Scones

"I'm craving for scones. Should we drive to Miss Marple tomorrow morning?" Minister asked this morning.
"I can try bake some scones if you don't mind being my guinea pig. I have never tried baking scone before. But can't expect me to produce ones which are the same as Miss Marple." I warned.

 Scones served with Miss Marple Jam without Cream

Few hours later at 3p.m. "I'm really craving for scones. Do you want to bake some and we have it for afternoon tea?? We can have it with Miss Marple Jam" Minister asked.
"OK" I answered. Entered the kitchen with my How To Be A Domestic Goddness bake book in hand. Pre-heated the oven while I measured the ingredients. Mix everything together to form a dough, keeping in mind not to over work it and be gentle unless I want to feed my Minister with rock hard scone instead. Rolled the dough flat and cut into round shape using a cutter. Pop into the oven for 10mins and hot, delicious scone is really for tea.



It's my 1st time making scone and was really surprised how easy and fast it was! The recipe called for cream of tartar and that's the only baking ingredient which I never used nor buy. Went online and manage to search for substitute using baking powder. Felt it shouldn't really matter or make any different by substituting as it's just to make the scone light and fluffy. I also halved the recipe as I don't think we will be able to finish 12 scones as what Nigella stated. In the end, I still ended up with 12 scones. Most probably because I rolled the dough too flat. Reminder to myself: To have higher scone, don't roll the dough too flat.

"You like it?" I asked after Minister took the 1st mouth-full.
"Oh Yeah!" He answered as he went for the 2nd scone.

Success!!!

Ban Mian

One stone kill two bird, I'm actually cooking Mei Cai Kou Rou with my favourite pot and making use the time to update my blog. OMG looking thru the entry, I have being blogging lesser and lesser. I have taken so many food photos, tried a few new places but not discipline enough to sit down and write about it. Reckon it's not going to get any better. Especially with my 6 weeks vacation coming soon.....seriously overdue especially for Minister! Hmmmm maybe it's still a bit to far to start counting down.

Read Jeroxie entry on Ban Mian and realised I had never blog about this dish. Mum used to cook this dish very often when I was really young! During then it wasn't even popular and couldn't be found in the hawker/coffee shop. I always thought it's a very traditional Hakka dish like Lei Cha. In my teens, I started hating this dish same as Lei Cha. Frequency of Mum cooking it also decreases.


As I got older, I began to appreciate both dishes. Lucky for me, Minister's family is also Hakka and he loves both dishes. Both of us grew up practically eating similar Hakka dishes.


Ban Mian is a simple and nice dish which I tend to cook when I have chicken stock in my freezer. Mix some flour with water to form a dough and either by hand flatten some dough and tear into pieces or using a rolling pin roll it flat (thickness depend on individual) and cut into pieces. As for the side ingredients to go with it really depends on what I like and what's available. But 1 ingredient which is a must is Ikan Bilis (Anchovy). To us, it's not Ban Mian if there isn't it.

Muffins Or Cupcake?

Muffin or Cupcake? What is the main different and how do I know I did end up with muffin when I use a muffin recipe and cupcake when I use a cake recipe?


I baked another batch of Chocolate Chip Muffins on Queen's Birthday before I get on to prepare next day lunch box. Found another Nigella's recipe which is fast and easy from Sarah's blog link. This recipe uses oil! Hooya! I'm just too lazy to weigh the butter and melt it or take my beater out and beat butter and sugar together.


All it need is a wooden spoon, a large mixing bowl and a measuring cup. I start by preheating the oven while gathering all the ingredients. Place all the dry ingredients into the bowl and combine all the wet ingredients into a large measuring cup. Pour the wet into dry ingredient and mix everything together using the spoon. Think most important while making muffin is try not to over mixed the batter which I find it extremely hard! Lumpy batter = Good muffin. 


Minster love the muffins. Anything with chocolate chips, he will like it. Easy to please right? I took 2 muffins to work and gave 1 to my colleague. He had it for tea and send me a sms after praising it's a nice muffin. I didn't tell him it's a muffin. Does it mean I manage to achieve the correct texture of a muffin? Or cupcake is still not such a huge thing here down under?

Comfort food - Mince Chicken with 3 Eggs(salted egg, century egg and egg) Congee

 Congee with You Tiao(chinese donut)


Congee is definitely my comfort food. I love love love congee, a bit of white pepper, drizzle a little sesame oil and I can have 2 HUGE bowl at a time. Though it's my favourite food, it's definitely not for Minster. It's one of the few dishes which he dislike. I even have to force him to have congee when he's sick. But recently he's beginning to accept it and able to finish a reasonable potion by himself. c") 


There's a huge variation in congee: Teochew style, Cantonese style. Different country has their own different way of cooking congee too.


My favourite is cantonese congee. White rice is cooked till it's totally dissolved. Texture of the congee is smooth, like thick liquid. It's not easy to achieve that consistency. Long hours constant stirring standing in front of the stove is required. 

My trick to shorten the process but still able to achieve that is to

# 1 - Use broken rice

# 2 - Soak the rice as long as possible (Best is overnight)

# 3 - Use my tiger thermal pot!!! It not only save on gas bill, it also save me a lot of time from standing in front of the stove and also chances of burning my congee is zero.

I also like to cook it with chicken stock if available instead of water to make it more flavoursome. I also like to diced up carrot, potatoes and dump everything in while cooking. It makes the congee sweet and I'm having my fibre intake.

Salad

Mister have being having quite a bit of salad when I was away. He got hooked onto salad and requested them almost very alternate days. To cut down on our carbohydrates, we started having more salad each week and limited ourselves to 3 dinners with rice a week.

I started trying out new fresh greens to spice up our salad. Adding all kinds of beans is another method which I did.

 Prawn and Calamari Salad

1. Marinate some Calamari with Sweet Thai Sauce and Lime.
2. Grilled some fresh Prawn with shell intact and marinated Calamari and set aside.
3. Cooked some sweet peas in boiling water for less than a minute. Drained and set aside.
4. Poached an egg in boiling water for few minutes. Peeled and set aside.
5. Mixed diced tuss tomatoes, cucumber and canned corn with  some olive oil.
6. Placed everything on a bowl/plate and served.


 Another salad which I did was Boiled Sweet Peas and Snow Peas + Diced Cucumber, Carrot, Tomato, Avocado and Apple + Fresh Sprout toss with Macadamia Olive Oil served together with Pan Fried Salmon.

Popiah But Using Rice Paper Roll

I did something different and special for dinner last night. It was popiah but instead of wrapping with the traditional popiah fresh skin, I used rice paper roll. Mainly because I  couldn't find fresh popiah skin in down under. Only available at the oriental supermarket are frozen spring roll skin which I find them too thick unless deep fried.

As filling, I stir-fried some granted turnip and carrot with some light soya sauce, sugar,pepper and dark sauce for seasoning. I also prepared some shredded omelette and bean curd and steamed chicken thighs.

It was my 1st time using rice paper roll. I had ordered Rice Paper Roll numerous times at Vietnamese Restaurant but had never tried wrapping it myself. Oh man, it wasn't easy on my 1st try! Maybe because I wet the rice paper roll in hot boiling water instead of warm water which caused the paper roll to soften up too fast. As a result it stick together as you can see above. But subsequently I got the hang of it very quickly.





To assemble:

1. Spread some sweet dark sauce and homemade chilli paste on the paper roll.

2. Pile on omelette and bean curd, follow by lots of cooked turnip.

3. Topped it with some shredded steamed chicken.

4. Wrap and served.

I lost counted how many popiah we had but both of us enjoyed the meal very much and I will definitely make it again with something different as filling.

Liz's Version of The Rock's Favourite Chocolate Chips Cookies

I was itchy to bake for weeks and finally found time last week to bake cookies. Plus I could test out our newly bought camera.

I found a recipe from Sarah's blog and decided to give it a try. But I did some changes to the recipe.




Liz's version of The Rock's Favourite Chocolate Chips Cookies

1 cup butter
1 cup caster raw sugar
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup all purpose flour
1 cup wholemeal flour
2.5 cups rolled oats, ground to fine powder in a blender
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
chocolate chips
nuts

Cream butter and sugar till light and fluffy.
Add eggs and vanilla, beat well.



Mix in flour, oats,baking powder, baking soda.



Fold in chocolate chips and nuts. I used all kinds of nuts I can find in my pantry.


Roll tablespoons of mixture into balls, flattening slightly and baked them in a 180 degrees preheated oven for 10-15 minutes.


I really like this recipe. Love the idea of grounding the oat and mixed it in. The cookie turn out to be slightly crunchy and also chewy. I was initially afraid that it will turn out too sweet but it didn't. CL just requested to bake another batch but just with chocolate chips.

Food I Tried/Eaten During My Trip

I actually started this post few weeks ago but didn't manage to finish it at all *sigh*. Reason being I'm too busy or am I too disorganised or I'm too lazy??? Too lengthy???

Well all the photos posted on this entry all taken during my latest trip to Singapore. Spending more than 2 weeks, I in fact didn't satisfy a lot of my craving! I can't believe I didn't eat much at all.....not much appetite. Mostly due to the extreme heat and humidity and also without CL :P. Note: I didn't manage to take all the food I eaten during the whole duration of the trip.

I spend the 1st 3 days hiding at home eating my favourite chef homecook food, spending quality time with my family members and doing a lot of catching up with them.

My 1st outing was to CityLink, Marina Square and Millennia Walk with my best friend,her hubby and godson. We had lunch at a Japanese place at MS. Honestly I don't remember the quality of the noodle because I was busy talking...hehe. The dessert was pretty nice though, a good mixture of red bean paste with two different types of rice balls. But the service was shocking! The place was almost empty as it was early and a lot of families were still doing their house visiting instead of shopping. The waiter who served us can't even hold a basic english conversation. I had difficulties conveying my order to him. I never expect that in a restaurant in the city with a high chance of tourist walking in.

The next day, I met up with my best friend again and this time she bought me to the newly open Ion at Orchard. We had an early lunch before starting to shop. I had a short tour around on the million dollar renovation food court at the basement (is it really necessary??? food taste nicer??) before we decided to try the Katsudon which 8-days magazine recommended. The tonkatsu was very well done, not dry inside and super crispy outside. Plus it's not soak with oil even though it's deep fried. As for the curry, nothing to shout about.

Basement of Ion has a lot of food stalls selling quite a huge range of food. 50% are japanese style food. We shared some Takoyaki. They were definitely different from those I used to have. These were huge, filled with ingredients, not tough inside. I also bought some japanese steamed rice cake for my Godson and also nephew. Mum told me Truman loved them.

Cai Fan(vegetable rice) for lunch, Dad and me went to get takeaway before we popped into Sis's place. This is CL's favourite, a huge choices of vegetable, meat, seafood, tofu, curry, eggs etc for you to chose. We packed 4 packets of rice each with 3 different combination of vegetable and meat. In total it cost less than S$10. Good budget!

Daddy also bought me and Mum to Zion Road market to have the famous Char Kway Teow. I also ordered some Satay to share because I had craving for Kueh Tupat. I also ordered a huge glass of freshly squeeze sugar cane juice with lemon. I had so many glasses of sugar cane juice during that 2 weeks.

I never fail to have my Gui Ling Jao and herbal tea after my visit to Guan Yin Ma Temple at Bugis. I'm a strange creature because the more bitter the herbal tea is, the more I enjoy. 

Chinese style pancake (Mi Jian Kueh) is another favourite snack/breakfast of mine. I did tried making them, passable but a lot of room for improvement.

Daddy and me also went to have Nasi Briyani and Indian Rojak at Little India Hawker Center. I loved Indian Rojak and so far have no luck getting them in Melbourne. It's a hassle to make as it consist of too many different ingredients plus I feel that the sauce is the most critical.

I walked past the hawker center and I couldn't resist to pack a packet of Chicken Rice even though I'm meeting my ex-colleague for dinner later that evening. It's a popular store and there wasn't any queue. Fantastic! Bought 2 packet, 1 for myself and 1 for daddy. It only took me 5 mins to finish it.

Muffins, Chocolate Chips and Berries

I got a bit sick of cereal plus weather being too crazy, extremely cold 1 week and warm the other. Almost half loaf of bread always end up in the bin because we didn't manage to finish it before expiry date. I need something different to start my day so I tried baking muffins.


I started off using Nigella How To Be a Domestic Goddess book but instead of baking Blueberry or Baklava or Banana Muffin in the book. I followed the basic mixture recipe and mix in Chocolate Chips to half the batch and the other half frozen Berries. 2 different choice of Muffins in 1 bake!


Not sure how many breakky I will end up. CL already eaten 2 of the Chocolate Chips Muffins.

Ayam Nasi Briyani

I'm now in bed, suppose to be resting but got woken up by a phone call. Since I'm awake, might as well make use of the time. Post a entry and go back to sleep.
This is the Ayam Nasi Briyani I tried from the newly added cookbook "The Best of Singapore Cooking". It's the 2nd recipes I tried and I loved it!




This is the picture taken from the book. It looks yummy isn't it? Comparing the appearance of the Chicken dish, it's quite different. Guess that's most probably I didn't really follow the recipe very closely.


For this entry, I'm going to post the recipe on. I love going to food blogs not only to look at photos, finding out where the good foods are. I also love to hunting down recipes and try it out myself. So why not start posting recipes on my own blog too. Right? If I need to cook when I don't have my cookbooks with me, I can just refer from my own blog. How easy is that???





(A)

1 thumb-sized piece ginger
3 cloves garlic
4 green chillies (left them out during marketing)

(B)
1 handful mint leaves (skipped, because he doesn't like it)
2 stalks coriander with roots,rinsed (skipped because he think this is poisonous)
2 tomatoes,cut in eighths
2 tablespoons tomato puree (instead of opening up a big can of puree and used only 2 tablespoons, I put in more fresh tomatoes)

(Seasoning)
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon msg (skipped, I never cook with msg)

1.6kg chicken quartered (I used 6 chicken drumsticks)
225g Ghee or 112g butter with 112ml oil (I used butter and definitely didn't use that much!)
1 teaspoon dry chilli powder mixed to a paste with water
1 level teaspoon garam masala
170ml evaporated milk mixed with 1 tablespoon lemon juice and 112ml water
285g shallots, thinly sliced

Marinate chicken pieces with 1 level tablespoon salt for 1 hour.
Heat a large saucepan with half of the ghee. Fry shallots till golden brown. Set aside.
Fry (A) till fragrant. Add chilli paste and garam masala, then add in (B), seasoning and 1/2 milk mixture. Stir-fry till oil bubbles through.
Put in chicken pieces, fried shallots, remaining milk and oil. Cook over high heat for 10 mins,
Reduce heat to low and cook gently till chicken is tender. Drain chicken, keeping oil to cook the briani rice.





(C)
1 teaspoon chopped ginger
1 tablespoon chopped garlic
4 shallots, thinly sliced

(D)
5cm cinnamon bark
8 cardamoms,lightly bashed
6 cloves

600g Basmatic rice, washed and drained (I didn't measure my rice, I cooked closed to 2 cups. Enough for dinner + CL next day lunch)
55g ghee (I used butter instead)

(Seasoning)
1 chicken cube
1.5 teaspoons salt
1.1 litres boiling water

(Colouring)
Mix 1 teaspoon yellow food colouring with 0.25 teaspoon Rose essence (skipped, because I didn't have any in my pantry) and 4 tablespoons water

Heat wok with ghee to fry (C) til lightly browned, add (D) and stir-fry for 0.5min. Add in the remaining oil and rice. Stir in pan till oil is absorbed into rice.

Pour n the boiling water and seasoning. Cook rice in electric rice-cooker till dry and fluffy. Do not stir while cooking.


Remove lid and sprinkle yellow colouring mixture over rice. Continue to cook for another 10mins. Remove from heat. Loosen rice,mixing colours evenly.

The rice was really fragrant. The whole house was filled with the fragrant smell while the rice was the the rice cooker. As for the Ayam, the gravy was a bit too watery. Maybe if I use tomato puree, it will have thicken it. But I like the taste, not too spicy, can still taste the sweetness of the tomatoes. As it used evaporated milk instead of coconut milk, it very different from Curry Chicken, not heavy. Overall, I feel it's a more healthy alternative.