Good cooking day

I’ve been having lots of bad days lately, and that includes bad cooking days too. But I finally had an ok day in the kitchen today.

Stir fried Canton pineapple beef with rice bento. Going back to one of the first dishes that I learned to cook almost 8 years ago from a HK auntie.

Teriyaki hambagu with stir fried minced pork and long beans with rice. It’s been a while since I’ve cooked teriyaki hambagu, I remember the old days when I used to live with Jo and it was one of her favourite requests. Must cook it for her again some day.

Japanese chicken curry with mixed vegetables and rice bento. Recognise the donkey? It’s the Donkey from Shrek. I hope the rest of the week is better, at least I know there will be nice lunch bentos to look forward to :).

Autumn

It’s finally starting to feel like autumn! The temperature has dropped below 30 degrees, the air is definitely cooler and I even dug out a light coat to wear during the weekend. While I’m glad that the super hot weather is gone *fingers crossed* there’s something a little gloomy about the darker sky, the quietness and the slight chill. Everything suddenly feels a lot more serious.

Now that the weather has grown cooler, I’ve started craving hot sweet desserts such as this hong dao sa (red bean soup) with sago and tang yuan, glutinous rice balls. I’m also wanting to make hot tau fufa with ginger but somehow I’ve never been very successful at it. I will try again this winter.

There was lots of leftover rice which I made into Thai pineapple fried rice the next day. What I like about this dish is the myriad of flavours and textures, there’s the slight sour sweetness from the pineapples, the crunch of cashew nuts, the mild curry flavours and the pungent saltiness of fish sauce.

I had a bad tonkatsu over the weekend. I knew my luck with good Japanese restaurants was bound to run out sometime soon (-___-).  The bad tonkatsu however inspired tonight’s dinner of crumbed chicken fillets with generous lashings of japanese mayo and tonkatsu sauce, japanese potato salad and tofu miso soup.

At least Bad Monday is over (^__^).

Bento days

Sometimes after a long working day, cooking in the kitchen can be a bit of a chore. I love  cooking days when I have the whole day to myself, the kitchen to myself  and all the time in the world to prepare my lunch bentos.

I also love cute bento boxes. When I was in Japan, they had so many pretty bento boxes of different shapes and sizes. I wanted to bring them all home.

Lunch bento with ossobuco and belachan kangkung with rice.

Stir fried chicken with basil, cashew nuts and button mushrooms.

Added with kailan and steamed rice, tomorrow’s simple lunch bento.

It’s been a while since I last made tamagoyaki so they look a bit wonky (^__^).

Teriyaki beef and tamagoyaki rolls with rice lunch bento.

Hooray for bento days!

Orange and blueberry friands

On Monday I cooked the most unauthentic spaghetti and meatballs in the world.

Doesn’t look remotely like Italian pasta right? Actually I was cooking a Japanese style pasta, as in my meatball was really teriyaki braised mini hambagus and my tomato based pasta sauce was mixed with beef stock and and my teriyaki sauce. It was surprisingly pretty good, very light and tasty. I will cook this again.

My lunch bento tomorrow is another Japanese-y dish, miso and mirin marinated pan fried basa fillets with kailan and steamed rice. Healthy or not?

When I told my mother that I was baking friands, she originally thought that I had spelled ‘friends’ incorrectly. Then she realised that I was talking about friands, a popular Australian pastry which is based on the French financier. These little cakes are very cutely shaped, made with almond meal, butter, icing sugar, egg whites and flour.

I only decided to bake them because I sampled a delectable friand over the weekend and discovered that they’re really easy to make and can be baked without using any machines! Yeah, no cleaning! I didn’t have a friand mould so made do with my muffin tray, the friands still came out looking very cute. I mixed orange zest, orange juice and blueberries in my friand mixture, the mini cakes were moist, buttery and yums. Haha, so happy that I found an easy baking recipe.

Nowadays I love being in the kitchen because it means I’m away from work (-___-). Two more days to the weekend …

Baking

Baking in the kitchen, also baking in the hot sun. It is 39 degrees today and I am dying from heat!! Why?!! Why is summer here so soon? Sigh…

The idea of curries, hot food has been off putting, so last night we indulged in a piece of raw salmon and had it sashimi style. Oishii!! It was so nice and best of all, cold …

Anyway, when it wasn’t so hot a couple of days ago, I actually did some baking. This time it was a Japanese Cheesecake. After getting tips from my mum, she said that I was making her ‘itchy’ (I thought people only use that term when playing mahjong!) and she baked one the next day too! Hehe, before you know it, Jan will be baking from her kitchen in London. The cake actually turned out quite good but I was looking for an even softer texture.

After a couple of days in the fridge, the texture is now rather dense and creamy, not so Japanese cheesecake but more Western cheesecake. But never mind, because it’s also cold!

Ok, back to melting and waiting for the thunderstorm to break for the weekend …. (T___T)

Baking Sio Pao with Ah Ma

It was Gloria’s last dinner in Perth before heading to the far far land of Kalgoorlie. She came over to pick up some spare crockery and utensils and stayed for a meal.

Salad was Thai inspired green papaya salad with grilled charsiew chicken. I like the crunchy texture of green papayas, but my personal favourite is the tartness of green mangos.

Entree was tamagoyaki, I love cooking eggs in different methods, steamed in a chawan mushi, or half boiled drizzled with a yummy sauce, but tamagoyaki, sweet egg rolls are possibly one of my favourite ways of eating eggs.

We did have a miso soup as well, so it was a Japanese themed dinner, probably because I was lazy and didn’t want to worry about cooking something new and difficult. Tried and tested teriyaki chicken with mashed avocado mayo is always a hit.

Pear tarte tatin for dessert again? Well sort of, only it was a banana tarte tatin which was nice as well, caramelised banana is yummy, I think I’m going to keep trying this with different fruits until I find a favourite.

This time I finally bought the vanilla icecream and we had it with a slice of tart.

It was Malaysia’s National Day on the 31st, unlike last year where we had a Malaysian themed food gathering, I completely forgot about Merdeka Day this year. I went home thinking ‘what can I cook that is Malaysian?’ I was out of coconut milk, sick of curries, couldn’t think of anything. So I went with simple and had a mee pok instead, not sure whether it’s Malaysian but it did remind me of Kuching a bit.

For dessert we had agar agar, it was orange and gula melaka flavoured. Looked quite pretty but I didn’t like the taste much, I prefer agar agar with coconut milk.

I don’t know how others decide what they’re having for dinner, but my day usually goes like this. (Sitting in the office) ‘hmm… what should I cook today’ (google for recipe) or ‘i think i have chicken in the fridge, something chicken’, then I get an email from my Ah ma telling me that she’s just tried a great siew pao recipe and the skin is flaky and crumbly and all my pre planned ideas are gone. ‘Tonight I’m making sio pao’.

Best of all was smsing my mum on the way home asking for tips on the buns, and then calling home to ask her to explain the exact rolling method. Hahaha, she even directed me to a video to see how it’s done. I noticed that we’ve been swapping recipes and influencing each other to bake or cook the same things. During the same week, my sister in London, my mum and I all made honeycomb cake, and then my mum started baking chiffon cakes. And now I’m making sio paos. The sio paos (literally translated ‘hot buns’ in Hokkien, or ‘shao bao’ in Mandarin) turned out pretty good.

The skin was crumbly and flaky, the filling of chicken, peas, mushrooms and onion satisfied my craving for sio pao. It’s really fun cooking with my mum!

七夕情人节 Chinese Valentine’s

(T__T). (T_____T). (T________T). Ya. The weekend’s over. Sigh.. very sad.

And it was such a nice weekend too. Sunday afternoon was spent sipping green tea poured from the cutest teapot, a Christmas present from my sister many years ago.

Dinner tonight was grilled teriyaki fish which I tried to cook unagi style, basting with sauce and grilling.

Steamed fish paste egg rolls with sweet brown sauce made from chicken stock, sweet soy sauce and mirin.

It’s Chinese Valentine’s Day today. Wendy told me that she was going to make sweet rice dumplings for the festival, I wanted to do something similar, but instead of tang yuen, I did it Malaysian style and made pandan onde-onde instead. Little round glutinous flour balls with hidden melted gula melaka filling and dessicated coconut , nom nom nom. Happy Chinese Valentine’s Day everyone 🙂

4 days and counting to the weekend.

Happy 端午节 Duan Wu Jie

also known as Dragon Boat Festival, and to me the gluttony daitaoha, the day we get to eat zhong zi, bak chang, rice dumplings (^___^)

I trekked a long way to get these rice dumplings, hopefully it will bring some cheer and foodie joy to my family and friends. It’s also Adrian’s birthday today, if you’re reading this, happy birthday, hope it was a great one!

More lunch bentos, hambagu with demi glace, my first attempt at demi glace, it was a very basic and simple version, will try more complex versions in future.

I like chawan mushis for winter. My mother gave me some fabulous mushrooms which just taste great in everything.

Dinner tonight was marinated lamb chops with mash and asparagus. I love tender and crunchy asparagus stalks, if only they weren’t so expensive, I would have them more often.

Banana and marmalade muffins for morning tea/afternoon tea the next day. Aren’t my 100 yen Daiso toothpick thingys cute?

Ok, time to sleep, two more days to the weekend, will it never come?

To Ramen With Love

The only other person I know who might love ramen more than my father is Richard. And I stress on the word ‘might’. Because my father is a huge huge ramen fan, seriously, I think he would have happily eaten ramen for every meal during our Japan holiday.

Myself, I’m not a huge ramen fan, I usually prefer rice over noodles. But ramen in Japan, is really something special.

My sister brought our whole family to the Shinyokohama Ramen Musuem located in Yokohama for some serious ramen eating. I’ll blog about the musuem in a separate post, it was a long trek away but definitely worth it, I would do it again in a heartbeat.

So if this is not about the musuem, what am I blogging about?

Well Richard didn’t make it on the trip, while we were downing bowls and bowls of luscious ramen, I couldn’t help thinking ‘ gosh, he would love this’. So the next best thing I could do (besides eating lots of ramen on his behalf, wuahaha) was … buy him a box of instant ramen from the musuem’s souvenir shop!

These boxes of ramen are only sold in the museum and include ramen from the  famous ramen shops featured in the musuem. I didn’t know which shop to choose from, but ended up choosing this shoyu based ramen because my sister and brother in law highly recommended it, my brother in law  liked the ramen from that shop best during their last visit to the musuem (sadly the shop was no longer in the musuem when we visited).

I bought a slab of pork belly and braised it tonight just for the ramen. Just one bowl, all the way from Japan, would it be anything close to the ramen heaven I had in Japan? I highly doubted it. I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered that the packet containing the broth essence wasn’t in powder form but liquid. A wonderful aroma emerged when we emptied it into our pot of boiling water.

Ta-dah! Ramen and shoyu based broth with thin slices of braised pork belly, strips of crunchy bamboo shoots, spring onion and half boiled egg, the essential condiments in a bowl of ramen.

Verdict from the ramen lover? ‘We need to eat more’. ‘Very good’. ‘I give it 8 out of 10’. He found the texture of the ramen springy and smooth. Fantastic combination with the broth which was flavourful, tasty and gorgeous with the fragrance of the spring onions, crunchy texture of the bamboo and creamy egg. My verdict? So much better than I expected, comparable or perhaps better than my favourite ramen shop in Perth, but in comparison with the real thing in Japan? Of course not as good, but still, really not bad at all. I was impressed.

My only regret? I should have bought more!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Tofu and eggs

I reckon I could live on tofu, eggs and fish for at least a month before getting sick of the combination. Healthy and yummy ingredients. I especially wish we could eat more tofu, but believe it or not, tofu is actually quite expensive here! Sadness.

A new recipe, onsen style eggs which I poached in boiling water for 10 minutes, then cracked on top silken tofu with a dressing made of mirin, soy, sugar and dashi soup stock.

With the rest of the tofu, I dusted with light coating of seasoned plain flour and pan fried till crispy with a drizzle of teriyaki sauce. Packed it with oven baked drumsticks, and half boiled egg for our lunch bento the next day.

I’m still going on my slow cooking soup spree, this one was papaya, huai shan, barley and bamboo shoot leaves soup.

Tomorrow I’m going to try cooking soup with pork ribs instead, I bought a whole pack during the weekend, can’t wait!