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Hainanese chicken rice was one of those things that I had always wished to try cooking, but never got around to it. It seemed all to troublesome. Some time last month however, I decided that trouble or no trouble, I was going to make myself some homestyled Hainanese chicken rice.
I searched around for an authentic looking chicken rice recipe, and settled on the one by Amy Beh. It can be found here. I used a smallish kampung chicken as the meat is usually leaner and more tender. If you ask me, preparing the condiments was a little more troublesome than preparing the chicken and the rice. The [...]
Read More Hainanese Chicken Rice
I absolutely adore the crabmeat squid ink pasta from Valentinos. The richness of the sauce, coupled by the sweetness of the crabmeat – simply heavenly. There are days where I actually crave for that pasta. And there was the day that I craved for it, only to find out that Valentinos was closed. Not for the day, but for the month. The only solution to ease the craving was well, to attempt to create my own crab meat linguine.
I must add here that I’ve attempted this dish before but was not satisfied with the taste. The sauce was a tad bit too watery and lacked the taste [...]
Read More Crab Meat Linguine
We had three lovely couples at our place for dinner the other night. I was racking my brains as to what to cook for a party of eight and decided that the theme for the night shall be “comfort food”. It was a fairly warm night, which was a shame because the menu would have been terrific if it had been a nice cool evening.
We began the meal with some lovely mushroom soup prepared by my hubby. The soup consisted of a mix of brown and white button mushrooms and portabellos. It was rich and creamy, and the added touch of sour cream was just about [...]
Read More Couples Dinner Night
To be honest, I was never a fan of gnocchi. I attribute it to a bad gnocchi experience at one of those pasta restaurants that claim to serve “homemade gnocchi”. The gnocchi I tasted back then was dry and bland, hardly worth remembering. Since then, I avoided gnocchi whenever I see it on the menu. My impression of it changed slightly after a meal at a pizza/pasta place in Sorrento, Italy. It was alot tastier, though it was still a tat bit dry. A week ago, I saw a cooking show on Discovery Travel and Living featuring a gnocchi dish. This gnocchi was made of goat cheese and ricotta [...]
Read More Potato Gnocchi with Pork Mushroom Ragu
This is attempt one at Spanish Paella. The downside? I couldn’t find paella rice at the supermarket. Took the advice of one of the readers on epicurious and substituted brown short grained rice. Big big mistake. It takes twice as long to cook. I would probably use risotto in future, or head to Culina, to attempt to find the correct rice.
Even though the paella took much longer than usual to cook, and I had to change the method of cooking from oven to stove-top, it still tasted mighty good. If I had used the correct rice, it probably would have tasted alot better. Well, well, there’s always attempt [...]
Read More Chicken and Seafood Paella
I had bought a packet of frozen spinach last week, meaning to cook creamed spinach some time this week. When this did not materialise, I decided to do something else with the spinach.
I was too lazy to roll out a crust, and so I decided that this quiche was going to be crustless. To save the trouble of having to cut it up, I decided to bake the quiche mixture in a cupcake tin. I used some aged pecorino cheese in place of gruyere cheese, the typical choice for quiches.
The quiche turned out nicely, though I think it was a tad bit salty, as I forgot that [...]
Read More Crustless Spinach Quiche
My mom-in-law gave us two thick stalks of asparagus today. I decided to make use of some of the left over ingredients that we had to make something rather unique.
What’s that you ask? Well, it’s asparagus wrapped with thinly sliced pork and coated with sesame seeds. These are baked for just 5-10 minutes and they’re really very good. One bite into the asparagus and you taste a varety of flavours. The fragrance of the roasted sesame seeds blended with the pork and the juiciness of the asparagus. Yums. I will definitely do this again, maybe with white sesame seeds.
Ingredients: 12 stalks of asparagus (regular sized ones) [...]
Read More Pork wrapped asparagus with sesame seeds
Mid week Wednesday seems to come by so quickly. Instead of the usual eating out on weekdays (since we’re both too tired to cook), I thought that I’d fix something “simple”. Home cooked food is always healthier anyway. We decided on something Japanese, seeing that we had some japanese ingredients that we hadn’t yet used up. Hubby had been craving for cod since last week and so I figured why not? We can simply merge the two ideas together: Japanese and cod. I didn’t have a recipe for this, but I vaguely remember eating something similar at Ichiban Boshi once, and so I decided to experiment. The result?
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Read More Foil baked butter cod with mushrooms
The 2010 April Daring Cooks challenge was hosted by Wolf of Wolf’s Den. She chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make Brunswick Stew. Wolf chose recipes for her challenge from The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook by Matt Lee and Ted Lee, and from the Callaway, Virginia Ruritan Club. She offered two recipes – one a longer more tedious one, and one a simpler one.
I decided to adopt the more tedious one, seeing how I already had some homecooked chicken broth in the freezer. I replaced the rabbit’s meat with pork. The stew was one of the most flavourful I’ve ever tasted. Hubby thought that it was simply bursting [...]
Read More Daring Cooks April Challenge – Brunswick Stew
I will confess that I’ve never baked bread before. Yes. Me, an avid baker (well, sort of), not baked bread before? Well, that’s because I’ve always been intimidated by the one million steps required to bake bread. The activating of the yeast, the proofing, the punching, the re-proofing. It all seems to tedious. Nevertheless, I really wanted to do something for Easter and so I decided to take the plunge.
I found a basic recipe online and changed a couple of things. It all turned out rather well I would say. The only silly thing I did was that I killed the yeast on the first try – my [...]
Read More Hot Cross Buns
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