Oh Martha, depression glass, BBM, some other old things

I’m sorry, I have to use the B word. I’ve been Busy. As anticipated, I’ve been working hard since my leave ended (where did all those days go??) I have not reached home earlier than 10 pm since Tues. I’m not sure how it happened but it did. I’m glad its Friday, but then again I’m on call again tomorrow. Another day and night in the hospital. Thinking about it today, had me trying to resist the strong urge to hop onto a train during lunch and go to a bookshop. I miss bookshops. I am also trying hard to forget that I am changing departments on Monday, my workload will triple then and I have 5 calls in November including 3(?!) weekends AND I have an exam to study for on the 3rd and 4th of December. But what am I complaining about? With markets crashing worldwide, I still have job which I can honestly say now is one that I love. It wasn’t always this way, I went thru a period where I just needed to be away from the sick. I then realized that it wasn’t the work I didn’t like, it was working hard. Working too hard that is. When I was chatting with one of my classmates on Facebook (ok, I have sold out and am on facebook) she said that she was really sick of ward work, I told her she wasn’t because I knew she’s a wonderful clinician (ie doctor seeing patients), she was just sick of Hard Work. That’s a huge difference. Anyway, I guess I’m just feeling a little sad my friend Razlyn is going out of the hospital to do something medically administrative. I still think she’s good with patients so perhaps she’ll come back like I did. Sometimes its upsetting when really good people leave and start working in the lab or something because the Hard Work just gets too hard.

Since I’ve not been home what more in the kitchen and I have no daylight to photograph some of the things I’ve recently purchased, Martha decided to help me out a little. I bought some glass recently, 2 small cake stands made of depression glass and 2 large pyrex baking dishes that came with silver plated covers. The pyrex I got really cheap as the small chinese man who owned the antique shop said that it wasn’t that old “only about 10 years old”. So that’s what you’ll be eating off when you come to my new place my friends, 10 year old pyrex plates and depression glass from the 1930s.

Besides old antique and second hand shops, I’ve been buying small items that go on sale. I just love a good bargain and I can’t wait for the post Christmas sales. I recently bought a teapot to go with my erm, mismatched Royal Doulton random teacups from different collections with no unifying theme. Ok, there I’ve said it! Recently my mom (don’t you just love moms, they’re the only people in the world who tell you the truth) tsk tsked me, saying my clothes were tatty. She said don’t save so much, just buy yourself some clothes for god’s sake! Erm, mama, if you’re reading this, I’m actually saving money to buy china tea cups.

The blue glasses are water goblets made from depression glass.

 

Now what the heck is depression glass, you ask? Since I knew you’ll be depressed not knowing, pun not intended, here’s from wikipedia

Depression glass is clear or colored translucent glassware that was distributed free, or at low cost, in the United States around the time of the Great Depression. The Quaker Oats Company, and other food manufacturers and distributors, put a piece of glassware in boxes of food, as an incentive to purchase. Movie theaters and businesses would hand out a piece simply for coming in the door.

Most of this glassware was made in the central and mid-west United States, where access to raw materials and power made manufacturing inexpensive in the first half of the twentieth century. More than twenty manufacturers made more than 100 patterns, and entire dinner sets were made in some patterns. Common colors are clear, or crystal; pink, pale blue, green, and amber. Less common colors include yellow, jadeite (opaque pale green), delphite (opaque pale blue), cobalt blue, red, black, and white (milk glass).

Depression glass has been highly collectible since the 1960s. Due to its popularity as a collectible, Depression glass is becoming more scarce on the open market. Scarce pieces may sell for several hundred dollars. Some manufacturers continued to make popular patterns after World War II, or introduced similar patterns, which are also collectible. Popular and expensive patterns and pieces have been reproduced, and reproductions are still being made.

I’ve just received a fantastic package from the US thru blogging by mail,more soon..

Biennale Part 2, Italian Raya and those chicken pies

The weekend and today was a whirlwind. There were those 700 pieces of chicken pie and sausage rolls that were made yesterday.

There was the Italian themed lunch I hosted as an Eid get together with the girlfriends. It was great fun, and let me thank all the people with the food they brought, sadly, no pictures because as hostess I was busy making sure everyone had a fork. If anyone is going to blog about the lunch, link it here!

Farah for the brushetta

Enah for the wonderful oreo shake

Mel for the salad

Yati for the creamy pasta with bacon and roast chicken

Liz: for the yummy apple strudel and the ice cream

Yani for the ice cream that became affogato, how ice cream and espresso taste so good together is a mystery

Rizal, Yati’s husband for gmely going along with all the girl talk and H, as usual for being my marketing partner and always appreciating my cooking. I made a seafood pasta with small white clams, squid and prawns

Photograph from another Italian dinner last May

Here’s the recipe

Seafood spagetti:

For 1 packet of spagetti (I really have to check the weight) This will feed about 10-12 people as a main couse

10 cloves of garlic, diced

About 10 anchovy fillets, diced

8 tomatos, diced

Prawn, Squid and clams, about a kilo each and 300g of clams

A bunch of chopped basil

Fry garlic till fragrant. Add anchovies and it’ll splatter like crazy. Add the tomatoes and all the seafood, lots of liquid will suddenly appear, cook till reduced slightly. Add the spagetti and basil, season with salt and pepper cautiously as the anchovies are really very salty.

Here’s from Husaini’s facebook: ….farmland and mountains for miles……. H and I spent a day with Husaini who was in transit and headed back to his new home in Christchurch. As usual, we always try to squeeze so much into the day. Of all things he wanted to have, it was fast food like Burger King since its not halal in NZ. I had so many fast food meals this week for some strange reason, so it wasn’t what I really wanted to have. Still, the company was fun and we had a pretty good time together.  

Here’s the rest of the photos from Biennale, I’m back to work so may disappear for a while.. I have to fulfill my call quota for October so that means 2 nights sleeping in hospital the rest of this week. Wish me luck..

 

I’m coming back Mr Prata man..

To the good guesser, yes, one of our favourite breakfast places is the Malaysian railway at Tanjong Pagar. Be still my coronaries.. It is definitely against doctor’s advice to eat prata for breakfast everyday. I would love to say I eat oats and fruit and other horse food in the morning but truth be told I eat toast, prata or skip breakfast all together and then try to squeeze in my 2 servings of fruit and 2 servings of vegetables the rest of the day. I will definitely miss the homemade breakfasts I’ve had these past 2 weeks at home. I found this article interesting, and for more on the art and beauty of breakfast, simply breakfast is one of my favourite sites. Go check it out.

Today I baked 700 small pastries as a small catering project H and I did together. We thought we could “bond” and make a little cash at the same time. Four hours into the project, I had to peel H off the kitchen table. We managed in the end but it really is hard work! We survived though a little worn around the edges. Tomorrrow, Italian lunch here we come! Can you imagine, more cooking?? Lucky for me though we are hosting the lunch, its gonna be potluck. (see u tomorrow gals)

 To answer some of the comments on the baklava:

-I bought the filo pastry from Cold Storage, you can also find it at Jason’s, Mustafa or Carrefour.

-I can’t remember the name of the Bakalva shop in Melbourne but I’ll try to find out..

-I think theres still some baklava in my fridge Mel

 

To all my friends who celebrate the festival of lights, happy deepavali!

Here’s also something I feel like sharing. I just love the idea of eating at the table, with friends or family, I even love eating alone  (heck I eat alone so often! Think dark lonely call room in hospital). To my dear friend Raz who’s working tomorrow, on a public holiday, for the whole 32 hours, I feel for you Raz, I really do.

Sweet Baklava

I love sweets. I inherited my sweet tooth from my Dad. He loves his dessert. From the Malay sweet porridge desserts like bubur kachang or green bean porridge to bubur pulot hitam or black glutinous rice porridge to scones for tea and baklava straight from a box from Syria. We seem to have an almost constant supply of baklava from friends who travel to the Middle East knowing how much my dad loves sweets. When my cousin was studying in Australia, aunty used to come back with boxes and boxes of baklava. Apparently the boy whos father ran a very famous baklava shop in Melbourne went to the same mosque as my cousin. They somehow had a special arrangement. The good thing about baklava is that they keep very well. The bad thing about it is that it really is quite a tedious process. Reading Sherry Yard’s recipe on macadamia baklava, I was intrigued by her method and thought I could definitely give this a go.

I tweaked the recipe as I thought there was way too much syrup for soaking. I halved the syrup recipe but used the same amount of sugar for the pastry as the recipe calls for. I prefer my baklava crispy and salty from the nuts and butter with a touch of honey. So I found this recipe a little too sticky and gooey. If I were to do it over again, I would use ghee instead of butter to get the crispiness and I would have made the syrup with less water so the sugar crystalizes more for a crisper bite. I would also definitely cut down the sugar that went in the nuts.

This got mixed reviews, some people loved it. My mother in law did. Grandma in law felt it had way too much butter. I still have plenty of baklava left, so it’ll be a while till I revisit this recipe. Its going back into the happygrub experimental kitchen waiting in line with that sugee cake I made sometime back. I was recently given a tried and tested sugee cake recipe and a fantastic marble cake and chocolate cake. I have a baking date next week with my mom so one of the cakes would probably pop up then.

See what I mean when i said the baklava was messy??

 

Baklava

Adapted from Sherry Yard’s Desserts by the Yard

300 g melted butter

3 cups of your favourite nuts: cashew/pistachio/almond or macadamias

1/2 cup sugar

2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

1 16 oz package filo pastry

 

For the syrup

1.5 cups sugar

1 cup water

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1/4 cups honey

 

Start my mixing the nuts with sugar and cinnamon in a bowl. Place melted butter in a separate bowl. Unroll the filo dough on a pieve of parchment paper with the long side toward you. Fold from left to write into a “book” so that the spine of the book is in the middle of the parchment. Brush the “cover” with butter than turn the “page” buttering each page as you go. I find a  silicon brush perfect for this, but any pastry brush would do. At the end of the 7th page, sprinkle about a 6th of the nut mixture on the page. Continue till the last page is reached. Cut in diagonals about 1.5 inches large. Shift parchement to baking sheet. Bake at 170C for 45 mins to an hour till golden brown.

Prepare the syrup by boiling all the ingredients together. Sherry says to boil till a candy thermometer registers 225F. I dont have a thermometer so I brought it to a roiling boil and continue boiling for about 10 mins till it was thick and syrupy.

Pour hot syrup over hot baklava. It would look like its swimming in the syrup. But leave it a while and its soaks up all the syrup like a sponge.

 

Stores really well in an airtight container in the fridge for at least a month.

Biennale part 1

I don’t know about you but I need a mid week breather. I feel like its been a hundred years of being holed up at home in my pjs, but its only been 2 days.

Here is just a little peek to the biennale at South Beach

More soon..

Psst… Rose has a message to tell you.

I know, I owe you lots of stuff, pictures of Biennale, the baklava that I made, the place that I eat breakfast before work. I can’t help it, I keep on getting distracted by seemingly benign things, like “here, try this, its homemade and supposed to be really good” offered by mother in law. I have passed by the container for weeks without much interest. It just seemed so ordinary and store bought and not really worth much compared to the pineapple tarts and meringue cookies that I have been downing. I didn’t realize it was truly a spectacular biscuit. It wasn’t hard and floury like many, it was really delicate, crisp and eggy. Its the simpler things in life that are sometimes really really good like Apple Happy and Apple Sunrise.

Inresponse to some comments: ovenhaven– No I didn’t make these! I had a kuih pai tee (a  savoury snack of crispy open egg shell cups stuffed with turnip and other goodies) disaster and I think this ranks as a relative of that darn pai tee shell! So no.. I didn’t. But when I get over the trauma I may. Not any time soon though!

To coffeesnob: the studying has slowed during the weekend. The number of questions I have done in last few days 50 -> 80 -> 40 -> 40, notice the last 2 40s were the weekend. Still below the target of 120 (I figured this would equate to 3-4 hours of study per day). Will let you know the progress (Like u are soo interested, haha, let me just imagine so!!)

Links to be added later, I’m too sleepy..

Life’s forgotten sweets part #2

Kuih batang buruk or the ugly stick cookie. All these sweet snacks came from an era where homes did not have tellys and definitely not an oven. Most cookies were baked in charcoal ovens or deep fried. Some even heat baked in the sun!

I spent time last night watching Mel wolf down wolfberries.

I spent time today cooking tahu goreng and mee siam with H’s grandma whom we live with, waiting for my maternal grandparents to come for a visit.

And more coming soon..

Its Saturday and its amazing what you can do with a “kuih rose” or homemade rose biscuit and a green Ikea napkin.

Biennale, chicken and sputum.

When I entered the hall, I didn’t get it.

But when I turned around, I did.

 

Sometimes life’s like that, you see little itsy bitsy pieces at the beginning but once you’ve reached the end, you turn around and just get it. I spent today grappling around with exam questions, trying to recognize some sort of pattern, what that test meant, how one diagnosis wraps up the whole clinical picture, what is the meaning of life etc. I spent half the evening waiting for my granpa to come out from his MRI and reading my book.

Today I asked him, “Atok, what is the REAL reason you don’t eat chicken?”. My grandpa does not eat chicken. And my grandma does not eat egg. I’m serious, I really am. You can ask Shafaa my cousin.

So this is the answer guys.. To the Musa clan who read my blog, the mystery is finally revealed here.

My grandpa was brought to live with his aunty when he was ten, who he calls Ummi Leha. He was eating chicken all the ten years of his young life till he started living with Ummi. Ummi did not eat chicken. She says that when she was young, she say an elderly man clear his throat and spat out a long green blob of phlegm that fell to the village floor, a hungry chicken flew for it in a flurry of feathers and gobbled up this blob of phlegm. My grandpa never touched or ate chicken since that day.

I’m not sure how convincing a story teller Ummi was, but my young grandpa was really convinced. So much so that he has not eaten chicken for 71 years from that day. H was really beside himself when he heard this from atok in the car while driving. He then said in all seriousness, but you don’t have to worry atok, now in Singapore no one spits because they’ll get FINED. To the non Singaporean, maybe this Tshirt may help:

To those who know H, you know he’s going to start a string of one liners like he was a stand up comedian in his previous life so I just HAD to change the subject, I could see the wheels in his head churning with this chicken and spit story.

Now why doesn’t grandma eat egg? Well, thats another story all together! Enjoy your weekend!

Here it is!

Baklava is a lot of work. I used Sherry Yard’s recipe and method which is an easier way to assemble this Middle Eastern dessert. It involves opening your filo pastry in a way that resembles reading a book. Its a little long to explain. I halved the quantity of the sugar syrup but it was still very sweet. More later.. I’m supposed to be studying!