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I looked through my shelves recently and realised that there were cookbooks I owned, from which I have never tried a single recipe from. I was determined to conquer at least one recipe from each book (so that I could have the excuse of buying more books), and decided to start on a bread making book – Artisan Bread in Five Minutes A Day.
I bought this book because of it’s interesting descriptions, good reviews, and of course, the hope that bread making could indeed be that simple. Well, I was fooled. It didn’t take five minutes a day. But having said that, the book does offer simple [...]
Read More Sundried Tomato and Parmegiano Reggiano Bread
I didn’t manage to take a decent photo of these cookies when I baked them – the photo that you all see above does not look very appetising but I guarantee you, these are really good chewy cookies.
The slightly modified recipe below is taken from one of my favourite books – Desserts By The Yard. The troublesome part about these cookies is that the raisins (that makes them oh so good) require special preparation. The good part about these cookies is that the dough freezes really well, and can last about a month (or slightly more) in the freezer. When you want to eat freshly baked cookies, [...]
Read More Oatmeal Raisin Cookies
Hubby bought a huge bunch of bananas some time back, and since it’s just the two of us, most of the bananas ripened (or over ripened) before we could eat them. We froze about 8 of them in a box – over ripe bananas freeze well, without their skins of course, and are delicious in all kinds of baked goods.
Seeing that I had some leftover walnuts from the not so recent mooncake making attempts, I decided to try a recipe from the book “The new best recipe“. The recipe is really simple because it does not require the use of a mixer. All the mixing can be [...]
Read More Banana Walnut Bread
What does one do when she has four lemons leftover in the fridge? Think of a dessert to make with them, of course. I came across the recipe below as I was flipping through Alice Medrich’s Pure Dessert. The heading “lemon-basil sherbet” immediately appealed to me because I had two pots of basil growing crazily on the ledge of my corridor. They definitely needed trimming. I made some small changes to the recipe in the book. The recipe (with my changes) is shared below.
The result was a thoroughly refreshing dessert. It was very tangy of course, with some hint of sweetness. The fragrance of the basil definitely [...]
Read More Lemon Basil Sherbet
We had half a packet of brown rice left over from the paella attempt. I looked around for ideas on what to use it for and decided on this. It’s inspired by a recipe found on epicurious; I made several changes to it to suit my taste. The pilaf is really fragrant, thanks to the addition of porcini soaking liquid, butter and some cream. Lemon zest gave it that bit of zing needed to complete the dish.
(Serves 2 as a main) Ingredients:
3/4 ounces dried porcini 1/2 cup hot water
1 cup brown rice 1 cup chicken stock 1 red onion (chopped) 3/4 cup chopped parsley 2 [...]
Read More Brown rice pilaf with porcini
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
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
The October 2009 Daring Cooks’ challenge was brought to us by Jaden of the blog Steamy Kitchen. The recipes are from her new cookbook, The Steamy Kitchen Cookbook.
I made this last Saturday for lunch, to fulfill the Daring Cooks October Challenge. This is my first challenge, and so I was quite excited about it! I had most of the spices, and thankfully, it’s really quite easy to find them in this part of the world. I had some trouble finding the rice noodles though, for some weird reason.
I decided to try the longer version of the recipe, which can be found here. Hubby helped with [...]
Read More Daring Cooks October Challenge – Vietnamese Chicken Pho
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