Spatula, Spoon and Saturday

I swear the god of blogging and cooking has been against me – all sorts of computer issues like you wouldn’t believe. Either I am just really really lazy. The facts remain: I spent two weeks in Thailand. I spent last weekend in Sydney and I’m due to spend a week in Vanuatu during Easter. I have much to blog through. Guess what? I still haven’t finished all Japan stuff. And that was our honeymoon. Let’s just soldier on, shall we?.

Anyway, the above picture is the Thai-style chicken rice (khao man gai), which is basically rice cooked in chicken fat, chicken stock, garlic and ginger (and maybe some times pandan leaves). It gets served with boiled chicken, chicken blood cubes, giblet, liver, etc. I generally just stay away from the innards because they get cooked until they are tough. Menolikey.

My crazy mother, on the other hand, has no such qualm. And she loves the sauce which is made up of pounded chilli, ginger, garlic, yellow bean sauce and various other seasonings. The dish also gets served with a little bowl of chicken broth on the side.

This is the Thai-style wonton noodles. As you might actually notice, a lot of these dishes have strong Chinese influence. So here we have egg noodles, blanched bok choy and some yummy wontons. These were good. And they were 30 baht. About a dollar. Read the rest of this entry »

I spent the past week driving from Melbourne to Alice Springs and back. We spent a lot of time on the road! We packed ourselves a whole bunch of things to take along because we knew we would have little time to do food shopping along the way.

But for a start, our very first lunch stop in Horsham in a gorgeous park by the river after a few hours of driving.

(spicy prawn bamboo shoot stir-fry with loads of chilli and garlic, I call it ‘the uber spicy’)

Mum made her specialty: prawns and bamboo shoots stir-fry. It was uber hot. It had, like, 10 great red hot chillis in it. That will now be what I call this dish: the uber spicy. It was very yummy though. She pounded some really hot red chillis together with some garlic and salt. Fried the paste in hot oil (warning: will cause tears), add tinned bamboo shoots, prawns and spring onions. It was then flavoured with fish sauce and a chicken stock cube.

(I packed some rice to have with the uber spicy)

Josh took one bite of the uber spicy and decided that while it was very nice, it was way too hot for him. So he settled for a banana sandwich instead, which was buttered rye bread with banana.

(banana sandwich)

I found some really nice strawberries so I brought them along. They were the juiciest, sweetest strawberries I had had in a long time.

These strawberries were gorgeous! The last time I had strawberries this good, I was in Japan and paid a lot for those famous Japanese strawberries.

I also had some cherries. I also found some lovely seedless grapes at an Asian grocery store in Glen Waverley by accident as well as a bunch of really nice pink lady apples and mandarins. Needless to say, this trip to the desert was hardly lacking in the fruit supply!

And then we continued on to our destination for the day, Adelaide.

This is what I make when I feel like dessert at about 11pm at night (granted I can probably walk to the market and get some dessert but whatever). Basically it’s just custard using instant custard powder (which I imagine to be made of corn flour, egg colouring, sugar and some vanilla flavouring but I could be wrong) in the microwave and toss in chopped banana. Voila. Almost instant warm dessert that’s really yummy.

Put one cup of milk (I always use pasteurized milk because UHT long life milk just does not do) in a big bowl and place it in a microwave on high for two minutes. Meanwhile, mix two tablespoon of custard powder with about 3 tablespoons of milk. Whisk that up (you don’t really need a whisk, but it is much better to have one) to mix well to form a smooth mixture.

Once the milk is hot (after 2 minutes), remove the hot milk from the microwave, pour the custard mixture into the hot milk, add two teaspoons of sugar and whisk until it’s all combine. Depends on what custard powder you’re using (some have more sugar than others) and how sweet and ripe your banana is, you may need more or less sugar. Work as quickly as possible and put the custard mixture back into the microwave for two minutes. Every half a minute, remove the mixture from the microwave and whisk again.

After two minutes, you should end up with nice thick custard. If the mixture is too watery, add a little more custard/milk mixture, if it’s too thick, add milk. This is why you have to check it every thirty seconds or so. You can do this on the stove top, which means you constantly whisk it. But I find it much easier to just use the nuke machine – less washing up that way. Add a sliced banana into the custard mixture, and nuke it for another minute or so. Let it sit and let the banana cook in its own heat or 2-3 minutes.

That’s it! It’s so simple. I can’t believe this is what they used to feed us in boarding school. It was actually a gem.

Why is porridge in Singapore made from rice and is not a breakfast dish? I totally don’t get it.

Okay, so this is a really good breakfast (and I’m a huge believer in good solid breakfast). Bring a cup of water to boil and add half a cup of oatmeals (I think they’re those instant rolled oats but I have to say I don’t know the difference between instant oats and non-instant oats, suffice to say the oat in question takes about 2 minutes to cook). Keep stirring while it boils because a cup of water is not really enough liquid for it. Once the liquid has almost all been absorbed (this should take about a minute or so), add a chopped banana, two tablespoons of molass sugar (okay, so it’s not brown sugar but the name just sounds better) quarter of a cup of cold milk and a pinch of ground cinnamon. Stir and leave to simmer for one more minute.

Umm. That’s about it. Served topped with a bit more milk or a dollop of cream and sprinkle with a bit more sugar, if you like. It’s so yummy.