Bar None

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:

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.

New Year, old habits

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!

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!

One and the same salmon

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!

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 parmentier 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

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?? :)