Elderflower grows wild in the UK. They flower in early summer, turning into berries later in the summer. Elderflower berries and flowers are regularly used to make cordial (like ribena but with flowers) and also wine. However, I found a recipe for deep fried elderflower, like pakoras or bhajis! I have never had fried flowers of any sort before and was suitably intruiged. I saw the recipe it last year, but bacon was more than reluctant to let me try it, as he had never heard of anyone eating elderflower before. This year I managed to persuade him to be slightly more adventerous, and this morning we went to the woods behind his dad’s place to pick some, as he used to climb them when he was young.

So, we came back with a good lot of elderflowers, and being me, I soaked the flowers without reading the recipe first which calls for no soaking as it removes the lovely floral aroma that it emates. We had a couple of friends over earlier in the afternoon who had never tried elderflower before as well, so I got cooking.

Batter seemed to be fairly ordinary with with the usual flour and milk. Instead of salt, the recipe calls for sugar. Hmm. It also calls for a squeeze of lemon and honey to top it off. Ours is not exactly a deepfrying household as I always end up getting oil splatter all over myself, but I don’t think I did too bad today - everything was cooked, nothing was burnt and I remained splatter free!

Presenting deep friend battered elderflowers:

You cant see the blooms anymore as they were all coated with thick batter. Compare it to the before picture.It was very strange, but in an extremely pleasant way. It smells like perfume, and tasted just slightly sweet with the honey on top being a nice touch as I had blossom honey as well which added slightly to the lovely aroma from the elderflowers.

Would I have it again? Hell yeah, its free food after all; elderflower is very widely available near where we live; and the taste is so pleasant that I would have it again even if I had to buy it from the supermarket, which by the way, they don’t sell.

Thanks to Liz at Gastronomy Domine for such a lovely recipe!

This, is for Mavis. We had a discussion yesterday night on bubur gandum, also known as sweet wheat porridge. It is basically made out of boiled wheat pearls fragranced by pandan leaves, sweeten by palm sugar and thickened with coconut milk

We decided yesterday that rice pudding tastes like gandum, and it got me thinking about sweet lashings of gandum all day today. As I go past the chinese supermarket on my way to the bus station, I popped in for some wheat pearls. Obviously as I don’t even know what it looks like, I was unable to find it.I figured that instead of gandum I could always make sago, basically a substituting tapioca pearls for wheat pearls, a traditional Malaysian dessert.

1) Boil 500ml of water with palm sugar (gula melaka)to taste. Add pandan leaves, knotted.
2) Measure out one cup of tapioca balls and boil until completely translucent. Keep stirring, otherwise the tapioca will clump together. Thin with extra water if needed.
3) Once it is thick and nice,lower heat settings to the lowest possible. Add a can of coconut milk. Keep stirring, and do not overboil otherwise the coconut milk might coagulate.
4) Add a pinch of salt, and taste for sweetness. This Nyonya dessert is originally very sweet - if it is not sweet enough you can add more palm sugar at this point.

PS: the white dots in the middle of the sago means that the sago is not cooked yet - I had to pop it back into the pot. Cooked sago is completely translucent.In case you’re wondering why my sago is green tinged, I bought pandan flavoured sago

2007 was the year that I bore my readers with recipies of dishes that no one ever cooks..I honestly cannot say that I had a response to one of my recipies that mentioned that they’ve tried it and it’s delicious. So unless I need to keep the recipie here so that I won’t go searching for it again, I will try not to post up recipies, only pictures ya….recipies will only be made available on request.

2007 is also the year that I made a whole christmas dinner by myself. Growing up with a maid and a kitchen-proud mother, all the cooking that I did was just literally popping stuff into the kitchen, all the pounding,grinding and peeling are premade before I even step into the kitchen. So Christmas 2007 is very special indeed,with yours truly slaving away in the kitchen..

Setting the scene.

starting off with bacon wrapped turkey

Orange topped raw ham joint

Pigs in blankies - hotdogs & sausages wrapped in bacon

The star - gobble gobble

Orange glazed ham

Mulled wine cabbage & swede carrot mash

Brussels sprouts with melted butter topped with crispy bacon

Roast potatoes with turkey fat, pigs in blankets & sausagemeat stuffing

The feast

My plateful

Ham was unsalty and slightly sweet, like it should be. Turkey was tender with a slight saltiness, not at all dry and flaky like how it is usually served - I have my secrets of course ;). This was my first proper ‘dinner party’, with decorations and all. Impressive, if I might say so myself. Of course, after two days of endless slaving away at the stove, the least I could have done was produce edible food.

Hope your Christmas was as delicious as mine!

Ahh…season of giving and all that nonsense. Online shops have started their clearance sales ith 50% off all gifts - trick is you don’t get it until the new year, rendering it obsolete as a chrismas present. Just makes me feel a tad prissy; so I will be buying gifts for myself now online. Yes, consumerism is the death of Christmas..

Making most of the food to be served tomorrow today so that I get a little time to myself tomorrow to just graze on snacks. Aren’t I clever. Bear in mind that this is the first time I am making all parts of a Christmas dinner myself being one of the brats the grew up with maids; my menu for tomorrow is:

Starter
Glass noodle salad with mixed seafood

Mains
Turkey with sausagemeat stuffing & bacon wrapped sausages and hotdogs
Baked marmalade ham
Brussels sprouts
Mashed carrot & swede
Roast king edward potatoes
Mulled wine red cabbage

Dessert
Christmas pudding with brandy custard and cream (store bought)

Menu with pictures to follow after Christmas. Let’s hope I don’t blow it k! Have a great Christmas all, remember, Christmas sales starts on 26th December!!!!

Have a purrfect Christmas!

When I was younger, Dong Zhi, or Tang Chek in Hokkien, was one of the very few times in the year when I was allowed to play with dough. Since moving to this lovely grey and dark country, it now symbolizes the end of the everlasting dark nights. Known as the Winter Solstice,because of the earth’s tilt, earth’s hemisphere is leaning farthest away from the sun, and therefore:daylight is the shortest today.

Days then gets longer by about a minute every day,and this goes on until the Summer Solstice, which is the longest day in the year. There is still 24 hours in a day, but with more sunlight as opposed to more darkness. The sun has been setting around 4pm everyday and this had depressed me to no end, as I regularly go for a few days without seeing the sun at all..:(.

The origins of this festival can be traced back to the Yin and Yang philosophy of balance and harmony in the cosmos. After this celebration, there will be days with longer daylight hours and therefore an increase in positive energy flowing in. Round glutinious rice balls seeped in sweet syrup are eaten in celebration of the winter solstice, symbolizing family reunions popular for this festival.

I must admit that it has been some time since I’ve made them myself, preferring to buy frozen ones from the supermarket. However, in the spirit of my me-can-cook, this year I made the more traditional plain ones and the cantonese-styled peanut butter stuffed version popularly available in Hong Kong dessert shops. This was heavily influenced by bacon, who had developed a liking for the peanut butter dessert - just like reeses’ peanut butter cups.

Ingreddients
syrup
2 screwpine leaves (pandan), knotted
2-3 piece of medium rock sugar,
1 liter water

dough
1 cup water
2 cup glutinious rice flour
1tsp olive oil
1tbs sugar

Boil ingreddients for the syrup on a low fire.

Mix ingreddients in a mixing bowl, adding flour as needed. The mixture is of the right consistency when it sticks to the spoon and does not drip down.

Add flour, if needed, to ensure that mixture is not too wet.

Divide dough into bowls, mixing in food coloring. Traditionally, red or pink is used to symbolize prosperity

With a lump of dough between your palms, roll to a smooth, round shape. Coat palms and plate with four so that dough does not stick

For filling, follow similar instructions, but with a larger piece of dough. Flatten out, drop a dollop of peanut butter, and seal. Roll the ball to keep the shape.

Once all dough is utilised, drop the balls into the now-boiling syrup mixture.

Leave boiling for about 5 minutes, by which all the balls should be floating, which means they are cooked

Serve a few balls with enough syrup to cover

Ahhh….I’ve missed plain,chewy Ee(round in hokkien)

Guess what we had for dinner on Sunday? After spending 3 hours in the kitchen sunday afternoon, I was rewarded by the lovely smell of boiling prawns and pork rib premating throughout the house. Actually, it’s not as nice as it sounds, boiling prawns tend to smell like boiling ham yue (salted fish). And my first blended chilli paste worked out amazingly well, way better than the bottled chilli paste you can buy off the shelf…and more expensive too as shallots are a rare commodity here.

You might remember the last time I tried making this dish - and failed miserably because I cheated. Well, last friday I had an unscratchable itch for prawn mee, and I just HAD to HAVE it. So I came back into town on Saturday and bought a block of frozen head-on prawns. Imported from thailand, naturally. Fresh head on tiger prawns bought in the supermarkets would have costed 3x more than frozen thai ones. Dug my freezer for pork ribs reserved for bah kut teh and we were good to go…well, I had to wait overnight for it all to defrost, which had me salivating over a block of frozen prawns late saturday night.

Ingreddients -

broth
1.5pounds pork ribs
Prawn shells & head, 1lb
3 liter water
Fish sauce
sugar to taste (be careful here, a little goes a long way)

Chilli paste (to blend)
30 dried chilli, deseeded
1 big onion, sliced
10 shallots
3 clove garlic
2 tbs water

Dry ingreddients
1/2 portion rice noodle (soaked in hot water)
1/2 portion egg noodle (quickly blanched)
beansprouts
Kangkung (morning glory/Water spinach)
boiled egg, sliced
sliced pork rib meat
cooked prawns
deepfried shallot flakes to top

Shell and devein prawns. Set prawn meat aside and clean the shells and heads

Pork ribs and prawn shells then are boiled to extract the taste. This should then be left to simmer for at least 2 hours

Whilst simmering, start preparing chilli paste ingreddients.Get someone to deseed the chilli for you;bacon was in pain for the whole day after deseeding 40 chillies. Blend until smooth.

Heat up 3tbs oil in work. Sautee the blended chilli paste for a couple of minutes to release aroma.

Once done, set chilli paste aside. Add half of the chilli paste from earlier into the boiling broth, leaving the remaining paste to add as you wish individually upon serving.

With the remains in the wok, sautee the prawns. This is very important, as it gives it a distinctive kick when the prawns soaks up the remainder of the chilli. Yummy eaten with rice only as well at this point.

Dish out dry ingreddients on bowl. You usually blanch the noodles in boiling water just before serving, but I use the vietnamese method of scooping the soup into the bowl, drain, and rescoop.It works just as well.

You can also blanch the beansprouts and morning glory before adding as well, but I like my vegs crunchy, so I don’t pre-blanch it. One plus point for making this at home is that I can use as much beansprouts as I like! I hate asking for ‘keh tau geh’, cause the hawkers don’t charge for veggies,and they’d stare at you funny when you ask for only extra veggies. I think usually they just ignore my extra veggie request.

Sieve the broth and remove all the prawn heads and shells. Slice the pork ribs. At this point,you can also skim the orangey oily surface of the broth.

Blend the prawn shells and heads to a very smooth paste and add to the boiling broth. At this point, bacon came trotting down to the kitchen wondering why is the blender on. His face blanched when I told him we were having pureed prawn shells, and my lovely prawn puree went down the bin as he threatened not to have anything if I were to add the shells to the broth. Hehe. So that was the end of the blended shell. I had a little taste before throwing the lot away, and it tasted really rich and yummy. So please add the puree into your soup - the hawkers do anyway.

I believe this was one of my better efforts :D. Hokkien mee from scratch - whoever would have thought I had it in me? When I told my mother, she did not actually believed me.HAHAAHAHAH!

One more time…heh.

Ahh. Because I made a whole pot, I have some left for tonight’s dinner. With tempretures hovering at around 3c, this will be a very welcomed treat when I get home tonight…

Oh shocking!!! NO PUMPKIN?!? We’re taking a break from kabocha due to bacon’s now extreme dislike of the jack-o-lantern for this lost British dish.

Kedgeree is one of those unique bastardized food that the british brought back from their worldly conquests. Originally kitchiri in its native India, this dish was de-spiced by the british rajahs,leaving the spices, delicious fish and rice but removing the chillies. This was a traditional British breakfast dish about 100 years or so ago, but nowadays it is very hard, if not utterly impossible,to find this dish anywhere in either Indian or British restaurants. I think this is a damn shame, as bacon and eggs gets pretty boring after a while.

This dish was orginally eaten during breakfast as the fishing vessels came in. Of course, in the pre-refridgerator days, fish were eaten freshly caught. When Scottish/English soilders serving the British Raj returned from South Asia, they brought this dish with them, subsituting the tropical waters fishes with smoked cod, haddock ect. Traditionally cooked with knobs of butter and a final swirling of double cream into it, I had modified this to using a rice cooker & yoghurt.

Kedgeree

2 cups of brown rice (basmati preferred)
2 slab of smoked fish, or any white fish
1 bombay onion sliced
1 egg per person, medium boil
1 cup semi-skimmed milk
1 tbs yoghurt per serving

spice mix:
1 cinnamon stick
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp tumeric
1 tsp paprika & chilli powder
strands of saffron if you’re feeling posh
3 star anise

additions:
chopped fresh coriander
1/2 cup frozen peas
double cream to swirl

Wash rice as usual
Sautee onions, leave aside
Arrange fish on shallow pan, poach with semi-skimmed milk
When fish is cooked, remove from pan and keep warm
use the milk (now flavoured with the fish smokiness) and another cup of water to cook the rice in the rice cooker
Mix spice mix well into the uncooked rice with milk & water. Peas go in now
Stir in sauteed onions
Start rice cooker
Immediately mix in the precooked fish into rice, and let it keep warm
slice the eggs to serve. yolk should be soft, not hard boiled
Plate up, serve with eggs on the side, chopped coriander and a dollop of yoghurt. Mix well.

I know it doesn’t look like oh-wow great, but it actually tastes alot like fish briyani, minus the cream and egg which its quite unlike briyani. Apparently the old-school British eats this dish cold, but I so prefer it warm,just like my briyani. Not bad for a first try, I have a good idea of other additions for my second try, maybe some fish curry powder to give it a kick up the ass :).

I know, this pumpkin/squash thing is getting REALLY ANNOYING isnt’ it! However, today’s dish concentrates more on the meat (or in this case, fish) rather than the squash..this is something that I had always wanted to try out but had always been way too lazy.

Miso-encrusted salmon with mashed pumpkin and herbed cauliflower

2 good slab of salmon
miso paste

1/4 pumpkin, cubed
cumin,cinnamon,paprika

cauliflower
dollop of butter
mixed herbs

Arrange the salmon on a baking tray
Spread a thin layer of miso paste on the fish, skin-side up.
Don’t worry about the smoothness,spikes add to the ‘character’

This needs to go in the oven at 220 for 15 minutes, depending on how over-cooked you like your fish and how thick your salmon is
Boil the cubed pumpkin until soft, around 5-10 minutes

When done, sieve the pumpkin to get rid of excess liquid…pumpkin retains water, so this move is nessacary.Make sure most of the water have been removed - about 100ml!

Mash it up with a potato masher, or in the words of malaysians, Ramly Burger press.
Season with paprika,cumin and cinnamon. This gives it a curry-like flavour.

Panfry the cauliflower with butter and herbs.
When cauliflower has slightly browned, put the lid on, this will ’sweat’ the cauliflower slightly and continue to cook it.
Keep the heat on for 5 minutes.

Back to the salmon, please remember to remove it from the oven after 10-15 minutes
Plate and serve up with a slice of lemon and a grind of pepper

I love love the taste of miso paste with salmon! Its a copycat and less-delicious version of nobu’s black cod miso,but seriously tasty irregardless of the wrong color and wrong fish. The squeeze of lemon goes deliciously well with the cauliflower as well, working hand in hand with the fish to achieve a good flavoursome dish. The pumpkin could do with a swirl of cream to make it creamier and nicer, but it’ll do finely :).

Enjoy.

We had officially gone OD on autumn veggies! After two solid days of pumpkin, I bacon decided that we needed a change and I served butternut squash instead - or what bacon calls penis squash…cause it looks like this:

hehe.

I had always wanted to try it, because it looks funny and I quite like the name, sounds like it tastes faintly like butter.I don’t think we have it in Malaysia, but I had definately seen it in Fresno with other cute-sounding vegs like spaghetti squash ect.And this is now part of my food adventure that I set out at the start of the year - welcome to the world of squashes! It definately has a very nice flavour, and I was impressed with the soft orange flesh inside, sweeter and tastier than my jack-o-lantern.

Stuffed Butternut squash with peppered steak

1 butternut squash, sliced half
mushrooms, whole
rosemary
mixed pepper seasoning
slab of good sirloin steak

Remove the seeds and other fibrous flesh from the concave inside the halved butternut
Marinate the butternut squash halves with rosemary,honey and olive oil
Roast in oven for 45mins. 1 hour will provide a nicely burnt edge to the squash
Sautee mushrooms with butter and a splash of balsamic vineger
Marinate steaks and panfry to taste - I prefer mine rare.
Remove squash,plate. Stuff mushrooms into the concave.
Serve with steak. No sauce required

today@8am…

Halloween used to signify the beginning of autumn for me. Somehow, in Fresno, Halloween is also the day that you’d notice the seasons have changed. Those going out dressing like hookers would be freezing their tails off, and you can barely keep warm in your costumes without a coat. BUT, it would still be warm enough. It’s around halloween as well when you lose an hour, turning the clocks back to daylight savings.

Those of you who have been reading this blog for some time would probably have heard before that I love halloween. My first (and last, due to my age) trick or treating trip was when I was 19, and it was heaven on earth for a sweet tooth like me ;). It also introduced me to Reeses’ peanut butter cups…the most heavenly and dastardly candy on earth (sen hon would agree) .Of course, growing up in Malaysia, if I were to walk around with a pumpkin on 31st October and in costume, everyone would be calling the cops rather than showering me with candy.

The English do not celebrate Halloween like the Americans do, which is a damn shame if you ask me. Everyone should celebrate halloween! It’s great! I love the color orange!Oops, secret out now… So, with the lack of halloween spirit means no more costumes for me to go to work in - but with today dipping down to 1c (WTF WTF WTF!!) there is no point putting on costumes unless you’re in a hot dog suit. Yummm…hot dog…The only trick or treaters I got last year was some jailbait mini hoochie mamas whose costume was to try to look like their trashy mother. Oh…shush.

This year I decided that I would try to celebrate Halloween adult-styled.Yep, no more pumpkin carving, but we’re eating it instead! I’ve bought a hugeass pumpkin carving-style and we are going to eat it instead of carving it up and letting it rot.

Roast pumpkin wedge with salmon

1/2 pumpkin - depending on size, 1/4 produces 2 wedge
honey to glaze
sea salt & cracked pepper
sprinkle of herb - rosemary’s great

Roast in oven on 200c for 1 hour.
Glaze with honey
Serve with grilled salmon, topped with a squeeze of lemon