Dinner with a special guest

We had a lovely dinner at Aunty Faridah’s with a special invited guest whom we really enjoyed the company of. Thanks a lot for coming! It was great fun in great company. Apologies for the blurred photos, the shutter speed of the camera was slower as it wasn’t so bright in the garden. I think the photos would have been better with a tripod. “Roti John” (pictured above) is a Singapore/Malaysian snack of French loaf with onion, minced meat, chilli, diced tomato, parsley mixture bound with egg, plastered on one side of the loaf and fried egg mixture side down. I made this as Nada (our cousin, Hi NAD!) had bought us a load of loaves which I wanted to use on the same day as it was made.

 

Aunty Faridah made her specialty scallop and saffron cream pasta. We were too busy eating to take a proper shot though. This was really good.

Gulab jamun for dessert. Deep fried ghee balls soaked in a sugar syrup, sounds lethal? It is.  

The inside of a gulab.

I’ve been awarded by the talented ovenhaven with the “Nice Matters” Award. Nice really matters. Its so nice to be called nice, there’s nothing simpler and straight to the heart..  I’m passing this award to  

QuizasFor being the epitomy of nice. As you probably already know, she’s the co-author of my other blog and “best friend in medical school”. Nice perfectly describes her as she’s so sensitive to others feelings and would not harm a fly. At the same time, she’s really spunky and girly and full or crafty ideas! Not to mention becoming a blooming baker too! 

MelFor being the nicest nicest blogger and best friend. And for her selflessness of course! 

HanneFor being my Canadian “penpal” and giving a listening ear, or rather reading eye to my raves and rants.. Haha, there’s nothing better than someone you’ve never met and know none of the people you do, listen to you pour your heart out. Another thing, I just realized from ovenhaven that some of the comments you leave me end up in my spam. I had no idea this happened and never looked thru my spam comments. Sorry to all who have left me comments that never appeared. I’ve cleared thru it and will sieve thru it next time..    

Roti John

Serves 4-6 people

1 large loaf of french bread cut into slices, 2 cm thick

1 green chilli diced finely

1 small onion diced

1 tomato diced

1 egg

1 cup of cooked minced beef (season meat before cooking with salt and pepper)

3 tablespoons finesly chopped Chinese parsley (daun sop in Malay!)

Salt to taste 

Olive oil to fry

Method

Combine all ingredients except bread in a bowl. Scoop about one heaped tablespoon of mixture onto bread. Heat oil in pan. Shallow fry in a non stick pan over medium heat. Flip to toast the other side and serve warm. If serving later, You can fry the whole batch then warm up in oven at 200C for 5-10 mins before serving.

Hands and Feet..

Aren’t these adorable? I’m in a cookie phase right now. From Cox&Cox.

Nutella filled Vanilla Bean Sables

I have been craving for a nutella inspired dessert. Having made these vanilla bean sables the night before, inspired my Mandy’s post on vanilla shortbread, I decided to sandwich it with nutella. I adapted the recipe from this and made it with almond meal instead of ground hazelnuts as I had bought a large bag for a new batch of Madelines. I also scraped the inside of a vanilla bean and added it into the dough.The texture of these cookies are really crunchy and sandy. I sliced them really thin after leaving them in the freezer for an hour. This dough is really soft so chill it first before rolling into logs.Use a serrated knife to slice, if it cracks don’t worry, just push the pieces back together and they look as good as new. These cookies are slightly bent as I pulled them off the baking sheet before they had time to harden after being taken out of the oven. Leave them out to cool on the baking sheet for a few minutes so they’ll be beautifully flat. I used your silicon sheet Shafaa! What a thoughtul gift, thank you!!

Ground almonds, useful for cakes, pies, tart bases, cookies, the possibilities are endless.

   Vanilla beans from Bali

  Scrape the bean with a butter knife. Don’t discard the pod! Push the pod into your pot of castor sugar for vanilla sugar.

This is for you Wen, you can see how the butter turns white after you’ve creamed it with the sugar. Your cooking questions are very useful to me.  

 

Vanilla Bean Sables with Nutella Filling

Ingredients

200g plain flour

1/4 tsp sea salt

125g unsalted butter, softened

90g caster sugar

1 large free-range egg, beaten

50g finely ground almonds

1 vanilla bean, scraped

Nutella for filling

Method

Cream the butter,vanilla and sugar together using an electric mixer until smooth and creamy.Gradually work in the egg.With the mixer on its slowest setting, add the flour a spoonful at a time, then the nuts.Stop mixing as soon as the dough comes together.Pop into freezer for half hour, then shape into logs. Freeze for 1 hour. Take out and cut into pieces 5 mm thick. Place on well buttered baking sheet or silicon sheet. To bake, preheat the oven to 160 degrees celcius.Bake for about 20-30 minutes until very pale golden. Leave to cool. Use a butter knife and dip into nutella jar which has been left out at room temperature. Place a small dollop of nutella on one cookie and sandwich with another.

 

.:delicious bali:.

Bali was beautiful, everything about it, from the mountains to the beaches to the rivers to the cliffs to the people to the food to the markets.. We had a lot of fun and were in and out of the spas, sometimes twice a day. We shopped and overspent and overslept and overate. I bought a lot of fantastic food gifts that I will share with you soon.. 

We stayed at two very different locations in Bali. Both very small homely villas with a maximum of 8 rooms. We were at the Diamondstar Hill Villa in Nusa Dua which is near the beach and we spent another 2 nights in Ubud at Alam Jiwa which is inland with rice terrace hill views. We didn’t want to stay at a 5 star resort as we wanted something more personal. We were happy with these 2 resorts. The rooms are huge with 5 star facilities and both properties were wonderful in their own way. We booked the rooms through AsiaRooms for S$120 per night. Of course the service was fantastic, the people there are really warm! 

We took over 500 photos and I will upload the ones we love at my other blog soon.. H and I fought over the camera quite a bit, I think its time we may need to get a camera each. I must say H is getting better and better at photography, he has an eye for the angle and light.

Ok here goes..

Food in Bali!

Let’s start with a welcome drink. It’s a mix fruit blend of banana, papaya and oranges. Very filling.

Lunch was a at a beachside restaurant. The view was fantastic of the whole ocean with crashing waves.This was prawn battered with a salted egg yolk batter. It was really deliciously crispy and salty.

I loved the roe. These prawns were live from the pond in front of the restaurant.

Battered squid

 

Ayam bakar or grilled chicken. The grilled tomato and chilli sambal or chutney that it came with addictive

Toasted coconut muesli, with a fruit salad in yogurt with local honey. I couldn’t stop munching. The photo looks slightly misty due to the fog in the morning on our balcony overlooking the rice terraces.

 

They called this a banana pancake, its more like a really thin crepe with local bananas thinly sliced, grated coconut, a thick dose of palm sugar syrup and a good sprinkling of freshly ground cinnamon. Sounds strange? The combination really worked!

 

Cappucino at Bali Coffee. This was the best cappuccino I had ever tasted. It had a rich and creamy taste. I could have sworn I tasted a pinch of salt in this that gave it a really delicious taste. But I don’t think a barista would put in salt into coffee would they..H had cappuccino twice a day in Bali. At wonderful cafes in Ubud or at the shopping malls. For S$2 each, they were good for a caffeine fix. Thats me in the background, reading a cookbook as the cafe was conviniently located in a bookstore, Periplus.

 

Klapon in Bali, or ondeh ondeh here. Glutinous rice balls which burst with a liquid palm sugar center. Eaten rolled in grated coconut that is salted with a pinch of salt.

I will post on the crazy markets and bargains and all the food I bought back soon!

All my recipes..

I have created a recipe index, for easy access to all the recipes on the site. I’ll be gone for a short trip to Bali, and will be back next Wednesday.

Catch up soon..!

Uluwatu

Dreamland Beach

Tanah Lot

Lemon and Orange Curd Layer Pudding

This is for you Hanne, I just realized it has both lemon and orange! Hope it still works for you.. Its delightfully citrusy with the softest sponge layer on top and a delicious curd below. Beware, the batter will look strange and curdy/lumpy before you bake it but the layers separate beautifully. Bake in a clear dish to appreciate all the beautiful layers.  

Lemon and orange curd layer pudding

Adapted from Gordon Ramsay’s Just Desserts

Serves 4-6 

Ingredients

300ml fresh orange juice

Grated zest and juice of 1 lemon

60g butter plus extra to grease dish

100g caster sugar

4 large eggs separated

60g self raising flour

½ tsp baking powder

150ml milk

Icing sugar to dust 

Method

1. Put orange and lemon juices in pan and bring to a boil till reduced by half – to 150ml. Set aside to cool
2. Butter the sides of a 1L soufflé dish and preheat oven to 180C. I just used a clear pyrex bowl that I had and watched the top while it browned to tell if its done.
3. In a mixing bowl, beat butter with sugar and lemon zest till soft and creamy. Beat egg yolks one at a time. Sift flour and baking powder together over the mixture and beat in.
4. Slowly add orange juice and milk, stirring to blend. The mixture will look lumpy.
5. Whish egg whites in another bowl till softly stiff peaks. Fold the egg whites into the runny cake mixture. Fold carefully but evenly. I find that if I don’t mix it well, the pudding gets a little lumpy, but be careful not to mix too much as the more air you knock out the less it rises.
6. Stand the dish in a baking tin and pour boiling water into the baking tin to create a bain marie around the dish
7. Bake for 1-1 ¼ hours till golden brown on top and creamy underneath. Lower the oven temperature if the top is browning too quickly
8. Leave to cool for ten minutes or more and dust with icing sugar to serve.
9. Spoon out onto dishes making sure you dig deep to get some of the soft curd layer.

Homemade Vanilla Bean Ice Cream with Chocolate madelines

I have made my first successful ice cream, it had a fantastic texture, not icy like my other attempts! I realize that what was holding me back was the type of cream that I was using. Here in Singapore, cream is not sold as single cream or double cream. The type of cream available are “pure cream”, “thickened cream” or “whipping cream”. “Pure Cream” has 45 % milk fat which is as close to the 48% found in double cream.  

I discovered this while reading Gordon Ramsay’s “Just Desserts” before bed. It’s a great read with very good recipes and useful hints. There are many recipes which I have tried including the crepes, lemon curd pudding (fascinating lumpy mixture that bakes to a soufflé top and creamy lemon curd pudding at the bottom), shortbread, custards and hopefully many more.  I’ve adapted this recipe from Gordon’s Ramsay’s classic vanilla ice cream. I adjusted the ratio of cream to milk as I wanted to finish what I had. Leftover cream always spoils and get thrown away in my fridge. I bought my vanilla beans from Mustafa, its organic from India and 2 for $2.50. I had this scooped on to chocolate madelines, recipe from here. The madelines are very rich and buttery, they don’t rise very much though because of the richness of the batter. I know I have a thing with moulds!! I love making individual portioned cakes and desserts.  

Classic vanilla ice cream 

400ml pure cream

100ml milk

5 egg yolks

50g sugar

1 vanilla pod 

Whisk egg yolks with sugar in a bowl till thick and pale. Split vanilla pod with scissors and scrape seeds with knife. Put pod and seeds, milk and cream into a saucepan. Put on low heat for about 5 minutes till steam rises from mixture and small bubbles appear on the edges of the saucepan. Use a balloon whisk to whisk mixture. Add half the cream mixture to the egg yolks in bowl and whisk. Pour the yolk and milk mixture back into the saucepan and cook on low heat, continuously whisking till the mixture is thick, about 5-10 mins. DO NOT BOIL.

Pour into a jug and keep covered. Leave to chill for 4-5 hours or preferable overnight.  Switch on your ice cream machine and start the motor. Pour the mixture steadily into the spout. Churn for 25-10 mins till the ice cream is a soft serve scoopable texture. When you lift the paddle out of the machine, there should be clumps of ice cream on it. Scrape into a plastic container and place into freezer to set.

New Year in Chinatown

We went to Chinatown to soak up the atmosphere pre new year. We went with our photography guru who’s only available after eleven. So we ended up roaming the streets till past 2 am on a week night. Not good for work the next day, but we survived. It was fun and bustling, good crowd and nice street food. We had kebabs and coconut water. Somehow the guys still managed to gulp down a bowl of wanton noodles after!

Peanuts by the kilo

Queues everywhere

In case u had a craving for bak kwa on pizza..

Looks like chicken is more popular. We preferred the beef though.

Turkish Ice cream man, gamely posing for a photo, I’m not sure why there were Turkish kebabs and ice cream here, but there was!

Happy Lunar New Year!

My version of Peach Yammi Yogurt

 

I have a lot of kitchen equipment which I use for a period of time then gather dust for a longer period of time. I have a waffle iron, a breadmaker, a sandwich maker, a grill, an ice blender, a slow cooker, the list goes on. They come out of the cupboard about once or twice a year at most. I was afraid my ice cream maker would join their ranks. I thought carefully about my next recipe and with all the helpful comments that people left on my ice cream misadventures post. I did not want to try another custard based ice cream because I didn’t want to scramble my eggs again. I wanted something low cost in case I had to throw it away, so I made this peach ice cream by David Lebovitz with tinned peaches. I did a few things different this time

1. I let the ice cream mixture rest overnight to thicken and chill thoroughly.
2. I churned my ice cream in two batches so it churns faster, resulting in smaller ice crystals and a smoother texture
3. The first batch was a test batch and a smaller amount, it churned within 15 mins.
4.  The second batch was a larger amount and took about 25 mins. I would say that the texture of the first batch was better
5. I used Bulla Pure Cream which has 45% milk fat, as you probably can guess, higher fat content in the ice cream mixture gives it its rich creamy texture. Premium ice cream has higher milk fat in cream content, think Haagen Daaz vs. Magnolia

 I use a Kenwood ice cream machine. A lot of recipes say that you churn your ice cream according to manufacture’s instruction. Actually it’s a lot of trial and error based on the recipe and how well you know your machine. A lot of people believe the faster you churn the ice cream the better. The key to doing this is to make the mixture really really cold to begin with. I may consider churning the ice cream in an air conditioned room in future as I think its too hot in Singapore. The machine literally sweats a lot on the kitchen counter. Stop churning when the machine mixture resembles a scoopable soft serve texture. 

In terms of the taste, this really tasted like a frozen yogurt! It must be the lemon in it and the sour cream. In fact it tasted a lot like peach flavoured Yammi yogurt according to my brother, one of the volunteer tasters. In terms of texture, it was the smoothest ice cream I made but still has a slightly icy sorbet texture. This is probably due to the high water content in the recipe. I think a custard based ice cream with lots of cream would have a better texture. Overall I was satisfied with this attempt as it taught me a lot about the timing of churning. I am a little bit more confident to test out more dangerous recipes now. I still have a tub of ice cream in my fridge, anyone interested??

Peach Ice Cream

Inspired from The Perfect Scoop by David Lebovitz 

Ingredients 

500 g drained tinned peaches

125 ml peach juice from the tinned peaches
75 g sugar
120 g sour cream
250 ml pure cream
1/4 tsp vanilla extract
Juice of 1 lemon¼ teaspoon salt 

method  

Microwave peach juice with sugar and stir to melt or melt in a saucepan over the stove. Blend all ingredients in a blender till smooth. Chill overnight. Churn with ice cream machine according to manufacturer’s instructions or advice above. I chilled mine in individual portions in small containers.