Kaya, Made with Love

So the other day I was with my grandmother, learning how to make kaya from the very best. I had an afternoon off and we had fixed this appointment earlier.

In the morning, I went with my dad to the wet market, getting the requisite ingredients for this coconut custard / egg jam that is so dearly loved in this part of the world. My grandma specifically requested for coconut milk, the freshly squeezed kind, not the off-the-shelf packets that are much more accessible. That vital ingredient was not available in the wet markets in my neighbourhood, so I said with great bravado, "Why not buy 3 freshly grated coconuts instead? I'll squeeze them!!" and so my grandma said "very well, you shall squeeze."

So I went to her place and realised that the recipe called for 4 coconuts... She bought 1 grated coconut already. Her original intention was to have the milk of 3 coconuts, and the 4th coconut was to be squeezed with grounded pandan leaves to extract the fragrance and flavour of the pandan. Oh, so it's 4 coconuts I'm squeezing. Very well, it shouldn't be too difficult.

By the 3rd coconut, my fingers were fixed into a clawing position and could not readily straighten. When I was done, my hands were stiff and sore, and I was crying out for mercy. My grandma simply laughed and me, and my mum gloated and said "when grandma asks for squeezed coconuts, listen to her, she knows better." Squeezing coconuts truly isn't a piece of cake.

Kaya making is labour and time intensive, but the taste of home-made kaya is so worth it. Best to do it with someone you love =) Then at least the time spent will be enjoyable ; ) This recipe is the old school way of doing it, I'm sure that a quick google search will churn out more convenient and fuss free ways of getting this done. Enjoy!

****
Ingredients:
- Milk of 3 coconuts
- 1 freshly grated coconut
- 2 small bundles of pandan leaves
- 15 small eggs
- 800g brown sugar
- 1tbs potato starch

1. Pulse 1 bundle of the pandan leaves in a blender until fine. Mix it in with the grated coconut, squeeze to extract milk and juice. Mix with the other coconut milk, strain it (Grandma says, important to strain it otherwise the loose bits of coconut in the milk will mess the texture).

2. Whisk the eggs and sugar together by hand, in 1 direction only (Grandma says, do not change directions halfway as it won't be as smooth. Grandma also says, whisking by machine produces too much bubbles and makes it harder to steam later. Grandma is wise, do as she says) for 30min until all sugar has dissolved. My arms nearly dropped off, but hey, no pain no gain.

3. Slowly add the strained coconut and pandan mixture to the egg mixture. Whisk for another 15min.

4. Put the mixture in a double boiler and continue to whisk in the same direction until the mixture starts to thicken to the consistency of cream, about 20min.

5. Dissolve the potato starch in water, add into mixture. Stir some more.

6. Add the 2nd small bundle of pandan leaves into the mixture. Stir some more. about 20min.

7. After the mixture thickens to a consistency of a gravy, cover the double boiler and leave it to heat for 1 hour, stirring maybe once in that hour.

8. After 1 hour, remove the container and portion out the kaya according to your relatives and friends =) I had 7 bottles portioned out. Nice =D

For a much easier recipe that doesn't involve stirring for hours over a hot stove, do check out this link: http://thelazychef.wordpress.com/2006/09/02/nonya-kaya/

=D

Weekend Baking Part Deux

I had a list of recipes to try out over the weekend, but decided to not be overly ambitious when I'm baking to give away. I needed to bake 2--1 for my family gathering on Sunday, and another for Intuition's family when I join them for the Mother's Day lunch celebrations. During times like that, you simply have to resort to tried and tested recipes.

I baked 2 orange cakes on Saturday mornings and things went well... I ran out of self raising flour and found a jar of flour at home, leftover from one of my brother's cooking projects. Just to be sure, I asked him,"Eh, confirm this is multi-purpose flour har? Not corn flour right?" He said "yah yah confirm chopped guarantee, it's multi purpose flour". Satisfied, I added half a cup of that flour for the cake.

After baking the cakes and going about my tasks for the rest of the day, I decided to end the day with an attempt at baking cookies. Cookies seem easy enough, going by all accounts of the online reviews for a recipe I had in mind. Pour everything in a bowl, mix, bake for 10min. Easy peasy, and I'd be done within 30min. Cool.

30 min later, I was still figuring out the measurements of the cookies.

45 min later, I managed to get 2 trays into the oven.

55 min later, I stared at the tray where the cookies have expanded and melded into one another, forming a nice bulbous cookie sheet. Sigh. Well nevermind, I'm sure they'll taste great, as the online reviews have promised. I took it out and let it cool for a while before breaking a bit off the cookie sheet. The texture looked dodgy, but maybe the taste test will prove it otherwise. *Munch munch*

The taste was great--intensely chocolatey and not too sweet. Delish. But the texture... it's both too dry and too soggy, if there's such a thing. The edges were almost powdery, the centre portions are soft and malleable... it doesn't hold a shape at all. *Downcast* Man oh man... I can't even get a simple drop cookie right. Everyone else said it's easy, but why does mine end up so disastrous? What a perfect waste of sugar and butter. So sad.

My brother came home and laughed at my baking failure (reminder to self: failure is an event, not a person. Repeat.) and took a bite... like a shining beacon of light, he said "the taste is not bad! not bad at all... just that the texture a bit wrong. I'll eat it for breakfast." and I said "Oh thank you thank you... please help me eat up my baking tragedy, I'm so grateful."

This morning, I whined to my brother "Sigh, there must be something wrong with the ingredients. I followed the recipe quite faithfully leh... You know, the flour looks strange to me. You sure it's multi purpose flour?" He thought about it, and declared "You know you're right! IT IS CORN FLOUR!"

...

My cakes had a bit of corn flour in them. One cake went to my family gathering--a family of food snobs, and another went to Intuition's family. The family took a look at my cake and commented that it's sunken, it's a bit more dense, etc... I don't know what to say, except to glare at my brother each time a negative comment came my way. He even had the cheek to say "It's the baker's fault!"

May I just reiterate the fact that my brother is a doofus.

Simple Pleasures in Life: Weekend Baking

I love weekends. I love my Saturdays, especially if I have absolutely nothing on. Then I can proceed to fill it up anyway I like! Tomorrow is one such day, and I'm looking forward to doing some baking in the morning.

Baking is something I'm very new to. The first time I did anything like baking was at a friend's place where she attempted to teach Intuition and I how to bake her famous brownie... and somehow, I managed to underbake it by quite a lot. The first time I did a baking project by myself was an attempt at an orange cake... the recipe called for "melted butter" so I went ahead and... melted the butter to liquid form. That's melted butter, right? Right? How come the cake never rose, ever? How come the cake, no matter how long I bake it, is still so soggy inside? Fail.

Last weekend, I tasted success by NOT melting the butter (it's just softened), and the cake rose beautifully, tasted wonderfully orangey and is yummilicious. Yum. I want another one.

This weekend, since it's the Mother's day weekend, I'll probably bake two for the lovely ladies in my family--my grandma, my aunt and my mum. They've fed me well and have pampered me in different ways through the years, so it's payback time ; ) I hope there's enough to go around!

The picture above is a delicious chocolate cake that my aunt specializes in. On my birthday last year, my mother was asking if I'd like to buy a cake from Awfully Chocolate or Lana Cakes. I was like "... can I ask Aunt to bake me her chocolate cake? And... can she bake a big one? Not for me to share with the rest, but for me alone? A REALLY BIG ONE? Please?" So shameless, right? And it was good. Not too sweet, great chocolate taste, beautifully crumbly and oh so sinful. That's why I couldn't fit into my pre-Christmas shopping post Christmas. I'm still paying for my sinful ways 5 months later.

Aunty's Chocolate Cake
Ingredients:
1 cup Van Houten chocolate powder
1 cup milk
1 stick butter
1 cup sugar
1 cup self raising flour, sifted
4 eggs
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon vanilla essence

- Cream the butter and sugar
- Melt the chocolate in a bowl on top of a pot of hot water. Stir in the milk slowly after the chocolate melted
- Seperate the eggs into yolks n whites
- Add the yolks one by one into the creamed butter and sugar, beating all the time
- Add the chocolate into the butter sugar yolks mix, followed by the vanilla essence
- After adding the chocolate, add the flour into the mix bit by bit til it's well mixed up
- Whisk the whites til it's stiff
- Fold in the whites into the delicious chocolate batter
- Pour mix into a baking tin that's buttered and lined with baking paper
- Bake at 180 degrees Celsius for 1 hour, until a stick inserted in will come out clean
- Gorge on it

Burger Queen

"If you don't study hard, you will end up flipping burgers at MacDonald's!"
"If you don't study hard, you will end up studying in MacDonald's university!"
Such were the threats motivational speeches of my childhood to keep me fearful motivated to hit the books. I mean hit the books metaphorically, not literally ^_~ Perhaps it's these psychological scars that kept me from lovin' the MacD's bleah burgers, but I digress.

So it is with great amusement that my brother watched me flip hamburgers for today's lunch and my dad polishing it off, pronouncing it "the best burger I've ever had!" Coming from someone who steadfastly avoids red meat, this is high praise indeed. My brother reminded my dad of his oft-repeated phrase and proclaimed it a prophecy, as I was indeed flipping burgers, though not for a living.

If you think that my burgers are anything like that of MacD's, HAH you're WRONG! A pox on you if you dare compare the two! My burgers have got thick 80gm beef patties that are juicy and crumbles at the bite, topped with an oh-so-juicy portebello mushroom and oodles of caramelized onions. My parents polished up all of it and picked at the onions that slithered out of the burger. It's goooood. *slurpz*

Burger Queen Burgers
Burger Toppings:
4 portebello mushrooms
3/4 white onion, sliced

Burger Patties:
320gm minced beef
1/4 white onion, finely chopped
1 Jacob's cream cracker, crumbled into crumbs.
1 tbspoon corn flour
1 egg
A squirt of ketchup
A squirt of worceshire sauce
1 teaspoon salt
A generous dash of pepper
Mix it all together in a large bowl, making sure that everything is mixed evenly.
Shape the meat into 4 patties and let it sit for a while.

Panfry the portebello mushrooms with a drizzle of olive oil and salt; that's all you need. Fry until juicy and soft. Remove from saucepan.

Reheat the saucepan (that's all I have, no fancy grills for these burgers of mine) and place the patties in it. Cover the saucepan! Leave it there for 2min, then flip the patties, cover saucepan and leave it there for another 2min. After that, switch off the flame and let it heat through for a min or two with the saucepan covered again. Then voila, the patties are done =) The reason for covering the saucepan? It retains the heat and moisture in the patties, letting it cook faster while retaining the juices as much as possible. I tried frying them without being covered and they cook slower, thus are more dry. Learn from my mistakes.

Remove the patty, drizzle some olive oil, sugar and salt on the suacepan that's still covered in burger juice and fry onions in there. It should be done in about 7min? Dump onions on the burger patties and viola, lunch =D

We like our burger buns lightly toasted and buttered. Cheese, tomato ketchup and mustard were piled on to add to the messy burger feel, but these are really up to the individual. I like mine without a chunky slice of tomato as I thought it detracted from the lovely onion + mushroom + beef combo, but my brother liked it with the tomato. No photos for this post, as my house was devoid of AA batteries and my camera was out of juice. T-T

A Lazy Dinner (Simple Pleasures in Life)

I didn't plan to cook dinner tonight, I wanted the easy way out: packing in. Unfortunately, I only felt like eating the meehoon kuei at the coffee shop below my flat, but the stall was closed, so I glumly made my way home and decided that I will have to whip up something instead.

I'm in trouble, I thought. I don't feel like anything too rich and creamy, I want something light and somewhat healthy, I don't want to shop for groceries, and I am feeling lazy yet fussy. How to have dinner??

Rummaging through my pantry and fridge, I found some odds and ends of vegetables that I used or that my mum bought: some celery sticks, half an onion, tomatoes. There were several cans of tuna soaked in brine, olive oil or teriyaki. I don't know who bought that teriyaki tuna, it sounds vile and there's no way I'll touch that, so I settled on the tuna in olive oil. (It also said "Lite!" on the can cover, so it's considered low-fat. Healthy!)

So it will have to be tuna-something. I could do a tuna-mayo sandwich, but I'm really not excited about tuna-mayo sandwiches. Tuna cream pasta? Ugh, too creamy and fishy. Not good. The only way I like tuna is when it's paired with tomatoes and vegetables in a tuna-salad, but I don't have the vegetables! Hmmm, let's just go by "feel".

Feeling really lazy, I decided that I'll just soak the spaghetti in hot water in a beer mug rather than go through the hassle of boiling them in salt water and straining them then washing another pot + strainer. I chopped up a bit of celery and a bit of onions and fried them with a bit of oil, followed by half a can of tuna and four tablespoons of cream pasta sauce for just a teeny bit of cream sauce. I threw in the undercooked spaghetti into the tuna-veg mush and let the heat cook the noodles for a bit. Taking the tomato out of the fridge, I sliced it into slim pieces for easy chewing and threw in a quarter of them into the tuna-veg-noodle mess in the pot while keeping the others aside.

When the noodles were cooked (they were al dente! a first!), I dumped the pasta into a bowl and arranged the tomatoes around it. And I dug in.

Tuna is usually tasty for the first few bites but it can get quite sickening after a while, so the celery and onions helped neutralize the fishy taste. The cooked tomatoes added some moisture and tang to the dish while the cold, fresh tomatoes really complemented the tuna pasta in a refreshing way. Mmmm. In that meal, there wasn't a lot of oil or salt; there was a good balance of vegetables, protien and carbs--fairly healthy, wouldn't you say? And it was actually pretty delicious!

The best part was that all I had to wash up after that was one pot and one bowl--perfect for lazy fussy me. Another simple yummy meal, another simple pleasure in life =)

Eating Mush

Ever since my extraction on Monday, I've had mushy lukewarm porridge for my meals. I try to break the monotony during breakfasts where I have something tastier, even if it's still soft, such as half-boiled eggs. Still, lunch and dinner consists of chicken porridge (which my mum cooked by the cauldron. For just me.) By the third day, I've had enough of chicken porridge / pork porridge and the like. The thought of any such porridge causes my stomach to shrivel up and whimper, so I decided to have something mushy and yummy for a change (not that my mum's porridge is not yummy :P it's just... you know, too repeated).

So for last night's dinner, I chopped up some potatoes, celery, half an onion and 3/4 of a carrot, boiled it all til it's soft and threw in a can of Campbell's mushroom soup. I added the remains of the shredded chicken from my mum's chicken porridge, fried some bacon and threw that into the soup as well. I bought some local baguettes to dip into the soup. The result? A savoury, rich mish-mash of flavours that is still gentle on the gums and a cinch to put together.
Gara came over to my place to 1. laugh at my uncanny resemblence to Popeye and 2. to have dinner with me. We gossiped, laughed, indulged in girl-talk bordering on neurosis and laughed some more at each other. It was refreshing to have some connection with the outside world besides my internet connection; my life-saver while I hole up at home.

It's now day 4. The swelling has gone down *very slightly*. My brother took a look at me this morning and laughed out loud, "You look like a tomboy who got beaten up!" Ah well, it won't be long before I face the world again. If you see a girl whose jawline resembles Popeye and has a short crop of faded red hair wincing as she eats in some cafe over the weekend, be kind to her. It's probably me.

Mushrooms

As I have been indulging in too much good food recently, I thought I would eat something light for lunch today. Half a packet of mushrooms and some slices of bread have been languishing for want of attention in my kitchen, so I thought I'd just use whatever was available.

Fresh button mushrooms are wonderful emergency food. They taste tonnes better than canned button mushrooms (ugh, what a way to spoil them!) and are just as easy to use. Chop it all up and toss them into cream sauce for creamy mushroom pasta (duh...). Saute them in garlic for a light side dish to any meal. Add them into cheese sandwiches for an instant oomph! The light fragrance and juiciness of these fresh mushrooms are all lost when canned, not to mention that canned mushrooms probably come along with a whole host of preservatives, so I like to use fresh ones whenever possible.

After chopping up the mushrooms, I tossed it with some salt, olive oil, garlic and dried basil and baked it for 5min on low heat. Dump the mushrooms between two slices of buttered toast with cheese and you've got yourself a light and healthy (I think it's still healthy, despite adding cheese and butter) lunch ^-^

Unfortunately I took a little too long posing the sandwich for the shot, so my sandwich was less warm than I'd have liked it to be. How silly ^_^b

Tomato Sauce

This is a simple recipe to make great tomato sauce for any tomato based pasta.
Ingredients:
- 4 or 5 tomatoes
- 1 white onion
- 2 cloves of garlic (smashed)
Condiments:
- 1/2 teaspoon of salt (you can add more if you like...)
- some pepper
- a sprinkling of sugar
- 2 tablespoon olive oil
- Italian spices (thyme, basil, whatever you like.. we use some thyme and basil.)

Chop up the tomatoes and onions, toss in all the condiments. Bake in the oven for about 40min. You might want to turn the tomatoes every now and then to make sure they don't burn (at least for my convection oven, we need to do that...).

After that, viola! You've got a really tasty tomato sauce to eat with your pasta. For this meal, my brother had some fish and squid stir fried in this yummy sauce to make our own seafood marinara. It's a light and comforting meal to eat after a series of unhealthy meals (read: BBQ with lots of chicken nuggets and sausages. :P)

Maggi Mee with a Twist

My brother, for all his healthy ways, has a few unhealthy snacks that he finds hard to resist. He effortlessly resists french fries, but he can't say no to a good curry puff. No chicken skin goes into his stomach, but roast duck skin goes straight in, even better if there is some fat stuck to the skin (and I confess, I have the same soft spot for roast duck skin. mmmmmm....).

Recently, he's been eating maggi mee for supper. Not just any maggi mee--only the Korean spicy ramen type maggi mee will do. This time, he adds something traditional and healthy in to tweak the flavours. Have you ever heard of "hong2 zao1", a.k.a. Hockchew red wine? It's a Hockchew traditional flavouring that is crimson red and has a strong wine taste to it. It goes wonderfully well when you stir-fry chicken, mushroom and ginger with a few tablespoons of that stuff, making the chicken look all bloody (but darn, it tastes so good). The Hockchews also eat it with meesua by adding it to the soup base. My aunty loves to add it to anything that she's cooking, especially if it's a soup.

It's from the hongzao meesua that my brother got his inspiration to add the hongzao to the maggi-mee. I tried it myself one evening and I must say that it's pretty good! Doesn't it look droolworthy from the picture? This hongzao supposedly has some health properties, so I'm sure it has magically made maggi-mee a healthy dinner. Yet another reason to indulge!

Green

My brother's little basil plant.

I used to think that there are only two types of pasta sauce: creamy and tomato-ey. Then I learned that there is white-wine sauce, aglio olio (garlic and olive oil, pretty much no sauce...), squid ink sauce as well as pesto sauce (huh?). I first heard about green pesto from a health-conscious colleague while talking about food.

She: Cream sauce is actually very unhealthy. The healthiest type of pasta sauce is...
Me: Tomato based sauce!
She: ... pesto sauce. Wah, my favourite!
Me: ?? pesto?? You mean the brand, Prego's?
She: No, i mean pesto. It's green colour, made of herbs. Mmmm.. yummy!
Me: ?????

I forgot all about the pesto sauce until one day, I was ogling at the ham and cheese selection at Jason's supermarket, when the sundried tomatoes, semi-sundried tomatoes, hummus and pesto sauce caught my eye. I toyed with the idea of buying some pesto to try it out, but the lovely semi-sundried tomatoes were too tempting, so I bought that instead. And I forgot about pesto again, until one evening when my brother and I were watching Jamie Olivier on TV effortlessly whipping up his delicious dishes. This time, he did a pesto pasta--pounded herbs with garlic, doused it with olive oil, added a shower of parmesan cheese etc etc... Greens never looked so good.

As usual, I forgot about it, but my brother didn't. He bought spinach, harvested his little basil plant, pounded in pistachios, added cream cheese and blended it all together with salt and olive oil. Viola! Pesto sauce! "I made my own pesto sauce today and I'm prett-y proud of it. It tastes prett-y good. There's some left in the fridge, help yourself. Oh, and I realised that it goes surprisingly well with tofu. It's slightly salty though," said he.

Let me tell you a bit more about my brother, the health nut. His colleagues are on a mission to make him flabby by tempting him with all the sinful yummy stuff like char kuey tiao and cream puffs, but he has always politely declined, saying that "it's unhealthy." When they ask him what type of food does he enjoy, he thinks about it and replies in all honesty, "Healthy food." And then there's the issue of salt. There were a few times when I complained that the pasta I cooked was too bland, but to him, it was just nice. Sometimes when he cooks, he'd say "today's sauce is a bit too saltish" but I'd think it's okay. Needless to say, when we cook together, salt is often a point of contention.
(Me: "There needs to be more salt!"
He: "No, it's salty enough already."
Me: *adds a dash of salt when he's not looking*)

Back to the pesto sauce. I was having dinner home alone tonight and the only available quick-fix meal was Tofu Pesto Pasta *cringe*. Don't get me wrong, I like tofu, but usually as a side dish. Tofu as a main ingredient in a meal? As the ONLY main ingredient? My brother liked it, but then again, he gets a kick out of eating healthy food, which is something that doesn't happen naturally to me. However, I have been pigging out on all sorts of unhealthy food, and will continue to do so since CNY is just around the corner, so perhaps my tummy will benefit from something light and healthy instead. Tofu pesto pasta, here I come.

My green dinner.

I decided to do the whole hog and have a healthy dessert while I'm at it. The taste verdict? The pesto does taste pretty yummy, and it doesn't mask the subtle taste of tofu, but it's still a rather bland dish. I added a shower of parmesan cheese as well as a pinch of salt with sauteed onions and red chilli, which thankfully added some flavour. It tasted just o-kaaay to me, as opposed to my brother's verdict of "prett-y good". The best part of the meal was the dessert, which was juicy and oh-so-sweet.

Considering the fact that my brother is pretty flab free and I'm not, perhaps I should do this more often.

Banana Bread recipe

And since I'm going about stealing recipes off Pauline's My Space (refer to previous post for the stolen rum-cake recipe), I might as well snitch this one for future reference =) It looks really easy. I've not tried my hand at baking yet, but one fine day I certainly intend to, and when I do, I know where I can start =)

Banana bread
mix first
3/4 cup butter
2 eggs
part 1/2 cup brown sugar

then add in
2 cup flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt

at the same time mash the bananas (about 2 1/3 cups), add in the remaining sugar (walnuts and raisins optional)
then add the mixture to the batter

bake for 60-65 min with 350F or 175C

How difficult does that sound? Not hard at all! This I'll bake, one fine day... Just you wait, Banana Bread, just you wait!

The Laughing Dinner Party and a Rum Cake Recipe

On Saturday, some of my (definitely quirkie) friends came over for dinner. It was a gathering of ex-colleagues and some of us have not met each other before, except in the online world. The chemistry was explosive and even before meeting up on the actual date, there were a lot of strange online exchanges going on via emails :P

We didn't have get to talk very much as most of the time we were laughing til our sides hurt :D It was a great evening of good food and company. Innocent words and phrases such as "Ahmad", "hotmail" (don't ask), "spicy" and "making space for rum-cake" effectively stopped us from eating as we laughed and laughed and laughed. We had to observe a minute of silence so that we can simply concentrate on eating our pasta, but even then, it wasn't a very silent observation :P I think the fumes from the red wine got to us while our stomaches are empty :P

The Mr Bing and Ms Krong talk show that evening was hilarious, hilarious, hilarious. It's the best comedy show in town, unfortunately tickets are not available to the general public :P No pictures are posted here to protect the innocent (i.e., the rest of us, except Ms Krong and Mr Bing...) If you're looking for entertainment acts, look no further.. just don't do it during dinner, for no one will be able to get a bite of food into their tummies!

We all laughed and ate to our hearts content =) Everyone brought something that evening, and all the contributions were great. After dinner, we had a round of Balderdash and laughed even more. If laughing can extend someone's life, we were saying that we must have had our lives extended by a week at the end of the evening! What a night!

The Menu:
Food:
Salad, made by Sheena.
Chicken wings, contributed by Bing Ren.
Meatball pasta, cooked by Yours Truly.
Rum cake, baked by Pauline.
Beverages:
Sparkling fruit juices, contributed by Ee Yuing.
Red wine, contributed by Gwen.
Mango tea, contributed by Yaling.
Others:
Paper cups n plates, by Matt.
Balderdash, by Matt.

I shall post the recipe for Pauline's rummiliciously delicious rum-cake. It's divinely delicious. My family had some of it for dessert on Sunday and were immediately huge fans of it! I have a tonne of superlatives for the cake, but never mind, here's the recipe. Go try it out! You won't be disappointed! And don't skimp on the rum!!

Rum Cake :):):)
1 cup pecan or walnut (toasted)
18 1/2 ounce yellow cake mix
3 3/4 ounce instant vanilla pudding mix
4 eggs
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 bacardi rum
2 min high speed
bake for 1 hour 325F

Glaze 1 stick of butter, 1/4 cup water, 1 cup sugar, 1/2 cup rum
melt butter then add water+sugar
boil for 5 min
remove from heat and stir in room temp

Mee Siam Mai Hum Recipe

For Stephanie and Samuel's sake, I have decided to get off my lazy butt and to organize and transcribe the recipe of my grandmother's superb meesiam. This is my first attempt at a recipe that is more complicated than "Chop. Stir fry. Add sauce. Boil noodles. Toss.", so do bear with me! If you need visuals for the cooking process, most of it is up on my previous post =)

Mee Siam Mai Hum Recipe For 8-9 Greedy Folks

Sweet sour spicy savoury soup
Ingredients:
- 2 packets of tamarind (a.k.a. asam)
- 2 large (peeled) white onions
- 1 packet of chilli paste
- 1 tablespoon of salted soya beans
- 1 packet of rock sugar
- 4-5 stalks of lemongrass
- a handful of dried shrimps
- 1.5 packets of (peeled) shallots, 5 candlenuts (a.k.a. buah keras, not bacarrats, which is a game), a tablespoon of belachan
- 1 packet of tau-pok

Steps:
1. Soak the tamarind in enough water to cover over. Use your hands to rub off all the soluble stuff off the tamarind. That's what grandma did, anyways. Drain and throw away the tamarind seeds.
2. Add 1 tablespoon of salted soya beans and 1 packet of rock sugar to the tamarind suace. Add water to fill the pot (refer to picture in the previous meesiam post). Set to boil.
3. Add the lemon grass into the boiling put.
4. Blend the dried shrimps.
Blend the shallots, candlenuts, belachan.
Heat the wok and add oil. Fry the blend of shallots, candlenuts and belachan with the packet of chilli paste. When fragrant, add the blended shrimp paste. Divide to 2 portions: 2/3 for the soup and 1/3 for the beehoon. Add the 2/3 portion to the soup.
5. Blend the white onions. Add to boiling pot.
6. Rinse and squeeze the excess oil off the tau-pok. Throw into the boiling pot.
7. Turn off the heat and let it simmer for another 20min or so. According to my meesiam consultant, a good meesiam sauce is one that is "Sour, sweet and spicy enough." So make sure it puckers your mouth and burns your throat as you swallow!

Yummy beehoon
Ingredients:
- 2 packets of 400gm beehoon
- 400gm of beansprouts (or as much as you like)
- 50c worth of jiu3 cai4
- 1/3 of the stir-fried chilli paste+blended stuff(leftover from the stock)

Steps:
1. Soak the beehoon in water until it's no longer brittle.
2. Wash the beansprouts and chop the jiu3 cai4 to inch long lengths.
3. Heat wok, add oil, fry chilli paste + blended stuff.
4. Add in the beehoon. Fry, fry, fry... Make sure the chilli paste is evenly spread out among the beehoon =)
5. Add in the beansprouts. Fry, fry, fry...
6. Drizzle in 3/4 cupful of water to the beehoon, so that it won't be so dry. Drizzle in soy sauce to taste. Fry, fry, fry...
Meesiam consultant complains that many stalls outside don't bother frying the beehoon--they simply add chilli oil to make the beehoon look reddish, but frying it adds that much more flavour to it.

Meesiam additionals
Boiled eggs, boiled prawns, sliced fish-cakes, lime to taste. Add as much as you like to your helping of meesiam! Use the best and freshest ingredients! Meesiam consultant says not to skimp on the quality of the prawns: buy expensive ocean prawns if you must! Otherwise it won't taste fresh and springy and will likely turn to mush as you try to slice them. Words of wisdom indeed.

There you've got it. If you need to clarify anything, feel free to leave a comment, and I'll call my meesiam consultant and get back to you when I can ; )

Grandma & Mee Siam Part Deux

On 6 Jan 2007, I spent the first Saturday of the New Year with my grandmother, learning how to cook her meesiam. I went with her to the wet market at 6.30am and spent that morning learning how to manoeuvre the trolley that she uses. One thing about shopping with your grandmother is that people will defer to her (and therefore to you too!). They'll be like "Aunty, you go first!" Wet market preferential treatment ;) Not bad at all!

My Meesiam Morning
We plunged right into the work after we came back from breakfast and worked non-stop from 8:30am - 11:30am. Making meesiam is a lot of work @_@


My first job is to peel shallots. I just spent a lot of time peeling this 1.5 packet of shallots ~_~ My grandma said that at the rate I'm going, I can only start cooking after lunch time T_T


What became of a nice plump white onion and the shallots I painstakingly peeled =) My grandma blended the shallots with balachan and this white-nut thingey she called baccarat, though I'm not sure what it is. She also blended a handful of dried shrimps.


She added the blended shallots and white onion into this pot of simmering broth. There is 1 packet of chilli paste, 2 packets of asam paste, 50c worth of lemongrass, 1 packet of rock sugar and other things I'm sure I've forgotten simmering in there. She used the dried shrimps and some chilli paste to fry the beehoon. No photos of those, though!


Hard boiled eggs. See, I get all the important roles. I peel the shallots and peel the eggs. Notice how half of the egg-white came off with the shell! My grandma shook her head and tutted when she saw the eggs =(


Another important task done by yours truly: Peeling the prawns. Yummy stuff, prawns :D These are fresh ocean prawns that were briefly boiled. Notice the succulent, plump flesh.


After a morning of peeling, deshelling, blending and boiling, the varied ingredients miraculously transformed into a steaming, glorious bowl of meesiam. Note: It's not dry meesiam, the soup is under the ingredients with the beehoon, as the bowl is rather deep. Doesn't it look fabulous??

It tasted great, of course (since I hardly interfered with the cooking process) =) My grandma didn't think that 1 session with her was enough for me to graduate though. She saw the day as a warm-up session, since she was still showing me most of the things (how to peel the prawn without tearing off half the tail, how to peel shallots in a more efficient manner, what are the names of the ingredients...) I wrote down the ingredients and the recipe, will post it up once I get a better idea of what are the english names of the vegetables and spices that she used! I will also need to have a go at it by myself, according to my grandma (she said that this time, she'll just sit and watch :P). I sound like a culinary dunce =(

All that aside, it was a lovely morning spent with her as we chatted about family members, laughed together and shared anecdotes =) It's been a long time since I could leisurely spend a whole morning with my grandmother... The time spent together is precious. She's happy that there's someone she can pass all her cooking skills to (albeit v.e.r.y. s.l.o.w.l.y....) and she's already thinking about teaching me her laksa, asam prawns and salted veg duck soup :D

I think that even if I don't really master the dishes, the most important thing is that at the end of the day, I'd have grown to know my grandma just a little bit better and that we've had some fun times together =)

The World's Best Grandma & Mee Siam

I'm staying over at my grandmother's place tonight in my attempt to learn how to cook The World's Best Mee Siam Without Hum tomorrow! My grandmother is a real sweetie. She usually sleeps at 9pm and wakes up at the unearthly hour of 4am to do her morning exercises (Mondays to Fridays! Without fail! For as long as I can remember!), but tonight, because I'm coming over late, she stayed up til 10pm to call me and check on how I'm getting there. She also set aside some slices of rock melon for me to eat before I sleep =) I'll be waking up at 5+am to go marketing for mee siam ingredients with her tomorrow morning too. Gosh, 5+am... @_@

My cousins, brother and I owe a lot to my grandmother, for she's the one who brought us up when we were young. She would make sure that we were well fed, that we got to school and back, that we were clean and well scrubbed, that we did our homework, that we didn't destroy the flat when her back was turned. All these and more =)

When I was lower primary, I stayed with my grandma while my family was in Malaysia, because my dad wanted me to have a Singaporean education, and my brother wasn't old enough for primary school yet. My cousin also stayed with my grandmother. I remember that we had many things to talk about and will chitter and chatter as we lay on the mattresses in the same room as my grandma while my grandma tried to sleep. Finally she would have had enough and the cane will come flicking randomly in our direction :P If you were unlucky, you get the stinging end of the flick. That tactic usually quickly puts an end to our hushed conversations :D

As mentioned before, my grandma is a great cook. She's also a very curious and experimental cook. There was one wedding dinner that we attended and a dish made a deep impression on us, an impression that I still have today. But because of my appalling lack of knowledge regarding vegetables, all I can say about it is that it's a wonderfully savoury and brothy leafy-veggie-thingey that has the flavours of a very good ham infused throughout. Even veg-haters (it was cool to hate vegetables at that age) like me couldn't resist going for seconds. While we were raving about this dish, my grandmother just ate it quietly and thoughtfully.

The next day, when we were having dinner at my granny's, this dish reappeared! My grandmother replicated the dish! The fact that we can recognize the similarity in flavours says a lot already =) Of course it wasn't as exquisitely tender and flavourful as what the hotel offered, but still, I think that's pretty cool =)

So anyways, back to mee siam. I never liked to eat mee siam in hawker centre and coffee shops. Even at places where they serve supposedly "famous mee siam", whenever I taste it, it never fails to disappoint. I always thought it was because I didn't like mee siam, until the reason struck me recently (and admittedly rather belatedly!).

It was because I grew up on my grandmother's mee siam! Soup that is so sour it makes your lips pucker, yet delightfully savoury and spicy, with as much prawns and fish cakes and fried tofu as you can eat, with the melt-in-your-mouth taupok, with crunchy fresh beansprouts, with perfectly hard-boiled eggs (my grandma's hard-boiled eggs are also the best in the world, no kid)... how can I eat the dry tasteless offerings outside and be satisfied?? Hence, I resolve to learn the art of her mee siam in 2007! Wish me luck!

Stir Fried Goodness

Last week, my mum was too lazy to cook, as was often the case, seeing how my family likes to make disparaging remarks on her consistently constant menu of "fried fish, fried eggs, fried veg..." It is good comfort food, no doubt, but we like variety. Furthermore, my brother and I are the pickiest eaters in my mum's world, so we need more than consistent comfort food to satisfy our greedy appetites.

Anyway, I digress. My mum declared herself too lazy to cook, and said "why don't you both cook for me instead?" to which we happily agreed, because it means that we get to experiment and eat something other than fish, eggs and veg, not that we're really complaining. We drove down to the supermarket and bought a pile of groceries, and since it was my mum paying for it, we bought indulgences like a block of parmesan cheese, more sausages, and more milk.

My brother wanted to cook the fool-proof Italian sausage pasta, and I simply went along. Since I've talked about it before, I won't bother going into the details of the recipe. However, I want to highlight one change: instead of cooking the usual oodles of Italian noodles (spaghetti, linguine, angel's hair etc...), we did gnocchi. Instead of boiling gnocchi like instructed on the packet, we stir-fried it. The result?



It's delish. The exterior was crispy, and the inside was chewy. It tastes a little like french fries, only healthier, chewier and better. Add a pile of sausages, sauteed mushrooms, onions and chilli to it, and you've got yourself some happy diners.

I read about this cooking method here. My mother, a staunch anti-pasta (hur hur hur, geddit? geddit?? anyways, bad Italian food joke here...) person, loved it! She said "Sometimes it tastes like it's cheesy... it looks like scallops, yet it can also look like fishballs.. I like it!"

I liked it lots too =)

Ambitions in Life

Well, not exactly ambitions. More like little goals in life that I want to tick of my "To Do" list ; )

Presenting a list of items I aspire to cook in this life-time, in no particular order:

- Pizza (including making the dough!)
- Mentaiko-tobiko Pasta (this seems easy enough!)
- Truffle-anything (pasta, with scrambled eggs, pizza, soup... anything lah!)
- Real vanilla beans infused creme brulee, rather than using vanilla extract / essence.
- Chocolate mousse cake (Varlhona, no less! and I've only heard of that stuff!)
- Chocolate truffles :D
- Mee siam (mai hum, naturally... My grandmother makes a mean, mean mee siam)
- Gourmet ice-cream
- Carrot-cake (the one with the cream-cheese frosting)
- Chocolate lava cake
- Clam chowder soup
- Lasagne

and a whole host of other things that I don't know I want to make until I chance upon them! Good night ; )

Who's calling the pot black...? Part Deux

So, previously, I ended with the tagline, "If I can cook, so can
you..." Let's talk about my successes, so that my detractors (you
know who you are... the both of you..) will have something nice to say
for a change ;)

The first time I was inspired to cook something by myself was when I
tasted this cold italian sausage pasta. The spicy sausages were
perfectly paired with olives and pasta, tossed in some herby cream
sauce. As I ate it, the magic taste seems to be coming form the
italian sausages--fragrant, savoury, juicy, with a good bite... When
paired with plain pasta and olives --> mmmMMMmmmm... The best thing
was that the whole dish didn't seem too hard to replicate! The
equation went like: storebought italian sausages + canned olives +
instant pasta + bottled tomato / cream sauce = yummy meal. Even I can
follow that!! Now, if only I knew where to buy these ingredients...

One fine day, while going grocery shopping with my family, I stopped
by the usual area to get some ham for breakfast when I saw these short
little fat suasages that are stuffed with italian herbs... the italian
sausages! I bought a dozen, grabbed some button mushrooms, tomato
sauce and pasta. Upon reaching home, I declared that I'll prepare
dinner, much to my mum's chagrin, who no doubt still remember the
curious incident of the dog-food in the night.

I can't remember if my brother helped me chop the onions and garlic
(he's my faithful and able kitchen help; a good cook and a much better
time-keeper), but no matter. I do remember dumping things into the
frying pan in the correct order for once. Garlic in with olive oil,
then the white onions, followed by the chopped up sausages
(*sseeezzzle.... sssszzzzz*), and then the mushrooms, and then a
generous dumping of Prego's tomato pasta sauce (ooohhh... can you
smell the concerto of herbs, meat and mushroons?). I also added one
chopped up red chilli to spice up the dish a notch. Not much fuss at
all, and altogether a very satisfying meal! The next time I repeated
this dish, olives were also added. I am proud and happy to report
that my brother and my mum ate it all up and declared me kitchen-safe.

Too bad this was done before the photography bug bit me, so no
photo-evidence, you shall just have to take my word for it. It was as
though I've attained enlightenment, that cooking is not such an
elusive skill. Given the right ingredients and right order of
dumping, anyone can whip up something yummy!

Who's calling the pot black...?

Besides taking photographs (a recent hobby of mine), I also enjoy
eating. I love eating Chinese food, Italian food, French food (when I
can afford it!), Western food, junk food, home-cooked food, fast food
and even slow food (those places where you wait 40min for a bowl of
bak-chor-mee).

Usually, people who love to eat will also be rather good cooks. Well,
I'm certainly not a good cook, but I've grown to enjoy cooking. When
did it start? I'm not sure, but I know that my first few attempts at
cooking were absolutely disastrous. There was once when I cooked an
egg, sunny side up. My friend took a look at it (burnt, oddly shaped,
all over the pan) and asked, " What's that?" There was another time
when my mother, the law-breaking stray-dog-feeder that she is, asked
me to boil some rice and bones for a stray that she's feeding. I did
as I was told: dumped everything into a pot, cover the contents with
water, and put to boil.

Since a watched pot never boils, I decided to <i>not</i> watch it and
go surf the net instead. There were lots of interesting web-games and
I played, and I surfed, and I... smelled chao-tar otar from my
neighbour's apartment. But oh well, our neighbours tend to cook
pungent food every now and then, so I suppose the otar smell will fade
before long. After a while, my brother came back and exclaimed "What's
that smell?!?" I complained that the otar smell has been coming from
the neighbour's since 10min ago without letting up. So we bitched a
bit about the smell and he went to the kitchen for a drink.

And lo, the kitchen was smoked.

The watched pot certainly never boils, but the <i>unwatched pot</i>
certainly runneth over!! I grabbed the (smokin') pot, poured water
into it and watched the charred contents sizzle and sputter.
EVERYTHING was charred--meat, bones, rice... (So that was the chao tar
otar!) It was blackened and burnt, not fit for consumption, and had to
be painstakingly scraped out with a metal spoon. Guess who had that
thankless task?

The lingering chao tar otar smell lingered for a few more days before
it decided to have mercy on me and leave our furniture. The pot
retained a yellowish tint at its base after that. My dad told me it's
because I dumped cold water on it while the metal was still sizzling
hot, and that affected the colouration of the metal. The smear on my
reputation was not so forgiving, and my parents never pressured me to
learn cooking after that.

And thus begins my little foray into the cooking world =) If I can
cook, most assuredly, so can you...