Spatula, Spoon and Saturday

I found this from 2006! You can even see my old kitchen (the one with natural light as opposed to my current kitchen with very little natural lights. Pictures from that period are so much nicer)

This is the basic Thai red curry that I added a whole bunch of not-so-Thai vegetables to it. Any veggies will most likely do. I like the combination of broccoli, carrot, zucchini, green beans, tomato and tofu puffs*. Don’t forget the Thai basil. It makes everything much nicer.

You will need (for four people), one small carrot, a handful of green beans, a small zucchini (not a huge one like I got from Jim’s – I’m still so impressed about its size, seriously), one tomato, a handful of broccoli florets, five-six tofu puffs (halved). You’ll so need one tablespoon of Thai red curry paste (I use Mae Ploy due to its availability in Australia), a small can of coconut cream (I like Ayam and Aroy-D), and about a tablespoon of fish sauce (I insist on a Thai brand). Substitute with soy sauce if you’re a vegetarian.

As I said previously, it matters what curry paste and coconut cream you use. You need to taste. Sometimes you won’t need to fish sauce and some times you’ll need a bit of sugar to round it off if your coconut cream isn’t sweet (note: coconut cream is naturally sweet. I’m not talking about the sweetened coconut cream that you put in your pina colada). Read the rest of this entry »

When I was in Melaka last year (we went twice because we liked it so much), I was very determined to eat as much laksa as I could. What do you know? One could eat laksa for breakfast, lunch and dinner after all! I did.

Let me blurb on a bit about the laksa that we got in Melaka. It is either the laksa lemak which is basically a noodle dish with curry soup with various ingredients such as fish balls, tofu puff, boiled eggs, fish, cucumber and laksa leaves (which are a kind of basil – I believe they are the same as what is known as Vietnamese mint here in Australia but I could be so wrong) or the assam laksa – with tamarind and fish soup base. Laksa are quite different depending where you go – in different states of Malaysia and Singapore, they are all slightly different. In Australia, laksa is always the laksa lemak. I personally don’t really like the assam laksa at all. I find it funny and fishy.

Anyway, suffice to say I had a lot of laksa and they were all fantastic. Of all the laksa I have had, I have to say Melaka is definitely the place for it. The laksa at Nancy’s Kitchen was relatively spicy with a good blend of crunch cucumber.

Josh ordered the house fried rice, which really was spicy. It had liberally amount of fresh chillis with the usual sambal balacan and the crunchy ikan billis (the small fish you deep fry and eat whole, excellent source of calcium). He picked out most of the chilli and still found it spicy though. I rather liked it but then I wasn’t such a pussy Read the rest of this entry »

I thought I might share some pictures from Brotzeit, a German restaurant in Singapore. From recollection, there are two outlets: one in Vivo City and another at City Hall.

Just the two of us for lunch on the day. We ordered the usual favourite, the mixed platter. It included a few variaties of the German wurst (sausages) with pork, beef, lamd and chicken with some saurkraut, pickles and a bit of salad on the platter.

We also ordered the German-style potato salad:

And ‘roasted’ vegetables (although I wasn’t quite too sure why they came out looking and tasting just like a bowl of  steamed, buttered vegetables but I was hungry and really couldn’t be bothered arguing):

Read the rest of this entry »

Yes. I am guilty of butchering the real Mongolian lamb. But we were very hungry and needed some quick fix.

For the two of us, I cut one lamb leg steak (about 150 g.) into cubes. For vegetables, I chop up a small carrot, half a large zucchini, half an onion, a handful of cauliflower florets, half a red capsicum and a handful of long beans.

I toss the cubes of lamb into a smoking hot wok (I <3 my wok! I bought it for like $12 and seasoned it myself and now it’s beautiful) with the onion slices. I fry them up until the lamb is browned, which only takes a few minutes. I toss in the carrot and cauliflower (these take a bit longer to cook) until they’re softened before I toss in the rest of the vegetables.

(before sauce)

I then cheat (massively) and add a pack of Lee Kum Kee Mongolian Lamb sauce. And it’s done.

Well, that was easy, wasn’t it? Serve with perfectly steamed rice (which I don’t really steam because I now have a rice cooker! Yay!)

I’m getting quite sick of zucchini actually but I shall soldier on.

This is from last week after I made cauliflower and cheese and had leftover Bechamel sauce (which actually sat quite nicely in the fridge for a day without complaining too much). Since I am such a terrific wife, I throw together a nice bit of pasta for Josh’s lunch.

I dice up whatever vegetables I have lying around (what’s new?) and that includes zucchini (again!), red capsicum, cauliflower (how much food can one make from cauliflwer? I still have some more left), and a bit of ham. I toss them into the tasty Bechamel sauce and simmer them for about 5 minutes or until the veggies are tender.

On the side, I boil up some wholemeat pasta. Once done, toss the pasta into the sauce. I find a nice vine-ripened tomato from Jim’s garden, peel it and squash it in. I dress the tomato slightly with a bit of balsamic vinegar mixed with olive oil. And then it goes into the lunchbox with leftover cauliflwer and cheese for Josh for the next day with some shaved parmasan.

How does one make potato and cauliflower soup look sexy? I can’t. But it tastes really good!

Chop an onion and two strips of bacon finely and slowly fry that off with a little bit of butter and olive oil. If you have some fresh sage leaves, now it’s the time to throw them in. But of course I don’t. Meanwhile, chop up about a cup of cauliflower florets and cut two really huge potatoes (or five normal-sized potatoes) into small 2cm cubes. Put them on a steamer for about 15 minutes until the cauliflower starts to fall apart.

Add the steamed cauliflower and potatoes into the bacon and onion mixture. Add two dried bay leaves and two pinches of ground nutmeg. Add a cup of water and a cup of milk. Add a vegetable stock cube.

Let the soup simmer for about 20 minutes, keep stirring constantly. I usually just mash the cauliflower and potatoes and I stir it. Don’t add too much water, you want a nice creamy texture at the end. Imagine a really watery mashed potato. That’s what we’re aiming for.

We got a Sunbeam Stickmaster as a wedding present from Kenny and Kirin. I tell you, it’s the most useful thing ever! Once the soup is ready, I blend it up a bit with the Stickmaster. I do like to leave some texture in the soup so I don’t really blend the hell out of it. I think it’s up to you. You don’t even have to blend it at all.

Swirl in two tablespoons of sour cream.

Serve with nice, fresh bread and butter. Sprinkle with freshly ground black pepper.

Meanwhile, I got a new batch of freshly picked figs from Lyn. I love her.

In reference to the challenge, I settled on butchering Jamie Oliver’s courgette carbonara from his Jamie at Home book. Well, I have to make do, don’t I? I have previously talked about making carbonara but I figure it’s worth repeating.

I chop up a green, medium sized zucchini, two cloves of garlic and two rashers of bacon. I put about 2 cups of wholemeal penne* in boiling water.

Meanwhile, I slowly fry off the garlic and bacon in a little bit of olive oil and butter. I mix together 1/3 cup of cream, 3 eggs and a big handful of grated parmasan cheese with a bit of salt and pepper. As zucchini is pretty fast to cook, I add the slices into the bacon/garlic mixture after the bacon fat has been fried off quite nicely. I toss the zucchini in and cook until it’s golden.

I then drain my pasta (which by now should be cooked) and toss that into the bacon/zucchini mixture and stir around until the pasta has absorbed all the sauce and become hot. I then turn the heat off and stir in the egg/cream/cheese mixture and toss around until I get a nice carbonara consistency.

I have some fresh parsley so I chop some up and threw them in last minute. It’s not the flowering thyme Jamie has asked for, but I think it will do nicely.

Note: I have found that wholemeal pasta tastes pretty much the same as the white pasta so I have taken to buying wholemeal pasta where available. However, I find that in a dish delicately flavoured as this carbonara, it’s better to stick with white pasta. Also remember that wholemeal pasta takes longer to cook. I have been caught out undercooking wholemeal pasta once. Never doing that again!

It’s Sunday morning and it’s always hot breakfast on Sundays. We usually do pancakes but since I have so many eggs to use up I decided on french toasts instead.

I found some blueberries in the freezer. Blueberries come out around January in Victoria and we usually go and pick them at Nana’s friend’s blueberry farm (I strongly recommend marrying a country boy, seriously, the amount of free food you get!) but as we were off trotting around in Japan for our honeymoon in January, we missed this year’s blueberries.

But fear not! We picked about 10kg of blueberries last year and let’s just say a large percentage of them are still in the freezer and they are still very good.

So I start by grabbing about a cup of frozen blueberries and add three tablespoons of raw sugar (raw sugar because that’s the only sugar we have in the house) and put them in a saucepan with the lid on and on medium heat. Just let it simmer and do its thing. There is no need to add water or defrost the blueberries. They will turn into a nice syrupy sauce – a fresh jam, if you’d like to call it that. Read the rest of this entry »

We have majorly scored! We went to visit Jim and Judy in Warragul on Saturday and were invited to go out to the garden and pick whatever we wanted. This is a selected sample of what we have scored:

We got some freshly dug potaoes and beetroots. Some zucchinis, eggplants and red and green capsicums. Some lemons and apples. We didn’t get many apples because it was started to rain (there was a bird stuck in the apple cage) but all the apples we got are really nice and fresh. Now it’s a really good time for beautiful fresh apples. Jim also runs an egg farm so we were given another tray of fresh eggs. These eggs are rejected because they are oversized and they don’t fit the standard supermarket cartons. They are usually double-yolked eggs. 2-in-1 eggs! Loves it.

I also scored a really really huge zucchini (it’s just above the egg tray). Judy said this isn’t that big. She had one that was much bigger when she went away (apparently zucchinis just keep growing if you let them. I had no idea.)

The challenge: cook and eat all of these while they are nice and fresh! So lots of eggs, potatoes and zucchini as well as some other veggies. I also have a cauliflower, some carrots and some frozen meat.

Let the game begin!

Today is ANZAC Day, which presumably means everything is closed at least half day today. So I’m stuck with reinventing whatever is in the fridge and freezer. What do you know? Just like a regular Saturday back in Singapore.

I originally think about grilled fish fillet with a bit of spices here and there but I’m just not in the mood to defrost a piece of fish in the microwave today. Furtunately, I find some sausages that Josh has had in the freezer for god knows how long but presumably still edible. They’re those Safeway sausages which can be terrific depending how hungry you are. Anyway it’s 1pm and I haven’t had anything other than two figs so they will do.

So I start by cheating and cooking some long grain rice in the rice cooker. Actually I make Josh put some rice in the rice cooker but that’s just semantics, isn’t it? Bastami rice would have been nicer but I don’t have any.

I dig up some cauliflower, zucchini, tomato, carrot and red capsicum from the fridge. All still good. The very same cauliflower from the previous cauli & cheese post.  I slice up an onion and slowly fry it up in butter to make a nice caramelised onion base for the pilaf. After the onion softens a bit, I splash in a bit of white wine that I found in the fridge (I’m pretty sure this is from my hen’s night in November). Then I add in the diced carrot, zucchini, capsicum and a bit more butter. After about five minutes, I add in half a cup of vegetable stock (which is 2/3 of Massel veggie stock cube and 1/2 cup of water. Why 2/3? Cos I used the other 1/3 somewhere else) and crush in the peeled tomato and just another tablespoon of butter.

Then I add the rice which has been perfectly cooked and stir them around a bit. They will be slightly wet at this point (make sure you don’t start off with soggy rice, that won’t be too good) and then cover the pan and let the pilaf sit on low heat for another five minutes.

When all that goes on, I pan-fried some sausages. If you time things properly, they should all finish up around the same time.

Not bad for desperate food day, eh?