Meal planning

One day, I would like to have a dinner table like this. What shall I put on it?

Where to eat - Kelantan

http://eatingasia.typepad.com/eatingasia/kelantan/

Soft boiled eggs

Malaysians Style soft boiled eggs.

This is a real Malaysian breakfast: soft boiled eggs broken into a small bowl with white pepper and soy sauce and a kopitiam, a drink. The toast is a thick home made style bread toast with no crusts and a heavy slathering of margarine. The kaya toast if you feel like celebrating with something sweet is the same thick toast with a generous slathering of butter and a layer of kaya. The toast is then dipped in the egg and the remainder egg eaten with a teaspoon.

It must take great care and precision to produce a precisely soft boil egg for every order. They would have to use timer and a staff member whose job is to only to hang around these eggs. One day, I spotted a yellow tower at a cafe with no burners. It looked like something one would put in a microwave but it looked too tall to fit. I saw eggs in them once. I also saw the customers having our typical breakfast. I put two together and realised the yellow tower made those eggs, but I didn't understand how and specifically how this cafe with no kitchen could produce this.

I finally asked, they confirmed my suspicion, but I still didn't understand how that yellow tower produced soft boiled eggs. I stumbled across the device on the net and found it was this:

It is a soft boiled egg cooker invented by a Malaysian. Typical for a Malaysian invention made in his kitchen in a terrace house in the middle of Cheras. (I am imagining this) It is made with the cheapest materials to make the device most affordable. It is utterly simple in its design and lacks the strong 'designed by a marketing advertising executive' who would have loaded it with accessories and weight to deserve its place in the middle class kitchens of the world. What happened to simplicity?

The most important part of this device is the valve, the only piece of non plastic. This is his story as said in the Star newspaper.

• How did it happen? Back in the days when Datuk Hew Ah Kow was just a lad working as a bulldozer operator in the jungles of Kelantan in 1973, there was little time to keep count of the minutes.
  
  “There were about 20 of us in a lumber camp who liked nothing better than to start the day with half-boiled eggs. The problem was, we always lost track of time, carried away with things like checking the engines and refuelling. So, by the time we got back to our eggs, they were always overcooked,” recalls Hew.
  
  “Young and full of bravado, I took it as a challenge and began to conduct my own experiments, puncturing the bottoms of Ovaltine cans with a nail and filling them with eggs and hot water,” says Hew.
  
  It took a year before Hew found the correct ratio of water to eggs. As he drew closer to a solution, Hew’s tests made him go off eggs. It also affected his colleagues who had to help eat his experiments.
   thestar.com.my
• • Image via Suanie.net
• The effort eventually paid off when one day, a direct-selling stockist rode his Honda Cub into Hew’s work camp and got marooned by the rain, forcing an overnight stay. At breakfast, he got to sample the most perfect half-boiled eggs he had ever tasted.
  
  “It was the camp cook who pointed me out. At first, he came to me and asked if I could give him one of my Ovaltine cans to take home. I said ‘No way.’ Then he asked if I could sell him the prototype so I said, ‘Fine, let me see the money first.’ He returned and gave me RM7,000,” recalls Hew.

Gula Melaka

http://eatingasia.typepad.com/eatingasia/2015/08/on-pursuing-an-obsession-and-getting-nowhere-until-you-do-me-and-palm-sugar-.html

Broad beans and Feta salad

My neighbour grows broad beans for the neighbour over her other side. She said it was his favourite and she grew it in exchange for all the favours he gives her. It made me think that broad beans must be something amazing. 

In Japan, we were once served a burnt broad bean pod. All they did was burn the broad bean shell and all over a barbecue, sprinkled with salt and served on a long plate. We were meant to break into the blackened skin and eat the inside. The way it was presented, I thought I was eating the most wholesome, treasured broad bean. 

So I have been dreaming about a good broad bean recipe, I buy broad beans and managed to get Nathan to like it raw. 

Here is one that I made for my mother's birthday dinner. I cooked roast lamb with lots of roast vegetables - brinjal, tomatoes, zucchini, onions. and needed something green. This wasn't planned so this is what I did:

1 packet Frozen broad beans

1/4 cup Frozen small peas

1/4 packet of Feta cheese block

Sprinkle of dried oregano

Slice the Apple mint leaves finely

Sliced roasted pistachio nuts

Glug of olive oil and lemon juice

Chilli flakes, salt and pepper

Throw the packet of frozen broad beans into boiling water for 5 minutes. 

Then remove, allowing it to cool, then remove the broad bean skin. 

Heat the frozen peas for 1 minute. 

Break up the feta with a fork till it is crumbly. Stir in the oregano to flavour it. 

Leave this to marinade while removing the broad bean skin

Mix the broad bean, peas, and salt. 

Add the lemon juice, feta and fold gently. 

Spread the mint, pepper and chilli all over the top of the salad. Fold them in. 

Sprinkle the sliced pistachios

Serve. 

We could add:

Fried bacon bits

Apple bits

Pitting

Here is a great explanation of what pitting is and how it occurs.

Salt the water after it boils.

"Stainless" steel... isn't actually stainless. The reason it doesn't rust is because there's enough chromium in the stainless alloy. Oxygen, instead of binding with the iron in the steel, preferentially binds with the chromium. This forms a very thin layer, a few molecules thick, of chromium oxide. This layer is called a 'passivation' layer, and it prevents further interaction of oxygen with the underlying metal, thus preventing rusting. Even if you scrub that layer off, it'll reform almost instantly as oxygen encounters fresh chromium.

However, chromium will react with chlorides (chlorine), better and earlier than it reacts with oxygen. So, if there's water with both dissolved oxygen and chlorine in it in contact with stainless steel, and the passivation layer of chrome oxide is scraped away, the chromium will react with the chlorine, leaving the oxygen free to react with the iron and cause rust.

So, what's the fuss with adding salt before your water boils?

Salt is sodium chloride. When you dissolve it, the sodium and chlorine are 'freed' to react. Oxygen dissolves in water (otherwise fish couldn't live). However, the warmer the water, the LESS oxygen (and nitrogen) it can hold. Now you know why all those little bubbles appear on the sides and bottom of a pot of water as you're heating it. That's the oxygen and nitrogen precipitating out because of the heat. Once the water gets near to the point of boiling, there's very little oxygen left dissolved.

So, you can see that salt AND oxygen together in water, along with the tiniest scrape (say, from a metal or even wooden spoon used to stir the water) against the surface of the inside of a stainless steel pot, can result in localized rust, or pitting.

The trick to avoiding that is to ONLY add salt *after* the water has become hot enough for the oxygen to have dropped out of solution. Then, even though a scrape might cause some iron to be exposed, it won't rust ecause there's too little oxygen in the water. And once you clean the pot, that passivation layer will form again in the absence of chlorides and the presence of oxygen.

So, yeah. Only add salt to water you'll be boiling after all the little air bubbles stop forming.

From here

Where to eat? Singapore

Popped rice, straight from the stalk at Teppei