Tussles with mussels

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.

One in the oven

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! :)

South-bound and spell-bound!

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!

WFF 10 - On a bittersweet note...

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!

Easter WFF Part 2 - Not just my stuff

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?? :)

Unwitting WFF 8 - Cooking like clockwork

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

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!