Greedy Goose

Birds of a Feather

2008-12-28T23:11:00.019+08:00

Traditionally, our family gets together every Christmas Eve for our yuletide meal. Aunties, uncles, children, parents and grandparents all under one roof devouring the spoils of the Christmas season. Then some years ago, my cousins started a new tradition: the Cousins Christmas Dinner, which, unlike the repast that our older relatives create, is always a little more decadent.

There's always good wine, lots of red meat and some manner of foie gras. Last year we bought 120 oysters, which we had to shuck. We're never doing that again. A few years ago we had a massive cote de bouef, on top of a roasted pork belly and a giant pasta pie.

And this year was no different—except someone came up with the idea of a turducken, and the rest, as the saying goes, is family history.

Thanks to good foresight on the part of our youngest cousin G, we got a de-boned chicken and duck from a butcher. And having read and reread Jeffrey Steingarten's account of his search for the authentic turducken in his book It Must Have Been Something I Ate, I decided that it was imperative I make three different stuffings for maximum flavour.

So here it is, our account of our first turducken in pictures. It wasn't as much work as I had imagined it would be (thanks in large part to the already deboned chicken and duck), and the process was wonderfully hilarious and just the thing to put us in the Christmas spirit. Every time I looked at the turducken I just had to laugh, it was ridiculously massive and a miracle that it fit in my oven.

Debone turkey, backbone first.

Beware the spotted beast stalking the raw meat.

Remove all but the thigh bones and wings of the turkey.

Spread over a layer of shrimp and cornbread stuffing.

Place the de-boned duck on top.

Spread a layer of pork and chestnut stuffing on top.

Place the deboned chicken on top...

And then a layer of smoked oyster and bacon stuffing. We also threw in the turkey giblets for good measure.

We figured we'd tie the bird up before stitching it together. But I think I over-did the stuffing a little and the chicken tried to make its way out of the crowded cavity.

Close up the beast with Christmas-red cotton thread. My fingers were sore the next day from it!

Season with salt and pepper.

Place in the oven at 100 degrees C for the first 6 hours and then increasing by 10 degrees C every hour after that.

The bird is done when it reaches an internal temperature of 74 degrees C or 165 degrees F.

Keep basting as you cook. The bird oozed a whopping 15 cups of juices and fat as it cooked and I ladled the fat out every few hours so the bird wouldn't steam.

The result: gorgeous layers of wonderfully moist meat and cupfuls of juices swishing about in the pan. Even with 17 of us at dinner, we only managed to eat about a third of the turducken. What a feast!

Happy holidays!

Canelés de Bordeaux

2008-07-31T10:01:00.032+08:00

As with all things, there are pros and cons to owning just 10 canelé moulds. The cons: My recipe for canelés will fill about 16 moulds. And because these copper moulds need to be seasoned and frozen for at least 6 hours before baking, you’ll have to wait at least 7 hours between each batch. But that’s assuming you’re a bit of a canelé expert. For a canelé virgin such as I, the 10 moulds proved to be a godsend. It meant I could make mistakes with my first batch and then correct them with my second — and that was not intentional, I assure you. In my mind, my maiden batch of canelé would be beautifully burnished, crisp on the outside and custardy on the inside. I never imagined I would yield beeswax-flavoured pucks of deep, dark brown — okay, black — shelled… things.

As anyone who’s ever made a canelé will tell you, it’s not really hard work. It is simply an amalgamation of several elements which require time and patience. Once you’ve made that initial outlay of effort, your subsequent experiences will then be a cinch.

For starters, new canelé moulds need seasoning — not unlike how you would season a new cast iron grill pan by brushing it with oil and sealing it in with heat. Canelé moulds however, require an initial seasoning with vegetable oil, and then further seasonings with “white oil”, which is made from 1 ounce of beeswax and 1 cup of safflower oil.

First, you have to find a beeswax supplier, which in Singapore, is no mean feat. (Especially not if you don’t want to buy 2kg of it — which is the minimum amount the wholesalers will sell you). So I ordered my soap-bar-sized beeswax through the internet; and shipping from the US to Singapore cost more than the beeswax itself. Safflower oil is much easier — it is available from organic supermarkets.

Before each use, the moulds should be brushed with the white oil, inverted onto a rack set atop a foil-lined baking sheet and baked for a minute to allow the excess oil to run out. You remove the moulds, let them cool to room temperature and then freeze them before filling and baking. In this way, your caneles moulds will remain mercifully non-stick.

The batter is much easier, requiring only that you heat milk to 183 degrees fahrenheit, pulse butter, cake flour and salt in a food processor; add sugar and egg yolks, and finally the hot milk. The batter is then strained through a fine sieve before the addition of rum and vanilla. A day or two later, it is ready to be poured into those gorgeous copper moulds.

Paula Wolfort’s The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen contains the full recipe and everything you need to know about making canelés. I love that she writes each recipe and story with such lyricism and care.

As you can see from the picture above, by the time I was done with first try at canelés, only two emerged edible. In my initial excitement, I baked my first batch of white-oil-brushed canelé moulds crown-side down, which meant I was baking AND filling my moulds with white oil. We had wax flavoured canelés for petite fours at dinner that night.

I prepared four more moulds the next morning (the correct way, this time) and baked the canelés for almost 2 hours at 200 degrees C. They were almost good — the interiors were suitably custardy, but the shells just a bit charred. So this time, we had soot flavoured caneles with our post-prandial coffees.

Yet the next morning, I prepared two more moulds. And this time I baked them at 180 degrees C for about 1 hour and 40 minutes. Magic — well, almost. There was the crunchy burnt sugar shell and the sweet luscious filling perfumed with vanilla and rum. But because I had filled them almost to the top, as the recipe implied — and likely because mine is a small oven — the bases of my canelés were slightly burnt.

So those bases were shorn off with a sharp knife and the new pretty canalés were placed on a plate after dinner. Again. No one seemed to mind — and by no one, I really mean my dear lab rat and loving partner C.

Next time, I reckon I’ll fill my moulds just three-quarters full so the batter doesn’t rise out of them, and hopefully, doesn’t burn. And thankfully, the next time around, the white oil is all mixed up and ready to use.

I Heart Cherries!

2008-07-08T23:05:00.006+08:00

But in these tropical climes, fresh, juicy red cherries are fleeting, not to mention expensive. But hey, a girl’s gotta live a little, no?

Recently C and I passed a fruit stall along Geylang where we journey to every now and then for our fix of pomfret charcoal steamboat. The pile of gleaming, rubescent fruit were simply impossible to resist — well, that and the durians that C carted home in a pungent Styrofoam box.

We had cherries, stoned and sliced into our bowls of yoghurt and cereal at breakfast; we ate them for dessert, and then for supper. They also found their way into this deceptively delicious cake from Mich Turner’s Fantastic Party Cakes.

Now there are books I buy for the recipes and those I pick purely for aesthetic inspiration. This book falls in the latter category. So until I read a review of the book in last Sunday’s newspapers, I’d never actually thought try out any recipe from it. But the reviewer said something about the author’s recipe yielding the best butter cake that had ever come out of her oven. And in our house, the quest for the perfect easy-to-make butter cake is a never-ending one.

Indeed, Turner’s recipe for a basic vanilla butter cake yielded one of the best that’s ever come out of my oven. And a few pages away was the recipe for this gem. It is moist, soft, fluffy and just downright delicious. The crumble on the top also gives it a nice, light crunch. It is a cake that needs no accompaniment — not ice cream, not crème fraiche, not whipped cream, nothing. Well, maybe just a steaming cup of coffee or tea.

Cherry & Almond Cake
(adapted from Mich Turner’s Fantastic Party Cakes)

For the cake:
140g self-raising flour
50g sugar
1 large egg
4 tbsp milk
85g unsalted butter, melted
1 tsp almond extract (I used vanilla instead)
350g cherries, stoned and cut in half or quarters (I got away with using about 200g)

For the crumble topping:
25g butter
25g ground almonds
25g sugar
1/2 tsp almond or vanilla extract

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees C. Grease and line the base of a shallow 20cm tin.
2. Measure flour and sugar into a bowl and mix well. Make a well in the centre and add the egg, milk, melted butter and almond or vanilla extract.
3. Beat with a wooden spoon till smooth.
4. Spoon into the tin and spread evenly.
5. Scatter the cherries over the cake mixture and gently press them in.
6. Make the topping by measuring all the ingredients into a clean bowl.
7. Rub the butter in until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs gently clumped together. Scatter this over the cherries.
8. Bake for 30 to 35 minutes, until a skewer inserted in the centre of the cake emerges clean.
5. Allow the cake to cool and then remove it from the tin to cool completely on a wire rack.

Easy Biscuits

2008-06-29T23:41:00.007+08:00

I can't say I've ever had a real Southern meal. Despite being a city rich with world-class restaurants serving all manner of cuisines, Singapore is not well endowed with eateries serving Southern food (that is, Southern USA — biscuits, gravy, fried chicken, grits, red velvet cake). And no, Popeye's doesn't count.

But I love biscuits. The kind you mop up brown gravy with; the kind they used to serve at McDonald's for breakfast many years ago.

My many attempts at making those flaky, fluffy buttermilk biscuits have all been in vain. Our tropical weather and my non-air-conditioned kitchen make it damn near impossible — which probably says something about my talents and patience, or lack of. So C and I would settle for the Pilsbury variety. That's until they stopped stocking it at Jason's several years ago.

So the long and short of it is that we haven't had biscuits for a while. Well, we stopped at Popeye's one night but they make a poor excuse for biscuits, which don't even come with gravy!

It's a good thing then that I discovered Bon Appetit, Y'All by Virginia Willis. Its catchy title grabbed me immediately, and as it turns out, it is filled with easy-to-do home-style yet refined Southern recipes gleaned from the author's family kitchen. Within its pages are a recipe for Buttermilk Angel Biscuits, which, with its "trio of leaveners protects even the worst of bakers from abject failure", she writes. She must be speaking to me.

But before I tread once more into that familiar territory of biscuit failure, I figured I'd have a go at a decidedly easier recipe for Mayonnaise Biscuits. It is such a simple throw-everything-together recipe that the even author confesses to — in her younger, more foolish days — regarding it as one step above a baking mix. Be that as it may, it yielded such fabulous results that I am now determined to try her recipe for Buttermilk Angel Biscuits.

When I eventually find the time to, that is.

Mayonnaise Biscuits
adapted from Bon Appetit, Y'All by Virginia Willis
(Makes 9-12, depending on the size of your muffin tins)

1 tbsp canola oil, for brushing your tins
2 cups self-raising flour (I made mine by following Ms Willis' instructions to mix 1 cup cake flour with 1 cup plain flour, 3 tsp baking powder, and 1 tsp fine sea salt)
1 cup milk
3 tbsp mayonnaise
1 tsp sugar

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees C.
2. Brush muffin tins with the oil.
3. Mix all the ingredients in a bowl.
4. Using an ice-cream scoop, drop a scoopful of batter into each muffin tin and bake for 20–30 mins, or until golden brown. Serve warm.

In the Mood for Spanish

2008-05-25T15:09:00.020+08:00

My brother recently returned from a month-long holiday to Spain and Paris and came home carting a bag full of delicious edibles for this grateful and gluttonous sister. There were macarons from Pierre Herme, jamon serrano from Barcelona, jamon iberico bellota from Bellota-Bellota in Paris (check out Chubby Hubby's post on this gorgeous ham), and a hunk of Manchego cheese.

Perhaps Spain's best known cheese, Manchego is typically made from sheep's milk in the central region of La Mancha. I like to think of it as the pecorino of Spain since it has a similar brittle texture and a sharp, nutty taste.

I used my stash to make a tapas of delicate triangles of bread fried in olive oil, layered with quince paste and topped with chopped toasted pine nuts. The honeyed flavour of quince paste provides a wonderful contrast to the sharp cheese, while the flavour of the olive oil which the bread is fried in just ups the whole Spanish-ness of it all. The recipe I used is from Spain and the World Table, a fantastic book filled with easy-to-follow recipes and lots of great information about Spanish ingredients, dishes and produce.

For this classic tapas of cheese-stuffed dates rolled in serrano ham, I used some leftover blue cheese that I had in the fridge and added a sprinkling of cocoa nibs for added depth and crunch. This surprising inspiration I gleaned from the same book, which uses figs instead of dates, but the principle remains the same. You could pop these sweet-salty dates straight into your mouth, but a short blitz in a hot oven intensifies its flavours, making the salty ham saltier, the sweet dates sweeter and endowing the blue cheese with added robustness — turning it all, quite literally, into a taste sensation.

More manchego went into this crab pasta, which is based loosely on a recipe for crab ravioli in Cocina Nueva, another book I turn to often when in the mood for Spanish. Plenty of freshly picked crabmeat is folded into a tomato sauce that is richly flavoured with carrot, leek, brandy, white wine, thyme, garlic and bay leaves. Before serving, the sauce gets a shot of cream infused with a flurry of Manchego shavings and a bay leaf.

Cookie Crunch

2008-04-06T23:50:00.006+08:00

I found myself with a rare free afternoon the Saturday before Easter and since I've had my Easter cookie cutter set for over a year, I decided now was as good a time as any to make my virgin attempt at cookie decorating.

And boy did I suck at it.

Patience, as anyone who knows me will tell you, is not one of my virtues. And cookie decorating requires plenty of it. Well, that and talent — which, as the pictures of my cookies will attest — is not something I am particularly blessed with in this respect.

Firstly, my cookies didn't bake to perfectly even surfaces, so the flooding didn't quite sit well. Secondly, my flooding was probably a little too thin, so it didn't render a nice opaque tone. Then there's my unsteady hand, which translated to quivering borders and, well... child-like designs would be a kind way to put it.

And then there's the patience thing again. I just couldn't wait for the icing to dry before piping in more dots and things. My dots had tails, my lines broke mid-way... I don't really need to go on, do I?

The only good thing that came out of this experiment were the cookies, which came from Peggy Porschen's Pretty Party Cakes. They are basic cocoa-flavoured sugar cookies, but they pack an intense chocolatey taste and a nice crisp texture. So I did the sane thing and cut the remaining cookie dough with a bite-size circular cutter and now serve them on a saucer with post-dinner coffee.

Chocolate Sugar Cookies
(Adapted from Peggy Porschen's Pretty Party Cakes)

200g unsalted butter
200g sugar
1 egg, beaten lightly
50g cocoa powder (I used Valrhona)
350g plain flour

1. Cream the butter and sugar until well mixed and just creamy in texture. Don't overwork or the cookies will spread during baking.

2. Beat in the egg until well combined. Add the flour and cocoa powder and mix on low speed until a dough forms.

3. Gather the dough into a ball, wrap in cling film and chill for at least an hour.

4. Place the dough on a floured surface and knead briefly.

5. Roll out to about 5mm thickness.

6. Use your cookie cutters to cut out shapes and then lay them on a baking tray lined with greaseproof paper.

7. Chill again for about 30 minutes.

8. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C.

9. Bake for 8-12 minutes, depending on size.

Raising Elephants

2008-03-14T23:37:00.003+08:00

Here's a lesson I learned this week: When make fondant cakes in tropical weather, keep them small. I'd been making cupcakes with fondant figurines for a while now, so when a friend asked if I could make her a birthday cake with elephants on it, I thought, now why the hell not?

So off I set to work, fashioning the cutest little elephant (well, at least I thought so) sitting up with a fat round belly complete with a belly button and a raised trunk. I figured I didn't want to bother with leaving it in an air-conditioned room because a) I'm tight and b) I didn't want it to wilt the minute the cake was taken out of the dry air-conditioning and into our humid climes. If it was going to wilt, it may as well do so right in front of me where I could rectify it. And of course, it didn't disappoint. When I woke up the next morning, my little fella had put on some weight, lost some height, and was slipping backwards. His trunk had lost a little enthusiasm too -- it was no longer raised.

So it was back to the drawing board. After flipping through a couple of books, I found inspiration in this one. A lying-down elephant, in a sort of clambering-up-the-cake kinda position. Why didn't I think of that? I also made a little baby one to accompany it.

I made this two days before it was to be collected, hoping against all hope that it would dry. It rained and rained and my elephants got less perky by the day. But I guess they held up well enough (the picture was taken shortly before it was sent on its way to the birthday girl).

Over lunch the next day, my friend D, who is spectacular at making fondant cakes — she's made entire Thomas the Tank Engine cakes, Spiderman cakes, and teddy bear creations (all while living IN LONDON) — later told me that in this weather, it's best to just keep the fondant figurines small so they'll dry out faster and won't wilt. I wish I'd had that conversation with her earlier.

But then I remembered her telling me that she'd made a Spiderman cake for her twin sons recently and asked her how she managed that. As it turns out, she ended up making little fondant buildings and streets and then sticking a plastic Spidy figurine in the centre of it all. "If I'd made a fondant Spiderman," she said, "the black webs on his mask and costume would have streaked, and he would have to be lying down playing dead."

She'd also left the air-conditioning on for four days straight so that the cake wouldn't melt and die. Next time someone asks for a large fondant covered cake, I'm going to suggest a Dali theme.

Orange Season

2008-02-09T23:21:00.000+08:00

It must be the festive season that's put me in a citrus mood. And it can't be helped, really, since everywhere you turn there are kumquats and mandarins, satsumas and oranges galore. So for dessert over many festive dinners, our table has been laden with all things orange.

At one dinner was crepes with kumquat compote and vanilla ice cream; at another was our nostalgic orange trifle which my brother and I nearly finished all by ourselves when the guests weren't looking. There was honey kumquat sorbet; orange cupcakes with earl grey tea-infused chocolate ganache frosting topped with candied orange peel. And now that the eating frenzy has passed, we're munching on sweet juicy mandarin orange wedges straight from the fridge.

Of all the orange desserts, the easiest has to be this simple and homely orange cake that's a cinch to make. Like the Lemon Poppy Seed cake in my last post, this one is easy to dress up. Made into cupcakes, they are delicious topped with fresh whipped cream infused with a teaspoon of orange blossom water and strewn with finely chopped pistachios. It also makes for a great teatime treat topped with candied oranges and a trickle of orange syrup.

Orange Butter Cake

250g butter, softened at room temperature
1 1/4cups sugar
4 eggs, at room temperature
2 cups self-raising flour, sifted
2 tsp orange zest
100ml fresh orange juice

1. Preheat oven to 160 degrees C.
2. Cream butter and sugar together until pale and fluffy.
3. Add the eggs one at a time and beat well after each addition.
4. Fold the flour into the batter.
5. Add the zest and juice and mix only until the batter is well incorporated.
6. Pour batter into a moulded tin, like a bundt tin, and bake for 40–60 minutes or until a skewer inserted in the centre of the cake comes out clean.

Lemon & Poppy Seed Cake

2008-01-12T23:37:00.000+08:00

Like another cake-loving friend of mine, I have, over the years, learned to appreciate the joys of the lemon. In fact, until several years ago, you would have been hard-pressed to get me to choose anything lemony when it came to dessert. For me, it had always been chocolate or bust.

I can't tell you exactly when I came to see (or taste) lemon in a different light. Perhaps it was in the curds I discovered when Marmalade Pantry first introduced the Harvey Nics range in what must have been around the year 2000. Whatever the case, I've since come to love a good lemony cake, cookie, tart or slice.

This Lemon Poppy Seed Pound Cake satisfies both C and I in the sense that he likes cakes at their plainest while I like them with a bit of variety and lots of dressing up. From The Cake Book, the secret to this tender, buttery, moist cake is in creaming the butter and sugar for four minutes, until it becomes a pale, fluffy shade of marigold. Brushing a lemon syrup over the cake as it cools also adds to its wonderful moistness and lemony-ness.

This is a great tea cake, which C can enjoy with his post-meal coffee. I, on the other hand, need a bit more than that, so to up the lusciousness and lemony-ness, I eat it with with a healthy spoonful of lemon curd on the side. For a more "complex" dessert, I turned to some leftover buttermilk ice cream which I had made a week ago, which also made for a lovely complement with its tangy and delicate taste.

Lemon & Poppy Seed Cake
(Adapted from The Cake Book by Tish Boyle)

200g sifted cake flour
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
3 tbsp poppy seeds
227g unsalted butter, softened
240g granulated sugar
4 large eggs, at room temperature
1 tbsp lemon zest
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/3cup heavy cream

For the syrup:
1/3 cup sugar
1/4 cup water
1/3 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice

1. Preheat oven to 150 degrees C. Grease the bottom and sides of a loaf tin and dust with flour.
2. Sift the flour, baking powder and salt into a bowl. Add the poppy seeds and whisk to combine.
3. In the bowl of an electric mixer, beat the butter with a paddle attachment till it is very creamy, about 2 mins.
4. Add the sugar and beat at medium-high speed until very light, about 4 mins.
5. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition.
6. Beat in the lemon zest and vanilla extract.
7. Add the flour at low speed in three additions, alternating it with the cream in two additions. Mix only until the flour is incorporated.
8. Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top.
9. Bake for about an hour or until a skewer inserted comes out clean.
10. Remove the pan from the oven and let it cool on a wire rack for 10 mins.
11. While the cake is cooling, make the syrup.
12. Combine the water and sugar in a small saucepan and cook over medium heat till the sugar dissolves.
13. Remove from the heat and stir in the lemon juice.
14. Poke the cake all over at 1-inch intervals with a bamboo skewer and then brush it with half the lemon syrup.
15. Let the cake stand for 5 mins, then invert the cake onto the wire rack and poke the bottom all over with the skewer.
16. Brush the bottom and sides of the cake with the remaining syrup.
17. Turn the cake upright on the rack and let cool completely.

A Madcap Round-up of the Last Two Months

2008-01-04T00:16:00.000+08:00

Ok, so that didn't really happen. But it is a pretty apt depiction of how many oysters went down at Christmastime. (The above is part of a lovely comic strip that C put together for me)

And—better late than never—compliments of the season and a very happy New Year to you all. It's been a whirlwind the last two months — between my ailing father and the year-end workload, we also moved house...all at the same time. It's amazing I'm still sane.

Somewhere in the middle of it all, I even managed to bake two cakes for my friend's gorgeous little girl who turned one. And what a lucky little lady she was — she had not one, but two parties, which of course entailed two cakes. And she didn't get to bed till the wee hours of the morning. Talk about party animal in training.

In late-November last year, this little crazy-looking bundle of blue eyes and way-too-big ears appeared at C's family's doorstep. Of course he took it back to our little apartment and after several arguments over whether to keep him (he'll grow too big! we already have a dog. We have two cats too!), we decided to keep him.

Fast forward 10 months later and little Ralphie is now not so little — and our apartment was still the same size. So we decided it was time for a move to a bigger place with some semblance of a garden — not just so Ralphie and Oxford would have more space to run about, but also for my sanity.

I am pleased to report that everyone survived the move. The cats are happier, the dogs (well, not so much since they are no longer allowed near our bedroom), and the humans don't have to worry about rushing home to ensure the dogs get let out to have a tinkle in the bushes.

So from our family to yours, Happy New Year. We hope yours is filled with blessings, peace and joy. And yes, part of this year's resolution is to post on this blog more regularly.

Pancakes with a Light Hand

2007-11-16T22:07:00.000+08:00

While small in build, I don't think anyone would describe me as "delicate". For starters, I have big hands for a small girl and on top of which, I am often known to be heavy handed... just ask my macarons. Overbeating may as well be my Red Indian name.

What does any of this have to do with pancakes? Indulge me while I explain how elusive light, fluffy pancakes have been for me until now.

I've tried numerous recipes — some using buttermilk, others just plain old flour, milk and eggs... and maybe a pinch of baking soda. After wielding my whisk to these unfortunate batters, I invariably find myself with pancakes that bear more resemblance to unleavened bread or leather pucks. You know the kind — chewy as a kitchen sponge, just like they serve in some backpackers' hostel in a Third World country, studded with aged bananas and drenched with diluted maple syrup.

Then last Sunday morning, I woke up looking for something new to whip up for breakfast. I reached into a book I haven't touched since I bought it two years ago and there it was: Buttermilk Pancakes. I all but gave it a quick glimpse — and luckily I did. Because it said, "Stir BY HAND until the batter is evenly moistened."
By hand! Could it be my hand alone, sans whisk or rubber spatula, could yield a lighter touch? No harm trying...

I am pleased to report that I made pancakes so good that morning, that I roused C from his Sunday sleep-in to have a taste.

Mixing it by hand helped meld all the ingredients together lightly and quickly so the gluten in the flour doesn't have time to stretch and render chewy pancakes. Of course it occured to me to try mixing my macaron batter by hand too — just in case it could help with my overbeating. Um, that didn't work so good.

Oh well, one thing at a time.

On another note, I've received a couple of emails and comments suggesting I add an RSS feed to this blog. Now the only reason why I hadn't done so is because I am a luddite and I had no idea how. Anyways, after 5 hours of trying, I think I've managed (see the bar on the right). If it doesn't work, let me know or better still, leave idiot-proof instructions as to how. Thanks everyone :-)

Buttermilk Pancakes
(adapted from a recipe from The Culinary Institute of America Breakfasts & Brunches)

2 cups all purpose flour
1/4 sugar
4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 1/4 cups buttermilk
4 eggs
1/4 cup butter, melted and cooled

1. Sift the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt into a mixing bowl.
2. Make a well in the centre of this mixture.
3. In another bowl, mix the eggs, buttermilk and melted butter. Pour this mixture into the well and stir by hand until the batter is evenly moistened.
4. You can now use this batter or store it for up to 12 hours in the fridge.

Cupcakes: A Birthday Bash and Baby Shower

2007-10-31T00:03:00.000+08:00

'Tis the season for cupcakes in our household, thanks to several friends who wanted custom cupcakes for two special occasions. The first was a birthday bash for a glamour-puss nominated Member of Parliament that co-incided with a Pink Party for a certain mobile phone brand. The brief, naturally, was "Think Pink", so I spent a few days trawling through my books to come up with ideas for the cupcake tower. Butterflies, roses, gifts and periwinkles made it on my list, and in the end, they chose a pink tower of rose-themed cupcakes.

Truth be told, I was terrified that the fondant was not going to make it in this heat. It certainly didn't help that the party was held outdoors, by the beach on Sentosa. But they were only slightly worse for wear by the time the cake was cut.

The top tier is a moist chocolate cake covered in pink fondant and embellished with a hot pink ribbon, while the rest of the cupcakes were a strawberry sponge topped with royal icing and fondant roses. On top of these, I also made "eating" cupcakes. (While fondant cupcakes are pretty, I can't say they make for the best eating — I know only two people apart from children who like the overly sweet taste of fondant or royal icing).

Of course, these dessert cupcakes were in pink flavours — strawberry with fresh cream frosting, pink velvet with cream cheese frosting and rose with, well, rose frosting.

The following weekend, I had such fun creating these fondant cupcakes for a baby shower. I just love those mini booties and babies in a blanket.

A Month of Macarons!

2007-10-01T00:09:00.000+08:00

Whoopee! It's October and the start of Canele's much-awaited (well, by me anyway) Macaron Festival. Just for this month, Chef Patissier Pang Kok Keong (Singapore's answer to the likes of Pierre Herme and Paco Torrablanca) has created a range of six special macaron flavours, packed in an irresistibly pretty box with a charming illustration of a Thumbelina-esque girl wearing macaron booties.

These limited edition flavours — Marron Glace (chestnut cream and candied chestnut), Pistache et Griottine (with pistachio cream and brandied cherry), Sesame, Matcha, Noisettine Truffe (truffle cream and roasted hazelnut) and Citron Vert (with green lime cream)— are sold in boxes of 6 or 12.

I'm trying to go through my precious stash slowly, which means so far, I've only tried the Citron Vert and Marron Glace. The former is a tangy, fun flavour, with the buttercream tasting surprisingly like lime soda. The latter has all the lovely, mellow sweetness of chestnuts. I'll let you know when I've sampled the other flavours in the days to come. (Believe me when I tell you that every ounce of self-restraint has been called upon to prevent myself from inhaling them all at once).

Already my friends and I are planning to head down to Canele sometime next week to try the Entremets (more lavishly assembled macarons). I'm looking forward to the Passion Chocolat, which promises an oversized macaron sandwich filled with milk chocolate cream, light passionfruit cream and caramelised bananas.

Meanwhile, I'm also hoping to check out the high tea macaron buffet (available on weekends) at Macaron (which sits beside Canele). For $55++ per person, you get a choice of appetizer and entree from Macaron's regular menu, followed by a buffet offering 18 macaron flavours, 7 macaron entremets and 2 ala carte servings of Canele's homemade ice creams or sorbets. Sounds like heaven to me.

Two Special Cakes

2007-09-23T22:45:00.000+08:00

I spied a basket of fresh figs the other day and couldn't resist picking them up. I'd been meaning to try this recipe for a while, and with a half packet of frozen raspberries sitting forlornly in the fridge, there was no better time than now. Jodie's Fresh Fig, Raspberry & Almond Cake from Kylie Kwong's Heart and Soul is the kind of cake I love — dense and slightly wet, a texture you only get from a batter heavy with almond meal. Left overnight, the cake's moisture content improves and you get a fantastic tea cake that makes for a great breakfast slice too.

Red Velvet Cake

I've always been curious about Red Velvet Cake. It's not something you find on the bakery counters here, Singaporeans being partial to more European desserts (except, of course, cheesecake). By all accounts—and by that, I mean from what I've seen on TV (Oprah, The Apprentice—yes, my goggle box diet needs reviewing)—it's a Southern (American) favourite.

Almost luridly red, the cake gets its colour from a good splash (or three) of red food colouring. Although, technically, the reaction between the white vinegar and cocoa powder should be sufficient to render a reddish hue. I can't vouch for the latter since I unloaded quite fair bit of red food colouring into my batter.

The good news is, taste wise, this cake rocks. It is wonderfully moist, tender and light, with the lovely flavour of buttermilk and an almost alkalinic lilt. A swirl of cream cheese frosting is all it needs, making this one of the best cakes I've made in a while.

Eggs Over Easy

2007-08-30T22:36:00.002+08:00

Again, inspired by Marc Bittman, a seriously old-school dish that's just so nostalgic. I haven't had devilled eggs since I made a batch in home-ec class decades ago. And even then, I don't remember it being this good. It was the shrimp that sold me — I'll eat shrimp in anything — and despite what everyone says about how bad it is for you, I adore egg yolks. The olives — an ingredient I can't say I am fond of — were an inspired addition. The overall dish made for great, simple children's party food, or a 1950s style hor'dourves.

As for these eggs en cocotte, I like them best with a teeny dollop of truffle salsa at the bottom.

Devilled Eggs with Shrimp
Adapted from a recipe by Mark Bittman in the New York Times

Serves 4

4 eggs
5 green olives, pitted and chopped
125 grams prawns, shelled, boiled and chopped
half a white onion, minced
1 1/2 tbsp English parsley, minced
1 tbsp Worchestershire sauce
2 tbsp mayonnaise
salt and pepper to taste

Boil the eggs. Shell the eggs and cut into half. Gently remove the yolks from the whites.

Mash the yolks with one tbsp of the parsley and all the other ingredients. Then use a teaspoon to stuff the egg yolk mixture back into the whites.

Sprinkle with the remaining parsley and serve.

Eggs En Cocotte
Serves 4

4 large fresh eggs
15g butter (divided into four portions)
4 tbsp thickened cream
1 tbsp chopped parsley
salt and pepper

Bring a kettle of water to the boil and preheat your oven to 180 degrees C.

Break each egg into a saucer then slide it into a ramekin (each egg should have its own ramekin). Season each with a tiny pinch of salt and a dash of pepper and top each egg with a portion of butter. Lastly, top with a tablespoon of cream.

Place the ramekins in a baking tin and place it in the middle shelf of your oven. Pour boiling water into the baking tin until it comes halfway up the sides of the ramekins.

Let the eggs bake for 15 minutes if you like them soft and runny, and 18 minutes if you like them more set. Bear in mind that the eggs continue to cook for a few minutes after you’ve removed them from the oven.

Sprinkle a little parsley over each baked egg 1–2 minutes before the end of cooking time.

Kneadless Pain

2007-07-07T00:44:00.000+08:00

Had I known bread could be this easy to make, I would have started a lot sooner. I first read about the miracle that is kneadless bread in The New York Times when Mark Bittman, better known as the Minimalist, extolled its virtues. But it wasn't until Jeffrey Steingarten waxed yet more lyrical about this loaf that I decided to give it a shot.

The entire process involves less than 15 minutes of work (or more like pottering about, if you ask me) spread over 20 hours or so. More a question of shrewd timing than technique, this wonderful loaf is like a cross between a soft country loaf and sourdough. Apparently experimenting with various types of flour will yield different results (read more about it if you can get your hands on a copy of the May issue of American Vogue). I've only tried the basic recipe using Waitrose Bread Flour and I've also found that you need a standard sized oven to do this successfully. In my smaller, standalone oven, the loaf tends to start burning slightly before the baking time is up.

This recipe was adapted from Jeffrey Steingarten's amazing article in American Vogue.

3 cups bread flour, and more for dusting
2 tsp fine salt
1 tsp instant yeast
1 1/2 cups water, at room temperature
1/2 cup coarse wheat bran*

Equipment
- A heavy casserole dish, preferably enamelled cast iron. You could also use a good glass casserole dish.
- 1 coarse dish towel

1. Combine the flour, salt and yeast in a large bowl.
2. Pour in the water and with your fingers or a spoon, mix for about 30 seconds until a rough wet dough forms and all the flour has been absorbed.
3. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and allow the dough to rise at room temperature for about 18 hours. (You can leave it for longer or shorter, up to just 8 hours. The longer the rise, the better the texture of the bread. But past 24 hours, the dough will begin to collapse, which is not what you want).
4. Heavily flour your work surface. Invert the bowl over the surface. It will spread like a formless blob.
5. Dust the dough with flour and stretch it into a rough square, about 25cm per side.
6. Fold the square into thirds to make a puffy strip about 10 cm wide and 25 cm long.
7. Cover lightly with plastic wrap and let rest for 15 minutes
8. Meanwhile, spread the dish towel on a flat surface. Rub a generous amount of flour into one half of the towel, and sprinkle a few tablespoons of bran over the flour. This prevents the dough from sticking to the towel.
9. Fold the dough in thirds again, beginning at one of the short ends of the strip. You should have a dough that’s shaped like a rough cube.
10. Gently lift the dough with both hands onto the floured half of the dish cloth that you prepared earlier.
11. Sprinkle the top of the dough with a little flour and bran. Cover with the other half of the towel or with plastic wrap. Let rise for 2 hours.
12. When an hour has passed, place your casserole and its cover in the oven. Set the temperature to its highest setting, probably about 220 degrees to 240 degrees.
13. When another hour has passed, open the oven and remove the casserole cover. Bring the loaf to the casserole and up-end it into the casserole. Shake the casserole sideways if the loaf needs to be neatened.
14. Cover the casserole and bake for 30 minutes.
15. Uncover the casserole and bake for another 20 to 30 minutes until the loaf is a lovely golden to dark brown. Remove and let it cool on a rack until barely warm to the touch.
16. This bread is best eaten when it has almost cooled completely.

*Wheat bran or bran flakes can be purchased at organic or health food stores like Nature’s Farm.

Turkish Delight Ice Cream

2007-06-19T23:34:00.000+08:00

I've never liked roses. Not the flower (I'm more a peony kinda girl) and certainly not the taste. Maybe it was an over-flavoured Indian dessert that I ate as a child—restraint never having been a virtue in my greedy life, I bit off a huge chunk rather than nibbled to taste, and the heady flavour of the flower exploded in my mouth. To this day, when faced with a rose-flavoured anything, I balk, images of a colourful Indian street flooding my mind, a firm warning that should I so much as lick the food in question, my mouth would fill with that potent sweet essence and linger there until the sacred cows on my imaginary Indian street amble their way home.

So imagine my surprise when I decided to throw caution to the wind and make a Turkish Delight ice cream with a whole 50ml of rose water, and ended up loving the delicate flavour of it.

Incidentally, I can't admit to being a fan of Turkish Delight either (must be the rosewater component, you think?), but this ice cream, part of a composed dessert by the always affable chef Geoff Lindsey at his Melbourne restaurant Pearl, was just too pretty not to attempt.

The dessert encompasses the ice cream strewn with vanilla Persian fairy floss and served with bits of glace ginger, fushia pomegranate seeds and rose petals. I was going to serve it with just the Persian fairy floss, which my cousin bought from Sydney's Jones the Grocer along with a box of their lovely Turkish Delight (the best I've ever tasted), but he forgot to bring the fairy floss to dinner that day, so it was just the ice cream. But no matter. What a wonderful ice cream it was. The bits of Turkish Delight, though turned hard in the freezer, yields quickly to the warm temperature of your tongue. The delicate flavour of the rosewater was just lovely, nothing like the cacophony of sharp, sweet gusto that I had imagined.

Other items on the menu that night included Osso Bucco with Risotto Milanese. A friend gave us a bottle of Spanish saffron stamens to try and they flavoured and stained the risotto a lovely shade of golden yellow.

My brother recently returned from a trip to Italy, so we also had a load of shaved parma ham, which we walloped with baguettes and a wonderfully fresh-flavoured salad of buffalo mozarella, juicy vine cherry tomatoes and fat basil leaves.

Cupcake Madness

2007-06-09T00:23:00.000+08:00

It was like a scene straight out of Ugly Betty. An order of 100 cupcakes, which I felt needed to be delivered as fresh as possible. So I baked them the afternoon before they were to be sent and frosted them after dinner. A task that took me through to 2am, when I finally crawled into bed only to wake early the next morning to deliver the bounty.

I call these Adult Cupcakes. In two flavours—banana and chocolate—both with dark chocolate whipped cream frosting.Kids don't like them. I know because my friend's four-year-old daughter took one bite of it and screwed up her face really bad. "It ain't sweet, Mommy!" she cried. Her embarrassed mother attributed it to her daughter's Americanised palate.

Another friend ordered these for her nephew's birthday party. She later reported that few of the kids even touched the mini-cupcakes, but the adults polished them off with ease.

Personally, I like them for the moist cocoa flavoured sponge—in which I use corn oil rather than butter so they stay soft even when kept in the fridge. The frosting, made of fresh cream and melted 64% Valrhona Manjari chocolate, provides a lush, ever so slightly bitter edge that offsets the sweetness of the cake perfectly.

The banana cupcake is a lot richer, but no less delicious. Made with plenty of butter, they are better served at room temperature. Again, the deep chocolate whipped cream frosting cuts through the sweetness of the cake, but this time, the mouth feel is buttery, decadent and deliciously sinful.

The Fat of the Matter

2007-05-26T13:03:00.000+08:00

Before I left for Tokyo, my friend G’s very kind mother-in-law invited me to their home for a lesson in de-veining foie gras and foie gras terrine. I adore foie gras. I had my first taste of it back in the day, at the tender age of 18, in a mock aircraft while undergoing training to be an air stewardess. It was a lesson in in-flight meal service; the most fun part of the class was devouring the food we were pretending to serve.

It probably wasn’t even real foie gras, come to think of it. More like duck liver as opposed to goose, but at that age, how was I to know? All I knew was that it was delicious. The most delicious, unctuous, deep-tasting moussy thing my palate had ever known. I was hooked—even if for years I had made it very clear to my mother that I did not like and would never eat any kind of liver.

Over the months that followed, I stole pieces of foie gras from my colleagues’ meal trays the moment any of them so much as hinted that they didn’t care for foie gras. Over the years, I indulged like a true freeloader at media events—the most memorable being under a huge white tent lining up more than a few times with a colleague for nuggets of pan-fried foie gras just before the Chanel show. If the models weren’t eating, I certainly was.

One of my family’s favourite Sunday brunches is at Raffles Hotel’s Bar and Billiard Room, where they serve all the foie gras you can eat—pan-fried or terrine. So far the record stands at 15 servings of pan-fried foie gras, set by my cousin G. Granted he arrived at brunch fresh from completing a full marathon, but he also devoured four lobsters, three servings of terrine, countless oysters, lots of grilled meats, cheese, some salad and dessert. Good thing both he and his father are doctors—he’ll need all the cholesterol meds he can get.

The little hole in the terrine you see here comes from not packing the foie gras in the dish tightly enough.

Back in my friend’s kitchen, her mother-in-law M, who was visiting from Lyon, showed me the intricacies of de-veining the goose liver. Her version of foie gras terrine is extremely simple—“home-style” as she likes to call it. Seasoned with herb salt, pepper and a sprinkling of nutmeg, the foie gras is tucked neatly into a terrine dish which was sealed with paste of flour and water and carefully cooked in a bain-marie. M even thoughtfully brought me a terrine dish from Lyon since they seem to cost a fortune here in Singapore.

With strict instructions to let the dish rest in the fridge for five days, she sent me along. It was a good thing then that I was off to Tokyo for exactly that duration, and when I came home, it was foie gras all week. Even then, at the end of week, I had to call in The Cleaners, otherwise known as my cousins, who lived up to their moniker impeccably.

Sweet On Tokyo

2007-04-23T23:44:00.000+08:00

It’s been almost two decades since I last set foot in Tokyo and when my sakura-obsessed friend A suggested we head there for cherry blossom season, I found it very hard to resist. Of course it helped that A’s brother currently lives and works there and he very kindly agreed to let us…well, me really…stay in his pad.

Life has been a bit of a whirlwind lately, so from the time we decided to make the trip to the time we stepped on the plane at almost 6am on a humid Monday morning, I barely had time to do any research on the best places to eat in the Japanese capital. In any case, I figured A’s brother Tim, having lived there for over eight months now, would be able to offer recommendations. So I did what any dessert-obsessed girl would do—I downloaded a list of French patisseries and chocolatiers, from Pierre Herme to La Maison du Chocolat, and braced myself for numerous packed-to-the-rafters subway rides. Oh, and I also brought along a dedicated foldable bag for all the macarons, chocolates and other goodies that I would hand-carry home.

Tokyo did not disappoint. It heaves with people at all hours of the day. Getting from one place to another during our first couple of days was a mission in itself, and on day one and two, we found ourselves snoring in bed by 10pm, having eaten nothing but bowls of ramen (and what good ramen it was) all day. Indeed, we got lost more times that we liked, and we got caught without umbrellas in very cold rain to boot.

On day three we realised that we had found our groove with the city and learned to seriously map our routes before going anywhere so we wouldn’t get too lost (or frustrated). The Japanese were also very kind to us—giving directions even when we could barely understand one another, for shops and patisseries that were just around the corner yet unexplainably invisible to us two guileless gaijins.

In the end, I lugged home a foldable bag bursting with chocolate truffles and macarons from Jean Paul Hevin and Pierre Herme, dark chocolate studded with sesame seeds and matcha truffles from Patisserie Sadaharu Aoki, two chocolate and chestnut cakes and a tin of black Russian tea from Joel Robuchon, several packets of beautifully wrapped wagashi, and more bags of rice crackers.

Food-wise, Tokyo turned out to be less expensive than we expected. While we didn’t dine anywhere posh, everything we ate—from the beautifully packaged bento boxes and egg sandwiches at the train stations to sukiyaki at a counter in Isetan Shinjuku—was divine. The Japanese not only take pride in the way their food looks and tastes, they also use the freshest ingredients that make all the difference (I’ve never tasted fresher eggs in my life).

Here then is my must-hit list of places in Tokyo, as varied as they are incredibly appealing—at least to a greedy chick like me:

For macarons, head to Pierre Herme (of course) at these addresses. Jean Paul Hevin has various outposts in the city and I found that his macarons travelled better than the ones from Pierre Herme.

Other fantastic patisseries include Patisserie Sadaharu Aoki, for its amazing selection of chocolates, cookies, teas and cakes (see their online shop on the website for the selection) and Joel Robuchon’s boutique at L’Atelier Joel Robuchon in Roppongi Hills.

Incidentally, L’Atelier Joel Robuchon is a fantastic place to sample the renowned chef’s cuisine at friendly prices. A four-course dinner costs ¥6,800 per head, plus taxes (about S$80), without wine. And what a fantastic meal it was. The entire experience was very pleasant, from the food to the service (the dishy waiters helped some too). The restaurant doesn’t take reservations, so either go early or early in the week—and be prepared to get in line.

If you can pull yourself out of bed at the ungodly hour of four or five in the morning, the Tsukiji Fish Market is worth a trip. This site has some pretty detailed pictures and information on the market. The market closes every Sunday and on alternate Wednesdays and Saturdays, so be sure to check before you head down.

The Japanese are incredibly polite, but I couldn’t help feeling like I was getting in the way of the fishmongers who are busily ferrying giant tunas along the narrow rows of the market. Us camera-touting tourists must be the bane of their existence—a right nuisance in the midst of their daily grind.

The best part of the fish market is the sushi you’ll have after. Everyone seems to head to Daiwa (Tsujiki Market, Bldg. #6, 5-2-1, Tsujiki, Chuo-ku, Tokyo | P: 03 3547 6807), much touted as the place for a sushi breakfast. I’m not much for queuing that early in the morning, so we headed to a little sushi bar (we didn’t even get its name), in which we spied several older Japanese folk having breakfast. If it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for me.

Everyone’s been talking about the new Tokyo MidTown in Roppongi. It’s huge, it’s posh and well, it’s a mall. It’s kinda like Little New York, with its coffee and bagel shops and two Dean & Deluca outlets (one little coffee shop and the bigger gourmet store). It is also home to Jean Paul Hevin and Patisserie Sadaharu Aoki outlets.

No self-respecting foodie should miss the experience of a Japanese supermarket. The noisiest, most crowded and most interesting by far is The Food Show in the basement of Tokyu in Shibuya. It has everything—from fresh fruit, meat, fish, cooked food stalls, patisseries, chocolatiers—everything. And it’s chock full of vendors screaming across the crowds, from one end of the place to the other.

Finally, for quirky home items, check out Tokyu Hands. Give yourself at least an hour (more, to be realistic) because it’s eight floors of everything from kitchen supplies to hardware to cleaning equipment and camping equipment to stationary.

An Unusual Pasta Pie

2007-01-06T02:00:00.000+08:00

I have certainly been a poor correspondent; a lapsed blogger, if you will. And to all those who’ve been checking in regularly and who’ve sent emails or comments asking after me, thank you and my apologies for going MIA since—how long has it been?—October??

It was a busy last quarter of the year—ironic, since I quit my job in October. The last few months have been filled with exciting new opportunities and naturally, lots of cooking and baking as it happens with the festive season. Between the rushing around and numerous dinners to cook and attend, not to mention the cake orders that came pouring in (just one of the aforementioned new opportunities), there was nary a free moment to document, photograph, or simply sit for a minute to reflect.

Hence, this post, with “action shots” taken just as the pie emerged from the oven, minutes before it hit the dinner table where 12 hungry cousins awaited. It is a late post, to be sure, but hey, better late than never, no?

This Unusual Tortellini Pie from Lynne Rossetto Kasper’s whopper of a book, The Splendid Table , was the reason I insisted Christmas dinner this year be held at my house. Just the thought of constructing this lavish centrepiece alone was challenging enough—especially with a project that took up a good nine hours a day away from home—but I was hooked on the idea, and there was just no stopping me.

A sweet, crumbly crust, bound by lashings of white wine, within which a layering of tortellini, ragu, and tiny meatballs lay. Just before the top crust is put in place, a voluptuous cinnamon-scented custard is ladled over it all, providing an gorgeous accent—both taste and texture-wise—to the pie’s meaty flavours.

As the author suggested, I made each component, one a day (or more like night, when the office and page upon page of magazine were left behind for the day): The meatballs on Monday evening, the ragu on Tuesday, the custard on Wednesday… Alas, by the time Thursday rolled around, I was simply too exhausted and overwhelmed to make the tortellini from scratch, so I went with some leftover dried penne instead. Purists may balk, but it was delicious nonetheless.

Some of the other items on the menu that night included a roasted pork loin with macadamia nut and apricot stuffing, a warm scallop and rocket salad, vichyssoise, grilled wagyu steak (a dish that’s turning into a new Christmas tradition among the Cousins Tan), vanilla bean pannacotta with raspberry compote, and three flavours of home-made ice cream: peanut butter and chocolate, rocky road and vanilla honey. Yes, we certainly ate well.

But back to the pie. In the 1500s, records of Italian court life tell of numerous elaborate and savoury pies. Sugar, being a status symbol, was used with abandon during feasts, so sweet crusts that held savoury or sweet fillings were the fashion of the day. Apparently, “many were designed to be showstoppers: when their lids were lifted, flocks of live birds flew out. Some contained three pounds each of butter and salt pork, four roast pigeons, juice of sour grapes, saffron, nutmeg, cloves, and handfuls of cinnamon and pepper.”

The sweet pastry of this pie is a nice contrast to its intensely savoury insides. On its own, the meatballs were too rich with Parmesan cheese, the Baroque ragu (dominated by chicken and encompassing beef chuck, Italian sausage and chicken giblets) and meat tortellini on top would have just been overkill. But the slightly sweet cushion of custard and the sugary pastry cut through it all nicely, so it was a fine balance of sweet and savoury.

Would I do it again? No doubt about it. But next time, I’m taking the entire week off.

Happy New Year!

Weekend Chocolate Treats

2006-10-15T13:03:00.000+08:00

Whenever I so much as walk past the Grand Hyatt Singapore , I make it a point to nip inside and pick up a bag of chocolate chip cookies from Mezza9. Those melt-in-your mouth cocoa-rich cookies don’t come cheap, mind. For something like $6, you get less than 10 cookies which a greedy goose like me can (and naturally, I do) easily inhale in one short sitting. As luck would have it, last week, while searching for a quick exercise in kitchen therapy, I flipped through my as yet unused copy of Paris Sweets and decided on the simple sounding recipe for Korova Cookies by Pierre Herme. Little did I realise that I had stumbled upon the recipe for those same chocolate chip cookies I often lust over at Mezza9 — well, almost.

Korova, says the brilliant Dorie Greenspan and author of Paris Sweets, was the name of the milk bar in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and the name of this restaurant located off Champs-Elysees for which Pierre Herme created these cookies. Think ice-box cookies gone luxe with 1/3 cup of the best Dutch-processed cocoa, 150 grams of the finest bittersweet chocolate you can find, and a good half-teaspoon of fleur de sel to take it to great heights.

The difference between the Korova Cookies and the ones from Mezza9 is essentially the size of the chocolate chips used — Mezza9 uses whole chocolate chips, while the recipe for Korova calls for the chocolate to be chopped into small bits.

Cocoa Nibs
There is an entire list of foods that I have yet to taste — an authentic tagine is one of them, as is an authentic cassoulet. Yet another was cocoa nibs which was within easy enough reach since it wouldn’t require my traveling hundreds of miles to persuade a French countrywoman or a Moroccan grandmother to cook one for me. When the nibs finally arrived, I excitedly tried almost every cocoa nib recipe that lay in my ever-growing library of cookbooks. That first weekend, I made a simple cocoa nib ice cream from Alice Medrich’s Bittersweet
and had a go at Emily Luchetti’s Cocoa Nib Florentines from A Passion For Ice Cream. I have to admit, it turns out I’m not that big a fan of cocoa nibs after all. They impart a nice chocolatey flavour to the ice cream, but they also burn and turn bitter easily, as I found out with my attempt at those Florentines. Anita of Dessert First was far more successful, so you may want to check out her post on them here.

The ice cream from Bittersweet was good. It was a Philadelphia style recipe that didn’t require a custard base, but it was a tad too milky for me. As a child, my mother would literally force down a cup of full-cream powdered milk, spiked with a teaspoon or so of Milo (presumably to make it more palatable). How I loathed it so. Alas, while I am a massive fan of Ms Medrich’s recipes, this one unfortunately brought back the taste of that childhood memory. Not so good. On a brighter note, an old friend of mine who popped by for dinner one night tried the ice cream and asked if he could take the whole tub home.

Fast forward to yet another Cocoa Nib ice cream recipe from Chocolate Obsession.This one had a richer custard base which I like a lot more (I like my ice cream dense and almost sticky). To add a little something extra to it, I also caramalised some nibs which I eventually decided to strewn over the ice cream as opposed to mixing it in as the recipe suggested. Now that’s also because I damn near burnt the nibs while caramalising them and was afraid I might spoil the flavour of my ice cream with any bitter crunch.

While I like this version of the Cocoa Nib Ice Cream, it’s not something I’d devour with abandon like I would, say, real rich dark chocolate ice cream. So I did the next best thing and turned it into an ice cream sandwich with the Korova cookies. Now that turned out to be a very good thing.

In A Blood Orange Mood

2006-09-17T01:15:00.000+08:00

I was so excited to see blood oranges on our neighbourhood supermarket shelf that I completely forget my doctor's orders to stay well away from citrus fruit. Blood oranges are exceptionally uncommon in this part of the world, the closest country to grow them being Australia. Named for their red specked flesh and deep red juice, blood oranges are lower in acidity than regular oranges and tend to be sweeter. The "blood" in these oranges come courtesy of a pigment called antocyanin, not typically found in citrus, but more common in other red fruit and flowers like pomegranate. Their colour alone endears them to cocktails and all kinds of pretty dishes with the added benefit of being antioxidant rich.

Alas, despite all the good stuff it packs, a glass of its vibrant vermillion juice later and my esophagus retaliated with a vengence. The good doc's orders echoed in my mind like a flashback in a bad movie. No pills could save me now. I would have to ride through the night gagging away uncontrollably like an unwitting porn-flick newbie.

Anyways, with a whole bag full of blood oranges still waiting in the fridge, I had to do something with them. Inspired by J's amazing Orange Conserve, the last of the precious portion she so kindly gave us dwindling fast, I decided to try something I had never done before: make jam. Following her recipe to the letter, but with blood oranges instead of regular oranges, I emerged with a beautiful coral-red conserve that was as delicious as it was gorgeous.

With the rest of the blood oranges, Claudia Roden's fool-proof and always-a-hit Middle Eastern Orange Cake, gussied up with a dollop of whipped thickened cream, strewn with chopped pistachios for that extra Middle Eastern touch and of course a teensy wedge of conserved orange like a sparkling garnet crown.

The Most Versatile Cakes of All

2006-09-10T16:24:00.000+08:00

Who doesn't love crabs or crab cakes? Luscious fresh crabmeat packed in a crispy crumbed skin. But fresh crab meat can be such a pain, involving as it does picking miniscule bits of the precious flaky meat from the smallest crevices of the crab's limbs. Hard work indeed, but often more than worth the effort.

I recently chanced upon an extremely versatile recipe that has quickly become a favourite in our household. It is from a book which I've owned for some time now but haven't really delved into until a few months ago. The New York Restaurant Cookbook packs 115 recipes, all of which are signature dishes from New York's most famous restaurants. Nobu's Black Cod with Miso is in there, as is Le Perigord's Rack of Lamb with White Beans and WD 50's Cherry Clafouti. I don't know why I waited so long to discover the gems within these pages, but I'm currently working my way through the flurry of post-in with which I've marked the recipes I'm gunning to try.

The famed '21' Club's Lobster Cake recipe is so versatile I've made them with all manner of shellfish. Delightfully piquant and spicy, they are extremely easy to make, even for a dinner party of more than 4 (have you tried picking crabs for 6?). I sometimes omit or use alternative ingredients since things like jalapeno peppers and flat leaf parsley aren't readily available at the average suburban supermarket here (I replace the jalepeno peppers with green chillis and sometimes do without the flat leaf parsley). I've used crabmeat, crayfish and prawns and in every variation, they've been wonderfully delicious. The book also provides a cucumber salad recipe to accompany the cakes, but both C and I aren't cucumber fans, so instead I make a citrus and fennel or rocket salad to go along with it.

Lobster Cakes
(Serves 4)

1/2 jalapeno chilli or 1 green chilli (seeded if you don't want the heat)
1/2 cup minced red bell pepper
1/2 cup minced onion
Salt and freshly ground white pepper
2 egg yolks
1 tbsp hot sauce (tabasco)
2 tbsp lime juice
5 tbsp mayonnaise
2 tbsp Dijon mustard
1 tbsp minced chives (I sometimes replace these with the white part of a spring onion)
1/2 tbsp minced flat leaf parsley
2 tsp coriander leaves
a pinch of cayenne pepper
1/2 pound fresh cooked lobster/crayfish/prawn meat (cut into 1/2 inch pieces) or flaked crabmeat
1/2 cup soft fresh breadcrumbs
1 1/4 cups panko (Japanese white bread crumbs)
1 tbsp unsalted butter

Heat a tbsp of oil in a saute pan and add the jalapeno, red bell pepper and onion. Season with salt and pepper and saute over low heat until the vegetables are soft and not brown. Remove the vegetables to a bowl and set aside to cool.

In a large bowl, combine egg yolks, hot sauce and lime juice. Blend in the mayonnaise, mustard, the herbs, and the cayenne pepper. Now the soft bread crumbs, 1/4 cup of the panko, the shellfish meat, and the reserved sauteed vegetables.

Now spread the remaning panko on a deep plate or a pan and shape the cakes (you can use your hands or shape them in a circular mould or in tuna cans with the tops removed). Place the cakes on the panko and then sprinkle more panko on top to coat. Refrigerate for 30 minutes and then saute over medium heat till golden brown.

To make the salad, segment an orange or ruby grapefruit, mix with rocket leaves or thinly sliced fennel and some fresh mint leaves. Dress with balsamic vinegar, some of the fruits' juices and olive oil.

Five Things To Eat Before You Die

2006-09-04T22:33:00.000+08:00

'Tis the meme of memes that seems to be doing the rounds, started by the über flogger Melissa from The Traveler's Lunchbox. Since I've been tagged not only by my friend and Singapore's most famous flogger, Chubby Hubby, but also by Jared of Alaska Cooks, I am of course more than glad to participate.

So here goes:

1) Baba Ganoush at Naguib Mahfouz Cafe in Cairo
Before I entered this bustling eatery in Cairo's Khan al-Kahlili bazaar, I was a baba ganoush virgin. But one taste of this creamy, tangy eggplant dip and I was hooked. Alas, throughout the rest of the trip, no other baba ganoush — from Cairo to Istanbul — lived up to our first encounter. None other to date has, in fact. Perhaps, as the saying goes, the first time is the best. But if you're ever, ever in that vicinity, you simply must give it a try. Incidentally, the cafe is named after Egypt's (and the Middle East's) most famous writer and the first Arab to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Mahfouz passed away last week on 30 August, at the age of 94. The cafe is open daily from noon to midnight. 5 Sekket al-Badistan, Khan al-Khalili, phone 590-3788 or 593-2262.

2) Cheok Kee Braised Duck Rice
So wonderful is this dish that I enjoy it no matter how I'm feeling—gluttonous, sad, sick or happy. Served in the traditional Cantonese style, a robust, thick dark sauce is poured over the tender duck meat and is accompanied with either yam rice (when gluttonous or in need of comfort food), rice noodles (for happy slurping) or rice porridge (for sick, sad or cold days). It helps that the guy at the stall always serves it up with a smile and is very generous with the gravy and two types of chilli—in sambal and a vinegar sauce. Stall 29, East Coast Lagoon, Singapore

3) Thai street noodles
I don't know what these noodles are really called, but you see them sold on every street side in Thailand. It's essentially egg noodles served with fishballs, porkballs, minced pork, or sliced chicken meat, in a seriously tasty broth. Whenever I'm in Thailand, I make it a point to eat a bowl (or two) for breakfast every day I'm there.

4) Oysters
I once tasted a poached oyster at some restaurant as a child, but it was so vile I spat it out right at the moment the manager came over to ask us if we were enjoying our meal, casting immense shame on our family's name. That put me off oysters for a long, long time and until I met my partner C almost seven years ago, I had never tasted a fresh oyster. I am pleased to report that I have since more than made up for lost time.

5) Cocoa Nibs
Right now, at this very point in my very greedy life, I am obsessed with experiencing the cocoa nib. I've never tasted a cocoa nib in my life and were I to die today, I would be really pissed that I haven't gotten down to putting one of those things in my mouth. I recently found a place in Singapore to buy them, but I can only buy them in a one-kilogram bag. Which I will — I've already placed my order. So, soon. Soon there will be cocoa nib ice cream and other confections. There are recipes flagged with lime-coloured post-its in numerous cookbooks, waiting for my nibs when they arrive.

I better be alive this weekend.

Saving Fruit

2006-08-26T22:48:00.000+08:00

“There are only 10 minutes in the life of a pear when it is perfect to eat," said Ralph Waldo Emerson. And I must have missed those precious 10 minutes with the batch that went into these financiers. I did everything they tell you to do — I stored them in a warm place outside of the refrigerator in a paper bag and I checked daily for ripeness, pressing them with my eager fingers, gently at first, near the stem, willing their flesh to give, just a little.

Two weeks passed; no joy.

And so I turned to Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Heaven, within whose pages my absolute favourite recipe for turning bum pears into baby cakes of beauty lay. Browned butter, ground almonds and mellow bits of cooked pear — what’s not to love? In the book’s picture, Ramsey’s financiers are made in cup moulds, yielding tall, cylindrical, seemingly fluffy golden cakes. When I first made them in similar moulds, however, they emerged dense and a tad heavier that I thought they should be. Several experiments later, I have concluded that they turn out best baked in shallow tins like traditional financier moulds or the barquette tins I used for this batch.

These cakes are wonderfully rustic. They are lovely and damp and need nothing more than a good cup of tea, or perhaps, when I’m feeling decadent, a dollop of vanilla or crème fraiche ice cream. They are best eaten the same day they’re made, but if you must, store them in the fridge and warm them in the oven slightly before eating.

Several days later, a pretty, fragrant pineapple appeared with my boxful of organic produce, brimming with such promise. I saved it for the weekend, bringing it to my nose every now and then to sniff its sweet perfume. When I finally skinned it and cut a small chunk out of it, alas, disappointment. It was so tart it made my eyes burn and my gums crawl. Had it not been one of those super busy weeks, I might have grated the lot and turned it into jam, and then maybe, just maybe, pineapple tarts. But as it turns out, it was one of those weeks where my cats are lucky if they get a quick hello before I drop off to sleep. So we saved the slices of pineapple for dessert the next day when we basted it with honey and grilled it till it turned a brilliant shade of gold.

Gordon Ramsey’s Pear Financiers
(adapted from Kitchen Heaven)

Serves 4

125 g unsalted butter
4 pears
165g sugar
25g plain flour
125g ground almonds
4 egg whites

Preheat oven to 190 degrees C/375 degrees F. Melt the butter in a pan over high heat until it starts to go brown and then strain through a fine sieve. Leave to cool. Peel and core the pears and chop them into 1cm dice. Put 75g of the sugar into a warmed pan and heat gently until caramelised. Add the diced pear and cook for 4 to 5 minutes until it just starts to break down. Take out of the pan and leave to cool.

Mix the flour, ground almonds and the remaining sugar in a large bowl. Slowly fold in the egg whites, then stir in the melted butter. Grease your moulds with butter and then dust with flour. Put in the fridge for 10 mins. Combine the almond mixture with the pears, then pour into the moulds. Bake at the top of the oven for 25 mins until golden brown and firm.

The Best Chocolate Ice Cream

2006-08-13T17:05:00.000+08:00

It’s been a while since I acquired my ice cream maker and I just love it to bits. I’ve made countless flavours so far, experimenting with recipes from different books—Chocolate Malt from Claudia Fleming’s The Last Course, Coconut from Les Huynh's Blue Ginger,and even a Fromage Blanc flavour which I adapted from a recipe for Crème Fraiche ice cream from the very handy Frozen Desserts.

Yet, for some reason, I’ve put off making chocolate ice cream for the longest time. I love chocolate ice cream—the richer the better. I love Haagen Daaz chocolate flavours, from Double Chocolate Chip to Belgian Chocolate. They are dense, smooth, super chocolatey and very, very fattening. Those were some of my most guilty pleasures. And I guess I’ve been afraid that I might screw up when it came to making my own chocolate ice cream and put myself off it forever. Yes, I know I’m being a drama queen.

Anyways, I finally got it together and turned to a book that I’ve come to love and depend on for some of the best chocolate recipes: Alice Medrich’s Bittersweet. Her recipe for Bittersweet Chocolate Ice Cream didn’t disappoint. In fact, I knew it was going to be better than good once I had put the ingredients together to form its custard base. It probably helped that I used a fabulous bar of chocolate (99%) that Prestat (who recently opened an outlet at Raffles City) had sent me a few weeks ago.

It was the most voluptuous chocolate ice cream I had ever tasted. Yes, even better than my once-favourite Haagen Daz. It was gorgeous eaten soft, straight out of the ice cream maker and just as delicious firm out of the freezer. In fact it was so good that we very nearly finished it all before I could take a few shots of it for this post…which would explain why you see a quickly melting scoop of ice cream in these pictures—there was just none left to top up as the ice cream quickly melted in the tropical heat.

Veggie Galore

2006-08-06T12:57:00.001+08:00

It's been a very busy week and before I knew it, I was faced with more organic vegetables than I knew what to do with or had the time for. So with Thursday (the day a new box of organic produce arrives at my door) rolling around once again, it was time to clear out last week's veggies to make way for the new stuff. The trouble with being a greedy hoarder is that there is always more food in my pantry than I can consume for a year. Over here a can of cannelini beans, over there a few rashers of bacon; tucked away in the corner of the cupboard a nearly forgotten can of tomatoes... In order to use it all up together with the organic zucchini, carrots, onions and broccoli, I chopped up the lot and turned it into my own version of minestrone soup.

Taking my cue from a sidebar on soup in Damien Pignolet's awesome book French, I sweated the chopped onions in olive oil together with the minced bacon. Then in goes the chopped canned tomatoes, some chicken stock and the rest of the chopped vegetables. An hour and some seasoning later, a hearty soup that needed little else but a drizzle of pesto and good, crusty bread.

Also begging to be used was a giant head of gorgeous red cabbage. I don't think I've ever used red cabbage in anything I've cooked before; in fact, I think the last time I ate any red cabbage was in some steak house's salad bar where the vegetable was sliced into little slivers and thrown into the mix, presumably for some added colour. And like I said in my last post, if you want a recipe for coloureds, you go to Nigella Lawson. True to form, I found one for Viennese-style red cabbage, or in Nigella-speak, "Red Cabbage in the Viennese Fashion".

In this dish, the cabbage is braised atop a stove with sliced apples, beef stock, cider vinegar and an onion. It is a sumptuously rich dish, especially since the cabbage and onion are first cooked in a half cup(!!) of butter or beef dripping. I should have trusted my better judgement and halved the amount of butter since I was serving this with a slab of roasted pork belly. Nevertheless it was wonderfully tasty, with the tang of the cider vinegar (the recipe called for just 3 tablespoons; I ended up using something like half a cup) providing a brilliant counterpoint to all that butter and beef stock. The roasted pork was simple—I just threw it in the oven covered with sea salt, skin scored and baked for 160 degrees Celcius for three hours. Yes, we did consume far more fat than was safe that night, but what happy bellies we went to bed with. The cholesterol we can deal with later. So much for healthy organic food!

Organic Gems

2006-07-26T10:01:00.000+08:00

In a recent bid to eat healthier, I finally gave in to my better (financial) judgement and decided to go organic (well, as organic as I can afford and is possible here, that is). My friend put me in touch with Elena from Red Gum Organics and now, every Thursday, a boxful of organic fruit and vegetables arrives at my door. Besides the known and obvious benefits of organic produce — no pesticides, no steriods, etc, etc, etc — going organic in this manner essentially forces one to find creative ways to cook whatever's at your door before they expire. Before you know it, you've also reached more than your usual daily quota of fruit and fibre.

Another upside to this arrangement is that Elena imports her produce from Australia, which means very often her list will include fruit and veg uncommon to Singapore, including jerusalem artichoke, passionfruit and rhubarb. These I buy up with glee, mostly because it forces me to rifle through my cookbooks and attempt recipes I normally wouldn't.

When it comes to finding recipes for rhubarb, one name on my bookshelf springs to mind. Nigella Lawson is the queen of bright and splashy produce. Stumped for ideas with clementines, pomegranate, peas or watermelon? The domestic goddess herself has them all in her books—if only, I suspect, so she can wax lyrical about their "gorgeous colours" and refer to them as "jewels" or "gems".

Anyway, with my stash of beautiful organic rhubarb, I made a Rhubarb Meringue Pie from Nigella's How To Eat. If you're going to attempt this in an 8-inch pan as Ms Lawson suggests, then I suggest you halve the quantity of the rhubarb and egg filling mix. The 650g of rhubarb was enough to fill two pies, which actually, was a good thing, because the recipe leaves out cooking temperatures for the filling and the meringue top. The only temperature instruction in that recipe appears when she calls for you to preheat the oven to 200 degrees for the pastry.

Essentially, you bake the pie shell blind and when it is cool, fill it with the rhubarb, egg and sugar mixture and bake till that is set. Then you whisk the egg whites with sugar and cream of tartare to make your meringue and bake that. Now, if you bake everything at a steady 200 degrees Celsius, what you'll get is pastry that is one minute from burnt and a bronze meringue that slices to a runny, watery inside that tastes of uncooked eggwhites. At least that's what I got even though I turned down the heat to 180 degrees when cooking the meringue and filling. Luckily there was still enough rhubard mix to fill another pie, so the next day, I tried again.

The pastry is dead easy to make — in fact, Nigella's recipe for pastry is quite foolproof. Measure out butter and flour in a bowl and freeze it for 20 minutes before blitzing in a food processor and binding with a bit of liquid. I got excellent, easy-to-handle flaky pastry every time. This time I baked the rhubarb mix at 180 degrees and the meringue top at 160 degrees. The results were far better. Even my cat, Flash, agrees.

Luxe Leftovers

2006-07-18T18:54:00.000+08:00

I'm a real pushover at the wet market. In most other aspects of my life, mine is a take-no-prisoners attitude. Yet in the face of the wellington boot-clad fishmonger, I turn into a wuss and take whatever he throws at me (thank goodness it's always fresh). We had two friends over for dinner last week, during which I served an Italian zuppa de mare. All I needed were 10 prawns, two handfuls of mussels, and four crayfish, but because he sells seafood by the kilogram, the fishmonger decided that he would round my stash off to the nearest 500 grams. Moments later, I was walking back to my car with far more seafood than I needed, kicking myself for not being more assertive.

So what to do when faced with extra crayfish, prawns and crabmeat? I fried it up with some leftover mushrooms, a bit of cream, paprika, white wine and saffron and served it on a thick slice of garlic toast. What a wonderfully luxe yet simple dinner it turned out to be. 'Seems being a pushover every now and then has its merits after all!

Blueberry Cream Cheese Tarts with Graham Cracker Crust

2006-07-12T10:06:00.000+08:00

When I first bought the book this was the one recipe that I knew I needed to try. Others had already raved about it and my good friend L even picked it out and said, "This looks damn good. You have to make it for me." It took me longer than I liked to finally get down to it simply because the whole wheat pastry flour that the recipe calls for isn't available in regular supermarkets here. I couldn't even find it in my baking supplies store (which doesn't say very much for it, come to think of it).

I finally found it in a humble little supermarket somewhere in Bangkok where I spent the weekend some time ago visiting a friend who was doing a baking course there. Of course when I came home and did a post about it, several lovely people left messages to tell me where I could find the pastry flour in Singapore (thanks guys!). Apparently I just hadn't looked hard enough.

Anyway, these are the results of my long-awaited tarts. They aren't the prettiest tarts in the world, but they sure were tasty. As the recipe suggested, I tried rolling the pastry to 1/8-inch thick, but it kept falling apart on me and refused to form a neat sheet that could be laid over my tart tin. I ended up pressing the pastry (like you would a biscuit crust on a cheesecake) into the tin and baked them blind. On a larger tart tin (I used 12cm-diameter ones), the pastry turned out thicker than I liked and the tart was a bit of a mess to eat—cream cheese custard oozing all over the plate and blueberries tumbling willy nilly. Indeed, not a disaster, but it could definitely be better. Plus as a dessert portion for one, a 12cm tart was kinda huge.

I then remembered these little boat-shape moulds that were part of a collection of baking tins my recently passed uncle left to me. These are quite wee (10cm long and 5cm at its widest), but they turned out tarts that could downed in just two bites. As you can see from the picture, I still haven't gotten the hang of the pastry, though it was easier to press in a thinner layer. But, as the saying goes, practice makes perfect. And since the tarts were fabulous taste-wise, there certainly is an impetus to try and try again.

Simple Shellfish Risotto

2006-07-04T10:14:00.000+08:00

C and I love risotto. It's hearty, warm, tasty and an elegant one-dish meal that soaks up all the yummy flavours of the stock used. Shellfish risotto is one of our favourite variations. Cooked in a rich shellfish stock—usually prawn or crab based—it goes with just about any shellfish, though we like the soft white and coral flesh of crayfish best. Alas, that day we decided to cook it last week, there was nary a crayfish to be found. So we settled on scallops, whose texture is equally tender, but with a slightly stronger taste of the sea. That's fine as long as the scallops are fresh and sweet. There are few things worse than less-than-fresh scallops to leave a stale, fishy taste in the mouth.

As a base for this winningly simple dish, I used chopped onions, garlic and bacon in a mix of butter and olive oil. Because I also added morels (C's new favourite mushroom), I added its stock to the shellfish stock to give it an extra, albeit, subtle taste dimension. To serve, a few drops of truffle oil for a touch of luxe.

Blueberry Corncakes

2006-06-25T21:58:00.000+08:00

Berries in general are expensive in this part of the tropics. A cupful of raspberries, blueberries or blackberries goes for a sweet S$9.90! Which is positively sinful, don't you think? Last week, the gods of berries deigned to reduce the prices of blueberries by half. And since I prefer my fruit cooked, I figured I might as well take advantage of the offer and pick up a pack of the inky hued fruit. In deciding what to do with them, I turned to my now trusty The Last Course by Claudia Fleming. I'd been meaning to try her Blueberry Cream Cheese Tarts with Graham Cracker Crust, but for the life of me failed to find a store that stocked the whole wheat pastry flour that the recipe calls for. I finally found it in Bangkok of all places, which I visited over the weekend, but that's another post for another day.

I settled for Ms Fleming's Blueberry Corncakes instead since I had all the ingredients on hand. And they didn't disappoint. As the author describes, "these golden little cakes are absolutely irresistible". Made with almond flour, yellow cornmeal (polenta), butter and egg whites, these cakes turned out utterly scrummy in mini-muffin size as opposed to regular sized muffins, which were a tad on the heavy side. The recipe calls for a whopping two and two-thirds cups of icing sugar, which made them slightly sweeter than I would have liked. But other than that, they were a real winner. Leave them out for another day and they taste even better. The cornmeal seemed to have time to meld into the cake and leave less of a crunch. One of the best things about these beautiful little cakes are the blueberries scattered throughout the batter, which pop in the heat of the oven, intensifying their flavour and making wee pockets of jam within. They are a real tea time treat, though I ended up having them for breakfast and with ice cream for dessert after dinner as well.

Braised Pork Belly

2006-06-15T17:41:00.000+08:00

This was such a serenely simple dish to put together, and with such elegant results too. Lifted from J's copy of Think Like A Chef, it was a matter of chopping carrots, celery, a leek and an onions, cooking them in a skillet till tender, searing the slab of pork belly and then braising the lot in chicken stock. The resulting dish was a wonderfully tasty yet clean broth and meat that was sumptuously fork tender.

The Best Cocoa Brownies

2006-06-10T10:51:00.000+08:00

Often, for me, the measure of a good cookbook is in the success of the very first recipe that I attempt from it. If it emerges a raving success, I gleefully congratulate myself on money well spent and bring out the Post-It stickies to flag yet other recipes I'd like to try. By that merit alone, one of my latest purchases, Alice Medrich's Bittersweet, was a tremendous hit.

Because my schedule of late hasn't really permitted me to do much in the kitchen other than boil water for pasta or make scrambled eggs, I was looking for something simple yet satisfying. Sweets for the stressed, is what I like to call the fat food that my colleagues and I munch helplessly at our desks during the last month of every quarter when impossible deadlines and printing schedules collide.

These moist, chewy, dark as midnight brownies were everything that Ms Medrich promised. There is not a drop of real chocolate in it, but the three-quarter cup plus two tablespoons of the best Dutch-processed cocoa made these intensely chocolately, and received an A for both taste and texture. They are, as they have been named by the author, The Best Cocoa Brownies ever. I can't wait to try more of her recipes.

Lychee Season

2006-05-28T15:47:00.000+08:00

I'm not much of a fruit person. Often, I prefer my fruit cooked rather than fresh and raw. For instance, I'd happily dig into banana cake or banana fritters; and I love a good apple pie or tarte tartin. But you won't soon find me eating a fresh apple or a banana straight from its comb. There are, however, certain fruits that I make exceptions for.

While this is one of those months where everything culminates into workdays and weeks that never seem to end—hence the long stretches between posts (my apologies to those who've been checking in only to find me MIA)—there are still a few little luxuries that I am thankful for. One of which is lychee and mango season, which kicked in about two weeks ago. These are probably the only two kinds of fruit that I eat and eat lots of, and given that my long workdays also mean my diet is completely out of whack (which means I eat anything that can be bought at a hawker stall), the arrival of these fruit at every fruit stand, stall and supermarket is a very good thing.

Few fruit have such sweet, juicy flesh that, when eaten straight from the refrigerator needs nothing more than a damp napkin too wipe the juices off your chin and elbows. It's not often that you find a ripe but sour mango or lychee. At least it's never happened to me before. However, it's not impossible to find yourself with a ripe mango that's relatively tasteless, or worse, lychees that are short on sucrose. Which is exactly what happened to me last weekend, when I picked up a kilo of plump red-shelled lychees from my fruit seller. When I got home and excitedly sat down to a bowl of them in front of the TV, I was disappointed to find that one after the other, the lychees were just short of tasteless, as if someone had forgotton to inject them with their requisite dose of syrupy sweetness.

What to do? Well, if, like me, you've just gotten a new ice-cream maker, you shell and seed the lychees, liquidise them, add water and syrup, and make sorbet. I adapted the recipe for Lime Sorbet in Frozen Desserts by Caroline Liddell and Robin Weir and used the same proportions with my bum lychees.

The results were fab, but I still couldn't get my mind off the thought of biting into fresh, juicy lychees. So out I went again to the fruit seller, who brought out a more expensive batch, which she said was imported from China. I was skeptical at first because of its green hue (which I thought meant they hadn't ripened and would be tart), but she shelled one and literally force-fed it to me. And I was sold. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a whole basket of lychees and some episodes of Lost and Desperate Housewives that I need to catch up on.

Chocolate Malt Ice Cream

2006-05-14T13:32:00.000+08:00

Chocolate and malt are some of my favourite childhood treats. When I was a kid, I would eat spoonfuls of Horlicks straight out of the bottle, or use whatever leftover pocket money I had to buy Horlicks sweets. I love a tall glass of ice-cold horlicks spiked with a spooful or two of condensed milk. And when the local supermarket started selling Malteses, I bought and ate so many packets that the roof of my mouth was sore for a whole week.

No surprise then, why this recipe jumped out at me from Claudia Fleming's The Last Course. I recently acquired a lovely ice cream maker which a kind and unsuspecting friend (I didn't tell him it weighed 11kg) lugged it home for me all the way from Perth, Australia. Since then, it's been ice cream galore for me and my neighbours, as I experimented with all sorts of flavours from vanilla and raspberry ripple to lime, lychee, coconut and dulce de leche. Using 1.25 cups of malt powder to 4 ounces of chocolate, this ice cream was super-malty (which I really like), though I think it could benefit from a stronger dose of chocolate. Next time I might experiment with using less milk and more cream and using more bitter chocolate and less milk chocolate to richen the texture and the chocolate factor. But for now, it ain't half bad at all.

Jam Thumbprints

2006-05-07T18:37:00.000+08:00

I can't help but think that these are the closest Western equivalent to our Chinese pineapple tarts which Chinese women whip up in truckloads come the Lunar New Year. So very more-ish and terribly addictive, these Jam Thumbprints from Claudia Fleming's The Last Course just melt in your mouth before an explosion of the sweet jam bursts onto your tastebuds. The recipe is really for Quince Jam Thumbprints. But the quinces proved too tart for me, even after hours of simmering over a stove, so I substituted it with raspberry jam instead and we were happy campers indeed. Strawberry jam didn't work so well; the combination was overly sweet for my liking. As Fleming suggests, these cookies can be eaten on their own as well, with a dusting of icing sugar. Neat, they reminded me of yet another Chinese cookie, the Walnut cookie, which is sold in every traditional Hong Kong confectionary.

Simply Thai

2006-04-28T23:54:00.000+08:00

Last weekend, we hosted our friends, J, the domestic goddess herself, and her immensely funny partner, W, for dinner. Now what do you cook a gal who's such a whiz in the kitchen? Definitely not anything French. If you haven't already visited her amazing blog, J is quite the master of French cuisine. Or make that many cuisines.

Since I visited the cooking school at the Four Seasons in Chiang Mai several years ago, I decided to put the skills I learned to good use. To supplement the recipes I had learnt from the school, I also delved into the highly dependable, not to mention beautiful David Thompson book, Thai Food.

For starters, I served a roasted eggplant salad spiked with sliced shallots and ground dried shrimps. I attempted steamed eggs to break on top of the salad as well. But after steaming them for the stipulated 10 minutes, my yolks were fully cooked, as opposed to the lovely runny yolks that the book promised. I guess the eggs over in Mr Thompson's kitchen are a lot bigger. Also for starters, I chose the Duck and Lychee Salad (pictured above), which was wonderful. Rather than roast my own duck, I hot-footed it over to the roast duck stall at the market and picked up half a quack. The succulent, flesh of the duck melded wonderfully with the sweet lychees, spring onions and coriander. And the dressing made with plum sauce, palm sugar, lime juice, fish sauce and black vinegar gave it that perfect zing and balance between sweet, salty, sour and spicy.

Also for appetizers, I made my mother's recipe for popiah. This time i fried them and served them with her homemade chilli cuca (chilli and vinegar sauce) and sweet sauce (tee cheo).

From the Four Seasons cooking school collection of recipes that I took home, I made the Thom Kha Kai. Chicken stock infused with lemongrass, galangal and kaffir lime leaf is heated and then coconut milk is added to it. In individual soup bowls, a tablespoon each of fish sauce and lime juice and whatever amount you please of narm prig paow (Thai sweet chilli paste), awaits. When the stock comes to a boil, you simply scoop it into the bowls and mix. Traditionally, the soup is served with chicken, but for a touch of luxe, I served it with crab claws, scallops and crayfish instead.

Also from the cooking school is a fantastic recipe for Pad Thai. The magic, I often say, is in the sauce, which is made with tamarind juice, mushroom soy sauce, palm sugar, lime juice and, of all things, ketchup. These all work together to create an excellent balance.

Finally for dessert, a slightly different take on the very Singaporean dessert, sago gula melaka. Instead of drizzling fresh coconut milk over the sago pearls and dark palm sugar, I made coconut ice cream using a recipe from Les Huynh's Blue Ginger and dolloped a scoop over the top.

Homecoming Cakes

2006-04-20T17:54:00.000+08:00

Looks pretty good, huh? (If, um, I do say so myself). Well, it tastes bloody awful.

I made this cake for C as a welcome home treat. He'd been gone for two long weeks to Switzerland and his homecoming dish after a long trip is always Hainanese Chicken Rice from either his favourite Boon Tong Kee stall, which he's been going to since he was a child, or made by his mother. I wasn't about to compete with that, so I did the next best thing: I made dessert.

C's pretty partial to plain old-fashioned cakes like Swiss Rolls and Sugee Cake. Since my pal CL left me three bags of semolina before she went back to Costa Rica (her baggage was 13kg overweight and some things just had to go), and there was a recipe I'd been meaning to try for this Eurasian classic, the choice was clear. The recipe for this Sugee Cake, suffice it to say, was a dud. I did exactly what it said, but what I got in the end was a cake that was as dry as a desert sandbag. Dear, dear C kindly declared it: "Not that bad," and proceeded to eat an entire slice. But I know an irretrievably dry cake when I cut into one, so it was back to the kitchen, so determined I was to redeem my culinary welcome-home efforts.

Since I had some fresh raspberries in my fridge begging to be used, I decided to try a take on another of C's favourites: the Swiss Roll from the stalwart bakery on East Coast Road, Chin Mee Chin. It's as old-school as they come: a layer of raspberry jam rolled into a plain sponge cake. Inspired by J's Ispahan, I made sponge drops, cut them into neat rounds and slathered them on one side with raspberry jam. In between, a dollop of unsweetened whipped thickened cream and a couple of fresh raspberries.

Thankfully, these ones turned out successfully. They didn't last longer than a day.

Pear Upside-Down Cake

2006-04-12T14:51:00.000+08:00

This is one of those desserts I turn to when I have friends coming over for a meal and I've been a tad overambitious with the menu. Last week, it was the Oxtail Daube from Paula Wolfert's The Cooking of Southwest France that did me in (I'll do a post on that sometime in the future).

This Pear Upside-Down Cake recipe comes from Vogue Entertaining + Travel's doyenne of food, Joan Campbell. It really is a throw-everything-together cake, the only real work coming from melting butter with brown sugar and slicing up a pear or two. I usually make the batter and leave it in the fridge, baking them as baby cakes just before eating. The original recipe calls for it to be baked as a large cake, with quartered pears embellishing the top. But they really do look a lot more sophisticated as individual portions and, for some reason, the cake actually turns out a lot lighter and fluffier that way too. The addition of ground ginger and cinnamon provides a wonderful, rounded spiciness to this classic, which I served with Vanilla Honey ice cream.

My Mother's Popiah

2006-04-03T23:05:00.000+08:00

Like all Peranakan girls, much of my childhood was spent in my mother's kitchen. My tasks were simple—stirring, plucking the tails off beansprouts, operating the hand mixer, or the most dreaded of all, peeling shallots...mountains of them. Like most Peranakan matriachs, my mother preferred to see through the entire process of cooking herself. The tasks she delegated to my brothers and I were merely well disguised disciplinary measures, meted out to keep us from trouble while she devoted herself to her woman's work. To my mother, everything about a dish—from the amount of ingredients to the way it is stirred and when—is instinctive. There are no written recipes; everything is in her head.

As a result, I am only able to make a paltry few dishes from my mother's fabulous and immense repertoire. My skills extend to the simpler stuff like babi assam (tamarind pork), temperah (fish or chicken cooked in dark soy, chilli and lime juice) or curry chicken. For the most part, I've long taken for granted that dishes like babi pongteh (stewed pork with bamboo shoots), mee siam, itek dim (duck and salted vegetable soup) and kueh pie tee are best made by my mother's hand. 'Ask and you shall receive' is a mantra that's played out in my mother's house for decades, even years after we flew the roost. Whenever any of us fancies something, my mother will happily oblige us, slogging away in the kitchen for days to put our favourite things on the table.

And if I had to name an absolute favourite dish from my mother's repertoire, it has to be popiah (fresh spring rolls). Not for any of our family members are the Hokkien popiah sold in hawker centres and food courts everywhere, with their shredded carrots, Chinese sausage and peanuts. Noooo! Nonya popiah, as we know it, should be chock full of bamboo shoots (julienned, not shredded), a deep caramel hue from the use of fine soy sauce, and infused with a rich, fragrant stock made of prawns and pork. Within the popiah should also be a generous sprinkling of fresh crab meat and sliced prawns, deep fried bits of garlic, freshly ground chilli, and a lick of Colonel's mustard for that extra kick. Even the sweet flour sauce (tee cheo) has to be a certain brand (Sin Ngee Seng)—any other, my mother will have us know, is inferior; either too thin, too thick, too sweet, or "with so much flour you can taste it". Over the years, the only popiah I've tried that's ever come close to my mother's was at the now defunct Soul Kitchen, at the hands of chef Damian D'Silva. He too shares my mother's philosophy of "the more bamboo shoots, the better" and that the bamboo shoots and turnip should never be shredded against a mandolin, but painstakingly julienned.

Faced with some free time last week, I decided now was as good a time as any to give making popiah a shot. I called my amused mother, who talked me through what I needed ("a few cans of bamboo shoots, make sure you use the winter one"; "make sure the heat is not too low"; "not too much turnip"; "do you have fresh chillies?"; "would you like me to a fry the garlic for you?"; "why don't I just make the whole thing for you?")

I guess having eaten a certain dish a certain way for as long as you've lived, bestows upon you some instinct of how a dish should turn out and what needs to be done. The thing that surprised me about making popiah is that it really isn't as complicated as I had convinced myself it would be. It's just time-consuming. But because I made it over a weekend—slicing the turnip and bamboo shoots on Saturday morning, making the stock and stewing the vegetables in the afternoon, boiling and shelling the prawns and crabs on Sunday morning and doing the rest (grinding the chillies, frying the garlic, etc) that afternoon—the whole process turned out to be less of a mission. The only thing left to do was buy popiah skins from the stalwart supplier, Kway Guan Huat, at 95 Joo Chiat Road (open daily from 9am till 9pm, ph: 6344 2875). The family has been making popiah skins for decades and it is one of the few places that my father, for all his impaired vision, can guide me to without incident (without him, I'd definitely lose my way around the little lanes and one way streets).

As it turns out, I am my mother's daughter. My virgin attempt at popiah was more successful than any complicated French daube I've attempted. In fact, it tasted just like my mother's. This my brother told me as he made approving noises at the dinner table. "Good lah," he said, "at least if anything happens to mummy, someone knows how to make popiah." Polite pause. Then, "So when do you think you'll learn to make Babi Sioh?"

Another Killer Meal

2006-03-25T23:36:00.000+08:00

When it comes to food, discipline, guilt, and calorie counting are words that fail to exist in my vocabulary. Over the years I have come to learn that dieting only leads me to eat more, abstinence only makes me hungrier, and...well, my greed knows no bounds. I would much rather drag my already damaged knees through 10-kilometer runs or damage my already frayed ligaments running after a small rubber ball in a squash court than hold back on a dish or, even more unthinkable, pass on dessert.

Given my Catholic upbringing, it's nothing short of a miracle that I feel no guilt tucking into seven helpings of pan-fried foie gras at the Bar and Billiard Room's Sunday Brunch on top of close to 20 oysters and three trips to the dessert table. It's a simply a matter of mathematics, if you ask me: to keep from larding up, burn what you consume. Suffice it to say, I spend a lot of time burning.

The same principle applies to the meals that I cook. Not one to watch what I eat, I certainly don't flinch at meals such as this one where the bright (at the time) idea struck me to allow the juices (read: melted lard) of this hunk of burnin' pork belly to drip unimpeded onto the bed of shredded cabbage (the other half leftover from the coleslaw), carrots and sliced potatoes that lay on the roasting tray beneath it. The recipe (if you can call it that) for this Pork Belly Boulangere was adapted from Gary Rhode's Keeping It Simple, where the skin of the pork is scored and then the entire piece of meat rubbed with coarse sea salt and pepper before roasting under the merest heat (160 degrees Celcius, to be exact) for three hours. The resulting meat is buttery, succulent and über tender with a crunchy layer of crackling that would leave an Atkin's dieter drooling for its crunch.

After the first hour of cooking, I slotted in the tray of cabbage, carrots and potatoes swimming in chicken stock which reduced to nothing but a tasty base in the heat of the oven. By the end of the cooking time, the vegetables were richly infused with pork fat -- waaayyy too rich, actually...even for my tastes. In went a quarter cup of cider vinegar to cut through the oiliness of the fat-soaked vegetables and that did the trick. Naturally, post meal C and I only managed to lay on the sofa, turning occasionally to pick up the remote.

The next morning, I dragged myself on a 10km run, burping the flavour of roasted pork fat and cider vinegar every 500 meters or so. What price, greediness, I ask you...

How To Kill Yourself With One Meal

2006-03-22T17:09:00.000+08:00

How can something so bad, be so good? Juicy chicken thighs left to steep in a marinade of buttermilk, seasoning and cayenne pepper and deep-fried to a crisp 24 hours later. The acidity of the buttermilk quite literally breaks down the proteins of the chicken flesh to render meat so succulent and tender, it oozed lovely, shiny fat with every bite. To accompany it, a classic creamy coleslaw, tangy with mustard and lemon juice and a drop of blood from whence I sliced my finger along with the cabbage (boy did that hurt). For the requisite carb, C requested his favourite corn on the cob—slathered in butter and left to cook on the grill. To unclog the arteries, a brisk walk around the block and a glass of fresh lemonade. What's not to like?

Grilled Peaches, Pashmak and Ice Cream

2006-03-16T16:47:00.000+08:00

When I think of modern Australian cuisine, the word "fresh" leaps to mind. Perhaps it's the bevy of Aussie chefs who go on any chance they get about how fresh, seasonal produce makes for the most luscious, tasty food ("Fresh" is quite possibly Kylie Kwong's favourite word -- at one press event I heard her say the word four times in one very long sentence; Neil Perry calls his line of bottled sauces and marinades "Fresh" and he'll tell you that "just because you are time poor, doesn't mean you have to compromise on freshness and flavour"). Not that there's no truth to that. Indeed, Mod Oz cuisine truly is the finest testament that fresh, seasonal produce and flavours is well, best.

These peaches, carted home by CL's mum from their trip to Sydney, are a perfect example of Australia's bountiful harvests. Sweet, plump and perfumed, they were lusciously delicious on their own. But if there's anything I like better than fresh peaches, it's grilled peaches. I love the way the heat caramelises the sugars to render them mellower and those sexy grill marks they leave on the peaches' saffron flesh. For a luxurious touch, I spooned over a generous helping of vanilla ice cream and topped it with a handful of saffron pashmak. Pashmak, by the way, is Persian fairy floss, which CL and I adore and consume in vast quantities when either of us gets a chance to pick up a bag (or three) from Jones the Grocer in Sydney. Unlike regular fairy floss, pashmak is silkier and has a mild, elegant nutty sweetness. On this trip, CL brought three packets home in chocolate, vanilla and the aforementioned saffron. Sadly, she couldn't stay to devour the lot with me, so they sit in the darkness of my cupboard while I munch on them slowly — neat or on top of ice cream. I'm still thinking of other ways to use in them desserts. Suggestions are welcome :-)

My Short History With Shortribs

2006-03-10T22:41:00.000+08:00

When it comes to beef shortribs, I've been a late bloomer. I had never heard of shortribs until my maiden visit to The Marmalade Pantry, when they first opened several years ago. I was about to order the Chicken Pot Pie, when a friend called out from a nearby table: "You must try the shortribs!" Given her enthusiasm, I decided I must indeed.

That first taste of shortribs was the start of an obsession that I find near impossible to shake. I went back every other week after that first visit, each time to buy a taste of that wonderfully robust, fork-tender cut of meat, braised slowly in red wine and herbs, served on a bed of mashed celeraic and topped with crunchy root chips. Many a time I left disappointed—all too often I would be told: "Sorry, but we're out of shortribs today." Several months later, the inevitable happened. I sat myself down on the restaurant's chocolate brown booth seat, crossed my fingers and spoke my order to the waiter. His reply: "I'm sorry, but the shortribs have been taken off the menu." I damn near jumped out of my seat and ran to the kitchen to confront the chef, but someone slid a bowl of root chips in front of me and I crunched my frustrations out on them before deciding that it was time to take matters into my own hands.

That weekend, I pored through my cookbooks hoping to find a recipe for Braised Beef Shortribs. No joy there. I went through my stacks of food magazines and couldn't find one that matched my idea of how rich the dish should be. Finally, I turned to the Internet and found this Charlie Trotter version and a more fuss-free one from Chef Eric C Maczko, winery chef at Napa Valley's Pine Ridge Winery. I tried the latter and it was just fantastic. The main prep for the dish is really in opening the wine bottle, searing the flour dusted shortribs and a bit of frying and stirring. Once you pop it in the oven, the dish makes its own magic, melding all the wonderfully deep flavours into an unctuous tasty sauce with achingly beautiful chunks of melt-in-your-mouth meat.

Over the years, I experimented with this dish, adding or subtracting different herbs and vegetables, and using different kinds of red wine (I find Merlots work best). Each time, the shortribs are the star of the show, always complementing whatever herbs I throw in (I like using more thyme and less rosemary) and always impressing guests, who like me, had never heard of shortribs until that first mouthful.

In this weekend dinner, I paired it with J's recipe for polenta, which was the perfect accompaniment with its rich, creamy texture and taste derived from long, slow cooking in a double boiler.

Carrot Cake

2006-03-04T00:51:00.000+08:00

Until last week, I hadn't seen my friend CL in a little more than two years. That's a long time to be away from my closest pal and partner in crime. At the time, CL left for Costa Rica with the intention of teaching diving for a season and then travelling across Central America with her now former beau. During diving season however, CL—like all Singaporeans—began craving for foods other than beans and rice. In particular, she craved the cakes and desserts that she was spoiled for choice here in Singapore and in my kitchen. With nary a bakery in sight, CL decided to take things into her own hands and start her own little bakery in the middle of a rural, touristy beach town in Costa Rica. "I'm living your dream," she often reminds me. Bitch.

Anyway, fast forward to two years later and CL is finally back in my kitchen. Home for her sister's wedding, we have all but four days together before she's off again. One of the things she promised she would make me is her carrot cake that is one of her best-sellers back in Costa Rica.

I have to admit: I've never thought much of carrot cake. For one, it's not chocolate. And secondly, it's made of carrot. How yummy could it possibly be? The few I've encountered were mediocre at best. Nothing to write home about and certainly nothing to gush over. But CL has been keen to convert me to the pleasures of her carrot cake. So like a true friend, I indulged her. And whaddya know? The cake was really good—moist and loose-crumbed, with the mellow flavour of nutmeg and cinnamon running gently through it. The recipe called for chopped walnuts, but the closest thing I had in my kitchen that night were pecans and hazelnuts. So we chopped up some of those instead and, as it turns out, I think the cake was that much better for it. Walnuts tend to get a tad soft and ooze a wee bit of oil into a cake; the hazelnuts and pecans imparted their sweet flavour to the cake and added some bite to it at the same time.

The next day, I frosted it with a recipe for Cream Cheese Frosting from Baking Illustrated. This time, I substituted yoghurt for sour cream in the recipe and went real easy on the sugar (the recipe calls for a whopping 5 ounces of icing sugar). I'm pleased to report that frosting turned out pretty alright too.

Later that night, when I found myself with a few spare hours on my hands, I decided to try my hand at marzipan carrots to decorate the top with. They were a tad fiddly to do, but fun nevertheless. Still, the task left me a quite exhausted (I'm pathetic, I know) and I fell asleep before I could transfer the cake from its stand to the refrigerator. Hence, you'll see in the picture that the oils and colour from the marzipan oozed slightly onto the frosting (tropical heat can be a real bitch).

Post and EaT Everything WeekEnd Lame LeftoverS

2006-02-28T00:02:00.000+08:00

This seemed like a timely post given the whole Pete Wells shananigan. While people have things like strawberries, a carrot or two, and crusty bread as leftovers, I have things like a whole container of chicken curry or the remains of some lunch dish from several days past. Straggler ingredients like the odd handful of spinach, a sole tomato, or two sticks of celery usually find their way into the dog's bowl at dinner. Either that, or they get made into some sort of cake over the weekend. Like my oven, my fridge is pretty small for one with such a huge appetite as mine, so I try as much to purge it of ingredients that will probably spawn moldy children or go limp.

Over the weekend, I rummaged through the freezer to find a Tupperware of chicken curry from several weeks ago. I figured now was as good a time as any to indulge in one of my all-time childhood favourites: Prata and curry. The prata goes by many names—the Malaysians call it Canai, some Indians refer to it as Paratha, and I've heard some Caucasian friends call it Roti (Malay for 'bread', go figure). Whatever name it goes by, the perfect prata should be flaky and crispy on the outside and soft and slightly stretchy on the inside (the result of lots of ghee and a very hot griddle). Like the doner kebab in the UK, the prata is the unofficial late-night food of Singapore, not least because most prata stalls are open 24 hours. It's also typical breakfast food, dunked in a spicy dahl-char (dahl curry) and accompanied by a steaming cup of teh-tarik. Heaven.

Strangely enough, I had to drive to three different places to finally get my hands on some prata that day. The first stall I drove to at Frankel had closed down; the second one, no doubt gaining from the other stall owner's loss, was so crowded I couldn't find a parking space; and the third had sold his last prata mere minutes before I arrived. Thankfully, not far away from that last stall, I found joy.

The chicken curry I had it with was made Peranakan/Eurasian style—with very little or no coconut milk and a few green chillies broken into it at the end. I've posted the recipe here.

I know I'm early, but the Post and EaT Everything WeekEnd Lame LeftoverS (PETE WELLS) event hosted by Tomatom kicks off on 13 March.

A Cake For The Naked Eater

2006-02-21T21:33:00.000+08:00

Anyone who knows both C and I will tell you that we simply cannot be more different from one another. C is quiet, reserved and is extremely measured in his manner and speech. Me, I'm just downright noisy. I talk a mile a minute and if you haven't already gathered from this blog, tact is not one of my virtues. When it comes to food, the same holds true. I don't like vegetable stems; C thinks they are fabulously crunchy. I adore egg yolks; C's more an egg white kind of guy. I love good food, fancy dishes and complicated desserts. All C needs is wantan mee or chicken rice and he's a happy camper. Yes, as C likes to say, he is The Naked Eater (you know, like how Jamie Oliver is The Naked Chef). Fuss-free, simple fare is all he really wants.

This might explain why I've never fulfilled my culinary potential the way my friend J has. Modern, intricate cuisine is lost on C. Hell, before he met me, he thought the word 'degustation' referred to something that happens when you eat bad fish. Once, at a Marcus Samuelsson dinner, he tossed a precious shaving of black truffle to the side of his plate and whispered why the chef would bother garnishing the dish with a shard of pencil shaving. Ok, that's just a really bad excuse. The immensely talented J is so consummate about her food and the serving of it, she makes me look like the pig farmer's daughter (ok, again I exaggerate. It's actually the vast amounts that I eat which make me look like the pig itself). But I digress.

There are days when I dream of making some fancy chocolate Pierre Herme-inspired confection. And in planning to do so, I talk C through what I think it's going to turn out like. The result of this conversation is often the same. After many words spent describing my intended confection, C would turn to me and say, "Can I just have a butter cake?" Most days, I harrumph and mutter something about pearls before swine. But last weekend, because he was darling enough to help me haul my brand new Kitchenaid home, I decided he could have the first cake to be mixed by my new prized contraption.

A simple Victoria Sandwich Cake it was. Made using a recipe for Yellow Layer Cake from Baking Illustrated and slathered with a goopy layer of raspberry jam in between. I tried to embellish it even further by serving it with a pillow of whipped cream, but The Naked Eater declined the slice, saying he just wanted the cake neat.

On another note, I wanted to say thanks to Chubby Hubby for the kind and generous mention he gave me in his fabulous and very widely read blog. As a testament to just how widely read his blog is, I've since gotten emails from friends whom I didn't even realise perused the blogosphere. I've also met some wonderful new blogging friends who dropped by based on CH's recommendations. Cheers, CH and thanks, everyone, for stopping by!

Banana Cake

2006-02-14T17:54:00.000+08:00

I could be wrong, but as far as I know, Singaporeans are fairly unique when it comes to eating cake for breakfast. To wit, give a Singaporean family a cake (as in the buttery kind, iced or not) and someone will invariably say, "Oh, good, can eat for breakfast." Such is the case for banana cake in my family. Banana cake is one of those comfort foods from our childhood years that we never seem to tire of. Almost every fortnight, I make a huge batch of banana cake and distribute it to my family members and friends. It's a hot favourite that never seems to go out of favour (even among snobs like me who are particularly partial to French-style cakes with all that whipped cream, chocolate ganache and something-or-other mousse). Something about the sweet scent of bananas as the cakes bake in the oven makes me feel like a child in my mother's kitchen all over again. And in that same vein, I often find myself opening the oven door slightly while they bake to watch those magnolia peaks rise and turn gold. I chanced upon a particularly fabulous recipe for Banana Cakes at Chubby Hubby that turned out soft, fluffy and rich all at the same time. I found it a little too sweet for my taste the first time around and the next time I made it, used slightly less sugar. The result was simply perfect.

Luxury Fast Food

2006-02-09T21:48:00.000+08:00

With my horrifyingly busy schedule these days, I find myself eating badly on weekdays. In my case of course, eating badly means not having proper meals at proper times, or meals sans (horror of horrors) dessert. Closet food snob that I am, I still eschew cheap frozen pizzas (I only like the Ristorante brand) and hamburgers, and instead try to inject as much luxury as I can into my quickie meals. One of my favourites means of doing this is with that little bottle of magic called Tetsuya's Truffle Salsa.

My first taste of Truffle Salsa was at Tetsuya's last year. I was lucky enough to dine there courtesy of Tourism Australia while on a press junket to Sydney. It was love at first taste and greedy goose that I am, I polished off the whole bread roll which was served before my meal with no small amount of Truffle Butter. I only regretted it slightly when I started to fill up prematurely after the fifth course. When I was told I could buy the Truffle Salsa complete with a recipe for Truffle Butter, I nearly ran to the front of the restaurant. The only thing that stopped me was the fact that the waiter had just placed a plate of that famous, sublime Confit of Ocean Trout before me. The Salsa could wait, I conceded.

To cut what could be a long story short, I took home three bottles of Tetsuya's Truffle Salsa and kept one and a half bottles for myself (the other one and a half landed in the grateful belly of my equally greedy brother). Within a month, my bottles were empty and I felt a slight bereavement for the loss of that wonderfully versatile salsa. Then several weeks later, I discovered that Culina recently began stocking Tetsuya's range of bottled sauces, including the salsa and his delicious oyster vinaigrette. Suffice it to say, I bought a bottle and it now serves as luxurious quickie meals at the end of my increasingly busy days. I usually make up a batch of truffle butter to spread on hot, fresh-from-the-oven rolls, or top otherwise ordinary scrambled eggs with a dollop of the salsa. C particularly likes the truffle salsa tossed through hot pasta with some butter and a good helping of parmesan. Now that's what I call Luxury Fast Food.

Weekend Herb Blogging #18

2006-02-05T19:09:00.000+08:00

It's strange how the palate changes as we age. Perhaps Life teaches us that unless we try something firsthand, we'll never really know if we like it or not. Before I met C six years ago, I would never go near a raw oyster or century egg. But thanks to his coaxing, I now cannot imagine how I ever passed on those two wonderful foods. It's the same thing with coriander. Until recently, I would painstakingly pick out every last leaf or stem in the dishes that greeted me on any given table. And being Asian, you can imagine how many coriander-infused dishes have crossed my dinner plates' path. Thankfully, things have changed. In the last two years, I've begun to appreciate the robustness that coriander bestows upon the dishes it anoints. For the longest time, I never realised that coriander root is the base for countless Asian dishes including my favourite laksa. And while I still tend to hesitate before eating whole coriander leaves, I certainly won't pick them out of the dish either. I've also developled a taste for pureed coriander, like in coriander pesto for example. One of my favourite dishes these days is Grilled Coriander and Chilli Prawns, which I devour with abandon, cholesterol level be damned.

To make those, simply pile a super large handful of coriander leaves and stems in a food processor with two or three fresh red or green chillies, a thumb-sized knob of fresh ginger, two garlic cloves and a pinch of salt. Blitz it and mix in a spoonful or two of softened, unsalted butter. Then get the biggest, baddest prawns you can find, peel the shell off its middle and make a cut down the middle (but not all the way through). Now pull of the flesh sideways so that it gapes and then whack of teaspoonful of the coriander mix in. Now grill for about 10 minutes or until the prawns are cooked. Yum scrum; don't count on stopping at one!

I am also pleased to report that my once fledgling coriander plant is now a flourishing adult, giving me yet more excuses to experiment with this wonderful herb that Asians have used for centuries.

To end off, here are a few coriander facts that I recently discovered:

Coriander goes by many names: cilantro, Chinese parsley, or its scientific term, Coriandum Sativum. According to Rhonda Parkinson, the word coriander is used to describe the entire plant: leaves, stems, seeds, and all. However, when speaking of coriander, most people are really referring to the spice produced from the seeds of the plant. The leaves of the plant are commonly called cilantro, which is derived from the Spanish word for coriander.

Indeed, every day we learn something new. Hope you all had a good weekend and thanks Kalyn for hosting Herb Blogging Weekend once again!

Chinese New Year

2006-02-03T12:01:00.000+08:00

Given that we are intrinsically Chinese, you'd think that Chinese New Year would be a grand affair. And it some ways, it is. On the night of the Eve, our immediate family (meaning mum, dad, brothers and I) sits down for our traditional Reunion Dinner, which seems relatively frugal compared to our Christmas shindigs. On the table is a giant plate of yu sheng (raw fish salad), which represents luck and prosperity; a vegetable dish made slippery with fish maw (the stomach lining of fish, another traditional Chinese New Year ingredient); and another meat dish, which bears little symbolism except to satiate our carnivorous tastes. Over the next two days, family members will drop by my mother's house to pay their respects to their elders (meaning my dad and her) and partake of her famous Nonya specialties that includes kueh pie tee, a dish of shredded turnip and bamboo shoots stewed in a dark soy prawn and pork broth, which you put into fried flour cups and top with a single prawn, coriander leaves and vinegar-spiked chilli sauce. Alas, so famed is this dish in my mother's house that we ran out after the first day and thwarted all plans I had to photograph a few on the second (less busy) day.

Like Christmas, we have our favourite traditional cookies and sweet meats at Chinese New Year. Some of my favourites include pineapple tarts made by my mum and C's mum (they are both different; my mum's version is larger and more crispy, while C's mum's are smaller and melt in your mouth); love letters (thin tuille-like cookies rolled like cigars), my mum's famous kueh bangkit (melt-in-your-mouth coconut milk cookies of which she sells more than 80 bottles every festive season); and of course, bak kwa (barbequed pork jerky for which you have to brave long queues to acquire during the Chinese New Year period).

Another traditional Peranakan festive dish is Buah Keluak. In appearance, the Buah Keluak resembles a Brazil nut. When raw, the insides of the nut are a pale cream colour. But once cooked, a good buak keluak turns oily and black like tar. Yes, tar. Indeed, like the durian, buah keluak is an acquired taste. It is bitter and very robust, and lends its ebony hue to the curry it is cooked in. Most people know the dish as Ayam Buah Keluak (which means Chicken Buah Keluak). In fact, many Peranakan restaurants and homes only serve Ayam Buak Keluak, in which the black insides of the nuts are scraped out and then mixed with minced chicken before being shoved back into the nutshells and cooked as a curry. However, really authentic Buah Keluak is cooked with pork ribs and the insides of the nuts are served neat, in all their bitter glory. The resulting curry is literally black, with a slight orangey sheen of oil that you either love or hate. This is the way my mother cooks it. If you so much as suggest that she tone down the nuts with the addition of minced chicken, you run the risk of her chasing you out and banning you from her house forever more.

Personally, I am no fan of the dish. As proudly Peranakan as I am, I've never acquired a taste for the black gastronomic tar. I do, however, love the taste of its curry gravy. When we were kids, my mum would save the gravy for us and serve it at breakfast to be mopped up with a few sticks of you tiao (fried dough fritters). Like otak toast, this is yet another Peranakan breakfast of champions that made my childhood that much more special.

I still have a bowl of my mum's Buah Keluak sitting in the freezer in anticipation of the weekend, when I will spend a lazy Saturday morning soaking you tiao in its rich, black gravy and pondering how one can love and dislike a dish with such passion at the same time.

A Sweet For Some Treats

2006-01-27T20:45:00.000+08:00

Throughout my adult years, I have, for one reason or another, spent quite a fair bit of time in London. Thus, over the years, I have come to love several things about Britain's capital city, like for example, Walkers crisps. Yes, I am indeed a junk food junkie and personally, nothing beats sitting in front of the tele with a pack of Walkers crisps and a bubbly sugary drink. So when my good neighbour Tom told me he was heading back to his hometown for a short spell, I begged him to bring back a few packets of my favourite Prawn Cocktail flavoured Walkers Crisps. The dear, dear man obliged.

And so last weekend, Tom turned up at my door bearing a pastic bag full of my favourite junk food. I could have kissed him, except C was standing right next to me. Once I accepted the bag of salted calories, wolfed down a pack and put the rest aside for later, I set about making Tom and his wife Kate a suitable thank you gift.

As usual, I went with my foolproof, always impressive Bitter Chocolate Tart -- it's super easy to make, yet elegant and extremely and, well, impressive. Its base is made from either ground Marie or Digestives biscuits and melted butter (yup, a cheesecake base, essentially). Once that's been shaped in a tart tray and refrigerated, I fill it with a chocolate ganache made with the best dark chocolate available in my cupboards (there's always dark chocolate in my cupboards) and thickened heavy cream. The ratio of cream to chocolate is 1:1. Which means if you use 150 grams of chocolate, then you mix it with 150ml of heavy or thickened cream. You simply chop up the chocolate, bring the cream to a boil, and then pour the cream over the chocolate and let it steep for about 30 seconds. The chocolate will melt under the heat of the cream and you then stir it all together to mix it into a shiny homogenous mixture. Pour that into the tart shell and refrigerate again. Two hours later, voila, a bitter chocolate tart that's as good as, if not better than, any patisserie-bought version.

Ten Things You Never Knew About Me Meme

2006-01-21T18:13:00.000+08:00

The wonderful and ever-popular Paz recently tagged me for this meme, so here goes:

1. Let's get this bit out of the way real quick: I'm 33

2. Besides my Dalmatian, Oxford, I also have two cats, Flash (in the picture above with Oxford) and Chyna (below)

3. All the camera equipment I use for the pictures in this blog belong to my partner, C, who just happens to be a photographer

4. I'm terrified of getting fat. Since I was a young, impressionable lass, I've worked in industries that place much emphasis on how a woman should "ideally" look (read: thin). First I was an air stewardess with Singapore Airlines, then I worked for a major fashion company, after which I joined a women's fashion magazine. Now that I'm older and (slightly) wiser, I've finally accepted that you cannot be model thin and 1.58meters tall. It's just not physically possible.

5. I'm one of those people that simply cannot sit still for more than an hour

6. I love running, swimming, cycling, yoga, etc. And I've since put it to good use and completed a triathlon and a biathlon last year

7. I am currently studying to become a Pilates instructor. It's so bloody hard!

8. I've had long straight hair all my life. A few years ago I cut it really, really short. Boy, was that a bad decision. I nearly went out and bought a wig. Sadly, it's almost impossible to find a good wig shop in Singapore.

9. I am petrified of cockroaches

10. I'm a shopaholic

Pomegranate Pavlovas, My Way

2006-01-20T18:59:00.000+08:00

Like everyone else, I love the way a pomegranate looks when it's split into half and its neat cross section of ruby seeds come tumbling out. To be honest, until this week, I couldn't quite remember what a pomegranate tasted like. It's not a fruit you buy to devour, as you would, say, a big juicy Navel orange or a fat, sweet peach. But since I chanced upon a pile of them in the supermarket's fruit section, I decided to pick up a couple and decide what to do with them when I returned home and consulted my cookbooks.

Surprisingly, none of my cookbooks yielded any recipes that featured pomegranates. And so I turned to my pile of Donna Hay magazines and Vogue Entertaining + Travel , where I found several recipes for a couple of cocktails, some salads, and a pretty trifle. Still, in my mind's eye, a beautifully shot picture of some luscious beads of pomegranate seeds atop snow white pavlovas repeatedly came up. And the picture in my vision was shot in a way that just screamed Nigella Lawson. So once again, I pulled out my copy of How To Be A Domestic Goddess , and there it was -- mini pavlovas with those fuschia seeds piled atop them.

As some of you know, I'm always slightly dubious when trying out recipes from the Domestic Goddess book. Sure, several recipes work beautifully; yet others render results so far removed from Nigella's brilliant descriptions of the dish (for example, her brownies and scones) that I now find myself wondering if it's worth the effort to try something new from it. However, I remembered a conversation I had with a friend about this and recalled her saying something about the pavlova recipe working for her. So I casted my doubts aside and jumped in, if anything, because the picture is the book was just so damn gorgeous.

I am happy to report that the recipe was indeed a foolproof one. But alas, this time, the fault lay with my oven. Because I live in a rented apartment, I don't have a "proper" oven - i.e. one of those Miele/Aga numbers that is embedded below the stove and amongst the kitchen cabinets. Instead, I have a smallish DeLonghi freestanding oven that, I must say, has been so good to me over the years. Anyways, because the oven is small, the heat tends to get extremely close to the food in it. Therefore, if a recipe calls for an oven at a temperature of 180 degrees C, I tend to set it at 170 degrees and bake the confection for slightly longer. I made two batches of pavlovas and both of them turned, well, a muted shade of beige -- a hue that looks great on soft furnishings, but not quite flattering on a pavlova. With the second batch, I turned the oven down to about 120 degrees but I still got a batch of light beige discs and thus concluded that the heat in my oven is just way too close for me to ever get pristine white pavlovas that don't fall flat.

Still, the beige pavlovas tasted pretty good and had a wonderfully light texture. So when they cooled, I topped them with a small pillow of unsweetened whipped heavy cream and a handful of pomegranate seeds. Like a mother who finds its hard to see the ugly side of her children, I still thought my beige, white and pink pomegranate pavlova dessert was quite pretty. Perhaps when I, ahem, grow up, and afford my own apartment and kitchen, I'll finally turn out a flawless batch of ivory pavlovas. Till then, these beige ones will just have to do.

Two Meats & Veg

2006-01-18T22:01:00.000+08:00

Over the weekend, I decided to delve into one of my new acquisitions, Jane Lawson's Yoshoku. From it, I chose two easy enough recipes to ensure I could spend my now precious weekends doing other things besides slaving in the kitchen (much as I love it, I also love plenty other things).

Her Beef Tataki Salad as well as the Crisp Duck Breast with Orange and Daikon Salad seemed wonderfully fuss-free. I made up the tasty dressing for the beef salad as well as the ponzu sauce for the duck on Saturday night. On Sunday morning, I headed to the new gourmet butchery that recently opened up in the mall near where I live and picked up a nice cut of Wagyu beef (because the barely cooked beef is sliced paper-thin, I decided to splurge and buy a small cut of the best). Then off to the market I went and bought a packet of rocket and a couple of other bits and bobs for our weekend meal. Deep in the recesses of my freezer was a frozen magret of duck (or, in less pretentious terms, a big-ass duck breast packed by the French). To be perfectly honest, I bought it months ago, but the expiry date had at least another year left on it (who knew you could keep meat that long?). Thus, I figured that this was as good a time as any to put it to use.

I am pleased to report that, if the two dishes I chose are anything to go by, Ms Lawson's recipes are a doddle to follow. Sunday evening saw me quickly searing that beautiful slab of beef just to brown the outsides and then pan-frying the duck breast before tossing the rocket (or arugula) in their respective dressings. Then it was a matter of slicing a daikon and some oranges, arranging the dishes on the plate and serving.

Both dishes turned out superb. The melt-in-your-mouth beef and peppery rocket was laced with a tasty dressing, sharp with the zing of grated fresh ginger. Similarly, the rich, pink flesh of the duck was counterpointed with the fresh orangey dressing and ponzu sauce. We had quite a bit left over, so we had it again on Monday night. Fab!

To go with the two dishes, I bought and served a pack of salmon sashimi from the new Japanese fish market that opened up alongside the butchery (it's great, the revamped mall!), together with some cold soba served with its traditional condiments of nori flakes, spring onions, wasabi and senka sauce.

Weekend Dog Blogging #17

2006-01-14T17:08:00.000+08:00

C's family's golden retriever, Molly, recently gave birth to a litter of the most beautiful pups. Unfortunately, of the six that she birthed, only three survived (one was stillborn, and the other two she stepped on on separate occasions). Indeed, she's not the best of mothers -- when she birthed her very first pup several years ago, she took one look at it and ran away -- but she has her charms, including an amazing ability to entertain herself for hours, swimming in the sea.

We soon found a favourite in the three pups that survived. Not surprisingly, it is the runt of the litter, whom I've named SlowMo for now. As her name suggests, little SlowMo moves at a much slower pace than her two siblings; she's always the last to reach her mother's milk-logged nipples and she sleeps far more than either of them. She has an extremely sweet and quiet demeanour and, given that her mum tends to be rather indifferent to her and her brothers, has taken a shine to C's other retriever, the grande dame of the house, Becky (shown in the picture below with Oxford when he was a wee pup) . On the rare occasions when SlowMo manages to rouse herself from slumber (that's her sleeping in the pic above), she crawls quietly to Becky and makes a game of catching Becky's constantly wagging tail.

As always, Weekend Dog Blogging is hosted by the lovely Sweetnicks, and this week's pictures were taken by the very talented C.

Otak On Toast

2006-01-10T18:10:00.000+08:00

Most Peranakans have extravagant tastebuds. And I'm no different. While others eat porridge, buttered toast, a greasy fry-up, or milk and cereal for breakfast, it isn't uncommon to find members of our family dunking you tiao (fried dough fritters) in ikan assam (a spicy and sour fish curry) gravy or buah keluak gravy.

One of my favourite breakfasts is Otak on Toast, especially if the otak otak was made from scratch by my mother. Otak otak, for those who haven't heard of it, are fragrant parcels of minced fish in a spicy paste that are grilled to succulent perfection within coconut leaves. My mum's otak is yet another of her recipes that I have yet to try. I know I'm a lazy goose, but scraping the makerel's flesh off its many bones and cutting and grinding the spices and coconut milk seem like hard work. Besides, mum does it so effortlessly. Still, given that it is such hard work, I can't expect mum to whip up a batch everytime the hankering strikes me. So when I do crave the spicy creaminess of otak, I head to Lee Wee Brothers, which is the next best thing and wonderfully easy to procure (Lee Wee has stalls all over Singapore).

Usually, I consume the otah neat, in front of the TV, with a tumbler of Coke and lots of ice. But I always save a couple to spread on slices of white bread and then lob in the oven for breakfast or a light lunch. Since today is a public holiday in Singapore (Hari Raya Haji), I woke lazily and indulged in this favourite childhood breakfast. It certainly was a good start to a wonderfully cold and sleepy day.

Meanwhile, Kel from Green Olive Tree, who incidentally, recently went on a fabulous sounding trip to Paris (read about it in her blog) has asked for my Pepper Crab and Crab and Saffron Tart recipes. Now who am I to refuse? You can get them here.

Oh, Crab!

2006-01-09T17:55:00.000+08:00

All last week dinner was made up of anything I could find in my cupboards or that could be bought on my way home. Being utterly unaccustomed to commuting from home to office and back, and spending eight hours each day talking or typing, evenings saw me completely knackered, unable to move a muscle once my butt hit the couch. Thus, my dinner menu last week read like a college kid's -- essentially, pot noodles and McDonald's.

By the weekend I was craving some proper grub and when I bought those crabs on Saturday, I had it in mind to make something that would see me through most of the following weeknights. And for that I turned to my favourite recipe from Nigella Lawson's How To Eat. This Crab and Saffron Tart is the bee's knees. It can be a cinch to make, especially if you buy ready-made pie shells like I sometimes do from Culina. Alas, this little gourmet store has stopped selling savoury short crust pastry shells of late and now only stock the sweet (really sweet, actually) variety. No matter, though -- you can still roll out some ready-made frozen pastry and bake that blind to start with.

Over the weekend however, I felt like a little work in the kitchen. So I decided to make my own tart pastry from scratch. All the conditions were perfect for it. It rained hard all day (which meant cool, cool weather; as cool as it ever gets in Singapore) and I needed the kind of therapy that only pastry making offers -- a kind of strange Zen that comes from carefully grinding butter with flour and patting the ball of dough gently with ice-cold hands and iced water before rolling it out with gentle care. I usually turn to the pie dough recipe from my trusty Baking At Home With The Culinary Institute of America, but that day, I thought, why not give Nigella's pastry recipe a shot.

I am pleased to report that her tart pastry recipe rendered a wonderfully crisp and slightly flaky crust that stood up well to the wobbly custard filling. On a side note, I have to admit that I often approach Ms Lawson's recipes -- especially for cakes and pastries -- with some measure of dubiousness. If you own a copy of How To Be A Domestic Goddess and tried more than a few recipes from that book, I'm sure you'll understand my doubt. But I digress.

The tart's filling is simply exquisite -- lining its bottom is a thin layer of a wonderfully robust tomato sauce infused with garlic, thyme and a single bay leaf. On top of that goes a custard fragrant with the goodness of saffron and fresh crab meat, which is cooked to a quivering mass that melds all the flavours together harmoniously. When it comes out of the oven, the cooked custard literally heaves and sighs, rising and falling like a sexy, tasty bosom. That alone is enough to make anyone want to attack it lovingly with a knife and shovel a healthy slice straight from knife to mouth.

Indeed as Ms Lawson comments in her book, this tart is best served "neither hot nor cold, but warm; this is at its paradisal, slightly baveuse best about 50 minutes to an hour after it comes out of the oven."

"And," she continues, "I have found that you can bring any fridge-cold leftover wedges back to optimum, faintly runny room temperature in a low microwave...And if you do have any left over, it is worth cutting into individual fat slices and freezing like that, only to resuscitate them for a perfect, gloriously luxurious dinner for yourself in the evenings ahead."

Which is exactly what I did. By the way, dinner tonight was just divine. I can't wait to do it again tomorrow and the next day and the next. But don't worry, by week's end I won't want to look at it ever again.

The tart used up the flesh of just two crabs, and with the third I decided to go local and do a Pepper Crab. If you're as much of a crab fiend as I am, I'm sure your next question would be, "how can you have just one pepper crab??" Relax. This little piggy went to market again on Sunday morning, headed straight for the slightly amused crab seller and bought two more of those delicious crustaceans. And so for dinner Greedy Goose and my dear partner C, supped on spicy pepper crabs. You can see how greedy I got from the picture here.

I couldn't even muster the effort to style it or care about lighting. In fact, as soon as i set the dish on the table, I tucked in and instructed C to take the picture. Good man that he is, he obliged. Burp!

On The Menu This Week...

2006-01-07T13:16:00.000+08:00

Yes, beginning with one pill of each twice a day and increasing the dosage by another pill every day until every last spot of Christmas food has been purged...hopefully in time for Chinese New Year. Which by the way, happens at the end of this month. Which, in turn, means more eating.

So if you're wondering why I've been rather quiet in the kitchen of late, I'm merely resting and preparing my greedy tum for yet more festive treats. Meanwhile, if I have to eat another ounce of mash potato, stuffing, minced meat of any kind, steak or any manner of roasted meat, I think I may just throw up. Evidently my greediness knows some limits. See, we learn a new thing every day.

This is yet another reason why I haven't put to use all the wonderful gifts that I received over the festive season. My friend M gave me a meat thermometre, my mum bought me a pair of serving spoons and forks, and with shopping vouchers given to me by my brother, an aunt and two cousins, I bought myself my very first Le Crueset pot - a 20cm French oven that's my new pride and joy in the kitchen.

Just before Christmas, I also received Gary Rhode's latest book Keeping It Simple from its publishers for review. I haven't quite delved into it yet, but I will pretty soon. My other new acquisition is Jane Lawson's Yoshoku, which I bought as a Christmas gift to myself. Over the festive season, a small Japanese fishmonger and supermarket opened up at the mall near where I live. I of course viewed it as an opportunity (finally) to start attempting to cook the modern Japanese cuisine, which i so love to eat. I also started a new job this year, and my office is conveniently located close to a much larger Japanese supermarket close to the heart of town. Again, another sign that I needed to buy Ms Lawson's book, which I'd been eyeing for some time now.

The new job is taking a bit of getting used to given that I've worked comfortably from home for the last five years -- yet another reason why I haven't been in the kitchen this week. But hey, you can't keep a greedy goose down for long. This morning, I literally woke from sleep thinking about what I would like to make and eat over the weekend and next week. So this little piggy went to market and came home with three lovely crabs which I've boiled and will decide what to do with later this afternoon.

A Year End Meme, Weekend Dog Blogging and New Year Wishes

2005-12-31T11:45:00.000+08:00

Mumu at A Curious Mix tagged me for a meme, which originated at The Seasonal Cook. Essentially, the meme calls for a list of things I would bring in order to cook in someone else's kitchen.

I have to say I've almost never cooked in someone else's kitchen. Usually, I'd prepare the dish at home and then bring it over. At the very most, I'd save the last step for the foreign kitchen -- which is often to bang the dish into the oven or fry it up in a pan. So what I've done is thought about the various kitchens that I am most likely to cook in and made a list from there.

The first would be my mother's kitchen, which is bursting at the seams with all manner of cooking equipment to turn out a fabulous meal. The second is my good friend L's, whose oven I have baked cakes in a couple of times. The third is in C's mum's kitchen, where I've pottered about once or twice putting together a salad for a barbeque in the garden. And so without further ado, here's my list:

1. My Henkel's chef knife
I don't know how our mothers can own all sorts of wierd gadgets for shaping carrots into roses and lifting surface oil from a curry, but not have a good knife that would slice a cabbage in half without any sawing action.

2. Oven thermometre
L's oven is the single most finnicky, unpredictable, and frustrating oven ever built. We've wasted many cakes in that damn appliance. Cakes that turn out perfectly fine in my dinky-ass DeLonghi mini oven, shrivels up to a burnt mess in hers. Or they take three times the duration to bake.

3. Real Aged Balsamic Vinegar from Modena
Once I tasted the sweet, mellow flavour of the real, aged stuff, regular Balsamico just doesn't cut it anymore. I take my precious bottle anywhere that requires me to whip up a salad dressing.

Meanwhile, I wanted to share Oxford's breakfast shenanigans in this Weekend's Dog Blogging event, which is, as always, hosted by the lovely Sweet Nicks. So without further ado, here's How To Steal A Pancake, by this weekend's guest blogger, Oxford.

Step 1: Practice stealth. Approach the plate quietly and keep it at eye level.

Step 2: Attack swiftly. Keep an eye on the guards who may waste no time in taking you down.

Step 3: Exercise restraint. Never try to pull more than one pancake off the plate at a time. Keep your eye on the prize and wait until the next opportunity.

Happy New Year everyone and thanks for all the support you've shown me in the last two months. See ya next year!

And So The Feasting Begins

2005-12-25T21:57:00.000+08:00

If I really were a goose, I'd be a prime candidate for foie gras right now. As of 23 December, I've been eating just about non-stop, living up to my blogging moniker and then some. That night, my cousins -- bless their greedy hearts -- decided that they would start a new tradition: The Gourmet Christmas Dinner. On the menu was an appetiser of foie gras terraine laid on a water cracker between a lick of French onion spread and Cabernet Savignon jelly. There was also a platter of blue cheeses, brie, and some sort of double cream cheese before our main course of Wagyu beef steak and a stuffed chicken. It's a good thing that when it comes to dessert I'm rather bovine, with a separate compartment in my belly to digest the butterscotch and chocolate ice cream log cake and several buttercream gourmet chocolate truffles. Now's that's a tradition I could get used to. Burp.

On Christmas Eve, our family dinner was, as always, stupendous. Aside from the turkey and our family's signature minced pork stuffing, there was a bone-in ham with apple and honey sauce, some sort of veggie stir-fry, otar (a spicy fish cake), curry devil (more on that later), sushi, feng (curried innards, another Eurasian tradition), and fried noodles. For dessert, my aunty served black rice pudding topped with ice cream, a chocolate log cake and yet more chocolate truffles. Suffice it to say, I had to eat at least one portion of everything. It's only polite.

What I love best about Christmas Eve dinner though, are the leftovers. Christmas morning just isn't the same without the Christmas Morning Fry-Up. Leftovers from the night before re-fried and gobbled up again, and like all leftovers, taste better when left to steep in their own flavours overnight.

My Christmas Fry-Up breakfast menu is the same every year -- slices of ham, whatever vegetable dish was on offer the night before, and my mother's turkey stuffing (chestnuts, minced pork, mushrooms, celery, baby corn, and onions infused with star anise, cloves and a dash of soy). I've been eating stuffing like this all my life that when I spent my first Christmas away in England at age 25, I expected the stuffing at my hosts' dinner table to be, at the very least, similar to that I'm accustomed to. So imagine my shock when I took a mouthful of their mushier stuffing of breadcrumbs, sage and onions and very nearly gagged. Luckily my greedy gene kicked in and in the time I took to rearrange my face, I managed to not only swallow the stuff but convince myself that it wasn't all that bad. My palate was simply expecting something different.

Christmas Day lunch, as tradition dictates, is taken in front of the TV. On the menu is a piping hot bowl of Curry Devil, with slices of white bread to mop up the fiery gravy. Devil, as we like to call it, (or Debal, the accurate Christang name for it), is a traditional Eurasian dish, that like Sugee Cake, is served at every festive event. Unlike other curries, it uses no curry powder, but a spice mix that comprises LOTS of fresh and dried chillies, onions, candlenuts, and turmeric.

This paste is then fried for about half and hour as it absorbs the oil in the pan and then releases it again, signalling well-cooked chillies and little risk of a stomach ache the morning after (less than cooked chillies, especially in such large quantities, will leave you clutching your belly in pain on Christmas morning before sending you to the toilet for a lengthy visit). That said, it is not Devil until you break out in a sweat as you eat it -- I guess that's where it derives its name. That, and it's fiery red colour. My advice to Devil virgins usually is to leave a roll of toilet paper in the fridge the night before.

Traditionally a curry for leftovers, Devil usually contains plenty of meat from the Christmas dinner table -- turkey, duck, pork, etc. However, these days Devil is made for the dinner table, so it usually holds sausages, chicken and roast pork, with potatoes, cabbage, and cucumber. What gives Devil it's full-bodied flavour is a bunch of bacon bones or smoked ham hock. At the very end of its cooking process, when the meat is cooked and the bacon bones have released its wonderfully smoky and savoury flavour, the curry is spiked with ginger, English mustard and healthy splashes of vinegar. At the risk of sounding Nigella-ish, I have to say, mmph, just writing about it makes my mouth water and my tastebuds tingle.

So that was lunch.

Dinner was at my childhood friend M's house, whose Indian-Chinese heritage saw to another menu of curries -- mutton rendang, chicken curry, devil -- fried fishballs and chicken wings, more turkey, fried egg noodles and oh, I can't even remember what else was on the table. For dessert, an amazingly filling coconut jelly that was so delicious I had to have two.

Tomorrow, as the saying goes, is another day. My mum will be hosting a group of family friends and it will no doubt be another round of turkey and stuffing, devil, lasagne (for the kids, but adults seldom resist) and god only knows what else. Meanwhile I'm off for a long run in preparation for yet another day's feasting. I can already feel my arteries clogging.

Merry Christmas everyone!

The Icing On The Sugee Cake

2005-12-22T22:48:00.000+08:00

This was my virgin attempt at cake decorating with marzipan and ready-roll icing and, boy, was it a bitch. Still, it proved rather enjoyable for the first hour or so, as I experimented with various shades of red food colouring, hoping to turn the icing a deep Christmasy magenta for the ribbon on my gift-shaped cube of cake.

One bottle of "Christmas Red" turned my pristine white icing a bright orange, while another tube of regular red colouring rendered a lurid shade of pink. Defeated, I dripped an itsy bit of blue colouring into a new batch of icing and came out with the shade in the picture you see here.

It's a tad bar mitzvah-ish, I know, but it was the least offensive of the colours I experimented with. And what with all the Christmas chores left to be done, I couldn't indulge the exercise the hours it would have required. After fiddling with the quickly wilting icing (damn this tropical weather) and fashioning them into the best ribbons I could, I gave up and dug out the christmas cake ornaments I saved from all the log cakes I received last year. These proved far easier -- just stick 'em on the top of the cake. What's not to love?

What's underneath all that icing and marzipan, by the way, is the unctuous, buttery goodness of Sugee Cake. Sugee Cake to Eurasians in these parts of the world (usually of Portuguese descent) is what traditional fruit cake is to Anglo Saxons -- the celebratory confection of choice at Christmas, weddings and christenings. Dense with semolina and chopped or ground almonds (depending on the recipe), it looks like any other yellow cake, but is so much more. You'll gasp at the amount of butter it requires, and how much it shows. Just lay your sugee cake on a sheet of greaseproof paper and watch the fat form a small, oily pool. Okay, I exaggerate, but I assure you, I'm not far off. Be that as it may, the crumbly, nutty texture of this artery-clogging tradition is worth every stent you'll have to endure in your old age.

It was difficult finding the perfect recipe -- the old Eurasian women who harbour the best ones guard it with their lives. Eventually I found mine in the most unlikely of places: my old home economics recipe book from my secondary school days. It's not the best, but it'll do. I recently found another promising sounding one here.

I might try that after the festivities are done. Meanwhile, I'm all caked out and ready for more savoury delights - my mother's turkey stuffing, curry devil (which I'll make tomorrow), and all the other good stuff I'm expecting at my family's dinners which begin in earnest tomorrow. I can't wait.

Festive Chocolate Cupcakes

2005-12-19T15:50:00.000+08:00

What's not to love about cupcakes? Especially soft-as-clouds chocolate ones, topped with decadent chocolate ganache made with Valrhona 70% choclate. These were my final entry into C's client goodie bag and boy were they as easy to eat as they were to make. The recipe is from More From Magnolia (I've been obsessed with Magnolia cupcakes ever since I watched Sarah Jessica Parker bite into a pink one in Sex And The City - I'm such a follower, I know). You can get the recipe here.

Instead of using Magnolia's suggested Buttercream Frosting, I decided to top it with my favourite ganache recipe.

You essentially chop 115 grams of the best bittersweet chocolate and boil up 125ml of heavy cream. When the cream is boiled, pour it over the chopped chocolate and let it sit for about 30 seconds before stirring it up. Then add 30 grams of cubed butter, softened at room temperature and stir till you get a smooth mix. Refrigerate it, stirring every 5 minutes or so until it's at the consistency you want. Then spread over the cupcakes.

To add a touch of festive shine, I sprinkled silver dragees on top.

Holiday Cookie Exchange #3: Chocolate Malt Cookies

2005-12-17T23:41:00.000+08:00

I am completely of the same mind as Dawn of So Cal Foodie, who just happens to be hosting the Final Instalment of Holiday Cookie Exchange # 3.

I've spent the last week icing countless ginger bread stars and putting together stained glass christmas tree cookies that I am starting to get ever so slightly burned out. And while the said cookies are irresistably pretty, let's face it, gingerbread and butter cookies are not everyone's cup of tea. So I decided that for the last batch of cookies that will go into C's client Christmas goodie bag, I would make something that's wonderfully chocolatey and universally liked. Again I delved into Martha Stewart's Holiday Cookies and decided on her Chocolate Malt Sandwiches. They sounded like just the thing, with their deep brown hue and crunchy-on-the-outside-soft-on-the-inside texture. So while C slept in this morning, I decided to whip up a batch and make use of that bottle of Horlicks malt drink powder sitting in my cupboard, the leftover of a Horlicks ice cream experiment several months ago (I'm still experimenting, in case you're wondering).

As it turns out, the cookies are a real treat. As expected, they are deeply chocolatey and are given an added dimension by the malt powder. In fact, they are so good that I didn't bother to make the chocolate filling. Rather than make them sandwiched cookies as the recipe suggested, I've decided to just pack them up as is, which offers them the added benefit of being able to keep better as well. Besides, it's near impossible to find the half-and-half required for the filling in Singapore.

Here's the recipe. I've added the recipe for the filling as well, just in case you're feeling more industrious than I am.

Chocolate Malt Sandwiches
For the cookies
2 cups plus 2 tbsp all-purpose flour
1/2 cup unsweetened Dutch-process cocoa powder
1/4 cup plain malted-milk powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp coarse salt
1 cup (230g) unsalted butter, softened
1 3/4 cup sugar
1 large egg
2 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 creme fraiche

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F or 170 degrees C. Sift flour, cocoa powder, malted-milk powder, baking soda and salt.
Mix butter and sugar on medium speed until pale and fluffy. Mix in egg, vanilla and creme fraiche and 3 tbsp hot water. Reduce speed to low and mix in flour mixture.

Space tablespoon-size balls of dough 3.5 inches apart on parchment-lined baking sheets. Bake until flat and just firm. 10 to 12 minutes. Let cool on parchment on wire racks.

For the filling
10 ounces semi-sweet chocolate, coarsely chopped
4 tbsp unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
1 cup malted-milk powder
3 ounces cream cheese, room temperature
1/4 cup plus 2 tbsp half-and-half
1 tsp pure vanilla extract

Melt chocolate and butter in a heatproof bowl set over a pan of simmering water, stirring. Let cool. Mix malted-milk powder and cream cheese on medium speed until smooth. Gradually mix in half-and-half, chocolate mixture and vanilla. Refrigerate, covered, until thick, about 30 mins. Mix on high speed until fluffy, about 3 minutes.

Assemble cookies: Spread a heaping tablespoon filling on the bottom of 1 cookie. Sandwich with another cookie. Repeat. Sandwiches can be refrigerated between layers of parchment in an air-tight container up to 3 days.

Stained Glass Christmas Tree Cookies

2005-12-15T21:12:00.000+08:00

These biscuits have been a hit since I started making them almost a week ago. There are certainly painstaking (I manage only three dozen a day), but are worth the effort since they are pretty impressive. Given that I gorge myself with chocolate, chocolate and more chocolate all the time, I think I've forgotten how delicious plain sugar-cookies can be. And these served to remind me well -- they are crisp and not too sweet, with a rich, buttery fragrance that hits you every time you open the cookie jar. Add to that the wow factor of the luminescent stained-glass windows (made by way of chopped hard candies) and you have another winner that's going in to C's Christmas goody basket for his clients.

The recipe has been adapted from Martha Stewart Holiday Cookies, a special issue with over 100 recipes that will take me more than a year to try!

If the cookies look like a mission to make, it's because they are. Chopping the hard candies are a messy and back-pain-inducing affair, so I tried pounding them in a mortar and pestle, which was even messier. At first I thought that blitzing them in my mini food chopper might grind them too finely, but as it turns out, that is the best option. Though if you live in the hot humid tropics as I do, it might be best to grind only what you will use each time because they end up melting extremely quickly and sticking together in clumps (not to mention all over your fingertips too). On top of that, the dough is pretty soft and buttery, so it's best to keep it in the fridge until ready to use. You should also flour your work surface generously so it doesn't stick all over the place. Finally, when it's ready to go into the oven, you need to check it every couple of minutes with a toothpick in hand to fill any little holes in the "glass" as the sweets begin to melt and boil.

Now, if you're still fancy making up a batch, here's the recipe:

Stained Glass Trees (makes about 3 to 5 dozen, depending on the size of your cookie cutter)
2 cups sifted all-purpose flour, plus more (lots more!) for work surface
1/4 tsp coarse salt
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup (115g) unsalted butter
1 cup sugar
1 large egg
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
7 ounces (about 30) assorted clear coloured hard candies (colours separated and finely chopped)

Sift flour, salt and baking powder and set aside. Put butter and sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted wth the paddle attachment and mix on medium speed until pale and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add egg and mix till smooth, about 1 minute. Reduce speed to low and add flour mixture. Mix till combined and stir in vanilla. Wrap the dough in plastic and refrigerate until cold, about 45 minutes.

Preheat oven to 325 degrees F (or 170 degrees C) with racks in upper and lower thirds. Roll out chilled dough on a well-floured surface to a little more than 1/8-inch thick. Cut out shapes using a tree-shaped cookie cutter. Using a metal spatula, space 2 inches apart on baking sheets lined with parchment paper. Using the tip of a paring knife, make a triangular cut-out in the centre of each cookie. Re-roll scraps and cut.

Sprinkle candy in a single layer in the hole of each cookie, avoiding the edges of the triangle. Bake until candy has just melted and the cookie edges are just starting to turn pale golden brown, about 11-12 minutes. Midway through baking, quickly open the oven door and check for any holes in the "glass" (there will probably be lots); use a toothpick to fill them in. Try not to let the candy centres become bubbly.

Cool completely on sheets on wire racks and use a metal spatula to remove cookies from parchment.

The Weekend Cookbook Challenge

2005-12-10T11:24:00.000+08:00

I loved the idea of digging into my oldest cookbook and attempting a recipe for the first time, as suggested by Alicat from Something So Clever and Sara of I Like To Cook in their Weekend Cook Book Challenge. Like everyone else, I'm guilty of a rather large collection of cookbooks, of which barely an eighth has been fully delved into and used to its fullest potential.

As I trawled my shelves, I tried hard to remember exactly the book that started my collection. Was it Nigella Lawson's How To Be A Domestic Goddess? Mary Berry's The Complete Cookbook? Or Zarina's Home Cooking by Zarinah Ibrahim? And then my eyes fell to a tatty red spine languishing quietly at the end of the second shelf.

I'd almost forgotten about this old treasure. With its blue hard cover and yellowing pages, this was the cookbook that I spent much of my childhood poring over, pointing out recipes that sounded tempting to my mother, who would then oblige me by whipping them up. Now here it was, on my shelf, an heirloom of sorts, with the binding coming charmingly loose and pages and pages of old-school recipes written in my mother's amazingly neat hand (the lack of computers certainly did something for good handwriting). In between those pages are also similarly yellow and tatty loose-leaf pages of recipes painstakingly typed out on the old Olivetti typewriter.

Though I've had the cookbook for a couple of years now -- my mother knows all the recipes in there by heart, it seems -- I've never actually used it. Why would I need to? Some dishes are best left to mum to produce. The cookbook would eventually be her legacy to me, but in the meantime, traditional Peranakan sweets like Kueh Ko Swee or Kueh Bangkit are best eaten hot out of my mother's ancient steamer (I intend to make that mine eventually too) and oven.

So, when it came to choosing a recipe to try out, I decided to go with one of my childhood favourites: Orange Trifle. This is old-school trifle at it's best -- it's sweet, it's simple enough and it's lip-smackingly good. When we were kids, my mum used to make this at least once a week. When it was sufficiently chilled and ready to eat after dinner, my brothers and I would devour the entire tray in exactly six minutes, sometimes less.

As I read through the recipe, I started to get a bit confused. The instructions in the sponge cake recipe called for me to "whip the egg whites and add in sugar a little at a time and heat well. Then add one yolk at a time and heat well again." I'd never heard of heating eggs for a sponge cake -- maybe she meant heating the eggs in a bowl above a pan of simmering water.

When I called mum, she sounded peeved. "Heat? Why would you heat the eggs?" she asked incredulously.
"Mum, that's what you wrote in the recipe."
"Rubbish, I've been making it for years and I've never heated any eggs."

When I read out the line from the recipe to her, she laughed. "BEAT the eggs! Not heat!"
See what I mean about mum knowing the recipes by heart?

Anyhow, once I figured that out, the rest was a doddle. The trifle was made and eaten in a day.

The following recipe is enough for two trifles. If you do try it, you must let me know how it turned out for you.

My Mum's Orange Trifle

For the sponge cake:
6 eggs
120g self raising flour
60g corn flour
1 tsp vanilla
4 tsp orange juice
120g melted butter
120g sugar

Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Whip the egg whites and add in sugar a little at a time. Beat well. Add in one yolk at a time and beat well till thick. Fold in the flour, vanilla and orange juice. Lastly, fold in the melted butter and pour into two ovenproof glass trays.

For the jelly:
1 cup boiling water, 1 box orange jelly powder (or Jello), the grated peel and juice of 1 orange, syrup from 2 cans of mandarin oranges (you'll use the orange wedges for decorating the top)

Mix the jelly powder with hot water until it is dissolved, and then add in the orange juice and the mandarin orange syrup. Mix well. Leave to cool.

For the custard:
1 teacup evaporated milk, half cup fine sugar, 1 cup water, 2 tablespoons custard powder, a pinch of salt

Cook all the above on a slow fire, continuously stirring until it boils. Set aside to cool

For the topping
2 cans (170g) Nestle's Cream (essentially cream with 25% milk fat)
2 cans mandarin orange wedges

To assemble
Pour jelly mixture onto the cake. Allow the cake to absorb and be soaked in the liquid. Then pour custard over the cake and spread evenly. Next pour the cream over. Spread evening and then arrange orange wedges on top. Chill in the refrigerator for at least 3 hours.

My Childhood In A Mouthful

2005-12-08T21:22:00.000+08:00

One bite into these fabulous coconut candies and memories of my childhood come flooding back in bright saturated colours. Perhaps it's the bright happy hues of these old-fashioned gems that seep into those memories, or the chewy texture that makes me feel like a kid all over again. Whatever it is, it's really, really good.

Time was when you could find packets of these at almost any mamak* stall or at fun fairs. These days, they are a lot harder to come by, though they can still be found in confectionaries along Little India. I also spied some at Glory Catering on East Coast Road. A fragrant concoction of grated coconut, sugar and milk, cooked to a dense sticky mix, these coconut candies are a doddle to make and last two weeks in an air-tight container or about a month in the fridge -- well worth the effort.

The recipe below has been adapted from Sylvia Tan's Singapore Heritage Food: Yesterday's Recipes For Today's Cook, a great book that summarises some of Singapore's best loved dishes, and a bible for Singaporeans living abroad hungry for a taste of home.

* "Mamak" is a colloquial term that describes Indian Muslims. "Mamak stalls" then are small shops run by Indian muslims selling sweets, drinks, snacks and provisions like canned food, sauces, onions and garlic. In the old days (um, that would be around 1970), mamak stalls were a common sight on the ground floor of apartment buildings in almost every Singaporean housing estate. These days, with supermarkets around every corner, the once ubiquitous mamak stalls are a disappearing sight.

Coconut Candy (Makes 24)
3 cups sugar
1 cup evaporated milk
3 tightly packed cups of grated coconut (skin removed)
1 tbs butter
a pinch of salt
1 tsp vanilla essence
a few drops of food colouring

Butter a wide, shallow tray and set aside. Boil sugar and milk in a saucepan over medium heat until it becomes a thin syrup. Add the butter and coconut, stirring constantly to prevent burning. The mixture is ready when it thickens and begins to pull away from the sides of the pan. To test, drop a small piece into cold water. It should harden immediately.

While it is still boiling, add the vanilla essence and salt. Take it off the fire and quickly mix in a few drops of food colouring. If you want to make different colours, have another saucepan (or several other saucepans) ready so you can divide the mixture and then colour them separately.

Spread the mixture over the buttered tray. Cut into pieces while still warm and leave them to harden.

You Are What You Eat Meme: My Top Ten Favourite Foods

2005-12-07T12:13:00.000+08:00

I was tagged by the fabulous Kalyn at Kalyn's Kitchen, who's been so wonderfully supportive since I started blogging mere weeks ago. Since she tagged me, I've been racking my brain, trying to limit my number of favourite foods to just 10 (I am greedy indeed). After a while, I figured the best way to do this was to list foods that I simply cannot live without. So, here goes:

1. Chocolate
I know it's cliche, but I can't go one meal without chocolate -- the darker the better. I often say that I have a second compartment for chocolate in my stomach. To wit, I could eat a massive buffet and stuff myself till bursting point and moan about how I am simply unable to put anything else in my mouth. But then place a piece of chocolate under my nose, and I'd inhale it in just one mouthful and ask you for more. I stopped smoking about two years ago and, alas, chocolate is my substitute for cigarettes. The end of every meal is punctuated with a small piece (oh, alright, a whole bar) of chocolate. Hey, there are worse habits a girl could have, no?

2. Chilli Sambal
Like a true Peranakan (Straits-born Chinese), I eat sambal belachan (fresh chilli pounded with toasted fermented prawn paste and a squish of lime) with everything. Not many places serve sambal belachan though, so I've developed a taste for any kind of sambal (chilli jam, for want of a better way to describe it). Asian dishes are just not the same without sambal and I'd rather forgo Asian food than eat it without chilli.

3 and 4. Prawns and Crabs
I love prawns and crabs cooked any way. Even if they are just boiled in hot water.

5. Oysters
Fresh and writhing slightly in their shells when touched, with a spritz of lemon and a dash of hot sauce. I've been known to knock back 35 oysters all by myself in one sitting. The ones pictured above are a platter of Bateman Bay oysters which I had the pleasure of supping on at Sydney's restaurant-of-the-moment Flying Fish. In fact, once that picture was taken, they all slipped down my throat in less than two minutes.

6. Fried Chicken Wings
I don't care for chicken breasts (white meat is just not my thing). But I adore chicken wings, particularly if fried in a light, crispy and spicy batter. My all-time favourite are the Prawn Paste Chicken Wings from the Crystal Jade chain of restaurants available all over Singapore.

7. Foie Gras
This is one of my favourite foods that I prefer to eat outside of home. Cooking it myself just serves to show me how much pure fat I'm consuming in one (very small) sitting. My favourite place to have it is at Saint Pierre, where chef Emmanuel Stroobant serves it pan-fried with caramelised green apples and port sauce.

8. Steamed White Rice
To be honest, I don't really like white rice that much. When I do eat it, I don't consume much of it in terms of portions. Yet, strangely, it is a staple that I cannot live without. Rice is the ultimate comfort food for any Asian, and I guess I'm no different. Though I could go a whole week without eating a meal that consists of rice, it is only a matter of time before something deep inside me starts to gnaw and growl and demand that I feed it with a spoonful or two of steaming white rice -- preferably served with a dollop of sambal belachan and a spicy, braised meat dish on the side

9. Pasta
This is another taste for which I cannot understand. When I'm carbing up during triathlon season, I literally dream of pasta in my sleep. I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night, craving those damn noodles, drenched in sauce -- any sauce. I crave it more often than I crave rice!

10. Ice Cream
Real Italian gelato, Haagen Daz, Ben & Jerry's, luscious home-made creations -- the richer the better -- need I say more?

Now I have to tag five more people and since I don't have many food blogging friends (yet, I hope), I'm going to tag five blogs that I enjoy reading. They are:

1. Liz from Gastronomy Domine
2. Dagmar from A Cat In The Kitchen
3. Ilva from Lucillian Delights
4. Cupcake Queen from 52 Cupcakes
5. Sam from Becks & Posh

I'd love to see what you guys name as your favourite foods.

It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas

2005-12-05T10:27:00.000+08:00

When C mentioned he wanted to send a bunch of Christmas goodies to his clients, I immediately volunteered my services. I imagined a basket of cookies, cupcakes and maybe a couple of chocolate truffles -- if I make some successfully when I try to -- studded with elegant silver dragees and perhaps some sort of Christmasy decorations that I hope to pick up from the baking supplies store sometime this week.

But first, a round of testing in the kitchen. Over the weekend, I pulled out my trusty Baking At Home with The Culinary Institute of America and attempted the recipe for Gingerbread Cookies. From the moment the batter was made, the smell was just awesome -- honey, dark brown sugar, ground spices like ginger, cloves and cinnamon richly amalgamated into butter, eggs and flour. Mmmm...it was enough to conjure Christmas right there in the tropical heat of my kitchen. As you might imagine, that heady scent also flooded the house once the cookies began cooking in the oven. Oxford waited desperately at the door hoping for a scrap or two to float his way. All he got, I'm afraid, was a pool of drool at his feet.

The recipe called for 5.5-inch star-shaped cookie cutters, but as I only had a small star-shaped cutter, I used that instead. The recipe makes about 48 small cookies or 24 large ones, and if you decide to make them small, be prepared to spend plenty of time icing them -- they are much more fiddly as diminutive stars. The cookies came out pretty cakey as well, which isn't bad at all, just not good if you were expecting harder crunchy cookies (which, um, I was). Still, they taste great though they soften even more when you leave them out to ice and then dry.

GINGERBREAD COOKIES
3 3/4 all-purpose flour plus extra for dusting
2 tsp baking soda
1.5 tsp ground ginger
1.5 tsp ground all spice
1 tsp salt
8 tbsp (1 stick) unsalted butter at room temperature
3/4 cup tightly packed dark brown sugar
1/2 cup honey
2 large eggs
Flourless cooking spray

Preheat oven to 180 degrees (or 375 degree Farenheight). Lightly spray cookie sheets with cooking spray or line them with parchment paper. Sift flour, baking soda, ginger, allspice, and salt and set aside.

Cream butter, brown sugar, and honey on medium speed till smooth (about 2 minutes). Add eggs and mix till smooth and light (another 2 - 3 minutes). Add the sifted dry ingredients and mix on low speed just until the dough is evenly mixed. Turn it onto a lightly floured work surface, pat into an even disc, and chill for 10 minutes.

Roll dough to a 1/4 inch thickness and cut out cookies with a cookie cutter. Transfer to prepared cookie sheets, spacing them about 1 inch apart. Bake till firm (12 - 14 minutes). Transfer to wire racks and cool completely before decorating.

ROYAL ICING
2 large egg whites
1/8 tsp cream of tartar
2.5 cups confectioners' sugar, sifted

Beat egg whites on low speed in a clean, grease-free bowl until they become loose (1 min). Add cream of tartar and continue mixing on low speed till the whites become frothy (2 minutes). Add the sugar gradually with the mixer on low speed. Continue to mix until the icing reaches the consistency you want (in this case, a thickish goo-ey consistency so it's easy to pipe and spread).

(Recipes adapted from Baking At Home with The Culinary Institute of America)

Mum's Cooking

2005-11-30T19:41:00.000+08:00

There is nothing quite like a regular fix of mum's cooking to make my tum feel all warm and satisfied. On my Tuesday night dinner visits, she indulges me with all my favourites - itek dim (ducked soup with salted vegetables), prawn sambal, sweet potato leaves stir-fried with chilli, babi assam (pork stewed in a dark tamarind sauce)...the list, no doubt, goes on.

Last night, she served up yet another favourite of mine - mee siam. I've been meaning to learn how to make it for the longest time, but I always manage to find an excuse not to. You see, like many Asian dishes, mee siam is a rather painstaking process, which involves peeling more than 40 shallots, grinding it with a bagful of chillies, making the rempah (spice paste), soaking the noodles, frying the noodles and tofu in the rempah (separately), chopping chives, boiling eggs, peeling and boiling a heap of prawns, plucking the stems off bean sprouts...you get the picture.

But I figured it was high time I learned and so I got mum to take me through it step by step. Now it all sounds easy enough - watching someone cook and asking the right questions. But it is the responses of your teacher that have everything to do with how well you fare.

Example:

Me: How many onions do you use, mum?
Mum: Three dollars worth
Me: How many chillies?
Mum: Forty cents
Me: How much water and tamarind?
Mum: Oh, about this much (she picks up a handful of tamarind and a small tub of water)

As you can see, measurements are not quite my mother's thing. So unless I go to the very same market stall from which she buys her onions and her chillies (come to think of it, I could have just sat there and counted them, couldn't I?), or grab that handful of tamarind and insist she drop it onto the weighing scale, I'm afraid, it's going to be a case of trial and error for me.

Mercifully, mum's still around to make it for me. So until I finally do it on my own AND get it right, I am unable to post a proper recipe (okay, my mum's recipe). So for now, I'm afraid the picture above will have to do.

A Quick Elegant Lunch

2005-11-29T16:20:00.000+08:00

Since I work from home, lunch is usually a solitary affair. Which means it often constitutes easy-to-make dishes or leftovers from the night before. This White-Cut Chicken Salad is one of my favourites. It is light, tasty and extremely elegant at the same time. The chicken was left over from last night's Hainanese Chicken Rice dinner - a dish almost all Chinese Singaporeans will tell you is the ultimate comfort food. I laid it on a bed of fresh baby spinach and made an Oriental-ish dressing of light soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, olive oil and a few drops of sesame oil. A handful of chopped red chillies and spring onions sprinkled over the top anoints the salad with a dash of colour and a good dose of heat.

The Spotted Grub Grabber

2005-11-28T13:53:00.000+08:00

Meet Oxford, my three-year-old canine companion who hoovers up the crumbs in the kitchen quicker than you can say, "Suck it up". Of course he has other talents too - like rubbing himself in the sand, swimming and annoying our two cats. When he's not stalking me in the kitchen, he finds comfort on our (now very worn) couch, where he snoozes till it's time for his next walk.

I've posted another picture of him at Sweet Nicks Weekend Dog Blogging #11.

Sephardic Chocolate and Almond Cake

2005-11-27T11:28:00.000+08:00

I've had Chantal Coady's book Real Chocolate on my shelf for almost a year now, but I only began dipping into it recently. What sparked it off was my friend Angie's search for a "baked chocolate mousse cake" recipe, which another friend had made for her. Despite Angie's many pleas, he refused to share the recipe. In my book, such selfishness when it comes to food is simply unacceptable, so I made it my mission to find Angie that recipe, which turned out to be a pretty easy task.

Once she was done describing it, I was pretty sure Angie was referring to the famous River Cafe Chocolate Nemesis. I haven't had the pleasure of tasting the original, but I've heard and read plenty about it. While I don't own a River Cafe cookbook, I remembered seeing the recipe in Real Chocolate. According to Ms Coady -- who owns the celebrated Rococo Chocolates in London and co-founded the Chocolate Society -- she thought the original Chocolate Nemesis to be (while deliciously sublime), a tad too sweet and buttery. So she tweaked the recipe for her book with the blessing of The River Cafe's owners. I am pleased to report that our rendition of Ms Coady's River Cafe Chocolate Nemesis Revisited was a success -- moist, soft, decadently chocolatey, but not too sweet. Unfortunately I didn't have a camera on hand that day and so couldn't take a picture. I'll try to post one next time I make it.

Today, feeling in the mood for chocolate again (oh, alright, I'm always in the mood for chocolate), I decided to attempt Ms Coady's recipe for the Sephardic Chocolate and Almond Cake. A variation of Claudia Roden's recipe, the dense cake is rich with almond meal and the best quality dark chocolate (I used Valrhona 70%, although I think something stronger -- 75% to 80% -- wouldn't be bad either). Dusted with cocoa, it is the perfect, decadent slice of tea cake that will satiate any chocolate craving in a flash.

Weekend Herb Blogging

2005-11-25T14:57:00.000+08:00

I'm new to this whole food blogging thing and recently signed up at Food Blogger S'cool where I came across Weekend Herb Blogging hosted by Kalyn's Kitchen. I figured I'd take part, if anything to make some new food blogger friends. (If anyone has any advice or comments for a newbie, please post them here or email me!)

It was opportune since two weeks ago, I was forced to send my basil and lemon balm plants to the grave because they were hopelessly infested by white flies. I mourned a little -- it was my first ever attempt at growing herbs, and how they thrived! Damm those white flies!

A week later, feeling brave, I went to the hardware store and picked up a couple of seeds. I chose mint because it's really, really hard to buy beautiful mint from the supermarkets or markets here. They are usually wilted with blackened leaves -- so not ideal for garnishing or crushing into drinks. The only place I've ever come across really clean, fresh mint stalks was at Tekka Market, which is a bit of a journey from where I live. Hence, a pack of mint seeds went into my shopping bag. The other was a pack of coriander seeds - because well, coriander goes with everything... in Asian cooking at least. And, as I recently discovered, coriander root is the secret ingredient in some of the best Asian dishes. I've posted an easy laksa-based recipe, which features coriander root and mint leaves at the bottom of this post, adapted from Nigel Slater's Appetite. It is a spicy, rich and comforting, treat on cold days like today.

I can't begin to tell you how excited I was when five days from when I first planted them, the seeds began to sprout. Now, two weeks have passed and they are fuzzy little baby leaves with so much potential. The picture at the top is of my mint, and here's a picture of my fast-growing coriander.

Heartened by the experience, I decided to get another basil plant -- they grow up quick and they taste yum. I bought a small plant from the supermarket and then transplanted it. Alas, basil and the sun are great friends and this being the end of the year, the sun has been rather elusive of late. And my new basil plant is all the weaker for it.

I'm trying to talk it out of its misery and feed it lots of water, but if the sun doesn't come out soon, I'm not sure it will last.

SOMETHING LIKE LAKSA

Serves 2

For the spice paste:
4 to 5 hot red chillies
3 cloves garlic, peeled
thumb-sized piece of ginger, peeled and shred
3 lemon grass stems (the tender, innermost leaves), sliced
a few coriander seeds, ground or crushed
a handful of coriander leaves and their roots, scrubbed of dirt
1 tsp ground tumeric
vegetable oil

For the soup:
2 cups chicken stock
1.75 cups coconut milk
the juice of 1 lime
Thai fish sauce
a handful of mint leaves

To finish:
Noodles - egg or rice (chor bee hoon) noodles
Crabmeat and prawns (or chicken, or whatever you fancy, really)

Throw all the ingredients for the spice paste (except the vegetable oil) into a food processor and blitz. Add the vegetable oil a little at a time to help this mixture go around and turn into a dry paste.

In a fairly deep pan, over moderate heat, add the spice paste and fry, moving it around the pan for a minute or so, then pour in the stock and coconut milk and let it come to a boil. Turn the heat down and let the soup simmer for 10 minutes. Meanwhile, cook the noodles briefly in boiling water and drain.

Pop the crabmeat and prawns (or whatever meat you've chosen) into the soup. Let them cook quickly. Season with lime juice, salt, a dash of fish sauce and some mint leaves. Divide the noodles into bowls and serve.

An Italian Birthday Meal

2005-11-15T16:35:00.000+08:00

Several weeks ago I enjoyed a wonderful tasting dinner with two food writer friends at a new Italian restaurant called Ristorante Da Valentino. It was a bit of a drive (to say the least), given that I was coming from the East Coast, but when we finally got to the neighbourhood trattoria in Jalan Bingka (off Rifle Range Road), it was almost like we had stepped into some quaint Italian town.

The restaurant is run by Chef Valentino Valtulina (formerly of Cantina) and his immediately family. Yes, that means mama, papa, brother-in-law and sister, plus a couple of delightfully knowledgeable waiters. Everything we had ate that night was simply fantastic and so on my birthday last week, when my partner C asked where I would like to be taken to dinner, I naturally chose Valentino's.

I was dying to taste the beautiful squid ink pasta with crab meat and cream sauce (it is chock-full of fresh crab meat and a lovely light sauce), and I really wanted C to try the pizza with parma ham and rocket (it was the best I had ever tasted). Chef V also managed to convince C to order a veal tenderloin and cream sauce dish which, as expected, was exquisitely delicious.

We eventually had to pack three-quarters of our pizza to go and though I didn't have much room for dessert, I ended up ordering these fantastic chocolate salamis to take home. The salamis come in either the disc shape shown in the picture, or sausage-like shapes as their names suggest. Indeed, they don't look like very much, but bite into their biscuity interior and you'll be gasping for more.

When I got home, I rifled through my cookbooks desperate to find a recipe for the chocolate salamis (even if it's not the same, some tweaking can be done later). I finally found one in A Cook's Tour Of Italy called Salame Di Cioccolata Con Salsa Allo Zabaglione, or Apollinare's Chocolate Roll with Zabaglione Sauce. I'm hoping to try it out next week when I get some time.

Dim Dim Sum

2005-11-07T11:18:00.000+08:00

Sunday brunch is one of my favourite meals of the week. It is lazy, it is decadent and, in our household, it's best taken in our favourite dim sum haunt, The Paramount. This weekend however, we decided that it might be a good idea to do something different. So we went for dim sum somewhere else.

Like The Paramount, Tea House is owned by the Tung Lok Group and I remember that on my last visit (oh, about four years ago when it first opened), the food was decent. I remember liking something called the Heavenly Bun - a steamed pau stuffed with lotus seed paste and peanut butter.

Anyway, Tea House has since relocated to the third floor of China Square Food Centre. Once we entered, its staff practically formed a line to offer us steamed and fried goodies from their trolleys. The speed with which we were served was just about the only good thing about our meal yesterday morning. Because the food, well, sucked.

The ingredients were less than fresh, the dim sum skins were hardly refined and there was nary a har gao in sight. How can a dim sum restaurant not have har gao on its menu/trolley/whatever? I also ordered a portion of siao long baos which were really pork meatballs wrapped in a crude skin. There was no broth in the siao long bao. 'Nuff said, I think.

In the end, we skipped dessert (we never skip dessert) and vowed to stick with tradition. No prizes for guessing where we'll be headed next Sunday afternoon.

A Quick Introduction

2005-11-05T21:29:00.000+08:00

Some of my sharpest childhood memories involve food - the eating of it, the making of it, the fighting over it and the recovering from it. Indeed, for me, food is inextricably linked to my emotions. I eat (and cook) to celebrate my happiness, sadness, successes and failures. One emotion could set in motion an appetite for various things - for example, happiness is usually accompanied by a hankering for fresh oysters and foie gras, while sadness usually draws a taste for potato chips, cheese and ice cream. On days when my world feels blissfully at peace, I crave the slow-cooked comforts of mee siam, itek dim or beef short ribs braised in red wine.

I guess as a first post, an introduction is necessary. I am a writer living in Singapore, who has been described by her friends as a small girl with a big appetite. When I'm not eating, cooking or thinking about eating and cooking, I spend much of my free time doing sport - running, swimming, biking, squash, Pilates, yoga...Indeed, given the vast amounts of food I consume each day, all that activity is certainly warranted.

I don't believe in small portions. I eat heartily and I make no apologies for it. On one occasion, while ordering lunch with an old friend, he turned to me and said, "You sure eat like a man." We both laughed. Many a true word said in jest.