Recipes from and for the people I love
And thats during a weekend breakfast. Breakfast was eggs scrambled with tomato and two slices of toast. The bread is called “Singapore Local Bread”. Cute.
Its August and I have 3 weddings, 3 birthdays and 2 other events to attend in the next 3 weekends and then its Ramadan!
..clockwise from top left, baked feta and corriander stuffed tomatoes, hash browns with sliced pepperoni, wholemeal baguette, scrambled eggs on a leaf of lettuce for some semblence of a balanced meal!
The tomatoes shared a tray with the roasting pumpkin.
Sunnyside ups, none for me though due to the risk of Salmonella. H’s new favourite baked beans are BBQ flavoured Heinz. We stayed home the whole weekend. Time for some tea and pastry
Milo with honey and milk, potato patties with leftover mashed potatoes from dinner last night, scrambled eggs with tomato and Japanese bread that he walked a few kilometers to get at a bakery in the mall just because it is really good, thick and soft and nice toasted.
Putting in sliced bananasin the pan before the pancake batter makes it a nightmare to flip. Sliced bananas on top of the poured batter on the pan creates round pancakes.
Other random things I’ve learnt:
1. Jif really gets rid of the brown spots that appear like rust on your cooker hob.
2.Accidentally breaking eggs in the carton after buying groceries yourselves is preventable. Go shopping with the huisband
3. Keeping that broken egg uncovered in the fridge for a few days results in a hard crust forming over the yolk.
4. This egg can still go in unharmed into a pancake batter and is hardly noticable.
5. Freezing bananas with their skins on is a sure fire way to make them impossible to peel.
6. When they’re impossible to peel, you’ll have no way to dip them in Valrhona and bring them to a dinner party.
7. When that happens, bringing left over gelato is an alternative.
8. When storing gelato in those styrofoam boxes they come in, never throw away that plastic liner that is used to cover the top of the gelato. Throwing this layer away will cause the gelato to stick onto the box and make it impossible to open.
9. Making everything Giro detuctable saves you from paying like 10 bills: handphone, internet, TV, electricity, conservancy, home loan, car loan.. Having internet banking helps you keep track of what comes out. Balancing what goes in and what comes out is beyong the scope of random things I’ve learnt this week.
10. Making your own chilli paste with a pestle and mortar is a potential disaster when wet things are added like tomatoes, they can splash onto the kitchen walls. Washing the pestle should be done by just rinsing without touching it and sponging than rinsing again. There is still a risk of having burning hot chilli hands for the rest of the day.
I’m not sure of anyone else would find this useful, but at least it’ll be a note to self!
Let me count the number of sandwiches or variations of bread and meat I’ve eaten in the last 5 days. There was the smoked salmon baguette sandwich, the burito, the sausage in the hotdog bun, the philly cheesesteak sandwich, the breakfast burito above, the sausage wrap.. I think I’m sandwiched and bunned out. I’ve made variations of dressings with a few ingredients: yogurt, mayonaise and dijon mustard with different herbs. I’ve rotated my different cheeses. (we have a designated cheese shelf in our fridge). I’m out of permutations.
The problem is, my rice cooker is too big for two. Its a family sized cooker and I think it cooks a minimum of one and a half to two cups. I used to have a tiny tiny pot that cooked only 3/4 of a cup which was just enough for the both of us and lunch for me the next day. If I cook rice, we’ll either have lots left over or if I cut down the amount, a layer of rice crust at the bottom of the cooker.
I’m starting to dream rice, so big rice cooker, you’re being pulled out tomorrow, I’ve never been so rice hungry.
We spent our first night in the new place and it was such a wonderful feeling to wake up at a time other than 6 am and go to work like the past 3 weeks straight. We had breakfast buritos, I spoke about the tortillas we had the other night and there were some left over. I fried up some diced fresh sausages, scrambled some eggs, spread grated cheddar and diced tomato on the base and layered all the ingredients then popped it into the oven toaster.
My outdoor wicker were all from the lifeshop. The sponge bases are all water and weatherproof.
I fell in love with this antique milk bottle holder from thelifeshop. The milk bottle is from iwannagohome.
The tortilla got a little too crisp to roll up so I had it open faced.
More non balcony house photos soon..
I guess if you’ve been reading this blog, you’ll know how much I love breakfast. Most of the time I try to make some sort of cooked breakfast for the weekend as weekdays are dominated by cereals and sandwhiches assembled in a hurry.
Most of my fry ups are made up of a few components: the eggs, starch, meat and veg.
For the eggs, you can choose a variety of ways and a lot it has to do with the technique. There are so many ways besides the scrambled and the omelettes, some taking a little more time. Today’s breakfast were scrambled eggs, here’s a video for perfect scrambled eggs. I find that cooking on the lowest heat my stove can go and adding one tablespoon of heavy cream per egg gives me good results for a homogenous soft yellow scramble. I use corn oil instead of butter to cut down a little on the saturated fat. (guess every single bit of cutting down helps if you’re gonna eat bacon and eggs). I take it off the heat when its slightly undercooked as it continues to cook off the heat. Other techniques for egg include
Omelette this is Gordon Ramsay’s step by step vegetarian omelette
Poached Gordon Ramsay shows it in his kitchen
Coddled a youtube video of coddled eggs, and interesting but a little time consuming way of preparing eggs.
Boiled: soft or hard its not really difficult, just a matter of personal preference how set you want the yolk to be. Generally I put my eggs in cold water and turn it off after it boils for about 2 mins.
Sunny side up, this doesn’t really need much explaination does it? Kylie Kwong does these amazing eggs which are super tasty, my grandma made them for me when I was young but I had it with a drizzle of soy not oyster sauce. The crunch of the deep fried whites contrast with the soft yolks.
Having some vegetables add colour, what works is you love and what you have in your fridge. I like mushrooms, tomatoes, asparagus, capsicums or peppers sometimes even corn.
For the starch, it could be simple like slices of a sandwhich loaf. Swissbake has great unbaked croissants that bake and puff up deliciously in your oven. They have mean wholemeal loaves as well as dinner rolls. If you don’t have bread which happens to us pretty often, I grate some potatoes for a hash or mix some batter for pancakes.
Indian cardamom tea going thru the strainer
Mug a little gift from when we were dating, I was a poor student then, couldn’t afford much but H loved the mug so much he drank his tea from it everyday since he got it.
The frother device from Ikea, only 4 dollars for millions of cups of foamed milk.
All I can think about is our new apartment. I spent the whole day while on call dreaming about my new flat. At least while walking in between the wards. We bought a coffee table last weekend but have not made any other major purchases. I called my father’s cousin who is a contractor to come and fix up the lights after we get the key. Speaking to him is like talking to my father, he’s warm and really caring. The flat is in move in condition with all the finishes done including cupboards, cabinets and air conditioners. We are just going to do the lights, fix the fans (u know how it feels to live in a tropical country) and put in some floor to ceiling full length mirrors to give the illusion of space! The curtain guy will come soon to fix up the blinds in the bedrooms and simple full length curtains in the living room. We are lucky enough to have a few offers from family to fix up the place. My parents are going to buy my living room carpet, I love Persian rugs. Grandma will get our fridge and dining set and mom in law our bed. You can check out the other blog for updates.
I want my dining table to be the color of driftwood like the one above from simply breakfast. I was really sad to hear that the blog will end at the end of the year! On a happier note, chockylit of cupcake bakeshop is back with a new blog!
I’m off work on New Year’s Day and Eve! I’ll be haing breakfast at Jones the Grocer with Quizas tomorrow, she’s off after working the night shift at the Children’s Emergency tonight.
This photo gives me a donna hay feel with her signature cool blues and whites. Today’s tea is Bentley’s Earl White which is earl grey but with white tea leaves.
Today’s spoon is from Aussino. Its going to be my everyday set.
This is today’s unfocused shot, which happens when I get more short sighted than usual.
Today’s read is Ismail Kassim’s No Hard Feelings, A Reporter’s Memoir. He’s the retired Straits Times foreign correspondent in KL. I felt the sudden need to know more about Singapore and Malaysia.
Today’s chocolate bite are cookies I baked at midnight last Saturday for Eid, a little crumb strewn from the rolling around in the cookie jar.
Today’s yogurt is Greek natural set yogurt so its a little curdy, the way I like it. The grapes are “flame seedless grapes”, they’re super crunchy.
Today’s honey is still my trusty bottle of Indian organic honey, it forms like a soup with the yogurt. I’m not sure what exactly happens when I add the two together.
Its hard taking a brewing tea shot with just one hand. In the end the focus was on the tea rather than the bag. My favourite lens has a manual focus so that’s really impossible to do with one hand!
Recent Comments