Spatula, Spoon and Saturday

I got this idea from Jamie Oliver’s book Jamie At Home. It was a decent breakfast. Nothing beats bacon fat in the morning.

1. 2 eggs per person
2. 4 fat asparagus per person
3. 3 slices of mild pancetta per person

To soft boil eggs (I was fiddling with the asparagus and overcooked the eggs so the picture isn’t really of a soft boiled egg), cover eggs with cold water and bring to boil. Once the water is boiling, turn the heat down to gentle simmer and boil for 3 minutes.

Trim back the woody ends of the asparagus and wrap the pancetta around the asparagus. Bake in preheated oven for 20 minutes at 220′c or until the pancetta is crispy. Serve.

(Vietnamese broken rice – $8.50?)

I can’t remember how we ended up there one night. We usually popped into a restaurant on Victoria St. due to being out late in the city and just needed some food. I do believe this occasion was one of them.

I have been to Co Do once before and was reluctant to go again, not because the food or service was no good, but because I have this misguided notion that I should try every restaurant on Victoria St. at least once so I shouldn’t go back on the one that I have already been to.

(complimentary side salad)

Unfortunate (or fortunately), we went in there because it was the first restaurant we went past that had an EFTPOS sign. Good thing we did. We had some really good food on the night.

I felt like a bit of noodle soup but I didn’t feel like the usual pho (which I love) so I ordered rice vermicelli with duck and bamboo shoot soup. Now, most Vietnamese noodle joints give you a bit of beansprouts, lemon slice and some basil, if you’re lucky, but Co Do goes all out with a heap of fresh yummy-looking beansprouts with a tonne of mixed lettuce and cabbage. The salad was very nice and fresh.

(rice vermicelli with duck and bamboo shoots soup – $8.50?)

The soup was beautifully mellow. The bamboo shoots were different types to ones you’d get in your usual Chinese-style stir-fries, it was a bit softer and just different. I know (being a Thai and all) that there are at least 4-5 different types of common eating bamboo shoots but this wasn’t one of the ones I was familiar with. The duck was tender and well cooked. I have this strange notion that duck pieces in a soup should be stewed until it falls apart but this one didn’t but it wasn’t tough and it was just right. It also came with a bit of duck’s blood cube. I’m never a really big fan of blood cubes anyway so I took a tiny bite and decided that it wasn’t any special worth bothering with.

(Vietnamese broken rice with fried egg, grilled pork chop and other goodies – $8.50?)

Josh, bless his cotton socks, went and ordered the Vietnamese broken rice. So predictable. Mind you, it is a really good Vietnamese dish. Whoever invented it was a genius. Basically, using ‘broken’ rice i.e. rice grains that were broken during the husking process i.e. second-grade, cheaper rice, they managed to make it a very special dish by serving it with grilled pork chop (marinated Vietnamese-style with lemongrass), fried egg and shredded pork rind (I think flavoured with toasted and ground rice – really I don’t know how. It’s one of those things that’s good so you don’t bother questioning it). Some restaurants also serve it with Vietnamese egg/pate/meatloaf type thing (again, don’t question it). Co Do’s broken rice is an example of a typically good Vietnamese broken rice dish.

(stir-fried mixed vegetables with tofu – $11?)

I was also desperate for some veggies (I suppose if I had remembered that the side salad was huge, I might not have bothered) so I ordered stir-fried vegetables with tofu. It was yummy but nothing special.

All in all, it was a good meal but I still have to go through ALL of the restaurants on Victoria St., damnit. How much can one eat!?!

Co Do Vietnamese and Chinese Restaurant, 196 Victoria St., Richmond, VIC

I was lazy so I got Josh to make lunch. Since I took over most of the cooking (unemployment, y’know?), I almost forgot what it was like to just sit there and wait for food to appear!

This is how he does a carbonara for two*:

1. 1/2 onion, diced
2. 2 rashers of bacon, chopped
3. 1/2 red capsicum, cut into thin strips
4. 3 button mushrooms, sliced
5. 1/4 cup of white wine
6. 1 egg
7. 1/2 cup cream
8. 1 tbsp of grated parmasan
9. 1 tbsp of grated Colby cheese
10. a pinch of dried tarragon
11. 1 tsp of dried parsley
12. 2 shakes of freshly ground black pepper
13. 200 g. of spaghetti

Cook spaghetti in hot boiling water. Add a bit of olive oil to the frying pan and sautee the onion, bacon and garlic until the onion is softened. Add mushroom and capsicum for a minute or so. Add the white wine to the vegetables and let them steam in the wine for a minute or so. Add cream, tarragon and parsley and bring to boil. Turn the heat all the way down and add in the egg, whisk very quickyly so it doesn’t scramble. Add the cheeses.

Toss the spaghetti through the sauce. Serve.

* Actually that is how he does a carbonara this time. He has a tendency to put in whatever he can find in the fridge. If you’re interested, this is how I make carbonara.

Is what I call this breakfast. I always like a bit of nice cooked breakfast on the weekend.

It’s made up of:

1. 2 scrambled eggs
2. fried tomato
3. buttered spinach and pinenuts
4. mushrooms
5. toasted sourdough corn bread

Start by putting a little bit of butter in the non-stick frying pan and add mushrooms. On one side, add two tomato halves, cut side up. Keep moving the mushrooms and tomato around until the mushroom is browned. Turn the tomato halves over. Remove the mushrooms. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the eternal lunch favourite in Thailand. Of course, they make it much nicer and spicier.

Basil (grapow) in this case means the holy basil, which isn’t the same as the Thai basil (horapa) here in Australia. You can get fresh Thai basil in abundance here in Australia as they seem to be much more hardy in this climate. I have tried growing the holy basil here in Melbourne and it just didn’t do well even in Summer. So in general, if you go to a Thai restaurant and order a pad grapow, you’ll most likely end up with a pad horapa instead.

Not here to teach you Thai! This is a cooking/food porn blog and so we must get on. In fact, don’t get me wrong, this isn’t authentic Thai cooking either. Just because I’m Thai doesn’t mean I cook Thai food properly, aii?

We like our veggies – so I toss a lot of vegetables in. I use (again for two people):

1. 1/2 carrot, cut into thin strips
2. a handful of long beans
3. 5 mushrooms, thickly sliced
4. half an onion
5. 1 red chilli (deseeded and cut into strips – I deseed this one because it’s really, really hot)

Together with:

1. 1 chicken breast, sliced
2. 2 tbsp of pre-made pad grapow* sauce
3. 1 tbsp of fish sauce
4. 1 tbsp of oyster sauce (I prefer Thai oyster sauce)

Start off by browning the chicken in a bit of oil on a really nice and hot wok. If you’re using the premade pad grapow sauce, then add that. Otherwise, pound together 3 cloves of garlic and 2 hot chillis (this obviously depends how much of a pussy you are when it comes to chilli) with a little bit of salt. Add that to the chicken. Season with the fish and oyster sauces. Add the carrot, onion, beans and ‘shrooms and stir fry for a few minutes until the vegetables are cooked. If you’re using fresh basil leaves, throw a handful in and turn off the heat.

Serve it with rice and Thai-style fried egg (below).

I made three portions so Josh can take the leftover for lunch.

Fried egg, Thai-style

It’s common to serve this basil stir fry with a fried egg. Crack a fresh egg into a bowl. Heat 3 tbsp of oil (yes, you’re almost deep frying it here) in a very hot wok. Carefully pour the egg in and fry it for about 3 minutes until the bottom is crispy but the yolk is still runny.

* Two reasons why I use the premade sauce when I’m not really a big fan. Firstly I found a packet which my uncle had left behind when he stayed over while we were on our honeymoon so I figured I would use that up. Secondly, there’s no other way to get the real grapow in Australia anyway.

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 »

This is bastardization at its best. It’s basically pasta with, um, tomato sauce. And when I say tomato sauce, I mean tomato ketchup. So I suppose a brilliant Thai person read about how the Italians eat pasta with tomato sauce and decided that ketchup should be used to flavour pasta! It’s one of those favourite childhood dishes simply because kids just love it. If you grew up in Thailand, you’ve had it. It featured in every school dinner.

We want to start off with some cooked pasta (macaroni, as the name suggests is generally the popular choice). As this being a bastardized Thai pasta dish, we want to overcook the pasta. No, I’m not kidding. I am suggesting you can forget all the al dente principle and just cook the hell out of the pasta the way the Thais generally do. This, after all, is a Thai dish. We also need half an onion, sliced. Half a carrot, sliced. A handful of sliced cabbage leaves and some chopped spring onions.

Just like my omuraisu, I used a hot dog (which is a very normal thing to do by the way) but you can used sliced chicken breast. Prawns are another popular choice.

So just like any other stir-fry, it’s a quick and easy thing. We start by frying off the hot dog in a bit of butter until it’s browned. Throw in the carrots, onion and cabbage. Toss around until the veggies are cooked (it might be a good idea to nuke the carrots for a minute or so in the microwave actually). Add the cooked pasta. three tablespoon of tomato sauce and a tablespoon of light soy sauce and stir around for a minute or so. Once it’s come together nicely, push the pasta to one side of the wok and crack an egg in. Scramble the egg around until it’s set slightly and toss the pasta over it (pretty much the way you would do to a fried rice). Fry until the egg is well cooked. Top with the chopped spring onions.

It may sound horrid but it’s really not bad. One has to wonder how one comes up with this. I have seen something similar at a Vietnamese restaurant but never got around to trying it (love the pho too much!)

And yes, I realise that I make a lot of pasta dishes.

How can I not be excited about omelet!!! (Would it be annoying if I follow the word ‘omelet’ with three exclamation marks? Omelet!!! Okay it is annoying, so maybe just one exclamation mark. I’m sure this will annoy Susi nevertheless and I must not upset 33.3333% of my audience) Omelet!

Omelet is what I make when the fridge gets clogged up with vegetables in the morning. Generally on Saturdays and Sundays because on weekdays I have a habit of getting up at 8.40 and I’m supposed to start work at 9. So toasts or muesli on weekdays, it is. You may notice that for the past three recipes I have zucchini, red capsicum and eggplant in it. This one will be no different (except the eggplant – which I have a grand plan for called kareraisu) because I can only do so many batches of shopping you know.

So I chopped up a bit of all the veggies, namely 1/4 of red capsicum, 1/6 of a zucchini, 1/4 of an onion, 3 cherry tomatoes. I know this is really silly way of telling you the measurements, let’s just say aim for about a cup of chopped vegetables all up (by the way this will make a HUGE omelet for one person). I also used a strip of bacon and two eggs.

Put a tiny bit of butter in a non-stick frying pan (this is the $4 Ikea non-stick pan which everyone should get just to make a good omelet in), add the chopped onion and bacon (which has been sliced, obviously) and toss around until the bacon browns slightly. Use medium heat here because you don’t want it to be crisp. Add the rest of the vegetables (except the tomatoes) and toss around in the pan for about 3-4 minutes until all the veggies soften. Add the tomatoes and cook for about 1 more minute. Add a few twists of freshly ground black pepper. Remove it from the pan and set aside.This will be your omelet filling.

Beat two eggs (if you need to season the eggs, add some salt but I find that the bacon and cheese that we’re about to put in is salty enough). Add a tiny little b it of olive oil in the frying pan and tip the eggs in. Turn the heat to medium-low, swirl the eggs around so it spreads out evenly. Leave it to set for about 1 minute or so (depends how you like you eggs cooked, I like mine not quite set on the inside).

At this point I put the bread in the toast oven.

Tip the veggie filling onto one side of the omelet. Grate some mild cheese (in this case I used Colby which Josh brought over from Australia because you just cannot get Colby cheese here in Singapore. I suspect because it doesn’t have a long enough shelf life to bother exporting). Carefully fold over the other side of the omelet to cover the veggie and cheese filling. I always make too much filling, but it just tastes better that way. I also like a bit of fresh herbs in my omelet and fresh parsley will be ace here but, um, I don’t have any (wow surprise factor+++). If you like neat little omelet, just halve the filling. Leave it to sit while your toasts finish off.

And that’s how you make the biggest breakfast omelet. Wash it down with a glass of nice juice. I am so in love with the mangosteen juice at the moment.

Variations:

1. Onion, ham, tomato and cheese (simple, functional, boring but tasty)
2. Olives, zucchini, semi-dried tomatoes, fetta cheese, fresh mint (add at the same time as the cheese)
3. Mushrooms, bacon, onion, marjoram
4. Red capsicum, olives, zucchini, goat’s cheese, fresh oregano

I <3 omelet! I’m going to put this in the Vegetarian category because you really don’t need the bacon to make the dish wonderful. I just felt the need for a bit of pig fat in my breakfast but you can easily do without.

Carbonara is another one of these things that you make when you are desperate (is it just me or I begin to sound like this on every post?) The ingredients are pretty much cupboard staple: pasta, egg, garlic, bacon, cream, parmasan and salt & pepper. That’s it. There’s nothing fancy to it at all – all cupboard staples (or should be anyway).

I have to say though my favourite carbonara is still going to be at Pelligrini’s on Burke St. in Melbourne. I’m not too sure what it is about Pelligrini’s that makes them totally awesome. They are one of those old school Italian joints – very Italian. I love sitting at the kitchen where Nonna cooks and sporadically yells at the waiters who will then yell back and very very Italian-style vocal fights will ensue. It’s a totally awesome place. One of times I went there with a few workmates, the very charming waiter came up and asked what we’d like for a drink. Poor Andrea, first timer, had made a mistake of asking for a Coke. ‘Coke!’ he sneered, ‘you meant to white powder stuff you snort? Honey we don’t sell that here.’ You have to love those fussy Italians. Pelligrini’s does take a little initiation, there’s no menu. They come by and plonk buttered bread in front of you. And the coffee, the coffee is definitely something else. The serving is so huge that by the time you finish, you realise you can never have desserts (which really are wonderful too – the creme caramel! Oh the creme caramel.)

But back to spaghetti carbonara for one. You start off by bringing a pot of water to boil. While that happens, chop up some smoked bacon or mild pancetta. I think about two-three strips are good amount for one person. Crush two cloves of garlic. Start a non-stick frying pan on low heat and throw in the chopped bacon. The bacon will generally have enough fat on it so I don’t usually add olive oil here. Can you imagine what this dish is? Bacon? Cream? Cheese? There really is no need for more oil. Slowly fry off the bacon – which will take about 5-6 minutes. Don’t forget to plunk in the spaghetti (or whatever pasta you’re using) in the boiling water.

Meanwhile, mix together an egg, 1/4 cup of cream, a handful of freshly grated parmesan*, good pinches of salt and freshly ground pepper to make the sauce.

So by now your bacon should be nicely browned and your spaghetti just al dente. Add your garlic to the bacon. Drain your pasta but leave some cooking water, about a tablespoon. Immediately toss the pasta into the bacon and turn the heat off. Slowly, pour the egg and cream mixture over the hot pasta and toss around. This is very important. If the heat is too high, you will end up with scrambled eggs. So I guess practice makes perfect. Leave the pasta to sit for about two minutes before serving, topped with some more parmesan and freshly cracked pepper.

How easy was that. Step by step pictures can be found here.

* A note about parmesan cheese. Buy a block of it and only grate it when you want to use it. No ifs. No buts. It doesn’t matter how lazy you are. Do not buy the poor imitation that is pre-grated parmesan.