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!

CTK chronicles

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.

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!

Jo bhi bane gobhi...

(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

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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

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!

WFF 7 - Muzzle up!

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

A Very Humble Offering

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

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