consolation - Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy will also be in S'pore in May, and their performance will be a week later. I might just make it if I can find someone to go with me to drum up the hooting decibels, heh heh. Somehow hooting at a concert when you go alone seems slightly mental to me. :)

It has been unseasonally sunny here, so I could not stay mad for long. Besides, I'd gone to the market last Sunday and found some beautiful sun-gorged fruit, so ended up doing this to them:

I've always been in awe of people with hands so deft mere fruit become masterpieces, and I suppose if I won the lottery and didn't have to work, I'd flood this blog with nothing but pictures of my attempts at carving, heh heh..

As for this week, hmmm, funny how comments from some of you on my last post dug into my conscience.. ;-) apparently, most of you assumed that I was clearing my freezer to make way for new dishes I would whip up and freeze to nourish that hubby while I'm away for a month. The original plan was for him to go out and buy microwavable meals, which I was in fact making space for, but after all the undeserved praises heaped on me about what a good wife I was perceived to be, I felt like pure scum accepting all that credit on credit, and had to do up a few can't-go-wrong favourites of his that were simple and pretty much made from other processed food, so please, don't make me go back to feeling like scum. I didn't really cook this weekend, I merely assembled various ingredients to arrive at a more elaborate end, heh heh. :)

The pies - tuna
and ham & tomato

Gnocchi - chorizo and 2-cheese & ham

What I did not make from scratch: pie crust, tomato sauce and gnocchi.
What I did do: cut ham, tomatoes and chorizo; cook gnocchi; half-fill 1 ice-cream tub with bottled tomato sauce and another with cream, blue cheese and grana padano. As for the tarts, I followed Michael Jackson's advice to "Just Beat It", haha.

There's not much "how to" for me to share with you here that doesn't sound like previous posts with tarts, but the tuna tart is one of my hubby's favourites, so apart from the crust, the rest of the ingredients are : mustard (to coat the base of the pie crust), tuna+lemon juice+plain yoghurt and/or cream+grated gruyère or emmental+eggs.

I might not blog much during my vacation, but keep writing! :) Thanks for your encouragement, everyone!

One and the same salmon

2007-04-21T21:48:00.000+02:00

You'd think that someone about to go on holiday would be in a peppy mood.. heh heh, well, you're half right, except for a couple of things I'll save for a minor rant right at the end of this post. :)

For the past week or so, I have been trying to make space in the freezer for the frozen dinners that will sustain my hubby while I'm away, so that means I didn't (and won't) have to cook much since I DO have a magic freezer containing the fruit of my past immoderate labour. I don't mean to brag, but I won't even be able to finish all that I froze before taking that plane! :)

Anyhow, I still had dill left over from last week's sai bhaji, and a couple of eggs that were ageing, so instead of an easy-way-out omelette, I had to do something I had never done before pasta-wise! :) The idea came from a cookbook I'd bought with my very first paycheck on French soil, so seeing mine turn out exactly like those in the cookbook was pure joy:

This is what a sheet looks like against the light.

Am I twisted, or does this make anyone else think of Braveheart? I don't know, seeing the sprigs of dill broken up by the force of the rollers in the pasta machine somehow reminded me of Mel Gibson as William Wallace being stretched 4 ways... oh, never mind!

Since the big thaw was taking place, heck, I also thawed the 1-kg bag of leek I had as well as some salmon filets, to get this extremely simple No-Bake Lasagna:

How to: Pasta - Sift 200g of flour in a bowl, make a well in the centre, add 2 small eggs, 1 tbsp of olive oil and 1 tsp of salt. Break yolks and stir, incorporating the flour. Knead the dough until smooth, cover and set aside for at least 30 minutes. When ready, make very thin pasta sheets, place dill sprigs on one sheet and cover with another sheet. Press lightly to remove air bubbles, then pass double sheets though the rollers again to get a sheet as thin as the original sheets. Leave them to dry for at least 2 hours, then cook in salted boiling water.

Salmon - Fry about 500g of salmon in hot sizzling butter and flake with a fork. Add salt and white pepper to taste and 100g of cream. Blend to get a smooth paste.
Leek - Cook 500g of leek in melted butter until leek is soft. Add about 2 tbsp of flour and stir until flour absorbs leek juices. Blend.

Place a sheet of pasta on serving plate. Alternate layers of salmon, pasta, and leek according to your liking. Can be served hot or cold.

Variations: Salmon & spinach-ricotta, salmon & broccoli, beef & spinach-ricotta, or really any meat and vegetable pairing!

Body Count: Salmon filets

I got impatient with the triangles after a while, so took to making these Double-barrel Cannellonis as well:

Another picture of the lasagna, at an angle that the hubby preferred:

And now, for the rant... :)

I am infinitely grateful to the management in my company for being so wonderful in having let me take most of my leave at one go the way I'll be doing shortly... before Friday, only the people who needed to know I'll be away, knew. From experience, I've learned to stop telling people who don't need to know for one very petty reason - the lame "jokes" or attempts at jokes that follow!!! What am I talking about? You know, "threats" to send me work while I'm away so that I won't be able to enjoy my holiday? I always tell those I A) directly work with or B) report to that I'll be willing to do bits here and there while on vacation, but when this comes from someone who's neither A nor B, I don't know, for some reason, it grates. Besides, that's OLD!!!

That's not all.. tell me who still encounters this - on my way back to my desk from the coffee vending machine, someone would extend his/her arms and "thank" me for the coffee. Am I wrong in wanting to give up the coffee, but without the cup?

Last but not least, when the administrator does something to my computer, thus sitting at my desk, invariably, someone passing by would say "Hey, D (my real name), you sure look different today!". If I'm in a good mood, I'll be charitable enough to pretend I didn't hear it. And even in a bad mood, I'm relatively charitable by ostensibly rolling my eyes. But I desperately want to do more for society besides just rolling my eyes! It is now the year 2007. Is such lameness still acceptable? How can I do my part for the betterment of human evolution?

UPDATE: A few of you have asked me about the cookbook that I have to thank for this pasta idea. Strangely, information on it is rather elusive, there isn't even a name of an author, so I'll just stick its photo here for all to see:

I don't even know if it exists in other languages, but it has 2 whole pages dedicated to sheets of pasta with different squashed herbs like the above example, as well as many other nifty ideas! Now you see why I had to buy it with my first paycheck? :) This one's a keeper!

WFF 9 : Dill Mangta... sai bhaji and more!

2007-04-15T20:11:00.000+02:00

The other day when I made Besan dal, I mistakenly said that it should be served with a methi pulao (fenugreek rice). Oops! My bad! The friend who gave me the recipes (including today's, which I'd distorted to my convenience) kindly pointed out that it would be better for Sai Bhaji, aka Sindhi Palak, a spinach dish I definitely didn't do justice to, as it has just come to my attention that it doesn't look one bit like how the Sindhis do it! Eeek!! (hides face in shame)

Nonetheless, for my efforts, I'll post a picture!

How to: Would you really want to learn it from me? haha!! :)

UPDATE:

Ingredients (quantities to adjust to taste): 3 tbsp channa dal (soaked), a few cloves of garlic (crushed), ginger paste, green chillis, 1 chopped onion, 1 potato (optional), 2 big tomatoes (chopped), 400 - 500g spinach, a pinch of turmeric.

Fry garlic in some oil, then add chopped onion and ginger paste and spinach, fry until fragrant. Add turmeric, channa dal and tomatoes and fry for a few minutes. Add potato and about 1/2 cup of water and transfer everything to a pressure cooker and cover. Cook until channa dal is soft. Add salt to taste and whisk. Garnish with dill weed and serve with a pulao and yoghurt..

Body Count: 0

I still had some duck leftover from the little I used last week on my mini tartlets, and made these Hachis parmentier aux petits pois et canard. Hachis parmen tier is pretty close to a cottage pie, except that pre-cooked leftover meat is usually used, and in recent years, adventurous chefs have replaced the usual beef with other meats, and the potato with other floury vegetables. In my case, I wanted to inject some colour into the dish and made it with a base of garlic, olive oil and potato mash, confit de canard in the middle and a broccoli & garden pea topping, garnished with shallot chives and a pea.

Lastly, a desperate attempt at eating light before heading home - a Chinese tofu stir-fry with baby corn and straw mushrooms. The sauce consists of oyster sauce, light soya sauce, water, corn starch and Chinese cooking wine, I believe, THE generic gooey stir-fry sauce. And of course, loads of crushed garlic!

Why do I want to start eating light? Some people being the way they are, ie, ill-mannered, on previous trips home, I've had a few of them telling me in my face that I'd put on weight (yes, of course, I no longer weigh what I did in 1995 when I was still a teen, idiots!), in varying degrees of tact and of indiscernible good intentions. While I know deep down that I shouldn't care what people think, negative remarks on my weight, no matter how unjustified, tend to make me self-conscious, and the last person to say something like that to me had his business card scribbled on and deposited in a very strategic location with an unambiguous exhortation to call for services I have no guts to elaborate on in a food blog, haha.

So no matter how confident I feel now, I hate to admit that the onset of a holiday mood has brought back in full force a habit I thought I'd dumped - snacking on chips. Sigh. I guess I'll have to stick to wearing black, heh heh..

Easter WFF Part 2 - Not just my stuff

2007-04-10T00:43:00.000+02:00

I'll try to make this quick since I'd already covered the stuff I made in my previous post. This post merely serves to show what goes on in a typical French 5-hour lunch and how expandable our stomachs really are! :)

Before we sat down to eat at this pretty table at my in-laws' place,

we gathered for the apéritif, which is not considered part of the official meal - a pre-appetiser if you will - but does its bit to squeeze out stomach space nonetheless, at this table:

From top to bottom: My foie gras (duck or goose liver) macarons - with or without alcoholic raisins, smoked salmon and blinis with tarama, crackers with egg and tapenade (a paste made of black olives), and slices of toast with foie gras and grapes. This is not the first time my MIL and I have had coinciding ideas, in this case, foie gras with grapes!

with champagne, what else? ;-) Remember, there were only 6 of us adults to eat all this, and we weren't even able to clear all these plates!

I had to take a picture of my place setting because no matter how hard I try, I am incapable of such attention to detail, so a round of applause for my MIL! The napkin ring/belt is just precious! As for the little purse next to the green-stemmed glass, it contained a couple of chocolates that mysteriously disappeared when I was attending to my kid!

There was still no need for me to loosen my pants when the cold starter was served - a scallop and salmon tartare with cubes of Madeira jelly, courtesy of my sis-in-law and her hubby. It was really good and I would have been contented to end my meal there...

...but of course the eager beaver that I was, I disobeyed my MIL's instructions to scrap the warm starter, so we had to eat my warm starter (the duck & orange tartlet) AS WELL AS the reason she wanted me to scrap my tartlets - the huge white sausage in the foreground called a "boudin blanc". :) Boudins blancs are made of pork, egg white, mushrooms and I don't know what else, and I like them a lot, but would have been happy to share it with the inquisitive chick instead, hee hee!

Did you hear me say "starter" twice? Yeah, a main dish was also waiting in the wings - a tenderloin on a bed of creamy mushrooms and a crispy crêpe. The side dishes from left to right - string beans wrapped in Parma ham, baked carrots & parsnip and a vegetable patty. See the chick-o-meter? My sentiments exactly! heh heh.. the little guy read my mind! :)

Just in case those pangs continued to act up, we each had a cake, too! :) When my MIL informed us there was a comprehensive cheese platter to be had, the other 5 of us raised our verbal white flags and voted her off, haha! In fact, I didn't even eat my cake straightaway! I came back for it after a 2-hour break!

Errr, it turned out we weren't allowed to leave without having dinner (lunch ended past 4pm), so the cheese platters - I hadn't noticed there were 2 of them, each containing 8 different types of cheese! - made their pungent appearance. My other picture, of the bigger platter, was blurry, what a pity! There were even cold cuts and assorted types of bread to go with it! I have trouble refusing cheese, so indulged in a few of them. Do you know some of those things can contain up to 40% fat?!

Whew... such extravagance! I knew my mom-in-law was finally convinced of our satiety when I saw the Périgourdine - basically a coffee and walnut ice-cream cake with bits of meringue and chocolate shavings that my father-in-law fought with to get 6 portions, haha!

I couldn't help noticing how thirsty I was at the end of the day, and now that I look back on all the dishes on offer, I'm not surprised - where in my belly could I fit in my daily quota of water?? :)

Easter WFF Part 1 - my stuff

2007-04-09T00:33:00.000+02:00

I'd mentioned earlier in the week that my mom-in-law loves my macarons, and Saturday, she called to tell me not to bother making the warm starter as planned for Easter Sunday since she went overboard on her purchases. Before hanging up, she asked me in a tiny voice if I could make some macarons instead. Heh heh, I found it rather cute and had to tell her she'd just ruined my "surprise". I hadn't made any macarons in ages because the novelty wore off for me long ago and I have little patience for all that sifting biznazz, but knowing she liked them, I was intending to make some ON TOP OF the warm starter and told her as much. Needless to say, she was thrilled, except that I refused to reveal the flavour and was already halfway through making the warm starter.

I was flattered by her compliment and happily went on to make the macarons, but that happiness soon gave way to some slamming of kitchen utensils, hurling of assorted instruments, unguarded language and a serious desire to kick in the door of my oven so that it would never open again. People, you have no idea how miffed I get when my macarons look like this:

instead of this, according to the laws of nature:

Of the two batches I made, only a minority turned out looking like those in the second picture, so my hubby's repeated assurance about his mom liking them for their taste instead of their looks was met with a steely gaze, enhanced by another real and dangerous source of steel - you know, the kind that can cut and cause blood to spill?

Hmmph! Anyway, I was in no condition to attempt a third batch, so went on to make them as planned - with a foie gras filling, and a couple of embedded vodka-steeped raisins (by the way, the yellow one was flavoured with saffron and the brown ones with chicory):

As for the warm starter, fortunately, it turned out satisfactorily enough to not warrant anger management classes for me! These are my very own Tartelettes au confit de canard et à l'orange.

"Confit de canard" is duck slow-cooked for hours in a bath of duck fat (its own and from other ducks, I suppose) and herbs until the meat is so tender, it falls off the bone at the slightest prodding. It can easily be found in cans here and is what made me a duck convert. I'm really not all that adventurous when it comes to meat and I've always found duck a bit strong, but when I first tasted confit de canard, I was willing to give duck a second chance and to taste it in its other incarnations! :) It's a mess, though, fishing out the meat from the canful of fat! Not something I buy often!

How to: For a change, I made the tart crust myself, but won't bother sharing it with you because it was really oily and crumbly, so I'm not sure I'll use the recipe again! I blind baked the crust in individual tart moulds, topped it off with a mixture of marmelade and lime juice, put it back into the oven to caramelise the marmelade, then garnished each tartlet with shredded duck.

Body Count: About 2 duck thighs.

My mom-in-law and I certainly have our differences, but one major thing we have in common is our fear of not feeding our guests enough! :) If you think my previous WFFs are excessive for 2 people, wait till you see my next post (whenever that will be!) on all that we had to eat for Easter, keeping in mind that there were only 6 of us adults, two of whom (my sis-in-law and myself) have bird appetites!

Oh, it being also spring, my MIL spring-cleaned her fridge, too, and so I am stuck with quite enough leftovers to last me until April 17th, I think if my calculations are correct. Great, since I have been staying later than usual in the office these days and have no time to cook when I get home, but not so great 'cos none of the leftovers can be frozen and I am quite sure some things will turn bad at my hands! :(

Too busy to tell you how busy I am!!

2007-04-04T23:08:00.001+02:00

At the end of this month, I'll be leaving for a month-long holiday in Singapore, and guess what? I have a ton of work to clear - work I was supposed to start on in late February, but am only receiving this week! How now, brown cow?

Today's my mom-in-law's 70th birthday, which we'll be celebrating in conjunction with Easter this Sunday, and I only learned yesterday that I'll be making the warm appetizer!! *panic* *panic* My MIL has always loved my macarons, so I'll definitely be making a stack of them, too, but what flavour? *pant* *wheeze* *pant* The ones I've made in the past that she preferred the most were lemon-flavoured, but I find that so ordinary! I still have a few more capsules of powdered saffron, and was thinking of using them, but what goes well with saffron?? Help!!

I'm not good with last-minute surprises, so I'll welcome any suggestions! Suffice it to say I'll have much less time for blog-hopping now until I leave, so pardon me all of you dear friends I've made over the past few months if I don't drop in on you as regularly as before! :( I certainly wish I could, but I'm hoping my job will still be there when I get back, so I'll have to prove I deserve the holiday! ;-)

This said, I'm really looking forward to meeting those of you I've said I'll meet when in S'pore!! :)

I hope I'll still have time to squeeze in another couple of WFFs!

Hugs,
S

Unwitting WFF 8 - Cooking like clockwork

2007-04-02T12:21:00.000+02:00

Hmm, I just realised that I never did specify what constitutes a WFF (for latecomers, that means "Weekend Feeding Frenzy", where I attempt to cook so much on one day of the weekend to avoid cooking on a weekday in a foul mood :) )... Now I will! I'll set the minimum number of dishes to 3, not counting desserts and accompaniments (e.g. plain rice). It's actually quite easy to accomplish!

The weekend started out stressful enough for me (ahem, it had to do with proving I could be trusted with a car), so food wasn't really my priority, but as it progressed, I found myself at the supermarket buying nothing, really, with dishes materialising under my nose! Am I turning into a - gasp! - machine?!?! I didn't even make a decent list of what to cook, or what to buy, but somehow I managed to make at least 3 things! I'm losing control!

Bread is a big part of life here, so when I was at the baker's buying a baguette, (a.k.a. ficelle, a.k.a. flûte, depending on where you buy it), I chanced upon this cute "crown" of bread and ordered one without missing a beat. ;-) Naturally, without having a concrete idea what to do with it! I was simply swayed by the alternating poppyseed and sesame buns.

Fortunately, I always have a few cans of tuna in my pantry to fall back on, and made a tuna salad from a recipe that was passed on from an aunt's friend, to my aunt, to my mom and then to me. Originally, it consisted of tuna in brine, mayonnaise, hardboiled eggs, chopped gherkins, 1 chopped onion and 1 chopped apple. For this time, I skipped the onion and replaced the gherkins with capers. As for the apple, I only eat green apples since they're always guaranteed crunchy. I hollowed out each individual bun and filled it with the tuna salad, saving the crumbs for something indeterminate at the time.

Variations: There aren't many things I wouldn't eat with tuna! Well, except strawberries, I guess.

Body count: 1 can of tuna

Then I remembered I had 6 green apples that had been lying around for more than a week, initially purchased for a potato, apple and camembert terrine. I only needed one for the tuna, but went on to skin the other 5, cut them into sixths and sauté them in a liberal amount of butter. I had cheddar-potato mash and a ready-made pizza crust languishing in my fridge, too, and put them to good use - together. There and then, the idea of a terrine became a pizza!

I spread the mash on the pizza crust, arranged the buttery apple slices on the mash and thinly sliced a whole camembert, which went towards adorning the apples. Baking time - 15 mins at 210°C. It may sound like a strange combination, but I didn't make it up - the recipe for the terrine came from one of the oldest cookbooks in my possession. I merely transferred everything onto a crust.

Body count: 0.

With all the apples used up, there was still a lot of butter left in the pan, which I sponged up with the crumbs from the hollowed-out bread crown. I really didn't want to, but the buttery breadcrumbs ended up as a crab stuffing for raviolis! Last week, when I made Maultaschen, it was the very first time I'd used my pasta machine even though it's been two years that I've had it. Making pasta turned out to be more fun than work, so I was itching to use it again and watch the pasta sheets getting churned out. The Maultaschen experiment was also the first time I'd heard of using bread to make stuffing, so there you have it - Crab & saffron raviolis.

Dough: 350g flour, 3 eggs, 2 capsules of powdered saffron, 2 tbsp of olive oil, salt. The Kitchen Aid did it all for me this time. Ordinarily, I'd knead it myself given the insignificant quantity.

Stuffing: 350g crabmeat, 150g of breadcrumbs, 30g butter (I think), 1/2 a bulb of garlic, crushed, salt and Martini for moisture. I'm unable to specify how much Martini went into it, but I just poured until I got the right consistency. I think I forgot to add salt, though!

I don't suppose I need to explain how to make raviolis, but I boiled these for about 7 minutes or more, and served them with a garlicky tomato & basil sauce.

Body count: 3 cans of crabmeat.

During the grocery shopping trip, I decided to treat myself to a bottle of Amaretto. When pouring myself a shot on the rocks Saturday evening, it suddenly occurred to me that all my favourite drinks came in squarish bottles! Just take a look for yourself to see what I mean:

Coincidence? Clever marketing? I'm not ashamed to proclaim that I get zero help from my hubby in drinking any of these, but I am sure the low levels in each bottle have more to do with evaporation than consumption! Oh, definitely!

Unsere Besten Maultaschen - Up close und persönlich

2007-03-30T00:37:00.000+02:00

Whew, now that I've wolfed down all my Maultaschen, I'm ready to externalise. As I'd mentioned in my previous post, I found a very good recipe online containing the typical pork, spinach, bread and egg stuffing. I thought the bit about the bread was absolutely innovative and would never have guessed that it (apart from the obvious addition and purpose of eggs) was responsible for holding everything together!

Maultaschen do exist in several other flavours, but for a first attempt, I didn't want to stray too far from the model I had. This will be my own version of events, or how I made mine.

For the stuffing, I defrosted 250g of frozen spinach, and with the water obtained from the spinach, softened about 200g of stale bread. Then I cooked 350g of minced pork and added it to the bread and spinach and blended it all very finely. Lastly, I folded in 2 beaten eggs, 1 tbsp each of salt, ground nutmeg and dried thyme.

For the dough, I beat 3 medium eggs with about 100ml of water and added about 400g of flour in gradual doses, kneading until all the flour is absorbed. I don't see why I couldn't have put the flour in the bowl first, then add the eggs and water, 'cos it seems easier, but I followed the recipe, thinking the result would have differed! Let the dough rest for at least 30 minutes (I left it for longer because I actually forgot about it with all the multi-tasking going on) before rolling out the dough into very thin sheets.

If like me, you have a Kitchen Aid with a pasta machine fitting, good for you. If you don't, good luck! I've been there before, rolling out pasta sheets with a rolling pin and I have to warn you, you'd regret it if it's meant for guests! All that effort should only go towards rewarding yourself!

Now, to the serious stuff. Cut pasta sheets into rectangles of whatever dimensions you prefer (I'd recommend a breadth-length ratio of 2:3), but I avoided cutting out rectangles that were too long as they became harder to seal.

Spread a layer of stuffing over each rectangle, leaving a border of about 0.5cm on all sides.

As seen in the picture, fold the lower breadth-wise border onto the stuffing, and pat lightly to remove air pockets separating pasta from stuffing.

Fold one more time to form a roll, again patting lightly to squeeze out air pockets.

Wet the other breadthwise border and fold it over the roll, pressing lightly to ensure that it sticks to the roll.

Pinch both sides of the roll to seal in the filling. If you're afraid of the Maultaschen disintegrating during cooking, fold in the sides one more time to get a sort of double seam.

Voilà! Now you have Schwäbische Maultaschen! Leave them to dry for about an hour. Avoid piling them, even if they're well-coated with oil or flour, as the moisture inside will still manage to permeate the pasta sheet and cause them to stick.

Achtung! Regardless of size, I've learned that you need to cook them for 20 minutes, so that the layer of pasta that has been folded into the stuffing gets cooked, too. When I boiled the first batch, I was impatient, and thinking they were smaller than the ones I had in Tübingen, lopped off 5 whole minutes from the cooking time. Ein Fehler! (A mistake!) :) The insides were slightly firm, and admittedly unappetising, so I had to boil them again.

There are many ways to serve Maultaschen, but the most common, as in my first encounter, which turned out to be my favourite, is in der Brühe (in broth):

A clear beef or vegetable broth is best, with a tiny sprinkling of parsley and fried onions. (I had a soup mix, sorry! The fried onions weren't fried by me, either!) Do not be tempted to cook Maultaschen in the broth itself, otherwise your broth would get all starchy and murky.

The other way I prepared them was by cutting them into thin slices (after boiling them), frying them in butter until they were slightly scorched (not unlike Chinese potstickers),

then stirring them in a creamy cheese sauce before topping them off with more crispy fried onions:

I'll definitely be making a vegetarian or salmon version one of these days!

WFF 7 - Muzzle up!

2007-03-25T00:25:00.000+01:00

Many moons ago, I had a love affair with German - the language. Unfortunately, I was swiftly snared by the rules of grammar and those dreaded distractions called gender and boredom. This was way before I knew how to cook anything, so the attraction was strictly intellectual. If I'd never set foot in Germany, I most certainly would never have had the opportunity of discovering Maultaschen (literally, "muzzle bags"), a speciality of the Southern region of Baden-Württemberg. I'm unwilling to say anything disparaging about German cooking, but let's just say that "dainty" is not my favourite adjective when describing German food. Nonetheless, Maultaschen is for me, as dainty as it gets! :) Some call it German ravioli but I demur. There are more folds in Maultaschen, making them bulkier but with more reliable seams. Absolutely necessary when they take about 20 minutes to cook!

In 2005, when I made a trip to Tübingen, a quaint university town where the current Pope hails from, I got out of the car ankle-deep in snow and was not pleased about it. I was starving but not to the extent of yearning blood sausages, and deliberately learned how to say I didn't want any in German! :) Seeing the word " Spezialität" beside "Maultaschen" on the menu in my hotel's restaurant, I decided it sounded safe enough to order, so the fact that I made them yesterday means I thoroughly enjoyed them! These are just the uncooked ones. I will be doing a separate post during the week showing how I folded them and the different ways of consuming them.

How to: I basically got my recipe from here, but tweaked it a bit here and there. The amount of flour I used for the dough was closer to 400g than 500, and I used 350g of pork instead of a mixture of beef and pork. I was very very contented with the result, and it helps to have a Kitchen Aid!

Variations: Exists in salmon and vegetarian versions.

Body Count: 350g of minced pork

If you remember my dear friend from this post, I had a long chat with her last Sunday and I asked her for a few Sindhi recipes. The sweetie that she is, she dictated 4 to me, and to be cautious, I started with the easiest - Besan dal, or better known as Sindhi curry. She practically had me from the moment she mentioned "besan"!

How to: Dissolve 3 tbsp of besan (chickpea flour) in 2 cups (500ml) of water, adding water in small quantities to ensure there are no lumps. Soak some tamarind to get a paste. Chop 3 green chillis, 2 large tomatoes, 2 carrots and about 150g of okra (in North America) aka ladies' fingers (in Asia) aka gombos (here and in West Africa). Heat some oil, and fry 1/4 tsp of haldi (turmeric), 1/4 tsp of methi (fenugreek) seeds, 1/2 tsp of jeera (cumin), a pinch of hing (asafoetida) and a few slices of ginger. Add the besan suspension and keep stirring until mixture thickens. Add vegetables, about 4 tbsp of tamarind paste and let vegetables simmer according to how firm you prefer them. Add salt and curry leaves to taste and serve with a methi pulao (which I was too lazy to make, because as you can see, I have quite a lot to eat! :) )

Variations: My friend says potatoes can be added, and the quantities of the tamarind and vegetables can be adjusted to taste. I didn't have any hing on me, and I believe the curry would have been even better with it.

Body Count: 0 (vegan)

It has been 3 weeks and I still have not gotten over the potato-in-microwave phenomenon, so I had to find more excuses to use the 2.5kg sack of potatoes I bought to that effect. Last week, I mashed hot potatoes with a crumbly cheddar and couldn't get enough of it with my stuffed jalapenos, so I had to make the same mash again this week, but this time, to make cups containing chilli con carne, as in these Chilli pots:

How to: My chilli has always come from this recipe, but I added one diced capsicum. I spied a few cans of corn in my pantry, too, and decided to empty one of them in into my chilli. For the pots, I crumbled 200g of cheddar with 3 microwaved potatoes and shaped them into crusts according to the muffin tins I used. Then I filled the pots with chilli and baked them at 180°C for half an hour.

Variations: You know, I think I should have added some flour to the pots to make them firmer, crispier and easier to handle. Just a thought for the next time I attempt this!

Body Count: 500g of beef.

I'll be darned if I still have to cook during the week after having made this much, but to hammer another nail into that imaginary sealed coffin, I made one more dish - Lor Mai Kai। Literally, it means "glutinous rice chicken" in Cantonese, and it's really just that, with of course, the usual sauce-pects (sorry, couldn't resist it!). Lor Mai Kai is something I occasionally had for breakfast in Singapore, which is significant in that A) I seldom wake up in time for breakfast and B) if I do, I usually skip it anyway. Strangely, though, I prepare it for dinner over here on a fairly regular basis.

How to: Soak about 400g of glutinous rice in water overnight or for at least 2 hours, then drain. Marinate about 500g of chicken meat with a few slices of ginger, equal quantities of sesame oil, dark & light soya sauces and oyster sauce (I'd recommend 2 tsps, but I didn't measure). Add white pepper and corn starch, and mix well. In a wok, heat a few tablespoonsful of oil and fry some shallots (I had pre-fried shallots) until they're crisp. Add rice and a tablespoonful each of Chinese rice wine, oyster sauce, light soya sauce and sesame oil. Add a few drops of dark soya sauce if you'd like some colour, then add about 300ml of water, 100ml at a time, stirring constantly. When all the water has been absorbed, remove rice from heat.

In individual bowls, line the base with chicken meat and top off with glutinous rice. Steam for about half an hour or until rice is fully coked. Serve with chilli sauce.

Variations: Black mushrooms or raw groundnuts can be added to the rice. For a vegetarian version, mock meat can be used, with a vegetarian oyster-flavoured stiry-fry sauce.

Body Count: 500g of chicken

5 Bloggers and more than 5 Reasons

2007-03-20T16:53:00.000+01:00

East Coast Life tagged me with the following meme almost a week ago :

If you had to live on a deserted island for a year, which 5 bloggers would you bring with you and why?

Ulp. As you can tell, I'm still new to blogging and most of the bloggers I have come to know and love are food bloggers, so that forced me to imagine a life outside the kitchen. My fellow taggee Tigerfish will have you know I am capable of losing sleep obsessing over what to make, so that was definitely no piece of pie.

If you could convince me to get on a boat in the first place - because with my kind of luck, if ever my plane chose to stall in mid-air, I doubt it would be over a cushy body of water, and even if it did, I doubt I'd have time to find the life vest under my seat, put it on the right way, find those whistle-looking things for inflating the vest and skitter calmly out of the plane (if the door would open!) to "safety", ie, not into the waiting jaws of a great white - these are the people I'd like to be stranded with for a year:

Trupti of The Spice Who Loved Me - Being a mother of 2 boys (right?) and a vegetarian, Trupti should have sufficient experience in breaking up fistfights (oh, believe me, I might even start some of them! :) ), and would definitely have the gift of turning otherwise exotic vegetation into nutritious dishes, thereby giving rise to said fistfights! :)

J of Eastcoast Life - You dragged me into this, you harvest the firewood, mwahaha!! But on a serious note, J is a recent buddy I made in the blogosphere and we get along so well, you'd have dificulty believing we don't go back a few years! Besides, with her sense of humour and resourcefulness, she would even turn our frowns upside down, finding ways to make our island so comfortable we'll have to fend off rescue ships and throw new shipwreck survivors back where they came from, nyahaha!!

Joji aka The Painted Chef - Multi-talented as far as I know, Joji unfortunately has only so many hours in a day. However, stranded on an island with us, he'd have all day to sketch us in varying degrees of distress (if J turns out less resourceful than expected, and Trupti's cooking fails to please), and find various ways of entertaining himself by carving "Joji was here" on trees for posterity, haha! Also, being the only guy, he would have ample opportunity to add a new skill to his arsenal - Catfight Arbitration! :)

Lydia of The Perfect Pantry - She appears to have encyclopedic knowledge of many food items, I'd bet even of those not found in her abysmal pantry! So we'll have her to thank for not consuming magic mushrooms! Besides, being a professional writer, she certainly could document our travails with Joji's sketches to illustrate! :)

Asha of Foodies' Hope - Going by her blog alone, it is easy to deduce that she is popular (from the number of comments she receives), patient (from all the step-by-step photos and explanations), and accessible despite her popularity (she replies to every single comment! How sweet!) so definitely a pleasant person to have around. Actually, no, I am aware of the fact that she can make a few mean cocktails, so with all that tropical fruit at our disposal, she will be able to distill her own liqueurs and make sharabis (drunkards) of us! Hey, The Stranded Sharabis, sounds like a good name for a band, doesn't it? ;-)

Trupti, Joji, Lydia and Asha, you've been tagged! :) Don't feel obliged to take it up if you don't have the time, it's just for fun!

WFF 6 - Gee, it's getting stuffy in here!

2007-03-17T23:44:00.000+01:00

Am I alone in vapidly going goo-goo-ga-ga over stuffed things? Would you prefer eating whole jalapeno peppers with a heap of cheddar dumped unceremoniously on the side or would you prefer those peppers stuffed with said cheddar, and oozing like lava when bitten?

What is it about disguising one element in other that transforms the appeal of certain vegetables? Personally, I feel that the apparent effort put into filling the cavity of a fruit or vegetable is enough to make the whole (or hole!) look tempting, especially when you make it yourself, never mind if the taste is dubious!

This weekend, all I wanted to eat was finger food, and being the ruler of my own kitchen, I didn't need to ask if anyone minded (snigger, snigger). It started off with these Identity-crisis Jalapeno Poppers. First and foremost, I almost never see chillis for sale at Carrefour, and wasn't even looking for them, so when I stumbled upon them, cheddar inexplicably fell into my basket as well. Except that I wanted at all costs a bhaji coating, but who's stopping me? :)

How to: For 16 peppers, mash 200g of cheddar with as much potato mash (does anyone spot a "phase" in the making?). Add salt and pepper. Slit peppers on one side and scoop out seeds and white centre. Wetting hands, fill cavity with cheddar-potato filling.

For batter: Mix 2 tsps each of besan, rice flour and all-purpose flour with 1 tsp each of baking powder, ground fennel, cumin and coriander. Add water to obtain a thick paste and add an egg if desired.

Heat oil, and when hot, dip stuffed peppers into batter and gently lower into oil. Fry until golden and drain on paper towels.

Variations: Other firm "stuffable" vegetables (capsicum, zucchini, small onions, okra, etc). Egg & breadcrumbs instead of bhaji batter.

Body Count: 0.

Note: This is something I could eat every single day (a very tall order for someone who makes a pastime of getting bored), if it wasn't the greasebomb that it is! I don't know if it was the potato or the batter, but I'd never seen the level of frying oil dip like that!!

The next on the list was totally unplanned. I thought I didn't have any more prunes in the fridge, and when I saw that I did, I remembered the time my mom-in-law came over for a dinner I was hosting, and to avoid coming empty-handed, brought exactly the same apéritif as the one I had prepared - prunes with streaky bacon! We had a good laugh about that, but ahem, somehow mine disappeared faster! :)

I only had lean bacon or very fatty rosette (which is what you see on the right), so what do you think happened? See those paper-thin slices dotted with saturated fat? They're bad for your heart but hey, if the industry continues to thrive, I imagine it only takes you to the threshold of a heart attack and not beyond! Whew!

before

How to: Folded into a band and tucked into the opening of a pitted prune, rosette, like many other fatty cured meats, confers its delicate flavours on the dried fruit and the fat provides a certain amount of moisture.

Place prune & rosette bundles on a heatprof dish and grill for a few minutes until meat is crisp.

after

Variations: Any fatty deli meats - bacon, speck, Parma ham, chorizo, you name it. Any dried fruit - fig, apricot, date, or grilled vegetables - capsicum, eggplant, sundried tomato.

Body Count: A few slices of rosette.

Since those prunes got me started on the whole dried fruit trail, I had no choice but to fiddle with a few apricots, to make Peppricots!

2 weeks ago, I'd used 2 other different flavours of Boursin, but didn't take pictures of the box. Today's flavour is black pepper!

How to: Mix a 150g dome of Boursin with a tablespoon of cream. Split dried apricots without separating the halves, and fill with Boursin. Serve.

Variations : Boursin exists in so many flavours, I've lost track. Nonetheless, they're all good for stuffing dried fruit, eg, dates, figs, prunes, etc, provided you have the patience!

Body Count: 0, not even rennet!

I promise this will be the last of the dried fruit foray, but dates were in fact what had been nagging since the start of the week. I'd never bought them before this week and so have never cooked with them, so it wasn't easy coming up with Deglet-Nour date burfi.

These were so easy to make I even managed to hold a phone conversation with a friend while making these, with the phone wedged between my shoulder and ear!

How to: Make a date paste by boiling about 20 dates in enough water to cover them in a saucepan. Remove stones, if any, and whizz to get a smooth paste. In another pan, heat 150g of ghee or butter. When it melts, add 3tbsp of sugar and 200g of besan and stir, breaking up lumps and cooking until besan smells slightly roasted. Add date paste, stir until even, then pour out onto wax paper and leave to cool before cutting into diamond shapes.

Body Count: 0

Note: Sorry to inflict psychedelic sugar dinosaurs on all of you (click to see them better)! As you can see, the date burfi does not have a very attractive colour, and the plate did nothing to help, so I was hoping those dinosaurs could perk things up! :)

I'm running out of breath, so for now, I'll post the last of the series, but will do the how to, variations and body count at a later date. In the meantime, please be satisfied with just pictures of my Grasshopper Tiramisu!

Update: For as long as I can remember, I've always liked the association of chocolate with mint, and when I became of age to drink, that appreciation moved on to Grasshopper cocktails (crème de menthe + crème de cacao + craem, I think). :) Somehow, the tiramisu version was very watery, so I don't know what went wrong despite doing things the same way I did for the past few weeks! :(

How to: Place a layer of chocolate pound cake at the bottom of each serving glass and drench it with crème de cacao (chocolate liqueur). Whip 2 egg yolks with 100g of sugar until frothy, then add 50g of whipped cream, 3 tbsp of crème de menthe (mint liqueur), 250g of mascarpone and colouring, if necessary. When mixture is smooth, spoon a layer onto chocolate cake and repeat layers (it was too watery for me to do so). Garnish with thin chocolate sticks to create "feelers".

Variations: Way too many! :)

Body Count: 0

Little treats from Paris, and my inedible stash

2007-03-15T23:17:00.000+01:00

Although I live only an hour away from Paris by train, or 3 hours by car, I only go there when I have a reason to, and not when I have an excuse. I do have a very dear friend - a fellow Singaporean and the only Sindhi I've ever known - living in Paris, meeting up with whom can only cheer me up, but we'd been living all our lives apart, and have gone on very well with life without having to meet regularly, so as callous as this sounds, she's an excuse to go to Paris. The last time I made it to Paris, it was in October last year, and I needed Sonu Nigam's concert to coax me there. No offence to my friend, but Sonu Nigam is a reason. :)

Fortunately, my hubby goes there once a month on average, and it so happens that Paris' "Little Jaffna" is just behind the station where he boards the train back to Lille, so almost invariably, that would be his last stop, be it to catch a bite or to run an errand for me. Whenever my stock of Hindi films runs low, I'll give him a wish list. He then turns it over to the DVD-wala, who scurries off to look for my films. I'm seldom disappointed, but in general, I prefer browsing personally.

When he went there on Wednesday, I didn't even draft a list, as I had been behind on my films and my stash was still bountiful. Nonetheless, he came back with these, awwww.. : (click on photo to see titles)

He also brought back these macarons from Ladurée despite my protests, and my unabashed claims of "Why pay people when I can make these at home for nut-Hing!". :) Well, as a matter of fact, I had a macaron phase about 3 years ago and managed to make assorted macarons that my mother-in-law more than approved of (that means a lot to me, seeing what a good cook she is!), but a phase is a phase, and after I realised how easy they were to accomplish, I got bored. I guess I used to make them often not because I liked how they tasted, but merely for their reputation of being difficult to make, which is unjustified. :-P

The ones in black are liquorice-flavoured, and so far, the only ones I've tried. I don't know what the other flavours are as yet. I will of course make macarons one of these days for this blog, but I'll need to decide on a flavour! I don't normally like liquorice candy, but I find liquorice in desserts highly fascinating. I have made liquorice crèmes brûlées a couple of times in the past, but again, that was a phase, and grating liquorice bark can be a noisy affair!

The following photo is not in the right chronological order, but shows some of my other treats from Little Jaffna:

Not surprisingly, when it's my hubby who buys them, he gets fleeced of chutney or chilli!

I don't usually blog about stuff that I didn't make myself, so this post will be relatively short. However, I thought it necessary to showcase my entire Bollywood DVD collection and conduct a poll while I'm at it!

Again, if you click on the photo, you will see the titles very clearly. (Krrish, Dhoom 2, Umrao Jaan 1981 and Malamaal Weekly are not pictured, and "La Famille Indienne" is the French title for Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham). The stack on the left holds the DVDs I have yet to watch.

Poll: What are some of the worst movies you've watched so far? They don't necessarily have to be Desi films, so I'd like to know! For me, from this stack, the TOP 5 films I really shouldn't have bought are:

Taal
Biwi No.1
Dulhan Hum Le Jayenge
Shabd
Fiza

The odd cod

2007-03-14T00:26:00.000+01:00

We had been cat-sitting for my sister-in-law since Wednesday last week, and I expected her over for dinner yesterday when she came by to retrieve her cat, Plume, so I did the unthinkable - cooking on a Tuesday! She's a real dearie, so I wasn't too ready to foist on her my leftovers from the WFF. Besides, I only had a few dishes of gnocchi gratin left (the HK/S'pore noodles and beans thoran disappeared very quickly since I packed them for lunch in the office, and I still can't bring myself to finish the last glass of tiramisu because then I'd have to make some more!), and deemed that too stodgy for her.

I got word during the day that she'd changed her mind and would come by while I was at work, but it was too late since I'd already defrosted a bunch of grilled Mediterranean vegetables from my magic deep (in all senses of the word) freezer, and came up with this Ratatouille & Chiquetaille pie:

Oooh, that must look like a mouthful, so let's see that again: Ratatouille ( rah-tah-too-y) and Chiquetaille (sheek-tie) pie. There! :) Simple? Well, so was this!

Calling it ratatouille involves a certain measure of embellishment here, for I merely used my favourite grilled vegetables - assorted capsicums, eggplant and zucchini - and smothered them with a mixture of heavy cream and ready-made bottled tomato sauce. Cheating again, I hear you say.. ;-) More dishonesty coming your way...

I'd had cod chiquetaille a couple of times before, but have never attempted to make my own, so once again, I bowed down to the idol otherwise known as convenience. :) While I'm at it, hey, even the pie crust didn't spring forth from my toil!

How to: Dress pie dish with flaky or shortcrust pastry, poke holes in the base with a fork and arrange chunks of roasted vegetables in a single layer. Mix a bottle of pasta sauce with a few tablespoons of thick cream (I like it rich, to counter the acidity of the tomatoes), spoon over vegetables and scatter mounds of chiquetaille onto sauce. Bake at 180°C until the pastry turns golden and some of the chiquetaille browns and crisps.

Variations: I can see roasted garlic doing very well in a pie like this!

Body count: Ratatouille - 0, Chiquetaille - 200g

WFF 5 - Edition régionale

2007-03-11T00:22:00.000+01:00

I wouldn't deserve to hold on to my titre de séjour if after more than 2 months of blogging, I did not write up a post featuring products typical of the region which has so kindly hosted me for the past few years - the endearingly singular Nord-Pas-de-Calais!

Following my successful experiment microwaving potatoes for mash last week, I had to repeat the stunt to make sure it worked on all potatoes in general, and not only those I had last week. This discovery gave me lots of hope, because for years, I had failed time and again to make gnocchi soft enough to not hurt pelted passersby. Well, guess what? One more point for this express cooking method! Not only was I able to knead the gnocchi dough today without having to keep adding flour, when shaping them into little dumplings, they did not morph back into smooth cocoons! I am impressed beyond words, and for that, it will be classified as another case of "pat my back or sock my eye?".

I don't understand why my recipe books unanimously tell readers to boil or steam the potatoes for gnocchi, because all that moisture is just going to bring out the starch, which is a nightmare for kneading, not to mention a total waste of time!

How to: To serve 6, heat 650g of potatoes in the microwave until they're cooked through (clue, when they stop "whistling" and when pressed with a knuckle, they dent). Sift about 250g of flour (expect to use more for rolling), make a well in the centre, break 2 eggs into the well and add salt and white pepper. Grate the potatoes (or mash them through a sieve) over the flour while they are still warm, then mix and knead to obtain a slightly sticky dough. Let it rest for 10 minutes, then cut into fat strips and then into cubes (add flour whenever necessary). Make dumplings by rolling dough cubes and pressing a fork onto a surface (this helps to "trap" sauce). Cook in salted boiling water until they float.

Variations: Sweet potato. I've also had gnocchi with chopped spinach mixed in with the dough which was good enough to eat without sauce!

Body Count: 0

Gnocchis aren't typically used in kitchens in this region, but I associated them with a regional beer and cheese, a cheese of malodorousness so formidable it is synonymous with a rotting sock - Maroilles! It is more often seen on a tarte au maroilles, and I'm not sure how easily it is found outside France. I live 20 minutes away from the Belgian border, and I don't see them systematically stocked in supermarkets there.

Tip: Having cut up a maroilles a zillion times with my bare hands, I have learned that soap is futile. Wash your hands while rubbing your fingers against anything made of stainless steel, and it will miraculously get rid of any lingering smells! Take this from someone who often handles garlic but hates smelling of it!

As for Ch'ti, it is a word in local patois to signify inhabitants of the region. I'm not much of a beer drinker, but this bottle came from a couple of colleagues who were at my place on Thursday for a gaming session and left this behind! :) It goes very well with maroilles and so I added it to my gratin de gnocchi.

How to: Mix 300ml of cream with 150ml of pale ale, and add salt and pepper to taste. Heat it without boiling, then add cooked gnocchi, diced ham or bacon (300g or so) and onions if desired. Divide into 6 individual portions, then cut up 400g of maroilles and garnish each portion. Bake at 180°C until the gnocchi absorbs the liquid and cheese browns.

Variations: Dark ale is good, too. Cheddar instead of maroilles, endives instead of onions (very regional!!), and cooked potatoes instead of gnocchi.

Body Count: Ham, and possibly rennet in the maroilles.

That's not the end of the regional edition! There's still dessert!

In the meantime, The Painted Chef reminded me this week of another of those dishes I'd been trying for years to "perfect", if it can even be called that. In Singapore, I knew them as Hong Kong Noodles, but apparently, in Chinese restaurants the world over (and in one of my cookbooks), they're sometimes known as Singapore Noodles. Hmmm...

My model of HK noodles is the one I used to eat in my school canteen towards the end of my schooling years. I have made these innumerable times with a mindboggling combination of additions and omissions, and yet it still doesn't measure up! My last resort will be to cook this with half a litre of oil, but I'll save it for the next time. I question a school canteen operator's motivation for adding any secret ingredient too exotic, but I still haven't quite put my finger on whatever it is, so whoever has a recipe that doesn't look like mine, please contact me!

Before I proceed with the underachiever's recipe, I cannot overstate the necessity of char siu (red roasted meat) for these noodles. Unless otherwise stated, pork is used for char siu. I had pork last week, and was loath to have it again, so imagine my glee when I came across whole turkey breasts (I know where to get them, they're just not sold all the time). Mind you, in the picture on the right, all 5 pieces of meat actually came from a single monster turkey breast! I cheated by making these with a powdered spice mix, but Melting Wok will teach you how to do this from scratch!

How to: Soften 400g of bee hoon (rice vermicelli) or dried yellow noodles, or a combination of both, in warm water. Thinly slice an onion and shred a carrot and beat 5 eggs with some water. Chop char siu into cubes or strips. On high flame, heat some oil (preferably peanut) and make several omelettes, cut them into strips and set aside. Add more oil, about 1 tsp of five-spice powder and white pepper, then add vegetables and saute until they go slightly limp. Add 1tbsp each of Chinese rice wine, oyster sauce, dark and light soya sauces (just an estimate - the more the merrier), then throw in noodles and toss until they are coated with sauce. Add omelette strips and char siu and heat through. Serve with vinegar-preserved green chillis.

Variations: Despite hating them, I've added beansprouts in the past out of sheer desperation. Love garlic, but not sure how much of a difference its presence makes. Have replaced 5-spice powder with curry powder before, to no avail. Sesame oil and sugar made an appearance once, but nah.

Body Count: 1/5 of a turkey breast

Without forgetting my masala quota, I also have beans thoran for you. I actually made this on Wednesday but didn't have time to post it earlier. Credits to The Painted Chef again for planting this idea in my head! :)

How to: Finely chop 300g of long/string/French beans. Grind one chopped onion with 100g of shredded coconut and green chilli (I used 2). Crush several cloves of garlic. Heat some oil and pop 1 tsp of mustard seeds. Add ground coconut paste and fry until the raw onion smell dissipates, then add beans, garlic, 1/2 tsp of turmeric and salt.

Variations: Curry leaves can be added.

Body Count: 0

Enfin, le dessert!

If you like coffee for its taste and not just the caffeine, you would like chicory as well. It so happens it's produced in abundance here, as a natural by-product of the endive industry.

On the right are just a few of the good things to be found here. Gingerbread is dissolved in and used for thickening the sauce for carbonnade flamande, one of my favourite beef stews, but I'm not sure I'm willing to make it anytime soon. Bols' Crème de Cacao (chocolate liqueur) is made in Holland, but will be used in the recipe that follows. I confess, I haven't tried Les Chuques du Nord, but they're supposed to be coffee candies with a caramel centre.

I had another tub of mascarpone to spare, so am back with a Tiramisù du Ch'Nord.

How to: Place a layer of ginger bread at the bottom of each serving glass and drench it with crème de cacao, or whatever liqueur you fancy. Whip 2 egg yolks with 100g of sugar until frothy, then add 2 tbsp of chicory, 50g of whipped cream, 3 tbsp of crème de cacao and 250g of mascarpone. When mixture is smooth, spoon a layer onto gingerbread and repeat layers. Garnish with a mini waffle.

Variations: Way too many! :)

Body Count: 0

WFF 4 - Two old favourites and one new flavour

2007-03-03T23:58:00.000+01:00

I have a feeling this is going to be one of those very hefty posts expected of a weekend freeding frenzy, so brace yourselves, friends!

But first, a summary... seeing as how I'd been neglecting distinctly "Western" recipes for a rather long time, I suddenly remembered and proceeded to make a stew I used to make so often that I could stomach it no more, and therefore banished to a shelf the magazine that provided the recipe. (Interpretation: my favourite cookbooks are never housed on shelves.) Since I was having a go at old recipes, I tossed in a second one that I'd not only consider old, I'd even say it is so passé and squarely out of season!

As for the new flavour, I made history this week with my maiden ingestion of bittergourd! I have Sandeepa of Bong Mom's Cookbook to thank for the "beginner's" tips on how to subdue the bitterness. :) Come to think of it, we may not have used the same species of bittergourd, 'cos mine was still bitter, but not overpoweringly so.

This said, I was also swayed by the need for a thick "comfort" soup (in order not to overwork my newly-glued tooth), and was torn between this one from Sandeepa and this one from Mandira of Ahaar. Stay tuned to see who won the palatal tug-of-war! :)

Let's get down to business! Photos are presented according to the order of completion, not exactly easy when you multitask, so I'm relying on their order of appearance on the camera!

Pork in cider stew. So easy, it practically cooked on its own! Which is perhaps why I used to make it so often, heh heh.. It freezes well, so things couldn't get more convenient!

How to: Chop 4 medium onions and crush 2 or more cloves of garlic. Heat some oil in a big saucepan on high heat and add onions. When they start to brown, add 1 kg of pork chunks (they don't have to be particularly lean) and fry until all surfaces of the meat are cooked. Scatter 2 tbsp of flour over pork and continue frying over high heat for about 2 minutes. Pour in half a bottle of cider (375ml, to be precise), add garlic, 2 tsp of dried thyme (or a sprig of fresh), salt and pepper and lower heat. Cover pan and let simmer for about 40 minutes.

Variations: For a one-dish meal, add 2 carrots and 3 potatoes 20 minutes before the 40 minutes are up. I've never tried making this with other white meat, so can't comment, but white wine or beer instead of cider is not uncommon.

Body count: 1kg of pork (going 1% of the whole hog?)

Blue cheese, walnut and pear tart. As far as I know, this is an autumn tart, and a few years ago, marrying pear with blue cheese was lauded as oh-so-original, but try serving this today in a restaurant and you'll get a snort. Pity, because I genuinely like it and think this combination is legit. I didn't actually plan on making this, but Thursday, while grocery shopping, I was startled to see pears for sale, so I snatched them away without so much as testing for ripeness. They turned out to be perfect - sweet and firm (but not crunchy) and without juice threatening to trickle down my forearm.

How to: (Apologies for those who can't find the products mentioned in your country of residence.) Preheat over to 180°C.

Dress a pie dish with shortcrust pastry and stab holes in the base with a fork (to allow the pastry to "breathe" during cooking). Spread polenta over the base (to absorb pear juice - optional). Halve 4 pears, and slice each half into 4 lengthwise. Place pears face down on the pastry and press lightly so that they fan out.

Beat 150g of walnut Rondelé or Boursin with two eggs and pour over the pears. Bake briefly until the mixture sets, then beat 150g of blue Rondelé or Boursin with another two eggs and pour on top of the first set layer. Continue cooking until the surface of the tart is golden.

Variations: For a stronger taste of blue cheese, I crumbled another 150g of blue cheese over the tart 5 mins before I switched off the oven, so that the cheese only melts but doesn't burn. Add walnut kernels for exra walnut taste.

Body Count: 0

Mandira's Spicy Roasted Sweet Potato & Onion Soup.

Ideally, I shouldn't have much to say about this one, but I cheated somewhere and am coming clean. :) My sweet potatoes were deathly pale (the lady in the shop was sure they'd be orangey when I asked), so I added turmeric. When that didn't help much, I added red food colouring, which looked really awful, so more turmeric came in. :)

Body Count: 0

While trying to overcome my disappointment over the colour of the soup, I had a candy break. See what my hubby brought home for me from an errand! Awwww.. Yanka used to be a famous chocolatier right smack in the centre of Lille, but they'd moved more than a year ago and few people knew where they went, or whether they went bust. It turns out their new outlet's just a walking distance from our place! Aren't these berlingots just pretty?

When I felt I'd sufficiently regained my strength, I finally tackled the 2 bittergourds I'd bought yesterday. Not surprisingly, this being my first time buying and manipulating any ever, I underestimated the width of a bittergourd cavity, and so the stuffing I'd prepared was just enough to fill one. Not a bad thing, though, since I'd had 2 stuffings in mind, and the last-minute discovery allowed me to try both! :)

I hereby present my bharela karela (stuffed bittergourd) - with a coconut stuffing (the initial plan) and with a potato stuffing (the afterthought)! Drum roll, please!

Prepare bittergourds by slicing them into 3-cm high logs and scooping out the seeds. If you prefer them less bitter, soak them for at least 10 minutes in salted water, then rinse and pat dry.

Coconut filling: In a bowl, mix 200g of grated fresh coconut, 2 tbsp of besan (chickpea flour), 2 tbsp of ground groundnuts, 1 tsp of chilli powder, 1/2 tsp each of cumin and coriander (seeds or powder), some chopped coriander leaves, 2 tbsp of sugar, juice from 1 lime, and enough water to make a thick paste. Fill bittergourd pieces with this mixture and shallow fry.
Variations: see below

Body Count: 0

Potato filling: First and foremost, you will need to boil and mash 3 largish potatoes.

Er, for years I'd known of people (e.g. my mom) who cooked their potatoes, brinjals and other hard veggies by microwaving them and generally regarded them with disdain for defiling the sanctity of the cooking ritual. I was tired, and like I said earlier, I only learned at the last minute that I didn't have enough coconut stuffing, so when I saw the last 4 puny potatoes I had, I swore I wasn't going to boil water and wait half an hour just for them to cook, so dumped them in the microwave (didn't even rinse them, that's how rash I was!). Huh, 3 minutes later, they came out all perfect and fluffy! Wha..??? That's it, the next time I need mash, that's how I'll prepare it!

Anyway... Heat some oil and fry about 1 tsp of jeera (cumin) seeds until they pop, then add mashed potatoes, 1 tsp of haldi (turmeric), 1 tbsp of amchoor (mango powder), 1 tbsp of cumin & coriander powder, 1 tsp of garam masala and salt and chilli powder to taste. Mix well and add water if necessary.

Mix a few tablespoons of besan with chilli powder and salt to taste. Stuff bittergourds with potato masala, then roll them in the besan mixture. Shallow fry until a crisp coating forms.

Variations: see above :-P

Body Count: 0

Yaen (ஏன்) can cook but can't eat?

2007-02-26T23:42:00.000+01:00

"Yan can cook, and so can you", declares TV chef Martin Yan... ஏன் (pronounced "yaen", or "why?" in Tamil), then is it that I can cook but not eat?

By saying I "can" cook, I merely mean I'm physically able to, as in propping myself up in a high chair and stirring something in a pot, etc, and has no relation whatsoever to a favourable palatable result. :)

Now that we understand the extent of my ability to cook, let's examine why I can't eat, at least not in peace, for the next week or so. I dislodged a crown today eating something as innocuous as gingerbread, and the earliest I can see the cute young dentist is Wednesday. I have terribly brittle teeth so this is not the first time I'm losing fillings, but losing a crown is trouble. We're talking about a pre-molar here, and I guess if you were looking for it, you'd notice its absence even if I smiled faintly. And I smile easily. Often.

The only upside of this missing pre-molar for now is that it effectively pulled the plug on my foraging ways, but I'm sure I'll more than bounce back once the cement on the new tooth sets!

You have no idea then how frustrating it is for me to continue preparing Chicken with baked beans - something I learned in Homec when I was 13 or 14 and had not made again since then - with the full knowledge I won't really be eating much of it. A poorly-timed trip back in time! I had already defrosted the chicken, so didn't feel like I had much of a choice. Of course I still have all my other teeth and am still capable of downing solids, but somehow, having to chew gingerly on just one side of the mouth (where there is another crown I'd hate to rouse) does strange things to my appetite.

Understandably, I don't remember the ingredients I had in Homec class all those years ago, but if this dish managed to resurface from the recesses of my memory, I have my mom to thank. It was during a recent conversation with her that I realised this funny combination had more of an impact on her than it did me! :) I hadn't noticed that she'd been making this occasionally throughout the years, although it's only been less than 6 years that I moved out! So this is something I'd taught her, forgot about, and had her teach it back to me. :)

How to: Cut 3 chicken breasts into bite-sized pieces and season for a few hours with 2 tbsp of soya sauce, a few slices of ginger and 2 tbsp of cornflour. Dip chicken pieces into beaten egg, then roll them in breadcrumbs (optional - I didn't bother with the breadcrumbs) and fry. Mix with a can of baked beans and serve hot with rice or bread.

Variations: Hmmm, never really thought it over, but I don't see why curried baked beans wouldn't work.

Body Count: 3 chicken breasts.

Now, for a mugshot of the offending gingerbread and the reason for its purchase:

I shall call these my lazy tiramisù, because they don't have all those pretty layers, and doesn't have coffee and all that typical stuff.

How to: I beat 250g of mascarpone with 2 tbsps of amaretto + 1 tbsp of Absolut Vanilla, 2 egg yolks, 40g of poppy seeds, 70g of sugar, and about 50g of whipped cream (can't be sure because it came out of a spray can).

Base - gingerbread softened with Marsala wine, topped off with frozen mixed berries.

Variations: Oh, I do believe you will be seeing quite a number of them from me! :)

Body Count: 0 (2 egg yolks)

A Very Humble Offering

2007-02-25T12:28:00.000+01:00

Oh dear, it's one of those weeks again... no idea what to cook, and not hungry anyway*. But in desperate times like these, I always have someone to turn to.. Sophia (and eggs).

Gosh, how many women continue to smoulder like that at her age? Although I've had this book for years and have thumbed through it countless times, I haven't made many of its recipes. The anecdotes inside provide for a good read, which I suppose distracted me from the cooking part. In it are snippets from different milestones of her life, photos and occasionally, the history of certain Italian favourites. One of mine is Carbonara, which varies from kitchen to kitchen.

This isn't Sophia Loren's recipe, but she pretty much taught me how to make a good one!

How to: For 4 - separate 4 eggs, cook 400g of fresh or 300g of dried pasta, chop one medium onion, crush 5 cloves of garlic and hack away at 200g or so of fatty bacon. Standby 300ml of cream, some oregano and grated parmesan.

Heat bacon in an empty casserole until the fat sizzles and the bacon starts to brown. If you're not health-conscious, add 1 tbsp each of butter and olive oil, then add the onions and cook until they brown, too. Add garlic and a few pinches of dried oregano, as well as a few tablespoons of water from cooking the pasta (if you remembered to keep it - I seldom do!). Throw in the pasta and heat through.

In a bowl, microwave about 300ml of light cream, and beat the egg yolks into it. Add salt and pepper if desired and pour onto warm pasta. Divide into 4 portions and sprinkle parmesan generously over each portion before serving.

Variations: Pancetta or coppa instead of bacon. Parsley instead of oregano. In this recipe, I also added the juice of one lemon to the cream. Not everybody adds onions. Alternatively, if you don't like your yolks to set, don't add them to the cream, but make a shallow well in each individual portion of pasta and place a yolk in it.

Body Count: 200g of bacon.

*I'd been losing myself in bags after bags of Doritos lately, even shortly before dinnertime. Now I know why my mom used to get mad at me for all that snacking! :)

WFF 3 - Bean there, Dhansak

2007-02-19T20:12:00.000+01:00

How often does a novel with no real relation to food inspire the reader to the extent of cooking a patently time-consuming dish that only gets a cursory mention in said novel? From the moment I first heard about dhansak, a Parsi classic, while reading "Such a Long Journey" by Rohinton Mistry, it intrigued me so much I knew I had to make it someday. Strangely, none of the random recipes I came across seemed to have much in common with each other apart from the lentils, so I'm still wondering how proper dhansak should taste. For this trial (was it an error?) I picked the recipe from a source I expected to be an authority, and even better, which required ingredients that I could find in my pantry and freezer! Ah, probably not a foolproof strategy.

I'll be frank here. For all the time spent stirring it to ensure it didn't stick to the base of my pan and burn, I wasn't impressed, and I'm not even sure if chicken dhansak is supposed to be this green and fenugreeky! I won't go so far as to complain about the taste, but I think I'll have to experiment with The Curry House's recipe the next time, mainly for the fact that its list of ingredients is half the length of the one I had. ;-)

How to: Wait for the "successful" version!

Variations: Like a curry, I believe dhansak also exists in lamb, beef, seafood and vegetarian.

Body Count: 3 chicken breasts.

I digress, but have I been in the dark all these years, or did everyone else know that Freddie Mercury was a Parsi and who counted Lata Mangeshkar as one of his inspirations? I hadn't the faintest clue until a few months ago!

It's a good thing I'm an effective multitasker, and
so had Chicken Balti simmering alongside on another cooking range. It was a lazy Sunday afternoon, and I just wanted to eat and not think, so this recipe is basically the same as the one from The Curry House, but with my own addition of 2 teaspoons of amchoor (dried mango powder). As for the "basic curry sauce" they mentioned, I ran out of it and used a different generic homemade one loitering in the depths of my freezer, and it still turned out quite good. Whew. I don't know about you, but when making curries, occasionally I get so distracted by the long list of spices that I forget the salt! :)

I had to soak some tamarind for my dhansak and pairing what was left with my mustard seed needs gave me more than an excuse to make Rasam, a sour South Indian soup usually poured over white rice to moisten it (thus facilitating the formation of rice parcels when eating with your hands), or just served on the side to be drunk alone. Rasam is supposed to aid digestion at the end of a meal, or if consumed at the beginning of the meal, to "open" the appetite. In any case, it doesn't allow room for indifference in your stomach! An infinite variety exists, so this is just how I made mine yesterday.

How to: For 1 litre of soup, soak about 2 tbsp of tamarind paste in some hot water, chop 1 large onion, crush 6 cloves of garlic and slice 3 green chillis. Slice 2 medium tomatoes or pierce the skins of 8 - 10 cherry tomatoes, then boil them along with the garlic and chilli in 1 litre of water. Add 1 teaspoon each of ground cumin and coriander seeds and black pepper. Remove seeds from tamarind and add it to soup. Simmer for 10 minutes.

In another pan, heat some oil or ghee and temper 1 tsp of mustard seeds. When they stop popping, add the chopped onion and 10 or so curry leaves and fry until onion is soft. Add these to the soup and it is ready to serve!

Variations: Lentils or toor dal (pigeon peas) can be added to thicken the soup, and for a different flavour, pineapple, lemon or tomato purée. Most vegetables can be added, too, to make a heartier soup.

Body Count: 0

The mister has a low spice tolerance, so I omitted most of the chilli I normally would have added in all the above dishes (I'm not intending to share the rasam, though). Nonetheless, I made a stack of these fajita-pizzas just so he has something else to eat for the week. I can't even say this was any work!

How to: I grated 200g of cheddar, sliced 200g of chorizo and 1 green bell pepper (capsicum), then spread ready-made fajita sauce on 8 small tortillas, added the chorizo, cheddar and capsicum in that order and baked them for about 10 mins at 200°C.

Variations: You must be kidding if you need pointers for this. :)

Body Count: 1 chorizo

To top it off, I also made these Raspberry-Ginger crumbles just because. Except that I forgot to use fresh ginger instead of dried, so it just wasn't the same.

How to: (I didn't weigh anything, so these are just approximations) Mix 500g of raspberries with 150g of sugar and 2 - 3 teaspoons of very finely chopped ginger. Spoon into individual mini baking dishes or a big one and bake for 15 - 20 mins until some of the raspberry juice evaporates. Let it cool completely.

Crumble pastry: 2 parts flour to one part chilled butter and one part brown sugar, plus a few teaspoons of milk. Rub butter into flour, and when there are no more lumps of butter, add the sugar and continue rubbing until you obtain what looks like fine sand. Add milk 2 teaspoons at a time to create lumps in the pastry, but don't overdo it, or you'll end up with cookie dough!

Distribute pastry over the portions of raspberry-ginger mixture and bake at 180°C until golden.

Variations: I've done this with ripe pineapple and fresh ginger before, and it was awesome. In that case, prepare a caramel and cook finely-sliced pineapple in it. In the pastry, add desiccated coconut to complete the whole "tropical" get-up. Otherwise, I can't think of any fruit that won't be good in a crumble (whatever can be made into a jam should work in a crumble). Ginger can be replaced or complemented by all sorts of spices - cinnamon, cardamom, clove, Sichuan pepper, nutmeg, vanilla - you name it... If you're adventurous, replace half of the butter with an oil that can withstand high heat - hazelnut (I used some here), olive, walnut, sesame.

You don't necessarily have to cool the fruit mixture before adding the pastry. I just prefer to do it this way instead of having my pastry sink into the fruit juices and become an indistinguishable glob!

Body Count: 0

I never thought I'd see this day...

2007-02-15T23:43:00.000+01:00

Wow. This is what I call a breakthrough in my cooking and something for which I'm still deciding if I should pat my own back or sock my own left eye (there have been several of these pat or sock dilemmas in recent months, but will tell you about them when I make the dishes in question). For years, I'd been depriving myself of Lor Mee (literally meaning "soya sauce noodles") under the incredibly unambitious and idiotic impression that I *couldn't* replicate it here and shouldn't bother. Tzk tzk. People who say they *can't* do something without giving some thought to a try systematically irritate me so I suppose I had double standards when it came to myself, which is despicable, I concede. It's not entirely my fault, though. Throughout the years, I had attempted googling for a recipe, but the results only frustrated me by giving me addresses of where to get the best, but never how to make it.

All this talk is getting cheap, so let's see what a breakthrough looks like to me:

Summary: Egg noodles, thick brown gravy, fishcake, ngor hiang (spiced pork roll), hardboiled egg, raw crushed garlic and some serious posterior-denting chillli paste.

Some of you would know by now that I'm a Singaporean and have been living in France since 2001, so Singapore is where I discovered these noodles (I can't be an authority on where they came from). It took me time during my teenage years to warm up to Lor Mee, but when I started working, I gave it a second chance and thereupon renounced many other edible pleasures that I thought I'd enjoyed up until then. Ex-colleagues to whom I'd preached its virtues would tell you that I was crazed enough those days to totter on heels for almost a kilometre under the scorching equatorial sun at high noon to get a decent bowl of it, and sometimes return with packs of it for some of them. For those of you familiar with the area, I'd walk from my office in the old Supreme Court building, past Victoria Memorial Hall and Empress Place all the way to the 3rd floor of the Golden Shoe food centre, usually running faster up the stairs than the lift could take me!

What's all the hype about? you may pause to wonder... Until I finally succeeded in making it yesterday, I think the hype was really in the mystery shrouding the components of the gravy. I've eaten Lor Mee in tons of places all over Singapore and to my recollection, no two servings have ever tasted the same! In any typical book of Singapore recipes, you'll never find it, so I'm starting to think it's one of those things early settlers did with leftovers.

I made it with no real expectations of success, and originally wanted to make just a prawn stock. Remember, I had access to quite a lot of prawn shells this week and didn't feel like throwing away the shells unceremoniously. Besides, garbage collectors do go on strike here once in a while without warning, so if I had to dispose of prawn shells, I thought they'd definitely smell better in the trash cooked than raw.

So cook them I did, and I actually even forgot them on the stove and let a few of them burn. It was a very fortunate accident since that gave my stock a smoky taste.

How to: Gravy for 4 - 5 servings: Make about 2 litres of stock from shells obtained from about 1 kg of prawns by heating them in an empty casserole, then adding water when they turn orange. Boil shells for about half an hour. Turn off heat. Boil 4 eggs in a separate casserole, let them cool and peel them.

Add about 50 ml or more of dark soya sauce and 20ml of light soya sauce to the stock, as well as 4 cloves of garlic, 1 tsp of 5-spice powder and 2 tablespoons of black vinegar. Mix 3 tablespoons of cornstarch or potato starch with 1/2 a cup of water (stir if starch settles). Lightly beat an egg and set aside. Return stock to a boil, and when it bubbles, pour in the starch and water mixture and keep stiring to ensure that lumps of starch do not form. Pour in the beaten egg and stir. Add the hardboiled eggs.

Cook egg noodles according to the instructions on the package and divide them into individual portions. Pour gravy over the noodles, then add a hardboiled egg, slices of fishcake, minced pork roll, chilli paste and raw garlic. Add a splash of black vinegar if desired.

Fishcake and chilli paste can be found in most Asian grocery stores. As for the pork roll, I mixed 400g of minced pork with 1tsp of 5-spice powder, a handful of chopped coriander, 1 tbsp of potato starch, oyster sauce, white pepper and light soya sauce. Then I rolled a spoonful at a time in beancurd sheets and deep-fried the rolls.

Variations: In some of the places I've eaten this, fried fish bits, with or without batter, are added. Instead of sliced pork rolls, I've also seen pork balls made with just the stuffing. Some people add beansprouts or braised pork. Egg noodles can be replaced with rice vermicelli or wheat noodles.

Body Count: 0.5% of a whole pig, fishcake and maybe 100 prawnless shells.

Let's take another look, with a slight rotation of the bowl:

NOTE: I DO NOT STINK OF GARLIC BECAUSE I ALWAYS HAVE MINTS IN MY BAG. :)

PS: I'd meant to warn those of you who are adventurous enough to try this recipe that Lor Mee isn't something you should eat if you're dressed in white. :)

What to do with garlic & prawns

2007-02-11T18:21:00.000+01:00

Before this starts to look like a post with a theme, it is worth noting that it's inadvertent. When I buy something I like, I tend to buy in bulk and then wonder what to do with the excess. See, raw prawns are hard to find here, and where I usually get them, they are sold in either an 800g bag or a frozen block of 1.8kg, in both cases already headless. I don't think I need to state the obvious...

So you see, I can't extricate, say, 20 prawns from the frozen block and use the rest later, since they're all tightly packed in overlapping layers, making it necessary to thaw the whole block. As for the garlic part, I didn't notice it during the preparations, and it was only after I'd started sinking my teeth into my prawns that I realised ALL of them were basted in some way with garlic.

Typically, I prepare the 1.8kg of prawns in 3 different ways, one of which is almost always Black Pepper Prawns, with the shells on. Cutlery is not a recommended part of this experience, and is even frowned upon.

How to: Crush as much garlic as you want (I think I easily crushed 10 cloves) and crack as many black peppercorns as you can handle. Melt some butter over high heat, fry half of the garlic until it turns white, then add the pepper and fry for a few seconds. Add oyster sauce, light and dark soya sauces in equal parts. When the sauce starts bubbling, throw in the prawns and fry until they are cooked through. Add the other half of the garlic, stir and serve with rice.

Variations: Add red chilli if you like it fiery, or add all the garlic at the same time if you don't like it too pungent. Lobster or crabs instead of prawns.

Body Count: A lot

This is my first time making Lemongrass Prawns, but the baste is not new to me - I just habitually use it with chicken.

How to: Pound or blend 2 stalks of lemongrass with 3 shallots (or 1 onion), 1 chilli and 4 cloves of garlic to obtain a fine paste. Add 1/4 tsp salt and

1 Tbsp each of soy sauce, oyster sauce, fish sauce and honey. Put prawns and baste in a freezer bag and let it season for a few hours or overnight. Thread the prawns on a skewer and grill.

Variations: Chicken, beef or pork instead of prawns.

Body Count: A lot

Finally, one of my favourite recipes for getting rid of this bottle of nasty tequila I bought way back in 2003, with which I have trouble making real Margaritas. Well, I can make those margaritas, I just can't overcome what smells suspiciously like industrial alcohol, you know, the kind you get in antifreeze? I've yet to find a decent brand of tequila here, so in the meantime, I'll continue to make Margarita prawns:

How to: Mix equal parts of lime or lemon juice, orange juice and tequila with 4 crushed cloves of garlic, 2 green chillis or jalapenos (finely minced), 1/2 a cup of chopped coriander, 1 tsp salt and 1 tsp cumin. Pour into a freezer bag with the prawns and season for a few hours. I left them overnight, and the lemon juice half-cooked the prawns, thus shortening their oven sentence.

Variations: Use Triple Sec instead of orange juice.

Body Count: A lot!

(Hey Trupti & Sandeepa, should have done this earlier, for Independence Day! :) Look at those colours!)

Like shooting fish in a barrel

2007-02-08T16:06:00.000+01:00

My suspicions that Saturday's output would go to seed midway during the week were indeed founded. After having squirrelled away most of the vadai into the freezer before the encroachment of surfeit (one of my regular visitors), I realised that my kala channa masala and aloo gobhi weren't very salty and could thus be eaten on their own without rice or roti. The result? A fridge that emptied itself sooner than my legs could regain their feeling. *Shilpa continues to box her calves*

Mercifully, while making space in the freezer for the vadai, I came across some salmon filets and made a mental note to cast them somewhere in my weekly list of dishes to cook.

OK, here's a poll - I'd like to know how many of you are as geeky as I am : every Monday, I look through my fridge and pantry and actually sit down to draft 3 separate dated lists (make that 4 if I'm buying Asian ingredients) - what leftovers there are to finish and the estimated number of servings (1), what I feel like eating next (2) and what needs to be bought (3 - 4). Logically, the longer List (1) is, the shorter will be Lists (2) and (3) for the week. List (3) relies heavily on List (2) which in turn relies on my imagination. Not something I have heaps of at the start of a week!

Whatever glowing remarks my friends and bosses past and present have to make about me, they'd hardly include "organisation". Ever. So it might come as a surprise (not to mention mild outrage) to them that I make this much effort for something as ephemeral as food. Hey, a girl's got to have priorities, right? :)

Well, List (1) was pretty paltry by Tuesday, so I had no choice but to quickly fill in List (2) and came up with a fuss-free way of using salmon - in a one-dish meal I can say was one of the first things I learned how to make after leaving the roost - Salmon Kedgeree.

How to: Cook about 2 cups of rice (Basmati or Thai) to get a kilo of cooked rice and set aside. Rub salt onto all the surfaces of 2 large salmon filets and let them season for about half an hour. Boil 4 eggs, then shell and chop them.

Fry salmon filets in hot oil (enough to cover the base of the pan) until they brown then roughly flake the flesh with a fork and set aside. Using the same oil, fry some crushed garlic and chilli or curry powder to taste until garlic softens, then add rice, 1 tsp salt (if necessary) and 1 cup of chopped parsley. Mix well, then add salmon flakes and eggs. Heath through and serve.

The cut green chilli tucked away in the corner just serves to feed my current addiction, so don't mind me!

Variations: Smoked salmon, salt cod, trout, haddock or any other firm salted fish. Coriander or dill to replace the parsley. Lentils with the rice.

Body Count: 2 salmon filets

WFF 2 - Take my pulse!

2007-02-04T14:37:00.000+01:00

Last weekend's feeding frenzy (hereinafter known as "WFF") so effectively lived up to its name that not only did I not have to cook at all during the week, I also had several choices and didn't let anything go bad! In my speak, that is quite an achievement for someone who habitually cooks for 6 when there are just 2, who has trouble eating the same food more than twice in a row, and who has a small appetite at mealtime from all the surreptitious snacking... What confounds me, though, is how I spent so little time and energy getting so much variety.

Alas, it was not to be this weekend... I definitely feel a varicose vein snaking up my calf from all that hovering over the stove, and I'm not even sure I WON'T have to cook during the week.

Legumes (pulses, geddit? heh heh) were on my agenda when I went shopping on Thursday, and my collection now includes kala channa (brown chickpeas), toor dal (pigeon peas) and urad dal (black gram/mung beans), which I recently discovered were available in my area.

Urad dal is the main ingredient in vadai, a savoury fritter in South Indian cooking, flavoured with onions, curry leaves, ginger and green chilli:

Not contented with just the usual coconut chutney (seen here in the white triangular receptacle), I also paired my vadai with a Kerala-style kala channa masala, a striking curry of unskinned chick peas, fresh grated coconut and a wonderfully fragrant combination of spices.

What better way to wash it down than with some potent adrak chai (ginger tea)?

It probably doesn't look like much, but this meal alone had a total of three items I made from scratch, and that was all I was able to cough up for Saturday's dinner.. I'd made a couple of other curries by then, but any curry worthy of such a name should only be consumed by earliest the day after...

I'm ashamed of this half-hearted attempt at a masala thosai below, another South Indian favourite, but I'll publish it all the same.. a decent thosai you get outside is not supposed to collapse like mine in the picture! *sheepish grin* Anyhow... it was filled with a potato and onion curry, accompanied by the ubiquitous coconut chutney and a mound of aloo gobhi (potato and cauliflower curry), which happens to be Punjabi and out of place here, but I added it for colour and good measure. :)

Since I was planning to wake up just in time for brunch on Sunday, before I snuggled under my comforter on Saturday night, I prepared a bread and butter pudding with walnut bread, jam, raisins, dried apricots and leftover coconut. Then I beat some eggs with milk, sugar and a good dose of kirsch, and let the bread sit in it until Sunday morning. I used to hate soggy bread, or the mere thought of it, but strangely, I find it easy to forget it's bread in puddings like these!

As for the pick-me-up, I could not decide between Olive Sencha...

(yes, green tea with dried olive bits! Tastes exactly like olive oil, but lighter)

...Hattiali, an Assam brew, apparently so strong that the guy who sold it to me repeatedly warned me "Uniquement le matin!" ("to be consumed only in the morning!") with a wag of the finger...

...or Maharajah, a blend of fine Indian teas from Mariage Frères, my favourite for making a simple version of masala chai with just cardamom, cinnamon and black pepper.

Conclusion: Hattiali meets Maharajah (with store-bought paal kova)! :)

How to: I suggest googling for these recipes, especially the curries! They're so much work, I'm surprised anyone even opens restaurants serving them! :)

Body Count: 0 - Everything except the bread and butter pudding (which contains eggs and milk) is vegan.

I'm IT!

2007-02-02T10:37:00.001+01:00

I had the honour of being tagged by Stefanie of Cumin & Coriander for the "5 Things Most People Don't Know About me" meme, and I must admit, this one's going to be harder than making my own puff pastry from scratch (which I've been too chicken to attempt at all)! What my friends know, my family probably doesn't, and what my colleagues know, my friends probably don't! So let me compile what I think are my best-kept secrets (or simply things I'd never found the occasion to bring up in a conversation)..

1. For all the junk I'm often seen eating and the sporadic exercise I deign to take part in, I definitely deserve to be obese, but am about 20kg/44lbs short (my secret is water, darlings, not genes or high metabolism, mind you). What most people don't know is that I'm NOT a calorie counter, carb hater, additive & artifical colouring & flavouring detractor, etc.. I am at peace with my food, even if it's blue and resembles a WC-scouring tablet. I read labels, just out of curiosity (and to learn my ingredients in foreign languages), and used to have a reputation for living by toffee alone and sucking on so many Sweetarts (see link) that my tongue and/or palate would start to bleed. Sorry, I know that's sick, but it's the whole truth! :)

2. I still don't have my driver's licence despite an embarrassing number of lessons, and aim to FINALLY get it this year. I panicked during my first attempt almost 2 years ago, making stupid obvious mistakes I ordinarily wouldn't have made, and cried like a baby all the way home because I couldn't understand what came over me. I'm usually a cool cucumber with a "chalta hai" (can do) attitude, but the feeling of not being able to succeed no matter how hard I tried was very humbling!

3. When I was 12, I wanted to break the world record for longest fingernails, so I decided to stop cutting them despite my teachers' repeated warnings and threats following complaints from classmates who got scratched. I lovingly measured them each week, but never got past 5 cm for a single finger because they kept chipping. Damn it, nothing ever seems to go my way!

4. Please, I need someone to explain this to me: Even though he has waxed armpits, there aren't many films he's acted in that I can safely say I liked and he's received lots of bad press for boorish behaviour, Salman Khan remains my idea of a hunk. Expert opinion welcome !

5. Shilpa is not my real name, but you'll have to be really nice for me to tell you what it is! :)

I'm relatively new to blogging, so I'll have a shorter list of people to tag:

Sandeepa of Bong Mom's Cookbook

Bee of Rasa Malaysia

Keropok Man of Singapura Daily Photo

Quick, tell us your secrets!!

Weekend Feeding Frenzy, Part 1 / many

2007-01-30T23:44:00.000+01:00

We're currently going through a slow period at work and more than once a day I'd wish I could use some of the time I'm forced to be in the office to skin and chop my vegetables or to knead my own pastry. What I now qualify as torture is having too much time to surf lots of food porn with at best, Pringles, Coke and candy to quell the lust. My frustration is further compounded by my frequent inability to upload or save posts at work, so I have to resort to writing drafts by e-mail and posting when I get home. Grrrr..

Much as I enjoy cooking (possibly as much as eating my own creations), I also have my hands full with a darling but stubborn 3 1/2-year-old who still insists on eating bottled mash, and a self-replenishing stack of Hindi movies that beckons, so cooking every day while holding a full-time job is out of the question. :) Fortunately I have recourse to things like weekends and a freezer!

This past weekend I acquired a new toy - a mini kougelhopf mould, thus dictating the production of a batch. But a batch of what? I'd been itching for the longest time to use a can of crabmeat, so the canful became crab cakes with a well in the centre that I'd felt compelled to fill up with ketchup and mayonnaise. C'était plus fort que moi!

How to: I beat about 100g of crab tarama with 2 eggs, 2 tablespoonsful of flour, 100g of cream, salt and pepper and gently folded in the crabmeat after draining it. Oh yes, I almost forgot to add that they had to be baked - the usual, 180°C, 20 mins or so.

Variations: Other kinds of tarama, the addition of herbs, replacement of crab meat with other flaked fish.

Body Count: Several, I fear.

Next!

I had a packet of filo pastry to use, and while buying the mould, bought a packet of frozen ready-to-use pearl onions, specifically for this caramelised onion and garlic tart:

This is an adaptation of a recipe from The Onion Cookbook by Brian Glover, which suggested this as a tatin, and with puff pastry. Using filo definitely wasn't a mistake, though. In fact it seemed lighter and less work this way!

How to: Fry 500g of pearl onions (or sliced onions) with cloves from 2 bulbs of garlic (try to keep them whole, or at least the same size as the onions) in some butter until onions are translucent. Sprinkle 1 - 2 tbsp of sugar and cook until sugar caramelises, then add 2 - 3 tbsp of balsamic vinegar, 50ml of water and thyme to taste. Continue cooking until garlic is soft enough to mash with a spoon.

For the filo, fold in the edges until the sheet is 1/3 of its original width to obtain a band. Brush 1/4 of the band with oil and spread grated parmesan onto the oiled surface. Fold pastry over the parmesan and repeat by greasing each upper surface and adding parmesan until you obtain 4 layers. Top off with a layer of caramelised garlic and onions, and bake for about 15 minutes at 180°C.

Variations: For a vegan version, omit parmesan and reduce the number of folds.

Body Count: 0

Lastly... a combination of the two very elements I consume in borderline abusive proportions - tea eggs!

The amusing thing about tea eggs is that I'd never eaten them prior to this, for a combination of reasons despite having known for years that they exist. A quick trip through Melting Wok's blog made it clear how easy they are to make, that they are delicious and definitely not medicinal, as was my previous persuasion. :)

How to: Boil the number of eggs you need for about 5 minutes (from the time the water starts boiling) then plunge them in cold water and crack the shells all over with the back of a spoon to get the veiny look above. Make tea with enough water to submerge the eggs, 1 tsp of salt, 2 tbsp of strong tea, 3 green cardamom pods and 1 star anise (I didn't have any, so used 6 cloves). Boil over low heat for 1 hour or more.

Variations: I added dark soya sauce to the tea for a darker colour, not sure if it's the norm but they tasted alright.

Body Count: 0

PS: I made much more than these over the weekend, I just couldn't find a flattering angle for the dishes that haven't been showcased here - bread and butter pudding, gnocchis with bacon + cheddar + beer and eggplant parmigiana. Photography tips are welcome! :)

Another way with eggs

2007-01-26T17:35:00.001+01:00

I shan't kid anyone into thinking I just made these, because those of you with eagle eyes would have spied a corner of this dish lurking in the background in the photos of my leek & gouda tart. Anyhow, the gaudy colours and sunny flavours of these tomatoes-doubling-as-pots make it easy to forget it's winter, so I'd like to do my bit of public service by posting this photo.

There are no rules on what should go into the tomato, so mine is but an example. Origins unknown, so they'll be classified under the convenient label "Fusion" for now. :)

How to: Remove the cores and seeds of 6 giant tomatoes, and keep the tops and flesh if you wish to, but be careful not to pierce the walls of the tomatoes, especially if they're very ripe. Coat the walls of the hollowed-out tomatoes with salt then turn them upside down to drain for at least half an hour (the longer the better).

Dice a medium onion, a green capsicum (I hate the sweetness of red ones) and tomato cores (if using) and crush several cloves of garlic (they lose their zing after cooking, so I don't see the difference between 1 and 10). Slice up a chorizo or cut into cubes and microwave for a minute or heat in a saucepan to remove excess oil. Heat some oil and fry the onion until it gets translucent, then add capsicum, tomatoes and garlic. Cook for about 10 minutes, then add enough white wine or Martini Bianco to cover, and let it simmer for another 10 - 15 minutes, then add salt and pepper to taste.

Rinse the tomatoes if necessary and arrange in a deep dish. Preheat oven to 180°C, then proceed to fill the tomatoes halfway with the vegetable mixture, then top off with chorizo cubes. If there's excess stuffing and chorizo, fill in the gaps between the tomatoes like I did. Bake until the chorizo sizzles, then crack an egg over each tomato. Continue to bake until the eggs cook according to your preference.

Variations: Olives, rice, zucchini, bulghur, raisins, dried apricots or dried figs can be used to retain that Mediterranean feel. Otherwise, the possibilities are endless! Anything that can fit into a tomato can and should be tested!

Body Count: 1 whole horseshoe chorizo.

Beaten, not shirred

2007-01-25T19:14:00.000+01:00

How do I even begin to describe my relationship with eggs in a few words? "Love" is a derisory litotes, for this flog would not even have come into being without the inspiration afforded by these versatile little ovoids we tend to take for granted. (I know someone out there who doesn't!)

Gratitude and dependency are closer to my true sentiments, which can be expressed as less than 3 eggs left in the fridge = panic. My regular purchases of eggs don't necessarily intersect with an intention to realise specific dishes, but materialise they do whenever eggs abound.

Given that they are sold in cartons of 6, 12, 20 or 24, and the intimidating thought of lugging groceries tens of metres through a hypermarket more than once a week after a trying day at work, 6 seem ridiculous, so I usually go for 12 or 20 depending on how many are still chilling at home. I don't know why it's not the case everywhere, but eggs here have their use-by dates printed on their shells. How neat!

Anyway, when I awoke with a start the day before the last 7 eggs in my fridge were due to "expire" (not one to tolerate wastage, I do lose sleep over how to use my eggs on time!), I agonised for the longest time on whether to make several crèmes brûlées, thus using all the yolks. But there was a mega hitch - I couldn't decide beween liquorice, lemongrass and chicory. That also meant finding some other solution for the remaining 7 whites - macarons or soufflés or angel cake? They all sounded wonderful to eat but unequivocally nightmarish to prepare and I couldn't decide either. All I was sure of was that I wasn't in the mood to slave, so finally settled on making these - flourless hazelnut Moëlleux au chocolat that used up all 7 yolks and whites!

Makes 10 small or 6 biggish ones.

How to: If making 6, grease 6 ramekins and dust with icing sugar (or flour). Preheat the oven to 180°C. Melt 200g of good dark chocolate with 100g of butter in a bain-marie (double-boiler) until the mixture is smooth. Beat 6 large or 7 small eggs with 100g of sugar and 6-8 tablespoons of hazelnut meal (which replaces the flour), then pour in chocolate-butter mixture and mix well. Pour into ramekins and bake for 25 minutes if you want a liquid centre or 35 - 45 minutes if you're concerned about salmonella. Turn out and serve.

Variations: Replace hazelnut meal with same amount of almond meal, or 3 tablespoons of flour. If flour is used, put ramekins in the fridge for half and hour or so to ensure liquid centre, then preheat the oven to 180°C 10 minutes before baking, and bake for 10 - 15 minutes. For solid centres, 25 minutes should be sufficient.

Body Count: 0

It's all in the sauce

2007-01-22T17:27:00.001+01:00

This is the third and last installation of my cabbage trilogy. Sniff sniff. (No, don't, if you know what's good for you! ;-) ) I couldn't think of anything more dignified than Okonomiyaki for the final send-off.

According to my Japanese brother-in-law, "okonomi" means "whatever you want", and "yaki" means "grilled", and I suppose it does look that way. The good thing about batter is its ability to disguise and surprise. If only he'd told me the meaning of the word before I made them and sent him the photos, because I sure would have preferred something bolder than the minced turkey I had on hand, I just didn't want to err.

Actually, the problem was not so much reticence towards my other options as the dreadful realisation that I was down to my last pack of flour mix and last half-bottle of okonomiyaki sauce, so I had to get it right (if there's a right and wrong to such things)!

How to: If you don't have an okonomiyaki flour mix like I did, don't despair. 250g or so of plain wheat flour with a bit of cornflour and salt or a few drops of Japanese soya sauce easily do the trick. However, if you don't have the sauce, scrap your plans. :) The only "Western" sauce to my knowledge that tastes really close is Marks & Spencer's Brown Sauce, which the label recommends for bacon sandwiches. Do not follow the crowd.

To make 5 single servings, finely slice about a third or quarter of a cabbage and set aside. Mix flour with its weight in water, add 3 eggs and beat to kill off all lumps. Chop whatever meat or seafood you wish to add, and start heating some oil. Fry the cabbage until it wilts and loses some of its volume, then add the meat and cook through. Pour enough batter to just cover the base of the pan and scramble, then press down the pancake with the back of the spoon/spatula/cooking utensil. When batter is crisp, flip the pancake over and cook the other side until it is charred and crisp, too.

Slather with a generous amount of Okonomiyaki sauce and mayonnaise and sprinkle shredded roasted seaweed, bonito flakes and dried young ginger.

I ran out of the squeeze-bottle Kewpie Japanese mayonnaise and had to use French mayonnaise, which as you can see is yellower, due to the addition of mustard. Just as delectable! Had no bonito flakes and dried ginger, unfortunately.

Variations: Halve the amount of cabbage and replace with onions, add octopus and/or ham and/or bacon and/or shrimp and/or pork, etc. Anything goes! I ran out of turkey for the 5th pancake and it was just cabbage and batter. Tasted just as good!

Body count: 1/2 turkey breast.

Copycat cuisine Part II: A Little Kraut Goes a Long Way

2007-01-20T12:59:00.000+01:00

Let me clarify a few things here.. When I say "copycat", it doesn't mean that the recipes in this blog that are not labelled "copycats" are my concoctions.. ;-) It's just that given my proclivity to experimentation or simply my mood-driven cooking, most dishes I turn out eventually do not resemble the recipes I'd intended to follow. This is often due to the substitution or blatant omission of certain ingredients, and this in turn has a variety of reasons - can't find them here, don't have them on me and must at all costs make the dish NOW, or I just don't like them and think the dish would fare better without them. Isn't that what enjoying food is about anyway? :)

So, having bought a whole cabbage for my Sayur Lodeh the other day, and having used only a third of it, I was stuck with the other 2/3 without a prior Plan B and C. I had already thought of making Okonomiyaki, a Japanese stuffed pancake, but that would also require just a third of the cabbage. I was in the mood for something spicy and colourful, so took a peek at Naughty Curry. The fact that they had a cabbage listing totally won me over, so here is my adaptation of their Sunset Cabbage Strips!

Confession time - I didn't have urad dal and curry leaves on me, so I did without them. Instead I sprinkled chopped coriander leaves when the dish was done. I liked the dish all the same!

Variations: This is already a variation. :) Wouldn't dare to tamper further with it.

Body Count: 0

Growin' up is hard to do...

2007-01-18T14:52:00.000+01:00

Hi people,

I'd like to upload something today, but turning 30 has kind of killed my appetite and capacity for whipping up something decent. And also, my fridge is uncharacteristically deserted.. :(

Will be back once I get the groceries!

S

Copycat cuisine Part I : Nut allergy alert!

2007-01-15T22:52:00.000+01:00

The credit for this one goes to Cumin & Coriander. Rarely do I follow a recipe to the letter, but this one seemed an original combination of some of my individually favourite ingredients, so I tried my best to be obedient.

Of course, those who know me know there's no such thing as "enough" garlic, so I went on a spree with it, and the vegetable oil I used for the garlic-chilli dressing was peanut oil since the highlight of the sauce for the pasta was peanut butter (why do things halfway, right?).

Ordinarily, I'd have reached for olive oil (ho-hum) without a second thought but now that the big 3-0 looms large, I alternate between feeling anxious, reckless and blasée. In short, I urgently needed to be surprised, even in a bad way, so peanut oil it was. And a surprise I got indeed!

I'll confess I was prepared for the worst, and was even reluctant to sit down and eat, buying time taking pictures and fussing over my hair, hoping a dingo would come and carry the noodles away. When I finally reminded myself that I'd sought to inflict the surprise on myself in the first place, I grudgingly poked a forkful of spaghetti into my mouth... Whoa! Did I get that right? I had to have a second forkful to believe it! The richness of the peanut butter was unexpectedly welcome, but nonetheless easily offset by the piquancy of the chilli and garlic. Perfecting the balance of sweet+salty+spicy isn't always a given, but I managed to and it was purely divine. And that was when the noodles were already cold! I can't imagine how I'd have gagged in pleasure had I eaten them hot off the stove!

This is definitely a dish that will make repeat appearances on my table! Thanks, Stefanie (if you're reading this)!

Variations: I'm sure asparagus would be just as gag-inducing. Just guessing, though, since this is my very first time making this.

Body count: 7 shrimp in this picture

P.S.: I happened to pair this with my last glass of Retsina from the bottle, and it also turned out to be a pleasant surprise!

Eating a salad with less mess

2007-01-11T22:38:00.000+01:00

Is an explanation even necessary for this one? ;-)

Anything that can be consumed as a crudité can be folded into a flour tortilla (I find corn tortillas less pliable) इस तरह से (is tarah se - in this way) and dressed with a vinaigrette of choice, either within the roll itself or on the exposed cross-sections. Or, if you tend to make up for the lack of calories in the worst imaginable way as I sometimes do (no, I do not wonder why I can't seem to lose that last kilo), why not dump a tubful of cocktail sauce or some other member of of the same whisked egg yolk + mustard + oil family? Sin by all means! *evil grin*

Vegetables used in this picture: thin beetroot slices, coarsely shredded raw carrots and lettuce leaves. The dressing had shallot bits, yogurt, red wine vinegar, salt & pepper, olive oil, lemon juice and mustard.

Variations : my other favourite combination is rocket + grilled capsicum + sundried tomatoes + parmesan, but almost anything goes!

Body count: 0

Sayur sorry you missed my Sayur Lodeh

2007-01-10T12:54:00.000+01:00

There is something deeply gratifying about coming home to a warm stew on a rainy winter night, and all the more so when the ingredients needn't be cooked to a pallid sodden shadow of what they were before they left the grocer's custody. When the calorie count is inversely proportional to its come-hither index, you know this one's a keeper!

That's what I thought when I had my bowl of Sayur Lodeh:

Frankly, I'm no authority on whether it should be considered a curry or a stew, if these are even mutually exclusive food groups. The flavour is evocative of a curry, but the cooking method is what I'd term stewing. At the verge of a boil, carrots, string beans and cabbage (in that order, since carrots take a notoriously long time to cook) are plonked into the fragrant curry thickened with just enough coconut milk to make the broth translucent. The whole vat should then simmer until the vegetables just start to lose their crunch.

Fried tofu squares and softened glass noodles are added towards the end as well as more coconut milk if desired. I'd like to say "Serve immediately", but as with all curried things, I'm often inclined to let Sayur Lodeh sit around and age so that the vegetables imbibe the character of the curry and shed some of their inherent individual flavours. If you live in a tropical climate, do let it sit in the fridge. 2 days is my minimum prescription.

How to: I'm not sure everyone has patience for this. Write me! :) I'm still trying to work out the shortcuts!

Variations: Adding cakes of compacted rice (called ketupat in Malay) turn this into a one-dish meal, and transforms its name to Lontong. Hard-boiled eggs and shrimp go quite well with it, too.

Body count: probably 20 or more tiny prawns perished to provide a tablespoonful of belachan for flavouring the curry.

This, I can make at home, for nut-Hing!

2007-01-05T19:44:00.000+01:00

For those of you who know the BBC comedy series Goodness Gracious Me, you will know who says this so convincingly! If you're only getting initiated today, you will hear this sentence being uttered in the first skit, by the adorable little matriarch (and also towards the middle of the 10-minute video - Youtube is a boon!).

The same can be said of what I made over the weekend.. paal kova, an Indian sweetmeat with milk as its main ingredient, using a recipe from one of my dear friends (you know who you are :) ).

Unfortunately, overconfidence got the better of me. While I remembered the main ingredients being milk powder, ghee and sugar, in 2, 3 and 6 tablespoonsful, you guessed it, I mismatched the ingredients and quantities!

I now believe 2 should have been for the ghee, 3 for sugar and 6 for milk powder. I got the ghee and sugar mixed up, so while I didn't mind my paal kova with less sugar, I was disappointed that it got crumbly since I had to add more milk powder to absorb the oil, and subsequently real milk to curb the crumbling. My nose told me to add cardamom, and who would have thought? Friability aside, it tasted pretty much like what I wanted it to - the ones I usually buy by the kilo (at roughly 17€ a kilo) from Ganesha Sweets in Paris (16 r Perdonnet)! I can make it at home! For nut-Hing!

How to: Melt 2 tablespoonsful of ghee (or butter, but unsalted, and don't let it burn), add 1/2 a teaspoon of ground cardamom, 3 tablespoonsful of sugar, then 6 moderately-heaped tablespoonsful of milk powder, one at a time. Remove from heat and mix well, then put in moulds. Cut up into squares. Makes about 8 squares.

Variations: Add chopped pistachioes, cashews or any other nuts. Saffron, ginger or cinnamon to replace the cardamom. Very thin sheets of silver or gold leaves are also used to decorate these sweetmeats on special occasions.

Body count: 0 (assuming no cows died during milking!)

A couple of gems

2007-01-05T11:07:00.001+01:00

I hadn't paid Thomas Green a visit for months, but needed a Dr Pepper fix the other day, and found other rare treats...

On any given day, I wouldn't mind a handful of Maltesers, but I'm a total sucker for anything that looks like a new snack on the market (even if that means a minor twist to an old snack or new packaging), so the fact that White Maltesers found its way into my basket was purely mechanical. No complaints, but I doubt it'll take off. The malt ball doesn't taste all that different from the white chocolate coating, so the lack of contrast may disappoint some.

Horlicks was something I grew up with, but apart from Thomas Green's, the only other place I can find it in these parts is at an Asian grocery store. For me, Horlicks isn't merely a wholesome beverage, but something to roll other food in. I don't remember when I hit on the idea, but I used to cut up bananas into bite-sized pieces and roll them in Horlicks. Since the slightest hint of moisture makes Horlicks cake up, you can imagine the monster snowballs I can make with these banana bouchées!

The mince pies were an afterthought. The purchase had nothing to do with fondness, but rather nostalgia for the good old days when Marks and Spencer had an outlet here. Paid for it with a terrible toothache! Aie! Do they have to be packed with so much sugar?

Body Count: 1 - me :)

No cheese please, we're Chinese

2007-01-03T15:44:00.000+01:00

Welcome to my blog everyone!

Before the little I've written so far has any capacity to cause any bristling within any ethnic community, this is just my attempt at a food blog (flog). Since I live in France, and English is the language in which I express myself best, the name came to me naturally, being a take on the Frog & Rosbif pub in Paris, which is iconic to me in the way of intercultural harmony. I mean, two former colonial rivals comfortable enough with each other to name a pub thus without either item actually being on the menu? (frog - what the English call the French for their appreciation of frogs' legs; rosbif [roast beef] - what the French call the English for preferring their steaks well done)

Which makes me wonder about inverse food discrimination - name-calling based on things you don't eat... Maybe I live in a sheltered world, but I've yet to hear of a nickname for someone who doesn't like a certain kind of food. Here in Lille, I sometimes get second looks. Alas, it's not because I'm traffic-stopping material (well, depends on how desperate the traffic is, I guess), but the friendly ones will tell me that they don't often see Asians in cheese shops, much less cheese in Asian chops! Why's that? The rot (think roquefort, stilton, fourmes d'ambert and gorgonzola)? The smell (maroilles, Vieux Lille)? The lactose intolerance (all of the above?)? I couldn't tell them either! I'm in it for the taste, and perhaps subconsciously for the calcium, but that's all I can münster...

It never crosses my mind to look out for other Asians during my ruminations in the expansive cheese aisles, but for this very first post, I'd like to sign off with 2 pictures of my leek & gouda tart.

How to: Sautée about 1 kg of leek in salted butter until limp and set aside to cool. Dress a pie dish with a sheet of pastry (when I do make my own, it's with a mixture of flour and polenta, which never gets soggy!), garnish with leek, add cubed gouda (I used cumin gouda for this one), then pour over a mixture of egg and cream (2 eggs for every 150g of cream? it's all a matter of preference, less cream for a firmer tart) and bake in a pre-heated oven at 180°C for 30 minutes or so.

Variations: Blue cheese works just as well!

Body count: 0 (the eggs weren't going to hatch into anything anyway)