Baked Miso Fish revisited

Since the first time I made this Baked Miso Fish, I have actually made it a few more times.
Every now and then, I would want to make this dish. Simply because it is so tasty and easy (note the bold, italic and underline).

But I never seem to get a good picture of it. One that does more justice to it.

Yesterday, we had this dish again and I tried (again) to take some better pictures, before we quickly sat down and gobbled it before it gets cool.

Lotus Root Soup 莲藕汤

I'm a soup person - creamy ones, clear ones, chinese ones, western ones, I like most of them. I don't drink a lot of water, but I like soup and I grew up mainly in an environment where Cantonese soup is part of the daily diet. If you do not already know, cantonese soups are the most delicious (and probably most nutritious) and are usually cooked over a slow fire for a couple of hours so that the full flavour of the ingredients get into the soup. I also like it that by the end of a few hours, all the ingredients would have usually be quite soft and easy to eat (you see, not only am I lazy, my digestive system is also lazy). Some people will only drink the soup and leave the ingredients. I drink all the soup AND eat all the ingredients.

For a long time, I've been wanting to share with you how I cook soup. But I usually throw in the ingredients "by feel", so this time, I have remembered to take measurements so that it's easier for documentation. Cooking soups this way, for me, totally eliminates the need to add salt or other seasoning. Not to mention MSG, which you can be sure is added, if you eat out.

There is no hard and fast rule about ingredients you add to the soup. There are the basics like pork ribs or chicken, but the addition of each optional ingredient adds their own flavour to the end product. So for me, dried cuttlefish, dried scallops, honey dates and red dates are just as important as the pork ribs.

I use this mainly as a base for other soups too, e.g. old cucumber soup, watercress soup, by just playing around with the omission/addition of the optional items (see notes on variation for what I do with other soups).

Do check out the recipe here. There are some notes at the end which can be rather long-winded, but I just want to explain every step of how I do things.

Ong Lai Tart (aka Pineapple Tarts) - Huat Ah 2011!

So, Chinese New Year is just over - the last day was yesterday. Wait a minute, why am I always late? I post about christmas after christmas, I post about New Year after New Year and now.....it's just beginning to become so like me to be late for my posts.

Anyway, I had been making making pineapple tarts for friends and relatives. Pineapple tarts are very important, because they signify prosperity. Everyone wishes for great abundance and prosperity in the year to come. For me, other than my waistline (and my hips too haha), I wish I will prosper in all other aspects.

This is how my tarts look like this year and probably will still look like for next year. If you read my post 2 years back on those tarts, you'll see that these tarts look kinda "naked" without the criss-cross strips on top. But what the heck, I'm making them in a much larger quantity this year, so those time-consuming strips have to go!

 

Anyway, just in case you want to relive these tarts at any time of the year, you can always find the recipe here. But remember, eat  only 1 or 2 tarts at one go. According to nutritionists, this is one of the CNY snacks with the highest calories. Be warned! :)

Perfect (and easy) Mashed Potatoes

New Year's Eve went away so quickly. All that hype about celebrations happening everywhere were just gone in a flash. 

I spent New Year's Eve watching a movie - Gulliver's Travels starring Jack Black, which was quite a letdown, and then back home to watch the countdown on TV. While the TV was screaming the last few seconds of 2010 away, I stood at my window. At the strike of the clock, the fireworks started, at several locations on our island. Only thing was that the fireworks I saw from my window were the occasional high ones from our neighbouring country across the Causeway. There were some to the right and to the left of the Causeway too, but I'm not too sure where they were and they mostly just lit up the sky, with the occasional few high enough for me to see.

A few hours of sleep later, that was it. We are in 2011. Back to reality, no difference from 2010. I have stopped making New Year resolutions a long time ago, because not only do I not keep to them, by February, I would have forgotten what I have resolved to do.

To start of the new year, I made something easy and fail-proof. Actually I made them on the last few hours of last year, but let's just start the year with a blog entry that is comforting and will never disappoint. 

That's it. Mashed potatoes. Easy enough? You bet.

This is from a new recipe book I bought from a book warehouse sale. It's called Grandma's Best Recipes - Traditional comfort food just like Grandma used to make. My grandma never cooked any dish from the book, she used to cook Hokkien dishes, but still, I'm glad I bought it. 

In it are many recipes which looks uncomplicated and accompanied by pictures that looked very appetizing. It is kind of a surprise, because past visits to book warehouse sales have quite convinced me it is impossible to find good cookbooks at such events. But copies of this particular book were lying around everywhere at the sale, and people were walking past without taking a second look.

Please pardon the picture. I made this at night and could not wait till the next morning to take better pictures. Besides, these days, we keep having gloomy skies which make it real hard to get natural lighting.

Try out the recipe here! Enjoy!

Choux a la Creme

My friend came back from Japan more than a week ago and came over to my place for a baking session. 

It is funny. We were really close friends back in Secondary school but we went to different schools after that and weren't exactly in touch. I can't exactly remember how we got in touch again after leaving school. Thinking back, that was 18 years ago when we first knew each other! No wonder I need to upgrade my face moisturiser to "Repairwear" range!

Somehow we got in touch again in recent years ( I think it's thanks to Facebook!) and somehow baking came into the picture. She is currently enrolled in a culinary school in Japan *envy envy* and seems to be enjoying her classes.

So she came, armed with her recipe from school and we made cream puffs (fancier name: choux a la creme just as they had taught in her school). I had an earlier attempt where I made cream puffs using Pierre Hermes recipe. I did not post the recipe but you can easily search from any Daring Bakers' blog in google.

I do not have my friend's recipe. Even if I do, it is from her school, I do not think it's nice of me to post it. To me, I am not quite able to tell the difference between her school's recipe and Pierre Hermes', yeah my taste buds are that lousy. They both taste good! Light and puffy, just like cream puffs should be.

Other than the puff, what goes inside is just as, if not, even more important. There are places that sell cream puffs with whipped cream and I think that is a lazy shortcut method. I like cream puffs that are only filled with pastry cream. I can accept pastry cream added with whipped cream to lighten it a little, but just not whipped cream alone.

Since I wanted to save my vanilla pods for my little project which is coming up, we used vanilla bean paste for the pastry cream instead. That is a good vanilla bean paste too with all the vanilla seeds in it, but of course, the pod would have been a little more fragrant.

2 weeks are going by in a flash and she will be back in Japan soon. Not sure when we will have the opportunity to bake together again, but the refrigerated cream puffs sure smelt and tasted so good!

I Scream, You Scream.....Old Fashioned Vanilla Ice-Cream!!!...with Oreos

Did I mention that I had graduated? I have attained my certificate for Wilton Cake Decoration Course 1! I'm really happy about it! This week I will be starting Course 2, so at least I can maintain the momentum.

Today, I made my first attempt at making ice-cream! I had extra egg yolks from making meringue buttercream and I had been wanting to try this ice-cream recipe for some time, so everything just fell nicely timed.

For a better vanilla flavour, I also used my first real vanilla pod. Well, I had always been using vanilla paste or extract. I bought this pod because I wanted to try my hand at making my own vanilla extract, but I never got down to it. This has now been put to good use.

I do not have an ice-cream maker, so I have to do it the old-fashioned way (the recipe is named 'old-fashioned' anyway!). It's not difficult, although it takes some patience to churn it every now and then. I added 3 Oreo cookies which I had been wanting to get rid off. It's just not my habit to chomp down 3 biscuits out of meal times, and I cannot only have 3 biscuits as a meal, so those poor fellows have been waiting to be eaten for weeks...or months. So now, I get to have Cookies N Cream ice-cream!

The end result? Creamy and smooth ice-cream with nice taste of vanilla. I love to see the vanilla seeds inside, just makes me feel like I am getting the real thing. I now feel the usual ones sold in the stores taste pretty crappy in comparison, unless you get some of the more expensive and better ones.

The recipe is simple and it is here. The only thing about it is, use the best ingredients you can find...good vanilla, good cream, fresh egg yolks. Why? Because that's the whole point of making your own ice-cream isn't it? Otherwise, you might as well go to the store and grab a tub.

Enough said, my ice-cream's melting...I gotta go!