Unholy Xmas Roast Chicken

I invited Vater und Mutter over for Xmas dinner, because no one was at home when I called on Xmas eve to say "come over for Xmas eve dinner". So I ended up slaving over a hot stove one day before going back to work the next day. Bad idea #1.

Tried to take a shortcut. Asked Mutter to help me check how much the delicatessen was selling roast chicken so that I only needed to cook fries, make a salad, brussel sprouts and soup. Mutter reported that the chickens were going at 2X their usual prices. So she said "buy your own chicken and cook it." Bad idea #2.

Standing at the supermarket eyeing the chickens balefully. Should I get the usual spring chickens (which I am used to making) or a giant bird? Chose the big bird. Bad idea #3.

Bloody chicken was a pain to roast. It took more than 1 hour to roast, not including the time to marinate and insert garlic and ginger slices under the skin.  I stuffed it with ginger, garlic, onion and apples, and slathered the skin with butter, sesame seed oil (my god, I just realized I dumped two types of oil on that bird), soya sauce and mirin. I finally blanketed the birdie with bacon slices.

In the end, it was still 90% cooked so had to zap it in the microwave again.  But it was moist and flavorful. Thanks to my basting the bird and and flipping it over half way through.

Other than sushi, everything else was made by me :D

Hokkaido White Chocolate Cookies

Hokkaido White Chocolate Cookies [img source: The Traveling Hungry Boy]

I have always been fascinated by this white chocolate cookies ever since Mutter brought a box home from her Japan trip with Vater. The cookies came with two loving pussy cats, and was light in taste with a melt-in-your-mouth quality.

Today I was reading "Popular Cakes in Hong Kong" when I cam across this recipe for said cookies. Don't look as pretty but I hope anyone who reads this, please give it a try and tell me how is the recipe? Maybe I could do it as part of Xmas presents (provided I am not exhausted. I am very easily tired nowadays).

Ingredients

Cookie Dough

60g butter, 40g icing sugar, 4g emulsifier

30g egg whites, 20g sugar, 60g low gluten flour (低筋)

  

Chocolate filling

100g white chocolate, 40g whipping cream

Method

Chocolate filling

Bring whipping cream to boil. Add white chocolate to melt. Rest at room temperature for one hour.

Cookie Dough

Soften butter at room termperature. Cream emulsifier and icing sugar until pale yellow and slightly fluffy.

Whisk egg whites and icing sugar when peaked.

Sieve flour and stir in soft butter. GHold in egg white by twice to combine.

Spread egg white batter on slit mat. Place in preheated oven. Bake at 160 degree celsisu for 10-15min.

Assembly

Pipe chocolate filling on biscuit. Top with another biscuit. Press slightly

Leftover cabbage, love for tomato, beef - what do you make?

Russian Borsch :D

Japanese cold salad for combating hot weather

Two weeks ago, it was incredibly hot in Singapore (yes, the fact that it is raining everyday now is such a 180 degree irony). Plants were visibly withering in the heat and so was I. The thought of cooking in the hot kitchen made me feel ill, but B1 is a man who is obsessed with home-cooked food so he emotionally blackmailed me into making dinner.

We compromised that I would make a salad, because it was simply too hot. I think even he couldn't harbor the thought of eating hot food in this heat. So I made Japanese cold noodle salad. I once made it at home, and even my fastidious Vater liked it.

sigh. I think I went overboard while using the microwave's thaw function

The last time I made it, the primary ingredients were vinegar and mirin. This time I dumped in natto as well. It added an interesting texture to the dish, I thought, as did the bonito flakes.

 For veggies, I used letuce, cherry tomatoes, olives, corn, endamame. I boiled some spaghetti till al dente, then dumped in the veggie, fried egg bits, and bonito flakes, before tossing the entire mixture with mirin, natto, vinegar and a bit of sesame seed oil. I chilled the salad before eating. It cooled down my inner fire quite a bit *pleased*.

Dear B1's Mother, this is what I feed Your son

B1 took revenge on my loving to tell my mother everything by telling his mother I don't feed him enough...

This is what he gets for breakfast. Is this not enough? Nuked eggs, Australian brie, Arugula salad, St Leaven's bread.

Just one bite and I have become a massive fan of this thick bread slices from St Leaven. You can buy a loaf (about 8 slices) for S$2.50, and it has a nice milk scent. :D

Simply Porridge

I am not sure if you know that there are at least two kinds of porridge familiar to the chinese people. One is where you boil bits of meat and vegetables into a seasoned rice soup before eating it with a fried yutiao. The other kind is known as Teochew porridge, is like a typical chinese meal with rice soup instead of plain rice and other dishes (like banchan).

I had a massive craving for Teochew porridge but because I had bought some ingredients for Japanese cooking, I ended up with a weird hoggle poggle of niku jaga, wasabi octopus, natto, preserved daikon etc.

I bought the wasabi octopus from the Isetan supermarket. It was nasty and expensive (about S$7, you can see it in its entire serving in the saucer). Don't buy it :D

Blackforest Ham

12 and I have this friend, DrZ (used to be Inno...) who has a massive thing about blackforest ham. Everytime he is peckish when playing CoH with us, he would disappear for a while, before coming back with blackforest ham. Since he is a pretty good player, he has two guys who always want to play with him (not me and 12. I can't speak for 12, but I am fascinated by this dude, who is the same age as me, has the determination to catch up to all his life's goals after, as I quoth, "played around too much in his 20s"). Our running gag was guy D was president of the "Blackforest Ham" fan club, and the other guy, its secretary and treasurer with their own "Blackforest Ham Weekly" publication.

Anyway after hearing about blackforest ham for the 100th time, I decided to buy some of it when I was at Culina. DrZ said that the ham costs about USD5 per 100g, I guess it was like 5SGD per 100g here. Almost the same...

It tasted pretty smoky, but I think I prefer apple ham. :D HM told both of us it was a German ham, anyway.

Oyster Black bean Chicken Soup 蚝仔鸡汤

This is my crappy invention. Oyster Chicken soup. I was convinced that oysters are an aphrodisiac due to the German (fiction, should have known) book "In Search of An Impotent Man" I read. For those who haven't read the book before, it is not about making a man impotent. It was an ironic tale about this hot women who has been disappointed in loveby lustful men, and so wanted to find an impotent man to develop a meaningful relationship with. As contrary as a woman tends to be, after finding the perfect "impotent" specimen, she decided she did not want him to be impotent. And so she tried to "arouse" the man by feeding him aphrodisiacs, one of which being oysters.

After cooking the dish, I checked up the benefits of oysters under an online culinary guide. Turns out oysters are good for menustral and pregnant women. Oopz.

Anyway my version contains black beans, chicken, quail eggs (I thought they were a nice touch, not that you would get any benefit eating them).  Quite savory, after boiling the whole thing for hours. Es Schmeckt lecker!!!

Breakfast 101: Bacon sandwich with crabstick salad

I love crabstick salad. It's really easy to make. Shred cooked crabsticks then mix with mayo (though in this case, I used the knoblauch sauce that B1 and I hauled back from Germany) and boiled egg bits. Dump on lettuce and munch away!

Pork Chop ala Kim Gary Style

Sometimes I don't know what is my problem. I was supposed to go downstairs to buy a bottle of ketchup to make my Kim Gary Style Pork Chop, instead B1 and I came back laden with groceries costing more than $50. Wtf. 

B1 opines that the reason why I think I am spending hundreds of dollars in groceries is because I am hoarding them in the freezer. I am very reluctant to admit that he is right (don't tell him!) as I have totally ran out of space in my freezer. I have to rearrange my freezer again and free up some space. Time to eat all the German sausages I smuggled back.

To make this Kim Gary Style Pork Chop is ridiculously easy.

Pepper and salt the pork chop. Leave it for a while before dusting it with corn flour and frying. For the sauce, fry sliced garlic and then add julienned tomatoes. Fry a bit then chuck in some chicken stock (else water is fine) and tomato sauce. Serve up with sunny side up egg. 

Herbal steamboat anyone?

B1 complains that I do not better his body with healthful food. So one day while waiting for him to fetch me, I popped over at a nearby medicinal shop and bought some ready-packed herbs and other dried goods. There was one specific for steamboat which I found intriguing, since we used to eat steamboat at the Chinese-run establishment next to my violin class, and they offered herbal soup as one of the soup stocks.

Since Mutter gave us so much (perishable) vegetables the other day, they had to be gotten rid of the fastest way possible in vast quantity via steamboat, which also gave me a chance to try out the soup pack. The supermarket was offering a deal of frozen scallops (apparently known as Jacob's mussels?) so I used those as the soup base with the herbs. Pretty luxurious huh?

I also made my own dumplings. 2 kinds. I shaped store-bought fish paste (tastes like dory, never buy again) and flavored it before mixing it with corn kernels and shaping it around asparagus stalks. I fried them so that they would retain shape and attain a kick to the flavor from the olive oil.

The other is minced meat which I mixed with endamame before fryng. All this took me 2 hours of effort. Sigh. Put in so much effort for the unappreciative B1. He didn't say anything except the soup was too sweet (I might have put in too much scallops, because we could eat them after all)

Braised Pork Belly

I am really turning Auntie. 

Case in point, today I was supposed to be buying fish cakes for my spicy Korean rice cakes but ended up chatting with a middle-aged auntie at the freezer compartment about whether I should buy chicken, and from there, we went on to chat about making double-boiled soup. In the end I didn't buy any. *face2palm*

2nd case in point, I couldn't resist the frozen pork belly when it went on sale. So I bought some to boil for soup. However as I stood in front of the crockpot, I thought to myself, boiled pork is tasteless and really gross in texture. B1 definitely won't eat it. So what should I do?

Braised pork is the answer.

Taking the pork from the pot, I fried some slices of garlic, which I then set aside for wrapping with the pork in lettuce. I then poured some stock and the meat, before adding dark soy sauce for color and flavored with light soy sauce, sugar, and five spice. 30 minutes later, the meat totally soaked in all that flavor and taste and was totally yummy while the skin and fat were QQ.

Veggies from Mutter's Garden

Mutter popped by last week, bringing with her loads of veggies in ugly ass plastic bags (recycled from grocery shopping)  from her garden. As I mentioned before, Mutter's friend rents a plot of land where all the auntie friends can set up their own little subplots and grow whatever they want.

Pouring everything out onto the table, I was delighted to find around six kinds of vegetables. Edamame (I was so excited, I drove to the plot and stole one of the plants), kangkong (well, I only found one thick old stalk), lady fingers, sweet potato leaves, baby caixin (so badly starved that they were as thin as sticks) and red spinach (or I hope it is)

There were so much of some of the vegetables, that it took me two hours to wash off the dirt and sort them out. We had to get rid of most of them in 2 steamboat meals, where B1 later complained that the vegetables were so tough and indigestible that he was passing them in their original form (TMI, so have to hide). 

I have no idea what this is, I just pray it is not a weed

Kangkong - one lone stalk

Grapes @ HM's Garten

I guess the most awesome thing about Germany's weather is that you can find grapes, apples, cherries and strawberries in gardens *envious*. This photo was taken with my new Nikon V1. Nice?

Which I especially bought for Germany =D.

Champignon Suppe

Coming home from Germany, I recalled the zwiebel suppe we had at Cafe Gerlinde, the restaurant run by the Beh family within their picturesque B&B. So I made Champignon Suppe (otherwise unglamorously known as button mushroom soup) *haha*.

Baking in the oven... for once it didn't burn

Just like how Gerlinde does it, I added white wine to the soup (but I was too lazy to use stock, and too health-conscious to use artificial flavorings) made from frying the sliced mushrooms, garlic, onions in butter then dumping water...Then I sealed the soup with some ready-made pastry skin and happily painted it with egg yolk which is why it is so pretty. 

We had it with some tough ass striploin I bought at Shop & Save (this is why you must marinate your cheap meat for days). I was too lazy to make a sauce, so we had it with some garlic sauce we bought back from Germany (mercifully no stomachache, despite carting that and curry sauce all over Germany and back).

Sunday Lunch - fusion cod

We had two pieces of cod left in the freezer, having fed B1 sliced fish noodle soup some weeks ago then using another for my Neffe when he came and took the ghost away from my place (long story, don't ask).

Being too lazy to go out to buy groceries (I finally got to recover from two terrible weekends), I took a peek in the freezer and fridge and made this from whatever I could find. Fried cod steak, mashed potatoes with carrots and bacon chives. 

I just lightly fried the cod in olive oil, then dumped in some butter and garlic. When the garlic was golden, I put in the mushrooms and added some soya sauce and water. QED.

Yam Rice

My Eltern make yam rice this way, they fry lots of garlic, shallots, dried shrimp (which they soak), yam and pour it on top of boiled rice and mix. Since I don't like prawns, dried or not, I use dried scallops. I prefer to fry garlic, onions, soaked scallops, soaked rice and julienned yam, then boil the whole mixture together.

Bier soß, steak und chips

I love sunny-side eggs with steak (esp beef patties). Not sure why. Could be the Japanese anime I watch, especially Rosen Maiden, where the sister serves flower-shaped runny eggs on top of beef patties. Yumz

I made this some time ago, as usual and posted it only now. So far I have made red wine sauce, cheese sauce,  milk sauce, so why not bier sauce! I even tried hollandaise sauce, though that was not for steaks. It was almost eclectically Chinese because I mixed soya sauce, Chang bier, and some sugar together to make this weird ass sauce. It wasn't very bitter, gott sei dank. B1 liked it. =D

Quick Mittwoch Dinner

I literally got it (meaning dinner) from somewhere. I just didn't have the mood to go to violin class on Wednesday, especially since I did OT until nearly 8pm, which made class nearly pointless.

I bought honey baked chicken from the supermarket, tortilla chips (massive weakness for them), and quickly made tamagoyaki and a salad. Oopz  now just realized I forgot to take photos of my dinner with my Bruder with his family. We were picnicking in our own apartment =D. Probably a taste of what we will be doing when we go backpacking again this year.

May I have 8 Prawns please?

B1 came home one day saying his colleague extolled on the pleasures of eating fresh prawns in medicinal soup. Since I hate prawns (that includes even prawns cooked in the same vegetable dish), it was a painful ordeal for me to even touch them. I went to the supermarket (I still hadn't summoned enough courage to visit the seafood and poultry sections in the wet market then yet). 

So I bought them at the nearby Shop and Save. I went to the seafood counter where I bewildered the counter staff and the auntie shoppers next to me when I replied "May I have 8 prawns please?" to the counter staff's "what do you want, girl?"

The expression of the auntie next to me was priceless. I later described it to my Eltern as a "WTF are you buying prawns if you are so fucking poor" face. Well, it isn't because I am poor (then again I am), it's because I thought 8 prawns were just enough for B1. 

"Who orders 8 prawns!?" My Vater lacht. He later said "next time ask them how much half a kg costs then order about 200-300g"

B1 was delighted that I bought the prawns but he refused to help clean them. So leery, I clipped each prawn gingerly and snipped off its horn and feelers. Ew.

I prepared the soup first. I chucked in some slices of ginseng that I had left over from the Samgyetang I made the other time, wolfberries, huai san, and garlic slices. Quick boil until I could smell the ginseng. I chucked the prawns in, and doused the flames. I also poured in some soya sauce to taste and a little bit of chinese wine.

"Eh..." B1 said when he saw the prawns.

"What's wrong?"

"I wanted steamed prawns in medicinal soup, not boiled." He also said he did not like prawn soup, so my soup was totally wasted on him.

If I had poured the soup over his head, I think no one would have blamed me. He said that that same colleague praised steamed prawns over boiled prawns, but that steamed prawns would have some strange egg-like consistency in the heads.

Spicy Korean Rice Cakes 떡볶이

I like Korean rice cakes, even though I did not have a chance to enjoy this delightful street food while I was in South Korean, as B1 has a pathological fear of street food, even though South Korea is really clean.

I thought I would make some, because I had some chilli paste I had to use up and I was burning to try them, after buying a bag of the rice cakes at Giant. 

I adapted beyond kimchee's recipe by dumping julienned oyster mushrooms into the mixture instead. Too bad my gochujang is the aged kind, so my rice cakes looked really dark instead.

Shroom Spaghetti

Lots of garlic, cooking cream (it was going for S$3 for 2), mushrooms and bacon were harmed in the making of this dish.

B1 suffered from withdrawal symptoms

Poor B1 must have been suffering withdrawal symptoms. Before we bought the apartment, we were free-wheeling crazy nutcases who don't mind dropping about S$100 on a meal. But now, I have become somewhat of a tight pussy in more ways than one. 

I have been trying to cook at restaurant quality, but sometimes, we miss the kind of stuff we used to eat. I am not as badly affected as Bär und I have been doing a bit of celebration this week (and comforting ourselves as well) with food. 

Last Sunday, while doing some shopping (he treated me to my favorite ice-cream after returning my library books), he suddenly craved some abalone...I said no, since I am the one who usually pays for groceries. 

"I pay." I was flabbergasted. Even though he wanted to pay out of his own pocket, I was like... let's buy some limpets and razor clams instead.

But he insisted, saying he hadn't eat abalone for a while. Eh, didn't we just have that at Chinese New Year's? Oh ja, now to think about it, he went back to his parents' for reunion dinner while I stayed at mine (thus losing my book vouchers *depressed*). Vater feeds me a lot of abalone, especially during the special occasions, so I guess that's why I don't crave it that much. We are a family of gourmands and we all can cook. Vater and brother has this meowish tactic of taking out a sardine can when they think that dinner (cooked by someone else) is poor pickings or not to their taste. To date, I don't like sardines. 

For my insult, I usually rout out an egg, cos I like tomato and egg.

But I digress. So he bought a can, while I stood in the queue with him, casting covetous looks at the can of abalone while having little pinpricks of poverty-driven consciousness. I am guessing the reason why he wanted to eat something expensive, is because he realized I was going to cook him a S$3 frozen chicken.

I tried to cut Mr Abalone as thinly as I could

I found this frozen chicken deal at 2 for $6 (usual price: S$4.50, yeah for me). B1 didn't let me buy more than 2, I had wanted to pile the fridge full. Since we are not always cooking, it does not make sense for me to buy fresh ingredients other than vegetables, as they will no longer be fresh by the time I get to them.

Mr Chicken was frozen, so I decided to stuff and marinate it for hours ago, so that he will have some taste (he did, a lovely garlic-infused flavor). I made two mixtures. One, rosemary, butter, garlic and basil, and tossed some cut shitake mushrooms in olive oil, thyme and basil, for another. After cleaning and drying Mr Chicken, I scored some parts of his skin, and stuffed the garlic from the first mixture under his skin (I was supposed to lift his skin and rub him with the mixture, but I chickened out.

I stuffed his cavity with the mushrooms, blanketed him with bacon before baking him for 1/2 hour in a bed of potatoes and carrots. He came out really juicy, though not as pretty as I would have liked.

The Americans have their Chicken Noodle Soup

The Chinese have their own chicken noodle soup too!

 

I had to do OT one night, so to speed up dinner, I just bought some roast chicken from the delicatessen. Being the stingy cow I am, I recycled the chicken carcass to make a stock, before boiling the leftover chicken slices with cabbage, fishballs and carrots.

Norwegian and salmon

It's a sickness really. I cannot buy salmon without thinking of Norway.

Norwegians and I don't get along well. I am not sure why, but it is the truth. But at least the salmon settles easily in my belly. This salmon was marinated in oyster sauce and honey for two days. It is accompanied by lotus root soup (with black beans and pork belly slices) and bacon and potato stew.

Cheesy Hamburger

This is what happens when you take photos of your cooking many weeks ago and not post immediately. You forget the details of the dish. Argh. I cannot remember what went into this sauce.

One thing I can remember is, dun buy the burger patties from Cold Storage. Very salty. I accompanied the burger with onion rings, baked potato and salad.

Wordless Sunday - A simple dinner

Sundays are always leftovers =D, disguised in other simple meals.

Thai Chicken

I found some lemon grass in the fridge. I had bought them in some weeks ago, thinking that I was going to mince chicken and wrap them around the lemon grass, and cook them thai-style. But I don't have a mincer and I was terribly lazy to mince the chicken by hand (no butcher knife). So =D.... I just cut the lemon grass into the chicken instead, and doused the chicken with soya sauce, sugar, garlic, lots of fish sauce and chilli.

I dumped the chicken in the oven to bake, but it didn't turn out as pretty as I wanted, i.e. caramelized chicken. So in the end I had to fry them on the stove too, which I should have done so in the first place. 

I accompanied this with the wintermelon soup. Hehhe. So you know I have started repeating dishes. Oopz.

My Samgyetang looked more like Chinese version of Ginseng Chicken soup

I questioned the rationale of cooking Samgyetang (which is Korean ginseng chicken soup) on Sunday night, especially when I was trying to force myself to sleep earlier, so that I could work better on Monday. I should have done this on Saturday night, and eat steamboat on Sunday night instead.

Mr Chicken swims in the ginseng soup

I didn't have a soup bowl big enough to hold Mr Chicken

Still I have to admit, dinner was very easy to cook, with Mr Chicken swimming contentedly in the soup for hours, with glutinous rice, dates, and garlic (I forgot pine nuts and added wolfberries *hehe*) inside his belly, until he was easy to tear apart.

We didn't have a big soup bowl, so I ended up using a smaller pot to hold the meat pieces. It came out to two smaller pots, and we drank every drop. B1 was very suspicious of the vegetable dish. He muttered darkly that this was yesterday's leftovers from the steamboat, and was pleasantly surprised to discovered egg tofu (new addition) inside, which he rutted out to eat, leaving behind the sad lettuce leaves.

A lot of butter was harmed in the making of this dish

Now and then I feed B1 better stuff, because he pays for the utilities *keke*. Cannot have him wise up and realize I have been feeding him crappy groceries. 

 

I splurged a little while I was "forever alone"ing at a supermarket in the next town. 

I bought two sirloin steaks at S$16 *heart pain*. I was muttering darkly about how thick the meat was, when the butcher caught me and replied drily "all the same size, madam".

I give you madam.

Anyway, I carried the steaks home carefully but ended up freezing them because we didn't have dinner at home the next day. Can't remember why, but what a waste of the expensive meat. 

Actually cooking them took a lot of coordination with Mr Microwave Oven. I set the oven to 180 degree Celsius and chucked in the purple and red carrots, cashew nuts into the oven to roast. I think purple carrots are very irritating, they left a stain on my beautiful white kitchen counter *infuriating*, despite my being extremely careful with them. So while that's roasting, I boiled some potato halves before frying them carefully in butter so that they become an adorable golden brown. Tinny winny crispy outside and soft inside.

I fried the steaks in butter the next chance I had until they were brown with flavors sealed in. Chucked them into the oven, next to the veggies. I then made my own vinaigrette with olive oil and apple vinegar with a dash of pepper and salt. I tossed the remainder of the mesclun salad and some blueberries with the vinaigrette. B1 was very unadventurous, he pushed the blueberries to the side of his plate.

Why am I, a greedy gourmand who lives to eat, with a dude who eats to live? Tsk tsk.

My first homemade traditional Kimchi

I did a lot of forever alone activities on Saturday. First I soaked my napa cabbage in a salted solution for hours.

this is how they look after 4 hours. Bendable but still crunchy

I was supposed to just go downstairs to buy the missing Korean chilli powder for my kimchi. But the supermarket downstairs only sold ready-made kimchi. So I decided to travel to the next town to buy. Interestingly I realized my location is so friendly I can joy-ride upwards and downwards by one MRT stop just to buy chilli powder. Happiness!

the mixture

So I went upwards, bought some powder at a specialty supermarket then popped over to the arcade to playing Razing Storm. I wanted to play the game by myself to completion. Some polite kiddy came over and asked me if he could play with me. His exact words (looking very anxious yet eager), "Auntie can I play with you, please?"

I supposed I asked for it, dressed in t-shirt, shorts and slippers. But like I said, I had just intended to go to the supermarket downstairs.  So I finished the game (I had to play twice, because the first time I died at the end of stage 3 but ok, since the kid compromised my "finishing the game alone")

I went to the supermarket, bought groceries and hauled them back home. Started working on my kimchi, only to discover that 12ax7 was online. Chucked my kimchi into the fridge to play with him (how is that for loyalty!).

Rubbing the mixture into each leaf

This is how it looks like after I stuffed all the kimchi in

I am not sure why but on the second day I saw water come out of the cabbage. No wonder the mixture was very dry. Anyway, it became wetter and wetter all until 7 days later, when the recipe said it would be edible.

Water came out?

Banchan

I was tired on Saturday so I just dragged some stuff out from the fridge =D. I got to try my kimchi which I made a week ago. It was pretty ok, but B1 said that it does not taste the same. Maybe because I used fish sauce instead of anchovies. =D

B1 was upset though, he said I served him side dishes for lunch. WTF...