Cashew & Prawn Rice

Its a slow week for posting despite my resolve to blog more about Faith. Unfortunately, my mom hasn't been feeling too well. She thinks its rheumatism and its affecting her lower back, causing her some pain when she walks. My mom insisted on making the daily trip to my house even though I repeatedly told her to stay at home and rest. Said she would go crazy cooped up at home and besides, the trip here will give her some much needed exercise and therapy for her rheumatism.

To ensure that she doesn't over strain herself, I've been taking Faith out after her lunch this week. We would usually take a slow stroll to AMK Hub, spending some two hours there before we head home for her to nurse and take an afternoon nap. While at the supermarket today, I decided to buy some ingredients to make some Indian food.

I've cooked a number of recipes from Vicky Bhogal's "A Year of Cooking Like Mummyji", all of them turning out great. Louis has been enthusiastic about the dishes that I've churned out thus far and today's Cashew & Prawn Rice was no exception. Vicky is a 2nd generation Punjabi, born and raised in London.

While my picture of the rice does not do justice to it, rest assured that its a simple dish to whip up in a very short time, yet scrumptious enough to guarantee that you will want to repeat the effort over and over again.

In fact, Louis loved it so much that he's declared that we should cook this the next time we have a dinner gathering :) I've accompanied it with a cabbage and moong dal dish to make it a wholesome meal. Unfortunately, NTUC ran out of curry leaves, so the cabbage and moong dal seemed to lack something at the end of it.

Cashew & Prawn Rice

Serves 2

Ingredients:

2 tbsp oil

1 tsp cumin seeds

1/2 onion, sliced thinly

250g cooked and peeled prawns

2 tomatoes, diced

handful of chopped coriander

1/2 cup cashew nuts

1/2 tsp dried red chilli flakes

1/2 tsp salt (or to taste)

1/2 cup basmati rice, rinsed with cold water

1 cup water

Method:

1. Heat the oil in a pan and add the cumin seeds.

2. When sizzling, add the onion and fry until translucent.

3. Add the prawns, tomatoes, coriander, cashews, chilli, salt and stir-fry for 30 seconds.

4. Add the rice and stir-fry for a further 30 seconds.

5. Add the water and bring to a boil. Turn down the heat to very low, cover and steam for 15 minutes.

Hmmm... just typing this makes me wanna cook this again for tomorrow night. Hahaha... I wouldn't although its really tempting :)

Bon appetit!

Sam Leong's Cooking Class

Many would know that one of my great love in life would be cooking and nearly every and any thing related to it. To that end, I've bought, collected and accumulated so many things from cookbooks to kitchen equipments, cutlery's, nick-knacks, spices, condiments and blah blah blah. Each time, I've justified to myself, and my dear hubby, that many items that I bought or would want to acquire would serve a specific and special need towards the fulfillment of this great love of mine.

My kitchen cupboards are filled nearly to the brim, my bookshelves loaded with cookbooks and magazines and so is my entire fridge even though I've bought the biggest capacity fridge available in the market. I equate going for extravagant meals at times as an eye-opener and education of the taste buds towards the achievement of greater culinary aspirations for myself. And of course, as with any cooks, one of my greatest passion is to attend cooking classes, especially if said classes are taught by luminary or celebrity chefs. More specifically, Sam Leong, Director of Kitchens for the entire Tung Lok Group, was going to be teaching some CNY classes at Shermay's Cooking School. Of course I had to sign up!

These days, signing up for cooking classes require a little more logistics coordination than the mere reservation of a cooking class, even if some of these classes may have limited vacancies on account of the popularity of either the cuisine or chef. Yes, the main coordination would revolve around to help take care of Faith :)

Usually, Faith goes off to my MIL's place on weekend afternoons, while Louis and I would go about our errands. However, this Sat, my MIL had something on, so it was just going to be Faith and her daddy. But, I was worried if Louis would be able to cope on his own with her on account that he had to pay attention to a few things on hand too. He's got to coax her to take her afternoon nap, cook her porridge and pack them into a thermos for dinner, warm and feed her her afternoon milk, as well as change her diapers. Alright, alright. So, I'm an overly worried mom/wife. Still... :)

We discussed and agreed to radio for help the night before from my BIL and SIL for reinforcement. Thankfully, they were all too eager to pitch in, so my SIL came by around 3-ish pm to help out.

That logistical detail settled, I happily trotted off for my class early, in anticipation that the seats would fill up as many tend to turn up early. It was the first cooking class that I'm attending ever since I was pregnant and the smell of all food and cooking turned me off. Couldn't help being a little excited and eager to go for the class.

Lesson was supposed to start at 3.30 pm and by the time I reached the venue at 3.10 pm, the seats were already two-thirds filled. I saw Sam togged out most professionally in his chef outfit, along with not 1 or 2 assistants. No sirree! We're talking about celebrity and renowned chef, who came along with 3 assistants, all geared out in chef togs too. And they were set out with a portable mini kitchen in the school balcony, ready to whip out more than 40 sets of the 4 dishes that Sam Leong was teaching as food tasting for all the attendees. As Shermay herself puts it, its equivalent to a private dinning experience for all of us. Yahoo and double Yum!!

The four dishes that we were supposed to learn that day were:

1. Crispy Shrimp Ball with Cheese Filling and Coated with Bread Crumbs
2. Baked Cod Marinated with Soy Sauce and Sauteed Scrambled Egg White
3. Braised Abalone, Conpoy with Home-Made Spinach Tofu
4. Warm Home-Made Almond Cream with Superior Birds' Nest
   
   Note: Numbered picture of dishes correspond according with the above dish listing.

I absolutely love the crispy shrimp ball. Its the same filling that is used to as the base of most dim sum dishes (e.g. siew mai, haa-gao, fu-pi-juan etc). However, it does require deep-frying and I'm not that keen to deep-fry stuff at home on account of the grease in the kitchen after. So, perhaps I might use the base to make steam dim sums instead.

I'm fairly certain that everybody loves cod and I'm no exception. Needless to say, I love the baked cod too with the scrambled egg whites. Now this is a dish that I'm likely to want to replicate at home.

The third dish of braised abalone, conpoy and spinach tofu requires a fair amount of pre-preparation work, especially the abalone and conpoy. Louis has the knack of turning up at the class at the right timing becos the 3 assistants were in the midst of serving the dish to all the participants. Louis got to eat the spinach tofu and most of the entire piece of braise abalone before he left. Yes, you read it right! Each participant had an entire piece of braised abalone to himself/herself. I would think that if we were eating at a Tung Lok restaurant, that would easily cost about S$30-S$40 per head?

And in case you're wondering, it would be too much to expect that each participant would get an entire piece of bird's nest in our dessert serving. No doubt, the serving portion, generous as it was, was the serving size as what you would get at the restaurant. What we had was a dollop of bird's nest dropped into our almond cream dessert :)

Serving up bird's nest in this dish would certainly make anyone a revered and most popular dinner host. However, even if you skip the bird's nest, this dish would still be a soothing dessert with just the home-made almond cream and glutinous rice ball. Now this is one dessert that I can certainly make and would be appreciated by my vegetarian and fussy mom *wink*

It being the festive CNY period, Sam Leong was very very generous with the portions for the food tasting. It was like having a degustation serving portion of 4 dishes and by the time we were done, everyone was saying that they were too filled up to have dinner. And the class only cost S$139 nett. It probably would have cost us about that much if we ordered the same 4 dishes at a Tung Lok restaurant and we came away with the recipes and much of our burning and inane questions answered by THE man himself. I consider this a great bargain.

My one and only regret about this class was that I didn't take a picture with Sam as a momento. Alright alright! Louis and my SIL were reminding me to bring the camera and in fact urged me to take a picture with him. But I was too embarrassed to do it then and am having some small amount of regrets now. However, all is not lost. I've gotten Ching to help me purchase one of Sam's cookbook and have the great man himself autographed it. As for myself, I rushed off to meet up with my MIL, Louis and Faith to head for our annual pre-CNY dinner treat by my FIL's sister.

Certainly, I was so full at the end of the night becos its a good Teochew restaurant with a 8-course meal. Absolutely no regrets even if it means I've got to run more on the treadmill next week.

Food Glorious Food!

Frankly, I don't know what I do with my time. The days just seem to pass so very quickly and one week has gone by and another has started. Before you know it, I'm so behind my blog entries for the last few weeks.

I haven't exactly been lazing around. The days flew by becos I think I was busier. Busy with cooking/baking mainly. I had my first "order" of muffins, albeit it was from my cousin, to bake 20 muffins for her school's event and I charged only at cost :) Still, its nice to have some reaffirmation that these home-baked muffins are yummy enough and not the often polite but encouraging comments meant to spur me to greater culinary aspirations. For the occasion, I decided to bake two varieties of muffins;- blueberry muffins and chocolate banana mascarpone muffin.

As for my other passion-of-the-month, I've also cooked 2 more Korean dishes, Sundubu Chigae and Jab-Chae. In one of my earlier postings, I've mentioned about Sundubu Chigae and how this little humble soup of tofu in a spicy broth made me a Korean cuisine convert. Thus, it is only natural that I should attempt to learn to make this dish on my own.

Surprisingly, it was a relatively easy dish to make and again, you don't really need any special Korean condiments. In order to make an "authentic" bowl of Sundubu, I'd convinced myself that I need to use the right equipment i.e. an earthen bowl. I'd procure my little "find" at the Korean grocery stall, Sol, located at the basement of Orchard Cineleisure. While there, I was very very tempted to buy another stone bowl to make Dosul Bibimbap but sanity and caution prevailed.

The verdict according to my dear hubby was that it tasted as good as the ones we had in Woo Jong, the Korean restaurant in Paris, as well as other Korean restaurants. The total cost of it (minus the cost of the earthen bowl) was only at a fraction of the ghastly amount these restaurants charged. Additionally, it taste better than the bland versions served up in many of the local foodcourts too.

Jab-chae, a festive noodle dish made of sweet potato noodle wasn't as successful. While final output was passable, the proportion of sesame oil used in the recipe had resulted in a rather oily plate of noodles. I figured that I would just need to tweak the proportion of sesame oil used the next time to get it right. Till then, here's the recipe for Sundubu Chigae.

Sundubu Chigae

Ingredients

1 tbsp red chilli oil

2 cloves crushed garlic

1 tbsp chilli powder

1 tsp light soy suace

1/2 onion, peeled and sliced

30g kimchi, roughly chopped

100g minced beef

1/2 beef or chicken stock cube

300ml water

1 tube silken tofu, sliced into rounds

1 egg

1 leek, sliced

Method

1. Heat the earthen bowl or a clay pot until hot. Reduce heat and add in chilli oil, garlic, chilli powder, soy sauce, onion, stock cube, kimchi and minced beef. Stir fry for 5 minutes.

2. Pour in the water and bring to a boil. Add the tofu rounds and simmer over low heat for about 10-15 minutes.

3. Crack the egg into the soup and remove from the heat. Sprinkle the leek slices and serve.

Korean Noodle Salad (Salad-Guksu)

Louis and I are still hooked onto our Korean dramas via cable Channel 55. Right now, we are catching Jumong, Prince of the Legend and The Song of Prince every weekday nights. Unfortunately for Louis, his Korean drama addiction is causing him to sleep much later cos The Song of Prince is airing at 11.40 pm to 12.40 pm, Mondays to Fridays.

Seeing that I have bid farewell to my cupcakes baking, I thought I should dedicate something to Korean food to match our addition. Korean cuisine is one which I only discovered when I was in France. A Korean friend of ours once organised a class get-together at a Korean restaurant, Woo Jung, in Paris. Woo Jung is located in the 16th arrondissement (Metro: Passy), very near to the Eiffel Tower. In fact, you can see the tower while standing on the sidewalk of the restaurant. We tried to return to the restaurant again last year when we were in Paris. Alas... it was closed and the staff were on vacation. Sigh...

Prior to that, my knowledge of Korean food was limited to what was sold in our local food courts. Quite frankly speaking, most weren't authentic and the repertoire were limited to different types of stir-fry hot plates such as Bulgogi. In Woo-Jung, I was exposed to the many different side dishes, many of which were deliciously prepared and were quickly gobbled up. And it was where I tasted my first tureen of Soondubu Chigae, a kind of spicy soft bean curd stew, that started me on my obsession on my return to Singapore to find chigae with exactly the same taste as those served in Woo Jung.

And I slowly learnt that there are many other Korean dishes that I was totally ignorant of, but once my eyes were opened to this "new" cuisine, I quickly lapped them all up. I especially love the bean sprout salad (kong-na-mul-mu-chim), seasoned spinach (si-geum-chi-mu-chim), stuff cucumber kimchi (o-e-so-bae-gi), sweet potato noodles (jab-chae), braised short ribs (gal-bi-jjim), spring onion and seafood pancake (pa-jeon) and a whole lot more. Most often than not, I just love the little side dishes that are served at the table and can never get enough of them.

So, I started perusing my Korean cookbook by Lee MinJung, as I watched my Korean dramas every night, pondering and deciding which of the dishes shall I attempt next. Since I had lots of soba on hand in the fridge and the list of other ingredients and condiments were easily found in the compartments of my fridge and kitchen, I decided to make Salad Guksu, a cold noodle dish mixed with vegetables in a spicy sweet sauce.

The recipe called for soba noodles but I had some spare cha soba, so I used that instead. For the vinegar, I used Japanese Mizkan grain flavoured distilled vinegar, but you can use any white vinegar The recipe for the salad noodles is as follows:

Salad Guksu
Adapted from Feast of Flavours from the Korean Kitchen by Lee MinJung

Ingredients
2 bundles Cha soba or soba noodles
5 leaves lettuce, julienned
1 medium cucumber, julienned
1/2 carrot, julienned
4 sticks crab stick, shredded

Sauce
3 tbsp light soya sauce
3 tbsp vinegar
2 tbsp lemon juice
3 tbsp sugar
1/2 tbsp oyster sauce
2 cloves garlic, peeled and smashed
1 tsp wasabi
1 tbsp chilli powder
1 tbsp sesame oil

Method
1. Combine the ingredients for sauce and blend well. Refrigerate.

2. Blanch noodles in boiling water until al dente, then wash under cold running water. Drain well.

3. Remove the smashed garlic from the sauce. Mix noodles with chilled sauce and some vegetables and crab stick.

4. Garnish with remaining vegetables and crab stick and serve.

I find that if you put the noodles back in the fridge and let it sit for a while, the noodles will absorb the flavour of the sauce better. I like that the sauce is a little sweet and spicy, interspersed with the flavour of sesame oil, giving it an uplifting fragrance. Perhaps the next time when I make it, I would add some sesame seeds into the mixture to give a slightly crunch.

Easy guacamole

I've currently into eating avocados. I love the creamy, rich texture that on its own seemed rather tasteless. But it absorbs beautifully the flavours of whatever dressings that goes with it. Of course, the other reason for my enthusiastic eating of said fruit these days is that I would like Faith to eat avocado when she starts weaning. I figured that the more I eat, she might get a taste of it through the milk and hence develop a taste of it herself *grin*.

Since I've been hankering after some not-so-healthy junk food like chips, I thought it would be a good idea to pair some junk food with health food by making an avocado dip to go along with my organic tortilla chips. That ought to balance things out a little.

So, here's my version of guacamole:

Ingredients

2 ripe avocados
1/4 onion, roughly chopped
Juice from about 1/4 of a lemon juice
1 tomato, diced
Salt, to taste

Method

1) Cut and scope avocado into a blender, along with the onions.

2) Squeeze the lemon juice in, add salt and blitz everything until smooth. If you like, you could pulse the blender so that the avocados don't get too mashed up and you have some rough bits for a different texture.

3) Scope pureed mixture into a container that can be refrigerated. Add in the diced tomato and mix well. Refrigerate it and eat with tortilla chips whenever you like *Slurp* :)

Personally, I don't like the strong taste of raw onions, therefore, I only use 1/4 onion. For onion lovers, you could even add in some chopped onions along with the tomatoes at the end for a nice crunch.

Next week, I think I shall make avocado salad. Hmmm.... Yummy!

Pain a l'ancienne

I've been having consistent, if varied, success with my focaccia-making. With the exception of the book by Beth Henspergn, the 2 other bread recipes I have are meant for bread-machines. Deciding to extend my bread-making repertoire, I eagerly scouted Amazon for bread making books that could make use of my KitchenAid -- I always have good reasons to buy cookbooks.

And so it was that I chanced about the book titled "Bread Baker's Apprentice" by Peter Reinhart. It won the James Beard book award and IACP Cookbook Award -- I have no clue what IACP stands for but I figured it must be something good (kekeke). Its gotten fairly good reviews and most importantly, there are recipes for artisan breads, many of which are European-type breads -- or are all artisan breads from Europe anyways?? After reading through it, I was rather proud of my purchase. The reason being that the author aims to provide a good foundation and explanation on the science of bread-making. What I like is that the author has attached a formula for each recipe providing the percentage component of all the ingredients. Meaning to say that if the recipe calls for a 1-pound bread but you would need to make a 3 1/2-pound bread, you could use the formula to calculate how much of each ingredient would you actually need. I found that really neat.

I've also found little nuggets of useful information that is not explained in a lot of cookbooks. For example, it explains that while the use of commercial yeast is helpful in leavening breads (i.e. make it rise), the maxim in good bread baking is to use the minimum amount of yeast because you do not want the bread to acquire a yeasty taste. Another useful info was that you only knead as long as it takes for the bread dough to form, not any less or more. What is more important is to allow the dough to ferment (or to proof) as that constitutes towards developing about 80% of the final taste of the bread (fyi, the remaining 20% are attributable to factors such as quality of ingredients, oven temperature etc).

Fortunately or unfortunately, most of the bread requires at least 2 days to make. The first day is used to make a preferment (known as starter or sponge), before making the bread proper on the 2nd day. Hence, its tough to decide that you want to make any bread spur-of-the-moment, especially if you entertain thoughts of making your own bread for a dinner at home with guests.

Anyways, I decided to make the pain a l'ancienne The author had visited Gosselin in Paris and was given the idea to refrigerate the preferment. The rationale for doing that in gist (since my chemistry was terrible back in school) what that refrigerating the dough retards the action of the yeast, but allow natural sugars to build up within the dough. Hence, when the dough is taken out from the fridge the next day, the return to room temperature will activate the yeast to start digesting the sugar. But becos the dough has produced more sugar after sitting overnight, there's better flavour to the bread.

Now, back to the all important question... how did the bread turn out? Well... it was certainly edible, but far from being good. If you could hear my mom, she kept saying that the crust was sooo haard, blaming it on the flour. Overall, with the exception of the teeth-aching hard crust, the taste of the bread really wasn't too bad. The interior of the bread didn't have that many air-holes, unfortunately.

The lessons learnt were:

1) It was a little tedious having to convert ounce and pounds to the metric system. Thus, when I was making the preferment, I had wrongly read and convert the amount of flour needed. Hence, the flour was rather wet. Took a while of kneading before I reread the quantity and realised my mistake. For ease of reference, am going to paste a conversion chart in the book or pencil in the weight in kilos and grams next to it.

2) Secondly, during the handling of the dough, I might have degassed it a little. Also, while dividing and cutting the dough to form the baguettes, the original dough was a little too long. Hence, transferring the baguettes was difficult as they slipped and slithered. Becos of the size (or length) of a home oven, the baguettes were more like demi-baguettes rather than the store-bought long ones.

3) Slashing the baguettes to form nice splits wasn't as easy as I thought. Some slashes were too deep, while others too shallow that the final output didn't even showed any slashes.

4) The book instructed to put the baguettes into the oven after shaping and transferring to a baking sheet without the need to proof. I felt that this might be a reason why the baguettes didn't spring more in the oven and partly resulted in the lack of airy holes in the interior. The next time, I think I will allow another 10-15 minutes of final proofing in order to allow the dough to relax.

5) Length of time that the baguettes baked in the oven was around 20 minutes. But becos my baguettes were a little skinny, I should have adjusted for that and not left it in the oven for the specified length of time. That was the reason why my bread crust was a little too hard. And when I measure the internal temperature of the bread, it was about 270F instead of the 205F, which was the optimum internal temperature.

6) I was reluctant to sprinkle too much flour on each of the cut baguettes, except for one loaf. However, in the final output, I realised the one loaf that I sprinkled more flour actually turned out more rustic looking. I shall be more liberal with sprinkling flour the next time.

I think I shall have another few more attempts at the pain a l'ancienne. It tastes a little like the baguette au levain that I loved in France, although when I googled the latter, the method was different. While pain a l'ancienne uses commercial yeast, the au levain type of bread relies on wild yeast (i.e. just water and flour, relying on natural air-born yeast to ferment).

Wish me luck!

Pumpkin Soup

My first taste of pumpkin soup was back when Louis and I were honeymooning in Europe. It was winter and the weather in Brugge, this little quaint town in Belgium, was so chilly and cold that a tureen of soup sounded really heartening and warming. Although I must say that I wasn't particularly enthusiastic about pumpkin soup at that time -- actually, I've never eaten pumpkin anything prior to that. That was an experience that changed my perspective on pumpkin and pumpkin soup. I came back a convert on pumpkin soup and googled many a sites before I stumbled onto a pumpkin recipe that is now my favourite.

It was only a few years later that I come to learn that pumpkin contains high levels of antioxidants and carotene, notably vitamin C and E and therefore may lower cancer risk, heart disease, cataracts and strokes. So, I'm always congratulating myself for being unwittingly discerning whenever I make pumpkin soup. Hahaha...

Anyways, I've decided to put up this post becos Jean has requested for me to share my pumpkin soup recipe. Unfortunately, I've lost that recipe and even though it was found on BBC's Good Food website, I've since been unable to find that same recipe again. Nonetheless, I've made it enough times to remember the ingredients, although not necessarily the proportions. To the best of memory, the below portions are guesstimate, so you might need to add or reduce some ingredients to adjust the taste a little.

Pumpkin Soup

Ingredients:
400-500g pumpkin or butternut squash, diced
1 medium carrot, diced
2 small-medium size potatoes, diced
1/2 red bell pepper, deseed and diced
2-3 stripes of streaky bacon, diced (optional)
8-10 cherry tomatoes
1.5L chicken stock (good if its home-made, otherwise Knorr's clear chicken broth with no MSG is also good)
Salt and pepper, to taste

Method:
1) Sautee the streaky bacon in a pot big enough to cook the soup until the fat oozes out. If you like, can add a little olive oil too. Next, add in the diced pumpkin, carrot, potatoes and bell pepper and mix well, about 2-3 minutes.

2) At this point, I usually reduce the heat, cover the pot and let the vegetables sweat in the pot for about 5-8 minutes. Thereafter, add in the chicken stock and cherry tomatoes. Bring it to a boil. Lower the heat and let the vegetables simmered covered until tender, about 20-25 minutes.

3) Puree the mixture (be careful there!) and then transfer it back to the pot again. Bring the soup back to a boil. Add salt and pepper to taste. Serve it hot with crusty bread if you like :)

This sounds like a lot of ingredients to chop and dice but I really like it a lot. The other way to make pumpkin soup is to cube the pumpkin into about 3 cm pieces, lay them on a single layer in a baking dish. Drizzle generously with olive oil and put into the oven to bake for about 30-45 minutes (depending on size) until tender. Puree the roasted pumpkin, transfer the pureed pumpkin into a pot and add chicken stock. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Personally, I prefer the recipe for the first pumpkin soup. Even though it involves a lot more work chopping and dicing, the end result is well worth the effort :)

Happy cooking!

What's cooking?

I was talking to Louis over the weekend and I told him that I miss cooking terribly. I don't mean the quick vegetables stir-fries and steamed fish type of daily cooking done hurriedly while my mom is babysitting Faith.

The kind of cooking that I enjoy is the whole works starting from perusing cookbooks, deciding on what dish to cook/experiment, shopping for ingredients and that satisfying process of transforming all that myriad ingredients into the final product, be it a cooked or baked dish. Pre-pregnancy and Faith's arrival, I used to look forward to the weekends to grocery shop and cook either for dinners or dishes that I shortlisted on a weekday. That was my ideal of a relaxing weekend, to the delight of Louis who loved entertaining to a home-cooked meal at home.

These days, cooking usually entails the first and the last part of the entire set of steps I've described above i.e. I would shortlisted the item to cook/bake and the key ingredients would be assembled (usually by Louis). All I need to do is to dump them into the cauldron, stir like a witch and abracadabra... my dish poofs out magically ;)

Seriously, when I think of a dish I want to cook these days, I would give Louis a shopping list of ingredients that he could get for me from Tekka market or when we put Faith with my MIL on weekend afternoons, a quick zip to the NTUC supermarket at Ang Mo Kio Hub. Somehow, its not quite the same as a leisurely stroll of my own up and down the aisles of the gourmet supermarket chains like Marketplace or Jason's. Sadly, I miss terribly the morning trips to Tekka market where I am always intrigued and fascinated by the amount of local and "ang-moh" produce, vegetables, fishes and what-have-yous .

Selfishly, its moments like this when I wish Faith could quickly grow up and start eating solids 3 meals a day. That's so I could put her with my MIL earlier or even overnight so that I can have a little more time on the weekends to indulge in the experience of sourcing for my ingredients. Am I evil or what?

I am eternally grateful to my mom cos she comes in every weekday afternoon to help me take care of Faith, allowing me a good 2-3 hours to indulge myself in cooking/baking. To-date, I've managed to do some fairly simple stuff like pumpkin soup, quiche, tiramisu etc on occasions. Like today, I'm trying to make sun dried tomato focaccia *fingers crossed*

On a positive note, Faith is entering her 5th month and it would be another 2 more months before we start weaning her. And that's gotten me so excited that I've gone out and bought 2 books on cooking solid foods for babies -- speaking of which, I've ran out of bookshelves to put all the new cookbooks I've purchased. I know I should not get overly excited and build unrealistic expectations that Faith would take to solids at her first few attempts. Nevertheless, I can't stop myself from anticipating and looking forward to all the different types of food I can cook for her in time to come;- pumpkin, avocado, sweet potato, brown rice cereal, fish porridge, leek etc etc

My next milestone in cooking would be less on the intricate dishes that I can churn out but cooking for a potentially finicky eater and rising to the challenge of getting her to enjoy a wide spectrum of food :)

Green Tea Creme Brulee

There are 2 green tea desserts that I love; green tea creme brulee and green tea tiramisu. Surprisingly, I had both while overseas, although not in Japan. I tasted my first green tea creme brulee at the Saffron restaurant of Banyan Tree Bintan. The green tea tiramisu was served at Satsumi restaurant at Wardour Street in London.

What I liked about the green tea tiramisu, which makes it very different from the other green tea tiramisu that I've tried is that the mascarpone portion of the dessert was flavoured with green tea while the sponge finger layer still retained the usual coffee liquer taste. It was yummy! The online recipes that I've found for green tea tiramisu were different in that they substitute the coffee liquer soaked sponge fingers for green tea instead.

I've decided to try to recreate these 2 desserts at home, starting with the green tea creme brulee becos it was the easiest. Here's a peek at the finished product fresh out from the oven. Its yet to be caramelised though.

The verdict??

Hmmm... there was a hint of green tea, but a very faint one at that. Perhaps its becos I was using green tea powder and did not use enough of it to bring out the flavor or I should have let it steep longer. Alternatively, I could use green tea leaves, which might give greater flavor. All the same, it still taste good.