Roast Radishes

the one vegetable you need to make now: roasted radishes

Author: Emilie Raffa
Serves: Serves 2

Ingredients

1 bunch of rainbow radishes

olive oil, for coating

lemon pepper seasoning, to taste

1 pat of unsalted butter


Instructions

• Preheat your oven to 425 F. Line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper.  

• To prepare the radishes, remove the leafy green tops and save for another recipe (they're great tossed into a mesclun salad). Halve the radishes lengthwise through the root. 

• Arrange the radishes onto the baking sheet. Coat lightly with olive oil. Season with lemon pepper, to taste.

• Roast for about 10-20 minutes, depending on size. Check at the 10 minute mark; insert a paring knife into the center of a radish. If it pulls out easily, they're ready. If not, cook for a little bit longer.

• To serve, toss with the butter while still warm.

• Enjoy right away

Taiwanese tomato omelette

I have tended to make this dish using the same method as magic eggs. I have tended to be disappointed with the result as the tomato dilutes the taste of the omelette and chilli. In fact I mentioned this to the lady with the stroke. She said she loved tomato omelet and wanted to make it that day. And Oh! it was a different recipe. 

Slice the tomatoes into 8 wedges.

So beat 3 eggs.

Heat some oil.

When it is piping hot, add the eggs. Swirl the pan, but don't mix the eggs. I think we are looking for the bottom to be well cooked and a little brown. It gives the flavour. 

When it is almost cooked through turn the eggs/omelette over. 

Add the tomato wedges and stir, breaking up the egg.

Add soy sauce for flavour. 

Add chopped spring onions

I haven't tasted it yet. 

Ma Po Tou Fu

I have been cooking for a lady who had a stroke. She has always cooked for the family, and now since her stroke, she cannot use her right hand very well. She is very upbeat about her disabilities and tries to do as much as she can. We are a great team - she the instructor and me the willing doer. Our chats while things are getting done is throughly gossipy.

I am learning a new style of cooking. She hardly uses garlic. The onions come from spring onions added in the end.

She uses a soft tofu that is not the silken type and not the hard chou tofu. After cutting into 1 cm cubes, it is put into salted boiling water until the water boils again. The tofu is then strained, it remains firm.

Heat a little oil, and fry the meat. I fried onion/garlic/ginger before adding the meat. But I think this is unnecessary. The next time I will probably double cook the meat. I shall wash the meat in hot water, remove and strain then add it to the oil to fry.

Add the boiled tofu and heat with the meat for a few minutes before adding soy sauce and the Taiwanese Chilli Bean sauce.

Coat the sauce thoroughly through the meat and tofu. Allow it all to heat and cook through. 

Add chopped spring onions and serve

Another tip I learnt from her: When cooking ready made frozen jiaoza, put it frozen in cold water to boil. When the water starts to boil, add a cup of cold water and let it boil again. When it boils the second time, it is cooked. I think this way, the skin is less likely to break. 

Aubergine Baigan

Watched this video yesterday while searching for Fried Aubergine Marsala. It looks simple enough, had most of the ingredients and I tried it out.

I chopped the onions, and heated the pan with more oil than I normally use.
Threw in the onions, cumin and fenugreek - I forgot he used mustard seeds too.
I chopped the aubergine and salted in while the onions were softening.
I should have left the onions caramelise a little bit but I thought the aubergine would take a while to cook.
As it flavoured the oil, I threw in the aubergine and let it cook. I added some curry leaves.
I prepared the next few ingredients.
When it looked half cooked I added the
 - chilli powder, tumeric powder
 - crushed ginger and garlic (should have added this earlier)
 - chopped tomatoes and 1/4 chilli
 And gave it a stir
I didn't have coriander leaves so I added rice vinegar.

I think this recipe needed some tamarind water. But thats often not in my pantry. The tomatoes were a good substitute. It doesn't often work for me, however, I think the ginger and garlic made up for it.

I cooked cumin lamb for the family. This went fantastically with it.

Cumin lamb you say? How was that made?

Just marinade slivers of lamb (lamb chops cut across the grain) of lamb in
 - crushed ginger
 - powdered cumin
 - dark soy sauce
 - tiniest cooking wine
 - tiniest bit of chinkiang vinegar
 - salt
Leave it for 30 minutes, or while I cooked the other accompaniments

Heat wok and oil in it till its quite hot
Add chopped garlic
Add the marinated lamb
When the lamb is half cooked
Add long slices of onion and 1/4 chilli
Stir it
Let the water come out and evaporate
Let it sit for a while to reabsorb the tastes.

Eat with Aubergine Baigan.!!

Next time - add the coriander leaves.

Asparagus with Hard-boiled egg vinaigrette

A small challenge to find this recipe. It got me annoyed that I get so many generic search results from google, none of which has heard of a hard boiled egg vinaigrette. Yet it is so healthy and delicious. Makes any vegetable taste fullsome and edible just on its own. What a lunch it could be.!

So I found this on http://foodnouveau.com/recipes/sandwiches/asparagus-with-hard-boiled-egg-vinaigrette/ but, just in case this recipe/website disappears, I copied and pasted it. It sounds great. the addition of the chilli's.

Serves 2 as a main or 4 as an appetizer 

Kosher salt or fleur de sel
2 scallions, white and light green parts separated and finely sliced
1 tsp [5 ml] red wine vinegar
2 hard boiled eggs, peeled
1 tsp [5 ml] Dijon mustard
1/3 cup [80 ml] extra-virgin olive oil
1 tbsp [15 ml] capers, rinsed and dried
Pinch dried chili flakes
2 tbsp [30 ml] handful of fresh, flat leaf parsley leaves, chopped
1 lb [450 g] asparagus, peeled if needed, trimmed and cooked to your liking

In a small bowl, pinch together 1/4 tsp [1.25 ml] salt with the white part of the sliced scallions. Once the scallion begins to release some juice, stir in the red wine vinegar and set aside.

Separate the egg yolks from the hard boiled eggs. Place one egg yolk in a medium bowl. Chop the other egg yolk and egg whites separately, and keep both aside for later.

Mix the Dijon mustard into whole egg yolk until smooth. Using the back of a spoon or fork, beat in 1/3 cup of the olive oil in a thin, steady stream. Once emulsified, stir in the vinegar and white scallions.

Add the reserved egg whites to the sauce, along with the capers, the chili flakes and most of the parsley. Taste and season with salt and pepper as needed. If the sauce seems too thick, loosen with the extra olive oil.

To serve, arrange the cooked asparagus on a plate. Spoon over the sauce, then garnish with the chopped egg yolk, reserved parsley and scallion greens.

Note: This asparagus makes a fine tartine topping (as pictured). If desired, toast two large slices of whole wheat sourdough bread, then top with the asparagus and the hard-boiled egg vinaigrette.


Recipe Credit: Seven Spoons

Hainanese Chicken Rice video

Its amazing how he leaves the whole chicken in boiling water and it cooks completely through. 

I am learning here how to loosen up the chicken before cooking, it softens the meat. And interesting how he treats the rice before cooking it. It is the same way I have learnt rice has to be cooked. 

There is a thermomix recipe for chicken rice. It puts the a stock on the bottom, the rice over the stock to cook, the chicken over both so the juices drop into the rice, and a vegetable can be cooked on a top layer if we could fit it all in. What an idea! I don't have a thermomix and I don't intend to get one. But I wonder if this method would work in a pressure cooker. I am thinking this because we have a deep pressure cooker which could hold different layers. After all the preparation, it might take minutes to cook. Just let it come to pressure and switch off. The one thing missing from this thermomix method is the ginger / garlic / onion oil essential to this dish. Perhaps we could use it in the preparation of the rice and let it mix with the chicken and stock through the steam. 

Anyway, the kids love chicken rice. The most important part (not here) is the chilli sauce that goes with it. I'll have to add a how to do that video part later. 

Mould: how safe can the food be?

Burning question: If you cut mould off food, is it then safe to eat?

First posted 17 May 2017 at 10:20 am

You're hanging out for a sandwich, but your heart sinks when you find the cheese is sporting a blue and white bloom and the bread is covered in white fluffy spots.

Can you attempt a rescue operation by cutting off the mould or should the whole lot go in the bin?

The answer to some extent depends on how you balance your approach to a potential health risk versus your desire to avoid wasting food.

If the cheese is a hard cheese, it's probably safe just to cut the bad bit off, says Dr Ailsa Hocking, of CSIRO Agriculture and Food.

The bread though, is probably better off thrown away, she believes.
Assessing the risk

It's not just an awful taste you're risking if you eat mouldy food.

Actively growing mould can release toxins into food.

Since the spread of the tiny mould tips is not always visible, it might be hard to know where it (and hence the toxin) is.

So how do you decide what to do when you haven't got a food safety expert on hand?

The low moisture content and dense structure of hard cheese means mould will usually survive only on the surface, rather than spreading invisibly into the cheese, Dr Hocking says.Two factors that should guide you are the moisture content of the food and how densely it's structured, Dr Hocking says.

So it should be safe to cut around the affected area and eat the rest of block. But she advises cutting with a margin of a couple of centimetres, just to be on the safe side.

But many other foods, including mouldy bread, are better off thrown away as the mould is more likely to be growing beyond the areas you can see.

Also, if a food like yoghurt is old enough to have mould, it might also contain harmful bacteria which could cause a bout of diarrhoea.

"If you can see a mould growing, there can be other microbes such as bacteria and yeast in the food as well. It's really not worth making yourself sick," Dr Hocking says.

Low-acid foods such as dairy products – think yoghurt, cottage cheese, dips – are the foods where this risk is greatest.
What's the concern?

There are many different types of moulds that can grow on our food; the most common include Aspergillusand Penicillium, and Botrytis which you might see as a fur on your strawberries.

So what do toxins from such moulds do to us?

One elderly man who became ill after eating canned soup contaminated with mould was reported in the Medical Journal of Australia as saying he felt so sick, he thought he would die.While it's rare, they can cause severe illness with symptoms including excessive sweating, tremors, muscle weakness, twitching, headache, fever, and vomiting.

Most toxins from moulds are heat-resistant and so may not be destroyed in the cooking process.

Eating mouldy food has also been known to cause illness in livestock and to kill dogs.

Domestic dogs are at particular risk when they have access to household waste.

But most toxins from moulds are only a risk if we eat them over a long period of time.

A lot of these compounds are carcinogenic, and ongoing exposure has been linked to liver cancer, Dr Hocking said.

That would be very unlikely to happen in Australia, where we have very strict food production standards.

But it is seen in developing countries where communities sometimes inadvertently use grain which is contaminated with mould.
What's safe?

If it's mouldy soft cheese, casserole leftovers or soft fruit like say berries, nectarines or peaches, it pays to know the high moisture content of these items means there is a greater chance branches of the mould have grown deeper into the food, where you won't necessarily be able to see them, Dr Hocking says.

The same rule goes for porous foods such as bread and cakes which have become mouldy. All of these foods should be binned if you spot mould on the surface.

Of course, certain domesticated moulds are deliberately introduced into our food as part of the production process — think blue cheese, for example.

While these are safe to eat, if a soft cheese that has been made with domesticated mould starts growing other types of mould, it should be discarded. (It can be tricky to tell, but Dr Hocking suggests looking out for any patches that are a different colour from the rest of the cheese.)
The jam and jelly debate

You can try to scoop off the affected jam, but its wobbly consistency means you risk dislodging air-borne spores that all moulds produce, that can float around, settle and start a fresh crop of mould.One area of some debate is whether fruit jams and jellies can be rescued if they have developed mould on their surface.

The US Food Safety and Inspection Service says moulds on jam could be producing toxins and the whole lot should be discarded.

However, Dr Hocking expects Australian jams would have a lower moisture content and are therefore less of a risk.
To eat or not to eat?

Moulds can grow in the fridge and will even survive freezing. They can also survive in salty, sugary and acidic environments.

As mould on our food is so hard to avoid, here are some general guidelines from the US Food Safety and Inspection Service on responding to the problem:

Discard all of these foods if mouldy:

• Luncheon meat, bacon, and hot dogs. 
• Yoghurt, sour cream and soft cheese. 
• Soft fruits and vegetables 
• Bread and baked goods. 
• Peanut butter, nuts and legumes. 
• Jams and jellies - but note Dr Hocking has a slightly different view for Australian jams. 

These foods can be saved from mould:

• Hard salami (the dry, aged type) – scrub mould from the surface. 
• Hard cheese – cut off at least 2.5 centimetres around and below the mould. Don't let the knife touch the mould and recover the cheese with fresh wrap. 
• Firm fruit and veg – small mould spots can be cut off 

Canned Tuna

A few months ago I had an annaphalactic shock. I was cooking, handling many foods potentially allergenic. All of them were not previously allergic to me. I was making tuna fish cakes with egg in it and feeding the dogs chicken.  So the concern was that I might have had been handling bad tuna.

What is bad tuna? Big fish are known to have heavy metals contained in their flesh due to the pollution in the sea surrounding them. The bigger the fish, the older it is, and the longer it has been in the polluted sea around it, the more polluted the sea it is caught in the worse it is.

In the end, I found I am not allergic to tuna. Though I did look out for tuna from different parts of the world. This is my collection.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scombroid_food_poisoning

Nasi goreng kerabu

Nasi goreng kerabu

Bahan-bahan : 

1 mangkuk nasi putih
*1 inci halia (saya lebihkan)
*1/2 inci lengkuas
*1 sb lada hitam
*1 batang serai - dihiris
*2 biji bawang merah
3 hiris Ikan masin talang
Minyak untuk menumis 

Cara-cara:
1. Tumbuk bahan yang bertanda *
2. Goreng ikan masin talang dan pecah-pecahkan.
3. Kemudian masukkan bahan tumbuk tadi. Goreng hingga naik bau.
4. Akhir sekali masukkan nasi. Goreng sebati. Enak dimakan panas-panas.
**sesuai untuk ibu-ibu dalam pantang untuk panaskan badan

Share Supaya Tak Hilang.
Sila Comment "Mohon Share"
dan tekan Share Untuk Aktifkan Newsfeed

Jaffna Kool

Plus

Mouth-watering Jaffna offerings By Smriti Daniel When she left Jaffna on her husband’s arm as an 18-year-old, Sathanithi Somasekaram took with her the secrets of her mother’s kitchen – she carried the recipes of curry powder and kool, the bruised pink of the Rasavalli pudding, and the delicacy of the milk rotti in her head. When she finally put them to paper, her book “Jaffna Cookery” became one of the few compilations of authentic Jaffna recipes, and a compendium of the tastes of her childhood. Coconut and palmyrah make many an appearance, but so do drumsticks and eggplant. Ejaz Ahamed Sathanithi Somasekaram: Putting together the secrets of her mother’s kitchen Jaffna cuisine is above all famous for its use of the fresh seafood that abounds along those coasts. The soup known as Kool is among the region’s signature dishes. “Everyone likes it,” says Mrs. Somasekaram, explaining that the dish is a meal in itself. Its unique flavour results from a slew of mouth watering ingredients. Crab, fish, cuttlefish, prawns and crayfish create a seafood broth into which Mrs. Somasekaram adds long beans, jak seeds, manioc and spinach. With hints of tamarind, the entire dish is thickened with the help of palmyrah root flour. Mrs. Somasekaram’s book includes pictures of some signature dishes. In a layout for lunch, red rice accompanies a set of curries that appear to conform to the standard rice and curry menu that is so common across the island. A closer inspection however, provides something of a surprise. The clear liquid is bone rasam. Made with mutton bones, the light, peppery broth is superb with rice and fried fish and is often drunk plain to clear the nose and the sinuses. Explaining that she, like most Jaffna cooks prefers to use boneless chicken, Mrs. Somasekaram says she uses the bones to make a spicy chicken rasam as well. Consistency occasionally decides the category to which a dish belongs – a curry is typically thicker than a kulambu, and a kulambu is thicker than a sodhi. Other dishes have their own story. She is particularly fond of the white, round eggplants that grow in certain parts of Jaffna. “These are good for white curries and we use green chillies instead of red chillies to make it very hot,” she says. Her table also holds a fairly straightforward dhall curry, a tart tomato kulambu and a vallarai sambal which is essentially her take on a gotukola sambal. While her book includes recipes for eggplant and ash plantain sambols, the more adventurous gourmands might be drawn to the range of dishes known as varai. In these finely chopped or minced ingredients are tossed with coconut, green chillies, mustard seeds, red onions, turmeric powder and curry leaves to create a distinctive dish. A good varai is light and flavourful, with each ingredient providing a distinct flavour. Though finely minced the primary meat or vegetable remains firm on the tongue and is never reduced to mush. Shark meat varai uses the tough, distinctive meat in a dry mix, but you can also use prawns, drumsticks, leeks, drumstick leaves and even plantain flowers to create the same dish. Mrs. Somasekaram finds room for several drumstick-based recipes in her book, in part because she remembers them being a staple food in her childhood. “Every home would make murunga (drumstick) curry in different forms – one day with prawns, one day in a sambhar, one day in curry, one day in varai...” she says reminiscing. For her the dry stalks that are up for purchase in Colombo are but pale imitations of those at home. Explaining that most families grow them in their backyards, she says “Jaffna murunga are fleshy and long, here it is like a stick...very hard.” Her recipes are enhanced by conversation with her, placing them in their rich socio-cultural context. For instance, among her desserts is the dish known as kolukattai – when a groom’s family goes to meet the bride’s side for the first time, the dish is taken along to serve as a sweet, beginning a new relationship. Of the two recipes for curry powder that she provides in her book, one is without chillies. It is said to be best suited for invalids and to nursing mothers – the mix is said to stimulate the flow of nourishing milk. Pulich Canji or sour porridge is good for those burdened with a cough or cold. Her subtly flavoured tamarind rice, a favourite with her family, has its own tale. As a young girl, Mrs. Somasekaram recalls making the annual pilgrimage to Nagadipa with her family – their menu for the trip rarely changed. Tamarind rice, known as Puli Chaadham, and ginger pachadi and brinjal fried in gingili oil were always taken around, because all three would survive the long trip, unrefrigerated. The fried brinjal is a favourite with Jaffna schoolchildren who take it to school with another signature dish – pittu. The dryness of this combination is rarely to the liking of the adults who prefer their pittu with curry or perhaps laced with fish as in shark pittu. Traditionally made with rice flour and scraped coconut, the dish is steamed so that the small flakes and nodules of the rice flour separate. A variation on the recipe produces a sweeter milk pittu. Soon, Mrs. Somasekaram and her family will celebrate the Tamil New Year, giving thanks to the sun for a good harvest with jaggery pongal – a sweet rice dish often eaten with the fat, sturdy kolikuttu plantain. Should you wish to sample a sweet mouthful yourself in a city where very few places serve authentic Jaffna food, cooking at home might be your best option. Priced at 499/- and published by Vijitha Yapa, Jaffna Cookery is available at all leading bookstores. Jaffna fast food Ejaz Ahamed is in the process of constructing a chain of restaurants that serve Jaffna cuisine. He intends to offer an option to more pricey venues like Hotel Renuka’s Palmyrah with his own Yaal. Located on Colombo’s Marine Drive, the restaurant features almost spartan interiors and an ocean view. Your food is served up by chefs from the region and at very modest prices. “There’s a demand,” says the hotelier, explaining that Yaal will soon be a chain, with a new outlet in Pettah. Among his five chefs are men with considerable experience, says Mr. Ahamad, proud of his distinctive menu that includes favourites like Jaffna style crab curry (Rs.200), kanawa (cuttlefish) curry (Rs.180) and Thirukkal Pittu (Rs.150) made with flying fish found in Jaffna. Also on offer is idiyappam and sodhi (5 for Rs.40) but its popularity pales in comparison to Odiyal Kool (Rs.200) the restaurant’s most famous offering. The Kool takes several hours to prepare properly, says Mr. Ahamad, adding that this, along with delicacies like mutton soup (Rs.250) and Suraa Pittu (Rs.240) made with sharkmeat are delicacies reserved for the weekend. Yaal is a family business, run by the same group that have made successes of hotels like Marrybrown, Olive’s Kitchen and Grill, Indian Spice and Mb Chennai, and Mr. Ahamad is confident that his customers will arrive in droves to sample dishes like chicken/fish perattal and idiyappam biriyani, that are above all “very spicy and tasty”. Contact 7548880 / 881. Recipe for Jaffna Kool  Ingredients:  150g fish 150g cuttlefish 150g prawns 150g crabs 150g crayfish 100g long beans 100g tapioca 100g jak seeds 100g spinach 3tbsp rice ¼ cup Palmyrah root flour* 10 dry chillies (powdered) 1 ball tamarind (lime size) ½ tsp turmeric powder 2 bottles water Salt to taste Preparation: Clean and wash the fish and the cuttlefish. Cut the cuttlefish into 3 cm pieces and the fish into larger pieces. Shell the prawns Wash and quarter the crabs Clean the cray fish and cut into chunky pieces Break the beans into 3 cm pieces Peel and dice the tapioca Wash and chop the spinach Cut the jak seeds into halves and then peel off the skin Soak the flour in a pint of water for ten minutes and then strain the water off.  Dissolve the tamarind in a pint of water for ten minutes and then strain and retain the water.  Method:  Half fill a large pan with water and bring to boil.  Add the fish, cuttle fish, prawns, crayfish, crabs, rice, beans, tapioca, jak seeds and salt and cook for about 45 minutes until everything is soaked. Mix in spinach at this stage.  In a separate bowl mix the palmyrah root flower, tamarind solution, chilli powder and turmeric into a thick paste.  Add this paste to the seafood broth, mix well and simmer until it thickens. Remove from the fire as soon as preferred consistency is reached.  Can be purchased at the Palmyrah Board’s outlet ‘Katpaham’ at 244, Galle Road, Colombo 4.

Crab curry pasta

You know how it is, someone buys home some Sri Lankan crab curry from Yarl's curry house, Brickfields. We smear the curry all over our faces trying to get past the crab shell to the crab meat. We need two hands to do this properly - or not properly: as I can see there is actually still meat in chewed up crab legs that cant be separated anymore, in the 'shell bowl'. And our water/beer glass handles are also smeared with curry from our fingers - do we care? If beer is the drink we are probably drunk, the curry is so hot. Anyway, at the end of the 'feast' - one doesn't really get full on crab alone - there is all that delicious gravy and no more puttu to eat it with, and we cannot throw it away. Oooh! just thinking of this crab meal.

So I volunteered to take some home and I tried this with some leftover crab curry gravy. 

1. Made some spaghetti (or linguine is better)
2. Heated the leftovers
3. Mixed the two together
4. While hot grated some cheddar on it.
5. Sprinkle a generous handful of coriander leaves.
Wolf it all down as you do with pasta.

Simply the best

Hong Shau Rou

Sang Ye's Hong Shau Rou (Braised Pork)

1kg streaky or marbled pork (use spare ribs if marbled pork is not available)
1/2 cup soy sauce
1 tablesp sugar
2-3 cloves garlic
5-6 slices ginger
2 stalks spring onions cut thinly
1 tablesp oil
2 tablesp cooking wine
an 'appropriate amount' of star anise
an 'appropriate amount' of cinnamon
an 'appropriate amount' of cumin
an 'appropriate amount' of brown peppercorn
an 'appropriate amount' of MSG

Dice the pork into 1.5cm cubes 'mahjong slices'.

Place the diced pork into a pot of boiling water for a few minutes. Drain and set the boiled pork aside. Reheat the pot, add a bit of oil, ginger and spring onions, garlic and stir. Place meat back in the pot and stir again. Add all the condiments, the soy sauce, wine, sugar, and 6 to 7 cups of water and bring the boil. Simmer for one hour or so. until most of the water has evaporated. If the meat is not yet tender, you might have to simmer for a while longer.

March 30, 2010

Chinese Cabbage with Ham and Cream Sauce

This is a popular dish of Beijing cuisine, which in Chinese is called 腿茸奶油津白.

When preparing this at home, I often apply my own preference. What I mean is to cook and flavor the cabbage predominately with ham and to coat it lightly with a creamy sauce which at the same time should not over-power the tastes of others. As such, I use no chicken stock, butter, and lard. Instead, I toast, stir-fry and then simmer the ham in the sauce to release its flavor. This might be a less oil-laden version however I find it equally flavorful.

This recipe needs only a basic technique of stir-frying vegetables. Having combined the cabbage with the ham, the seasoning and the sauce at the right time, I would say there is nothing complicated.

However, be honest, I also love to order this dish when dinning out. It is usually available at restaurants serving Beijing or Shanghai or even Sichuan cuisine, places like those I mentioned about their pork dumplings (Xia Long Bao小籠包). 

• Ingredients
• 400g Chinese cabbage
• 100 ml fresh milk
• 2 tsp finely chopped ham (I use Jin Hwa ham bought from a specialty store. If not, use any dry-cured Chinese ham which can be found in vacuum packs in groceries and some supermarkets.)
• 1 tsp salt
• 7-8 slices of ginger
• 1 1/2 tbsp oil for stir frying

• Thickening
• 1 tsp plain flour
• 1 tbsp water

Method

Rinse cabbage, cut it lengthwise into chunks of about 6 cm in length and 2 cm in width. 

To prepare the ham, rinse, pat dry, and cut it into thin slices. Then heat them in a toaster under low heat for about 4 to 5 minutes or until fragrant. Let cool a while, finely chop them. The sliced ham is relatively easier to chop than it is just out from the fridge. 

Heat wok over high heat. Add 1 table spoon of oil, distribute it halfway over the sides. As soon as the oil starts to smoke lightly, put in ginger slices. With a turner, briefly stir them in oil for a couple of seconds. In this step, from heating the wok to sautéing the ginger, actually is a Chinese way of cooking for stir-frying vegetables. 

Pour in cabbage chunks. Keep stirring and flipping the vegetable. In about one minute, the cabbage shall be softened a bit and start to exude water. If not, add about 1 table spoon of water. Cover lid and turn to medium heat to simmer the cabbage for about a minute. Remove lid, add salt, give a few more flips and stirs to mix it well with the cabbage. As salt is added, more water will be exuded, so act fast for the stirring. Dish up, discard water and ginger. 

Add the remaining half table spoon of oil in wok. Toss in half of the chopped ham, sauté it briefly, pour in fresh milk. Over low to medium heat, bring to a boil. Return the cooked cabbage to wok, simmer for about a minute. Stir well the thickening and mix it into the sauce. As soon as the cream boils up again and thickened, remove from heat (check the taste, as the saltiness from ham may vary). Dish up cabbage and sauce, garnish with remaining ham. Serve hot and enjoy.

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