Friday, December 25, 2009

Scones for Christmas Breakfast

Today we had freshly baked scones for breakfast, served with cream and jam. I got this recipe from ABC (Melissa's best ever scones). The recipe was very simple and easy to follow. 

The recipe suggests using half and half (half milk and half cream) will make a denser scone with richer flavour. 

I changed parts of the recipe like the oven temperature (mine is a fan forced oven) and the thickness of the scone dough rounds - so here are the exact bits and pieces I used:

Ingredients
  - 2 Cups Self Raising Flour
  - Pinch of Caster Sugar
  - 30g butter (cut to small cubes, straight from the fridge)
  - 180mL of Half and Half (half milk and half cream)

Method
  1. Sift flour
  2. Rub butter into flour until it resembles fine breadcrumbs
  3. Add a pinch of caster sugar
  4. Add milk or half and half until the dough is soft and not sticky
  5. Turn dough onto a floured surface and knead/pat until its smooth
  6. Use a rolling pin (start from the centre and roll outwards) 
  7. Roll dough until it us about 1 inch thick and cut into 5cm rounds
  8. Place into oven tray (lined with baking paper)
  9. Glaze top of scones with milk and bake at 200°C for 12 to 15 minutes.

I baked it in the over for just over 15 minutes. Some came out just on the mark and some needed an extra minute or two. The outside was crunchy and the inside was soft and flaky. The texture of the scone was wonderful (quote from Mr. K). I reckon it was pretty good myself, good enough to be cafe worthy. Will definitely use this recipe again. Only I might warm up the oven tray (have it pre-heated) and try it with milk only....


Sunday, December 20, 2009

Christmas Cookie Spirit

Just a short post this time for some cookie time.

Our nice friend has made us some cookies to celebrate this Christmas! The cookies were just so nicely tied up that I couldn't help but turn paparazzi on them. These homemade shortbread m&m's cookies were just so perfect for camera :)





While I was on food paparazzi mode, I dug out another of my good friends givings. Ah, the goodness of cookies. These I think are called 'gem biscuits', some of us with a Hong Kong background call them "to chi beng" meaning belly button biscuit. Don't ask me how this name came about. These biscuits are have icing sugar on top of a plain biscuit on the bottom (tastes just like a marie/milk arrowroot) but it was one of my all time favourites in the 80's. They're quite hard to come by these days and brings back many childhood biscuit memories.



Thank you and Wishing all my friends a Merry Christmas and a great new year. May we all have happy cookie times !

Saturday, December 5, 2009

Breakfast at Cafe 58

Today we ventured out for some breakfast endeavours. Last time we came to Cafe 58, the Canadian pancakes were to die for. The pancakes were high and puffy, extremely fluffly yet dense enough to give you something to bite on.

We decided to try again this time, I ordered the Canadian pancakes and Mr. K had eggs benedict. I was suggesting to order his drink (a flat white) for him as well so that it'd match the eggs benedict in the photos, but I was forcibly declined :P In the end, he had his short mac, traditional and I opted for a flat white - double shots. (ah.. the caffeine).


The eggs benedict was quite good value, the bread was a good sized and it came with two large poached eggs and plenty of ham. The hollandaise sauce was creamy, yet not too rich nor salty. I find some places has it with a bit too much lemon juice in it making it a bit sour, but this one wasn't too over powering and felt just right. It was still really filling though.

As for my canadian pancakes, I was a little bit disappointed as it wasn't as tall and fluffy as last time. The taste was still there, but it was lacking a bit in the pancake arena. Coffee was great, all in all, a great neighbourhood breakfast place. They have very nice cakes on display though, got to try one of them next time :)

Cafe 58
Address: 58 Carrington St Palmyra WA 6157

Saturday, November 28, 2009

Singapore

It's been a while since my last post. I guess with Christmas coming it will give me more excuses to make more food and make more posts.

I didn't have to cook in the last week as my time was spent sniffing around in Singapore. Was lucky enough to get taken around to eat the signature dishes, I guess you can't really go without having Singaporean Chilli Crab in Singapore.

We went to East Coast (Jumbo Seafood Resturant) for chilli crab. There was so much gravy, much more generous than what we're used to here in Perth.  I needed more than one stomach to eat the mantou (the fried chinese buns) to soak the gravy. I was told Jumbo is one of the better places to eat, but the location is pretty much hyped up by tourist advertising, so next time I think I'll have to try a local stall and see how different it tastes.

Apart from the traditional hawker stalls and all, I was looking for some Sinaporean Bak Ku Teh. Its a soup made with garlic and pork ribs. The Malaysian version contains more herbs but the Singaporean version consists mainly of stock, garlic and pepper only.  

I found Song Fa Bak Ku Teh near Clarke Quay MRT. There were quite a few people sitting in and it looked quite authentic. The Bak Ku Teh was very nice. The taste is not as strong as the Malaysian style, its more clear and doesn't mask the taste of the pork. I used to like the Malaysian style a lot, it is very hearty and warming with all the herbs. After trying this one, I found it more simple and easy to drink/eat, it also brought out the flavour of the meat much better. I think I like this one more now.

Address: 11 New Bridge Road 
Take Clark Quay MRT Exit to Central Mall)


After a small Bak Ku Teh, I walked down New Bridge Road into Chinatown for some Hock Lam Beef Kuey Teow. It's a Teochew style noodle, the soup was very rich and beefy. I asked for the version with soup and the lot (beef tripe, tendon shin, beef shin, sliced lean beef and tendon). Apparently its $1 more with tendon.

The noodle was very nice. The 'tendon shin' was bits of beef shin with tendon in it. The shin part was very well cooked and the texture of tendon melted in my mouth. The combination of both was just so nice that it sort of dissolved altogether. The rest of the meat were very nice two, but I think the tendon shin was my favourite.

Address: 22 China Street (Far East Square)
Website: Hock Lam Beef

After all this, I think my best Singaporean local food discovery will have to the street side ice-cream stalls. You can find them at most tourist attraction spots, for me it was Orchid Road and Esplanade Park across the river from the Merlion.

The ice-cream is wrapped in a sweet white bread with green and pink swirls, you can also get ones where the bread is just green. The texture of the bread is similar to the Asian style white bread which is sweeter and lighter in texture compared to the Western style white bread. I guess you can call it the Japanese style milk loaf. It is actually a very common bread loaf found locally. 

The vendor has blocks of ice-cream sitting inside his refrigerated trolley. When you order, he'll take on block out (about the size of a brick), cut about an inch of ice-cream and wrap it in a slice of bread. You can choose to have the wafer instead if you like, but I found the bread nicest. The sandwich ice-cream works so well in the Singaporean heat, a perfect snack - especially when you bite into the ice cold ice-cream and it melts a little into the bread.


Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Strawberries and Cream Cake

It was Early November in Perth and Strawberry season. I wanted to make something light and found the perfect recipe here: Jessie's Strawberries and Cream Cake @ The Hungry Mouse. As the recipe is on Jessie's site, I won't post it up here. However, one change that I did was use pouring cream instead of heavy cream as that was the only thing I had in the fridge and I wanted to use it.

The cake came out very nice. The colour and texture were really good. I think the best time to eat this cake has to be straight out of the oven. It was very soft and light, not too fluffly. The strawberries were warm and melted into the cake with everything else and you feel like you could just eat the whiole thing in one go.

I had some leftovers on the next day. This I had to warm up in the microwave since I had to keep it in the fridge to protect it from Australian summer heat. It tasted more like a muffin, but I think that maybe because I had used the "light" cream (what we call whipping cream here) instead of heavy cream. It might taste more cakey with the heavier cream ...

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

What to do with left over Peanuts? (Chinese Peanut Cookies)


Came across an easy recipe for some Chinese Peanut Cookies the other day at A Table for Two.

I would skip the recipe this time as you can find it at the link above, but I couldn't believe that it was so simple. I had left over peanuts in the house and all I needed to do was grind them up, add a bit of sugar, flour, oil and a pinch of salt :)

The only difference was that I had a fan forced oven and the cookies kept turning out dark brown at the beginning. I decreased the temperature to 150°C and baked for 11 minutes instead of the recipe for 200°C at 17 minutes.

The best bit was that it gave me a chance to practice my photo taking, still have a long way to go, but here are some of them. I think I need to work on my styling a bit more - heehee, time for more practice :P

Before the Oven:

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After the Oven:

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Friday, January 30, 2009

Steamed Hairy Gourd (Hairy Melon) with Dried Scallop Sauce

This is a very simple and healthy dish passed on from my mum. It's something I've had since little and one of the easiest mum recipe dishes :)

Hairy Gourd has various names (see Victoria Agriculture site) and is widely used in Chinese cooking for soups and dishes (mainly steamed and stir fried). It's always a more 'saucy' dish, it is plain and simple, but has a subtle sweetness to it which makes it a perfect option when you're after something light..

To the recipe...

Ingredients
  • Hairy Gourd
  • Chinese Dried Scallop (soaked overnight)
  • 2 tsp cornstarch mixed in 1/4 cup of water
Method
  1. Soak the dried scallop overnight so they soften.
  2. Slice melon into medium chunks, it depends how you like it. If you're running low on time, slice it thinly so its quicker to steam.
  3. Steam the melon til its soft, you can check by poking a chopstick through it.
  4. Heat up the wok, add the scallop and also the water it was soaking it.
  5. Add some sugar to taste
  6. Add the cornstarch water to thicken the sauce
  7. Pour onto the melon and serve


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    Monday, January 26, 2009

    Zucchini and Bacon Quiche

    Happy Chinese New Year !

    To celebrate our Chinese New Year this year we invited a few of our good friends over for a lunch as mostly everybody is busy due to family dinner plans. It was another chance for me to cook up something :)

    The menu of the day became what I could find in the shops on Saturday which turned out to be chicken salad, some pastry wraps from Lenards and garlic bread :P That together with our fruits in the kitchen didn't seem to be quite enough for about 10 people with 4 guys ("why do guys eat more?") I remembered having a really nice zucchini slice at my other friends place earlier this year and decided to make a zucchini quiche as I still had some shortcrust pastry and whipping cream together with some zucchini in the house.

    I've made a very nice quiche lorraine from a French recipe book called "The food of France) before but hadn't made a second one since. I wanted to add zucchini to the quiche but didn't know what other ingredients I should add to make it tasty. In my attempt to check out what's been tried and tested on the net, I came across a nice zucchini quiche recipe from Epicurious and also a zucchini slice recipe from taste.com.au. I'd probably try this one by itself next time, it looks very easy :)

    With my homework done I set out to incorporate some of these ideas to the quiche lorraine recipe that I had tried.


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    Ingredients
    • 1 Tart Pastry (I used pampas shortcrust pastry)
    • 25g butter
    • 300g diced bacon
    • 250ml double cream (I substituted with 1 cup of milk and 1 cup of whipping cream)
    • 4 Eggs
    • 1/2 zucchini (was what I had left :P)
    • 1/2 onion
    • 1/4 teaspoon salt for the vegies
    • 1/4 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon of pepper for the egg mixture
    • Grated nutmeg to taste (I only had ground nutmeg and used about 1/2 teaspoon)
    Prepare
    • Prepare zucchini - scoop out the seeds to limit the moisture coming out. Cut it up in thin slices about 8x2cm wide.
    • Prepare the onion and bacon- finely diced up
    Method
    1. Cook bacon first. Melt butter in a frying pan and cook til golden, leave the oil in the pan. Drain bacon on paper towels.
    2. Cook the onion and zucchini with 1/4 teaspoon of salt til tender and browning. Take out and put into a colander to get rid of excess liquid
    3. Preheat oven to 200 degrees celcius. Line a 25cm tart tin with pastry.
    4. Place a piece of baking paper in the pastry and pour in some baking beads (dried beans or rice will do).
    5. Lightly prick base of pastry with a fork in a few spots.
    6. Bind bake pastry for 10 minutes.
    7. While its baking, mix cream, eggs and milk together with salt, pepper and nutmeg.
    8. Remove the paper and the beads and bake again for 3-5 minutes until pastry is just cooked but still very pale. (directly from the cookbook)
    9. Take out the pastry.
    10. Scatter the 1/2 of the bacon, zucchini and onion in the pastry.
    11. Add the remaining in the egg mixutre and pour into the pastry.
    12. Bake for 30 minutes or until the filling is set.
    13. Leave in the tin for 5 minutes before serving.

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      The quiche was well received, though the pastry could have been done better and was quite hard to get off the pan. Luckily we had some skilled scapers who managed to cut up the quiche and serve each slice in one piece. I guess that's more motivation to try making some myself :)


      Friday, January 23, 2009

      Tofu from Japan

      This post is slightly diverted from our blue kitchen in Perth. Still Life With is one of the blogs I follow quite often and I just love the photography there. One of my secret little aspirations is to be a food photographer, though I have a lot to work on in terms of composition, lighting and all sorts of things. For those that have similar aspirations, I find the monthly challenges on Still Life With are great to practice some food photography :)

      This month's challenge is Complete Protein and is my first time posting on the flickr group.

      I looked up protein on good 'ol Wikipedia (ah, where will we be without Wikipedia) and found that foods containing protein may not necessarily include all the essential amino acids and dietary needs of a human. 'Complete Protein' contains a balanced set of the essential amino acids, these include meat, poultry, eggs, fish, milk, cheese and soy beans. However views of soy beans being a complete protein are contested. Nonetheless, I love soy beans.

      Coming from an Asian background, we grew up with them. We have soy in many of our dishes, from the normal tofu to tofu-fa (which is like a sweetened tofu dessert that you can get at dim sum places), soy milk and many more.


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      I chose to post this photo as my first on the flickr group. I took it during our Japan Honeymoon in November last year.

      Apparently Kyoto is famous for tofu and there have many restaurants that specialise in tofu cuisine. I think the most famous is yudofu (湯豆腐) which is tofu cooked in soup/broth and yuba which is sort of like tofu skin.

      It was one of the best tofu I've ever had. The texture was tender, not too soft and brittle. It was really smooth and the flavour was subtlety nice. It was a cold dish which turned out perfect as we were exhausted and sweaty after walking around half of Kyoto. A very simple dish, basically just tofu and I think they

      Hope you like the photo :)

      Monday, January 19, 2009

      Stir Fry Capsicum and Honey Pepper Beef

      Chinese is our staple dinner almost every night. I had tired to learn my favourite mum recipes when I first moved out by myself a few years ago. Since then, I've been lucky enough to cook up a few of my own :) Nothing too extravagant, just nice and homely :)

      Tonight's dinner was a combination of some left overs, chicken soup, stir fried bean sprouts and capsicum beef. Its usually what I can cook up from a few specials we find in the markets. The winner of the night turned out to be the capsicum beef stir fry with beef in honey pepper sauce.

      Ingredients
      • About 250g of beef
      • 1 yellow capsicum
      • 1 green capsicum
      • 1/2 onion
      • 2 tablespoons of Honey
      • Cracked black pepper
      • Salt
      Marinade
      • 2 tablespoons soy sauce (light)
      • 1/2 teaspoon of sugar
      • 2 teaspoons of cracked black pepper
      • 2 teaspoons of cornstarch
      Method
      1. Slice the capsicum into thin slices (1cm) and the onion into slightly thicker slices (1.5-2 cm).
      2. Slice beef into thin slices about the same width as the capsicum
      3. Marinate the beef for about 20-30 minutes.
      4. Heat Wok, add 1 tablespoon of oil.
      5. Cook onions first til slightly soft then add capsicums. Add 1/2 teaspoon of salt.
      6. Cook for about 3 minutes til the vegies are half done and take them out.
      7. Clean the wok and heat it up again.
      8. Add 1 tablespoon of oil, seal the beef. Keep tossing it to stop it from burning on the wok.
      9. Once the beef are sealed (just on one side is enough), add the vegies and toss together.
      10. If you find its too dry, add about 2 tablespoon of water and put the cover on.
      11. Once beef is cooked, add honey and cracked black pepper to taste.
      12. Dish up and serve :)

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      I had to slice up a nice piece of scotch fillet steak as I didn't have any beef fillet handy at home. It turned out just as nice, if not better :) The whole cooking process only takes a few minutes. I followed my mum's stir fry principle which is:

      "cook the vegies; add some salt -> take it out ->
      cook the meat -> add back the vegies -> serve it up"


      The only problem was that by the time I had finished cooking, we were pretty famished and there was not really much time to take out the DSLR. Though our little canon point and shoot does an "ok" job, it feels like there is something lacking in the photo. I wonder how I can make a chinese dish look good on camera, especially if it's stir fry so all the bits and pieces are tossed together...

      Sunday, January 18, 2009

      Apple Pie Trial #1

      I bought a bag of nice green granny smith apples last weekend and wanted to make my first attempt an an apple pie. Though after flipping through some of my favourite blog/recipe sites and my cookbooks, I just couldn't decide which type to make o_0 ... It occurred to me that I couldn't make one big apple pie since there were only two of us and it'll be so hard to eat the remaining parts once it's all cut up.

      So I decided on mini apple pies would be perfect since we could easily reheat or perhaps just take to work if we didn't finish. I wasn't sure of the exact texture that I wanted but it's a good start to try making the filling :)

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      Ingredients
      • 3 Small Granny Smith Apples
      • 1/2 teaspoon of Cinnamon Powder
      • 1 tablespoon brown sugar
      • 2 sheets of pampas shortcrust pastry

      Method
      1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees celcius.
      2. Chop up apples into small cubes (I placed them into a bowl of water with a tablespoon of lemon juice to stop them from turning yellow)
      3. Heat up skillet and cook apples
      4. Add the cinnamon and the sugar
      5. Cook apples til it dries up (like a sticky mixture)
      6. Cut pastry into circles to fit your muffin tin

      The pastry was a bit too crunchy and seemed to suit a savory tart more than an appie pie; not the mention the inconsistent sizes :P I could just hear my better half giggle behind me, though its ok for the two of us, but I think I'll make a better effort next time to make sure they're all the same :)

      I think the apples could do with a bit more cinnamon, so I think next time I should up the amount to at least 1 teaspoon.


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      I saw this post from Coffee and Vanilla. If you have a look at the link the pie pastry look so much nicer and crumblier. I think this was the sort of texture I wanted to achieve and I think I'll make that my trial #2 :)

      Friday, January 9, 2009

      Mint Peas


      Today we are going to have pasta and being the Chinese brought-up me, I have to have some vegies on the side otherwise dinner just doesn't seem like dinner. There was nothing much apart from a packet of peas left in the fridge as we did a good job at cleaning up the left overs from Christmas and New Years.

      I started thinking what would go well with peas and that we have around the house. I wanted something light as we have been having a heatwave of 37 degrees celcius here in Perth. My mind wandered to our mint plant which had been under utilised since last year and the leaves had just been looking at me for the past few days :) With some web surfing, I made some modifications to this recipe on the
      eHow website:


      Ingredients
      • 1 Tbsp of Finely Chopped Mint Leaves
      • 1-1.5 lbs of Fresh Sugar Snap Peas (I had normal snow peas only)
      • 2 Tbsp of unsalted butter

      Method
      1. Wash and snap of ends of the peas. I also peel of the fibre on the sides.
      2. Boil peas in boiling water (add a bit of salt to it) until its cooked but still crisp
      3. Cool peas in a colander with running water, you can use ice
      4. Melt the butter in skillet over medium-low heat, add the peas and half the mint.
      5. Add some salt and ground black pepper to taste


        I only used half the mint from the recipe as I didnt want it to be over powering. The fresh mint from the garden was very fragant, I noticed the flavour was stronger if I shredded them right before adding them to the peas :)



        We served the peas as a side with some light pesto pasta and chicken from Lenards ~ yummm ~