Bookin’; not cookin’

It being  a public holiday and all, I decided to close my kitchen for the day. Instead, I set my sights on checking out some cookbooks and some books on cooks. Reading about cooking can sometimes be just as satisfying as actually cooking. Sometimes.

My first stop was Kinokuniya at KLCC. The selection of cookbooks there is phenomenal and I actually had all the time in the world to look through them. Books for amateur cooks, professional chefs, aspiring professional chefs or just people looking for easy recipes for a dinner or tea party. It’s cookbook haven …

I spotted at least a dozen books I wanted.  But goddammit, none of these books were under RM100. If I got even a few, it would leave me with practically no money to buy any ingredients to cook anything.

Except maybe eggs, cos you can get a dozen eggs for just RM4.

Anyways, I didn’t buy anything. Thankfully, there was a huge booksale going on in PJ — the Big Bad Wolf sale. Heard of it? Well, it was at Amcorp mall and I decided to drive to the book sale and brave the crowds in search of cheaper books.

Have you been to a book sale? Crazy. Scores of people with boxes — big boxes — grabbing books from every aisle. Long lines to look at books, long lines to pay, long lines to get into a long line … you’d think our literacy rates would be pie-high right?

So I went. And I bought four cookbooks — three hard covers that would usually cost at least RM120 each — and three crime novels all for just RM80.

And there wasn’t that big a crowd.

And it took me just 10 minutes to pay for my books.

See that Anita sarawak book in the top left corner? No, didn’t get it though it was an interesting browse. See the Smiths picture book, top right? Nope, didn’t get that one either.  Got the rest though And now I am having the time of my life going through them.

Exciting new recipes, revelatory new old recipes (new ways of cooking classics), beautiful pictures … it’ll take me a couple of days to begin to digest these treasures but I can’t wait to start cooking again.

Say thanks with pie

Thursday's Sweet treat

Thanksgiving is a very American celebration. Way over here in the hot and wet tropics, I have no real business bloggin about Thanksgiving. So I won’t.

But, what do I do when most of the food blogs I have visited in the last few weeks and the food magazines I have recently bought are  filled with Thanksgiving recipes?

Heck, it would take an iron will not to want to try  at least one of the recipes.

Decided to start with the most obvious. The Pumpkin Pie. Only I made a small pie because not many people I know like pumpkin and I’d probably have to end up eating most of it myself. Ermmm, I don’t think that’s wise.

So I looked up quite a few recipes for Pumpkin Pie and decided to stick with dependable (except when in jail — KIDDING; I honestly do like her)  ol’ Martha.

Here’s the recipe for the easiest pumpkin pie I’ve ever tried (and incidentally the first).

♣Hooray for Pumpkin Pie

(for the dough)

2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1 tsp salt

1 tsp sugar

1 cup  cold (2 sticks) unsalted butter, cut into pieces

1/4 to 1/2 cup ice water

Mix together flour, salt, sugar. Add butter and mix with your hands till crumbly. Sprinkle the ice water until dough is crumbly but can hold together. Press onto a pie dish and chill in the fridge for at least 30 mins.

(for the filling)

2 large eggs

3/4 cup packed light-brown sugar (you might want to taste the pumpkin first cos some are sweet enough and don’t need as much sugar)

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons cinnamon

13/4 cup solid-pack pumpkin

1 cup milk

Just whisk everything together till smooth and pour it onto the pie crust.

Bake (180 C) until it sets  – about 50 mins or so. Cool and eat or chill it for later.

Autobots, (egg) roll out

It’s easy to be ambitious at 10am. Planned to make some sambal puffs for dinner seeing that I had plenty of left over sambal from a couple of days ago. But after returning from lunch at about 3pm, laziness began to set it. It was beginning to rain and I decided to chill in front of the TV to watch the deliciously sarky and slightly twisted Dr House terrorise some patient or other. Season Six of House MD rocks, btw.

I thought I’d watch one episode and then start on my puffs. Fat fat hopes. After three episodes, I made my way to the kitchen … to put my defrosting shortcrust pastry right back into the freezer. Puffs for another day … dinner would have to be something simple.

What’s simpler than egg rolls? Not much really. You can fill em with almost anything and they’ll still taste yummy.

The egg bater has chilli flakes and dill, salt + pepper

I used the sambal this time around but I sometimes stir fry mushrooms, bean sprouts, carrots and capsicum in light soy sauce or mushrooms in a low fat cream sauce. It’s hard to go wrong really unless you decide to stuff em with Apples or whipped cream. Now that’s whack.

Plump looks good on rolls

I pie with my little eye…

I just finished watching Julie and Julia and what can I say, I’m inspired.  I too have a job that’s quite a drag (at times, now especially) and I too desperately need to find something I look forward to doing every day that I love. No No No … I ain’t saying I’m anything like Julie Powell and, my goodness, definitely not Julia Childs. Cooking  is such therapy and it was delightful watching the two protagonists immersed in their cooking; although I wonder how Julie Powell could afford paying for all the ingredients to sustain her project — to cook all 524 recipes in Childs’ book in a year. She is, after all, a government worker and lives with her husband in a tiny apartment in Queens, NYC. And we know how much groceries cost … cheese alone, I swear, will bankrupt me soon enough. Anyways .. if you’re familiar with Julia Child, you’ll know that she’s a fantastic primary resource for anyone who wants to cook. I think she was probably the first cook who actually embraced mistakes …. nothing is uncorrectable (is that even a word).

This isn’t a movie review (though my faith in Nora Ephron is once again restored).  Am just saying you can’t possibly watch the movie and come away not wanting to either cook and cook and cook or eat and eat and eat. Incidentally, in an interview with Salon.com, Ephron says there were “enormous amounts” of food on set all the time as they had eight (yes eight) of every dish shot!

Anyways, I digress. To be kind to my hips, I chose the former.

So right after the credits rolled, I made my way to my kitchen, heated up my oven and baked me a pie. Not a Julia Child recipe — she’s pooh pooh it I am sure — but a easy to bake, healthy vegetable pie. Made one with a crust and another without. And I topped both with a dollop of cream cheese.

To watch the real Julia Childs on my fav Letterman, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHX0pv8_JOE&feature=related

So wonderful

What a wonderful movie. What a wonderful story. I wish it were my own.

Go watch it – whether or not you love to cook! I bet you’ll run out and buy yourself some butter …

Easy but not sleazy

Char Keow Teow... vege style

As a kid, Sundays were were the best days. Apart from school holidays, that is.

First great thing bout Sundays — we got to wake up late. Late, of course, meant 9am because though we didn’t have to go to school, we (my  sister, brother and me) had to take turns accompanying our folks to the Dato’ Keramat market in Penang to help carry the week’s supplies. I didn’t mind really as I loved going to the market. The noise, the crowds, the stacks and rows of vegetables, watching the butcher cut slices of  meat, weigh them and wrap them up … it was a heady experience. Heck, I’d often come home and re-enect the experience. I’d offer to help my mum put away the vegetables in our old Kelvinator and in the process  pretend I was a vege vendor! Hey, I was young.

Anyways, after marketing, we’d stop at the food stalls outside the market to buy breakfast home — the second great thing about Sundays. Buying breakfast was a treat indeed. No bread. No corn flakes. Sundays, we got to buy anything we wanted for breakfast. We all had our favourites. Wan Tan Mee and Kueh Kak and Yau Char Kwai were top choices. As was Char Kuey Teow (CKT).

You can argue all you want but, to me, the best street food is in Penang.

Many CKT fans claim that the succulent prawns and the kerang are what gives the CKT it’s flavour. I beg to differ because if  this were true, vegetarians would be an unfortunate lot, never able to taste the wonder of a great plate of CKT. What really gives CKT its distinctive flavour is the way its cooked — in a wok over a very hot flame. Chilli paste is necessary as is soy sauce and for vegetarians, mushroom sauce. Bean sprouts are a must and chives or kucai, and eggs. I added some very thinly sliced fried tofu too. But it’s important, I think, too keep it simple.

Well, it’s been a really long time since I left Penang. Feeling nostalgic though (it’s the rainy weather I tell ya), I decided to revisit my childhood, beginning with a CKT brunch (home made though) after a visit to my neighbourhood wet market.

Friday Dinner Wars.

It’s the end of the year and, as always, I find myself having to clear all my leave days. No complaints as that means I have 4 day weekends till the end of the year…yippee.

For my first Friday off, I decide d to clear up my fridge and use whatever I had in there to cook dinner.

Here’s what I found. Two pieces of chicken (the real deal — I do cook the occasional non-veg meal for my partner, though since I don’t taste it, he sometimes has to eat low sodium meals); some shitake mushrooms, leftover vegetarian ham, 2 eggs, some frozen potato wedges, half a bottle of pitted black olives, remnants of some shredded cheddar cheese and half a leek.

Decided to go Western. Simple Western. It was Breaded Chicken Chop and wedges for the meat eater and an egg crusted pizza for me. Yum.

Since this is  a vege blog and since I technically have no business talking bout non vegetarian food, I’ll stick to talking bout the vege pizza.

Actually, it’s not really a pizza. It’s a modified frittata: cooked pretty much the same way only slight modifications so it doesn’t fluff up. The egg remains at the base and kinda looks like a crust — expecially if you load it with lotsa yummy toppings.

My toppings were simple: mushrooms (lots of them) and vegetarian ham. Oh, and cheddar cheese. Lotsa of it too.

First, in a little butter, fry the veg ham until they have a lilght brown crust — about 5mins or so. Then, drop a tablespoon of butter into the skillet. When melted and hot, add leeks and sweat them out. add musrooms and let them brown. Add 1 tbsp (this depends entirely on whether you are a spice girl (or guy) or not.) of chilli paste and mix well.

Beat two eggs with about 2 tbsp of milk, season. Pour the egg mixture into the skillet. Leave for a couple of mins and stir the egg around with a wooden spoon to spread the contents evenly around. Make sure the egg mixture covers the surface of the skillet. Leave to cook (low fire) for 2 mins then cover. Cook for another 5 – 7 mins. Add cheese on top. Cover and cook for a further 2-3 mins. remember low flame or the base of your egg crust will turn to charcoal.

Turn heat off. Transfer to plate and voila, you have an egg crust pizza. No carbs, no guilt. Lovely.

Oh and if you’re wondering, the chic chop turned out alright. A polished plate is a good sign , dontcha think?

 

FYI, I had to include pictures of the polished plates — both of em.

Let’s Samba-l

Sambal. I swear  sambal is among the best food creation ever thought up. Being a vegetarian though, I can’t eat a lot of the sambal from the roadside stalls or restaurants because they usually contain shrimp or ikan bilis. So, the only thing to do, is make my own. It has taken me a long time to get it right. I still haven’t got the perfect concoction but the wonderful thing about experimenting is the things you come up with along the way.

En route to the perfect vegetarian sambal, I’ve come up with a vegetarian fish sambal that’s good as a side dish or condiment.

There’s some prep involved, mostly in making the chilli paste so, make extra which you can freeze and use again in the future.

♣ Chilli paste (Extra portion)

25 dried chilli, cut and blanched in hot water for 5 mins

2 medium onions, roughly chopped

2 garlic cloves

dash of oil

generous pinch of salt

Blend or pound. What I did: blend the mix roughly and then pound it in mymortar and pestle so it got super fine.

Super spicy Vege Fish sambal

Hot Hot Hot

1/2 a slab of veg fish ham (The “Fish” ham  is a 2.5 in  by 1 ft slab of sea-weed covered soy) See collage atop page.

2 large onions, chopped small

2 – 3 tbsp oil or butter

1/2 to 3/4 cup chilli paste

handful of roughly ground roasted peanuts

1 tbsp kicap

2 tbsp tomato kechup

salt and pepper

Pan fry veg fish (sliced) till golden. Remove and drain. Cool and mash roughly.

Heat oil, fry onions till soft. Add chilli paste fry till fragrant and oil floats above paste. Add veg fish mash and mix well. Add nuts and the rest of the ingredients and cook till it thickens, but don’t let it dry up.

Remove from heat and let cool. It’s sooo good you can eat it on it own (like Gardenia). Or, you could put it in between two slices of  bread and have a sambal sandwich. Yesterday, I used it to cook my Sambal Scambled Egg.

Scramble egg sambal style

Kitchen dreams

I love my kitchen. I do I do I do. After years and years  of dreaming, planning, wishing, saving, looking longingly at magazines and IKEA catalogues and then some more dreaming, I finally got my dream kitchen in June.

It took two months (actually five years and two months) of planning and researching, a month of renovation work and a helluva lot of money but it was all worth it.

First, I treated myself to an island in the centre of my kitchen. Measuring 4ft X 3ft, it serves as a workspace for my prep work, a table for my morning tea and newspaper ritual and also storage as it has open shelves, cupboards and drawers.

Next, space. My kitchen used to be a tiny, made for one and only one cook space. There was hardly any places for storage, barely room to move around and it was no place to hang out in. Too small. Too dark. What I did — got rid of the adjoining store room (which contained accumulated junk only) and extended the kitchen to more than double it’s original size.

Colour: I have always loved terracotta but you  can’t have terracotta tiles unless you have a fairly big space. Thanks to my expansion, I could floor my kitchen with terracotta and I used it as the surface of my island too.

I also painted my old-school kitchen door fire engine red! Woo hoo.

I never fully realised how much a nice kitchen could  inspire me. I loved to cook before but now, I am driven to try new things all the time. I spend a lot of  my time at home in my kitchen — I have a TV and a DVD in there so I don’t have to sacrifice my TV watching.

Did I already say how much I love my kitchen? Cos I doooooooooo.

Ssss-Creaming good, I tell ya.

Cream puff with herbed cream cheese.

I love cheese. Who doesn’t love cheese? Creamy white, sunny yellow, smelly and blue … love them all.

While leafing through an old recipe book I swiped from my aunty (she got it as a gift from some students way back in 1968) and my eyes rested on a  recipe for cream puffs a.k.a profiteroles that seemed too straightforward to be true.

Bored and feeling a tad fearless (could it be the wee shot of single malt I had a while before?), I decided to try it. After all, I  had all the ingredients — all 5 of them (water, butter, eggs, salt and baking powder).

Instead of a custard or cream filling (as recommended by the recipe) ,  I decided to go with cream cheese.  Oh Yumm.  I whisked the cheese after adding  some herbs — dill and parsley — a sprinkling of paprika and a coupla drobs of lemon juice.

♣ Simply delicious cream cheese puffs (makes 10)

1 cup boiling water

2 oz butter

1 cup all purpose flour

2 tsp baking powder

pinch of salt

herbs

Whisk flour and salt. Boil water and butter until well mix and then add in the salt and flour. Stir till  the mixture comes off the sides of the pan. Remove from heat, let cool for 5 mins or so.

Add the eggs, one at a time and then the baking powder and herbs and stir well until you begin to see air bubbles form in the pastry.

Using an icing bag, squirt out small blobs of the mix (about 50 sen coin) on a lined baking tin. The pastry will puff out so don’t squirt them too close to one another.

Bake at 180 C to 200 C for about 40 mins. After 20 mins, take em out and poke a small hole through so the insides cook quickly as well.

Filling

A cup of cream chesse, softened

tsp each of dill and parsley

Mix and fill!

Stuff yourself silly and watch some telly.