2-minute miso

10-minute miso by Jaden's Kitchen
I just read this, just as i was going to post about miso soup =) Except i made quite the whole process work friendly. I bring in tofu, a small tub of miso, wakame and bonito flakes and chuck it in the office fridge. While everyone makes a coffee, i mix up the ingredients and make myself a nice helping of miso soup.

To next level it, i plan to bring in butter, can of corn and a wee bit of noodles. That's right, i'm gonna have miso butter ramen for snackies =P

miso and soy

burns instanteously. If you ever intend to use these two in a marinade (like i did for dinner) make sure you do it on a bbq, cos doing it in a pan is gonna seroiusly mess it up. Miso, soy, ginger, mustard and mirin to marinade pork. On the barbie it gave it a nice smoky salty aroma... not great but not so bad either...

really not sure what i can do with miso, except stick it on eggplant or make miso soup. Using it to cook stuff is a little awkward....*shrugs*

crepes from a french guy

The entire weekend was quite uneventful till a work mate, David and housemate Irlene? showed up at our door with a fabulous idea of having crepes for dinner. They went to get the groceries, pierrick went to get the wine and i watched the house to make sure nothing happened to it =D Anyways it was a fantastic evening of wine-drinking, crepe tossing and wii playing. Just check out the photos! =)

Pierrick also let on how one makes the perfect crepe mixture.
1) Decide how many eggs you want in the mixture
2) Slowly add flour and mix the flour into the eggs
3) Keep doing it until the mixture is relatively gooey and sticky
4) Add milk until the crepe mixture becomes runny again =)
5) Get a crepe pan, and get ready to do some crepe tossing!!!

Apparently the first crepe you make off the pan is for the dog, and the rest of them are good. Something to do with absorbing the butter off the pan and so on.. The rest of the night we had crepe throwing competitions. I accomplished a double somersault with a half twist for an amazing score of 9.5, while others... well.. you can see from the photos =)








A trick that i used to get a good consistent crepe thickness was to heat the pan up, and then pour the batter on, wait a few ticks and then pour anything that is still runny back into the batter. This was not well receieved by Pierrick, but well, it works! so who can argue with that?

Pickled Eggplant (Ah Cha?) Aunty (Winnie/Mrs) Tan style (SUGOI!)

4 red chillies seeded and chopped
6 cloves garlic chopped roughly
2 small pieces of ginger
2 table mustard seeds
3 tablespoon tumeric
1 3/4 cup olive oil
1.5 kg eggplant cut into cubes
3 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup vinegar
2 tsp garam masala

1) In blender blend the chillies, garlic, ginger and mustard seed with a tablespoon of water until pureed.
2) Combine with tumeric powder.
3) Heat oil and fry blended mixture for a few minutes, then add egpgplant cubes.
4) Lower and cook over gentle heat until eggplant is soft, stirring occasionally.
5) Add salt, sugar and vinegar and stirring until thick, stirring frequently to prevent burning.
6) Last stir girm masala and turn into a sterlied jars, cover and store.

lemon tea

you know when you have tasty tasty crab and you eat as much as you can till ure super stuffed? So you reach over put your hand in the lemon tea to clean your hands, pop the nice cool towel. Ahhhhh a great meal. Yes? Then you look to your left and see a bunch of white people enjoying the same crab you just had. As they finish, they reach over and drink the lemon tea. What the?

A story from my roommate =)

btw, i have no idea how lemon tea would ever break down grease... im sure it does, 4000 years of civilisation, i'm sure we have a good reason to put our hands in lemon tea whenver they get a little greasy =)

1 week hiatus

So i'm back on the food blog, i really have to get into the practice of taking photos of what i eat. I seem to keep forgetting...

The first weekend back from sydney, it's the first chance i've had to cook. Last few days it has been munching on kebabs after many beers and getting home in the wee hours of the monring. No time for cooking there. Today, pierrick cooked a classic french dish that his mother cooked for lunch while I cooked a bbq for dinner. It's pretty kewl, we both manage to keep it simple and try to have minimal mess and fuss.

Pierrick's dish was some vegie stew with tomatoes, zuchini garlic and parsley. Put in into a pan and simmer down for like an hour, adding water/stock when neccessary. then as it is almost done, crack a few eggs in there let it cook a little more and bang your done. Apparently if you had a bagette it would be very awesome. Personally i think it needs some meat in there, lets say just small bits of ham, bacon or pancetta to make it just that little bit more interesting. But it was good and filling =)

I on the other hand basically bbq'd veges, onions, leek capsicum and potato. Onions and capsicum are naturally superb after bbqing, so nothing but heat and oil for these two. Potatos, i sliced thinly, salt pepper and rosemary as it fried on the flat plate. Leeks i tried to do with soy sauce, but err, it burnt =D gotta figure out how to bbq leeks nicely =) For meat LAMB. Lamb rib eye steaks i think it was. Dont really remember anymore. I wish i had mint, but none the less, dijon mustard, rosemary and herbs de provence. I think i should have put more of the herbs de provence, but it didn't really matter, the mustard and rosemary made it taste awesome already =)

Carbohydrates! will any meal be complete without one? I have to have a filler.. my mind cant even fathom preparing a meal without one. Today i tried polenta again, this time in a pot. This was a mistake, dont cook this in a pot unless your looking to spent a good 15 minutes scraping the dregs off the bottom of the pan. This stuff is like steel glue, I cant imagine how it sticks so hard. Anyways as per the first time, i struggled to make it interesting. Perhaps i need to use some kind of stock, but after adding butter salt pepper and oil repeatedly i finally got it to taste... alrite. *shrugs* Perhaps if i had milk or cream i could make it a little runnier and interesting. Atm, the only way it works for me is letting it cool into a rather solid gelanteous goop. It's good, but seems so unhealthy =P In SA they use creamed corn in their pap, maybe i can try that with polenta one day =)

Verdict: its okay after adding a lot of stuff and constantly tasting it. rice is better.

oh, fyi Altitude is an awesome restaurant, look it up!

joys of cooking

It's seldom, but like the satisfaction i get from my work.. i also get satisfaction from my cooking. I know that i'm not doing anythign complicated, intricate or creative with my food, its more just the fact that i'm actually doing it. But when i make something and my roommate goes.."wow that taste really good" or i get him at least curious enough to try things that are out of his norm, i find great satisfaction in that. I'm not sure why...

Today i brought in my bitter melon and beef curry, and offered some to a colleague who hates bitter melon. Now he doesnt hate it, and actually rather enjoys my curry. A little extras sunshine on a already sunny day =)

(good to be back in sydney. really)

beef and bitter melon curry

Finished off the rest of the bitter melon today, since i wont be around until thursday. Got the idea of a bitter melon curry for the the website mentioned last post (which for some reason didnt get published). Curries are relatively easy nowadays with all the spice pastes going around (just gotta get a good generic one) so this was a fairly simple to concoct. Somethings i wish i had around was chicken stock and cucumbers but, well i'll get by without it.

Started off with blanching bitter melon for a while, strain put aside. Started the curry with frying the garlic and ginger (maybe more ginger next time) and then in goes the onions. Wait a while, sit down watch some house *twiddles thumb* Cook the onions down then add the beef. Wait again, practice tossing the beef about like how they do on iron chef,  Oops, lost one =) Straight down the hatch. Well it looks brown enough now, add bitter melon and the strained water, bring to boil.

Thats it!

well, not exactly, but thats as hard as it gets. Now mix up some spice paste into the water and add whatever you think will help. I added kecap manis salt and pepper until the broth seemed quite tasty. Just keep adding bit by bit and constantly mixing and tasting. I hate recipes because you tend to just follow their amounts and do less tasting. Anyways once you got the broth up to scratch turned down the heat and simmered for 30 minutes or so.

Since i only have peanut butter around the house, i added that in to give it a satay-ey taste which actually went well with the "bumbu ayam panggang" paste. I couldnt imagine peanut butter in like a thai red curry paste... But yes, peanut butter in and simmer for another long while until the oil starts to separate from the sauce, you'll know you'll have this gooey consistency (that i like). If only I had coconut creme about, that would ahve been the extra oomf. In the absence of coconut creme, i will add apples, for tmr's lunch =)

The bitter melon this time was cut quite thickly and blanched significantly less, as a result even thogh it was stewed for quite a while it still retained some of its bitterness. Enough to not be masked by the curry, so a success! =P 

(bitter melon a-cha?)

Last night i was cooking on the porch... and got attached by a number of possums..Look at them GREEDY EYES!!! SHOOO!!! and stop drinking our BEER!!!

carrots and bitter melon

refrigerate them. if not, after 3 days, u have mouldy carrot. Thought id be like potatoes (both roots) and keep for a good while. That was very wrong.

Tonight, bitter melon and lamb? *shrugs* I have no black beans, no stock and possibly no garlic, i'm way outta my comfort zone...

Well that was very educational, first off it seems that it would be good to give bitter melon a bit of a boil before you use it in cooking. Get it on its way kinda thing. If its raw it has this kinda sharp raw taste, which very "blergh" (more blergh then regular bitter melon).

If you intend to chuck it into a stew then you probably dont need to blanch it all (maybe a little bit). Problem is if you stew it in too long it seems to loses all the bitterness, which is also undesirable. I think another factor is I cut the slices of bitter melon way too thin.

So anyways, I stewed it with a mix of beer, ketchup manis, mirin and a spoonful of soy and hoisin sauce. Probably was a little sweet, but went well with the (not bitter) bitter melon and pork belly slices.

If i had balls, id try and match it with shrimp paste. =P more here