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I love soba – especially in a salad form. I still haven’t quite got used to the hot soupy form of soba yet; preferring udon if it was going to be served hot in a soup. I remember the first time I purchased soba – thinking that it was udon. Uh. Yeah. In my defense, I was 18 and had no idea what was what. Thank god I had a Japanese roomate and she schooled me in the difference and how soba was really only popular in the summer (not too sure how true is this?).

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My go-to soba dish is probably not authentic but it is pretty darn tasty and dare I say a great use of soba. It is also a clever way of using up leftover roast beef – I concotted this dish as a starter once when bacon’s parents dropped by without notice for lunch and I wanted to serve a starter with our mains. They appreciated the cold roast beef more than the noodles; but I fell in love with this tangy, salty and sweet dish. Wonderful in summers; or when you just need a quick meal that just so happens to be bento friendly as well.

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Soba salad with edamame & roast beef strips

Cooked soba noodles, thoroughly rinsed in cold water to get rid of the starchy residue
thinly sliced leftover roast beef slices (or chicken)
cooked edamame (I chuck mine in towards the end of the soba cooking time)

dressing
1/4 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup rice vineger
1 tbs mirin
1 tsp sugar

garnish
toasted sesame seeds
nanami togarashi (japanese mixed pepper powder)

Instructions? Mix it all up!! Yes, it really is that easy. Not only is it simple, it keeps well cold and room temperature too, making this a perfect SPEEDY bento dish. I take mine out of the fridge in the morning before I leave for work and then just leave it on my desk until lunchtime. I hate it straight-from-the-fridge cold, so this is perfect for me.

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In my bento I included some pickles as well to eat with my noodles – the pickles enhances the flavours of the noodles. Two carrot flower sticks, a brocolli and some oranges completes the bento. I love the colours in this one; purple, yellow, orange – and most importantly, all the colorful flavours blends well with each other. I did not realize how fragant this is as well – people could smell the wonderful intermingling of rice vineger and soy sauce with mirin when I opened it up during lunch time. In a good way of course – not like when I decided to bring kimchi jjigae for lunch. heh.

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Okay, have I got the most AMAZING banana-bread recipe for you or what? I am a big fan of banana bread, and had spent ages seeking for the best banana bread recipe ever. Following normal recipes and tweaking a variety of recipes did not seem to work, but this recipe not only works, is is the perfect level of sweetness, super duper moist (sticky, even) and as light as marshmallow. I have been baking quite alot recently, but not many of my tweaked and adapted recipes turn out well…..regularly stuck with two giant loaves of hardened flour. After weeks and months of frustration, I am so stoked to be sharing a recipe here at long last – at last, no more baking #fail!

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Super-moist Banana Bread
adapted from The Hummingbird Bakery Book

to cream
250g brown sugar
2 eggs

to sieve
1 tsp baking powder + 1 tsp bicarb soda
1.5 tsp ground cinnamon
1.5 tsp ground ginger

to add
1.5 tsp essence of madagascan vanilla/scraping of 1 vanilla pod
300g mashed bananas
120g unsalted butter, melted

(this makes two 1lb loaves)

Preheat oven at 180C / 340F
Cream eggs and sugar until light and fluffy using an electric mixer.
Fold in mashed banana, you can whip this with the electric mixer.
Sieve in powdered ingredients in three batches, ensuring that it is all properly mixed in.
Add in melted butter and vanilla, and mix well.
Pour in lightly oiled loaf pans
Bake for 50 minutes – 1 hour or until the cake bounces back when depressed.
Leave cake to cool in tin for that crusty texture.
Slice, and serve with a good cuppa tea

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I have never been a massive fan of pickles, but bacon adores pickles. Pickles with cheese on crackers or sandwich, or with pork pies – anything really. The problem that I have with commercial pickles are that they are less of a pickle and more of a sauce. A commercial jar usually contains a small handful of fruits/vegs and more of the ‘sauce’. Maybe it’s part of the traditional culinary make-up of the country, but a watery pickle and cheddar cheese sandwich is an extremely popular choice for lunch.

Even thought I am not a fan of pickles, I think that pickles should really be more chunky rather than watery. It’s not ketchup, it’s a PICKLE. You would think that there needs to be more of the pickled medium rather than the pickling medium. So I have been doing some pickling for bacon, and this weekend was the turn of the farmhouse pickle. This is the pickle that is served with the ubiquitous British ploughman’s lunch – cheese, bread and pickles. It is sweet, savory and tart at the same time. The magic is in ensuring that the balance in taste and flavours are correct. And then the agonizing wait. As nice as the pickles is fresh from cooking, it is important to leave it for a month to develop and mature. The tartness stands out if eaten fresh from the pan, but if given time to develop and mature, it takes on a vastly different character of itself, almost developing an umami-like character.

Farmhouse Pickle (commercially sold as Branston’s Pickle)

to dice:
300g carrots
100g sweet gherkins
130g dried dates
300g courgettes/zuchinni (about 2 med. sized)
300g cauliflower (1/2 a medium head)
300g rutabaga/swede
150g cooking apples (1 large granny smith)
150g red onions (about 2 med. sized)

- 150g palm sugar (you can try muscavodo or other dark brown sugar)
- 300ml cider vineger
- 1-2 tsp liquid pectin
- 1.5 tsp allspice
- 0.5 tsp paprika
- 1 tsp powdered garlic
- pinch of salt

Start by sauteeing the onions, swede and carrot. Once soften, tip everything else in.

Bring this mixture to a rapid boil for 3 minutes, stirring constantly.

Leave to simmer for 1 hour…occasionally stirring and mixing pickles in the pot.

Wash and steralize new or used jars by washing in warm water. Place in a pan and leave in the oven at 120C for 15 minutes. I usually recycle used jam jars or get some pretty kliners/mason jars if they are for gifts. If you are using Kliners (or Ball Jars) please ensure that you do NOT steralize the rubber stopper in the oven. This WILL MELT.

Once the pickled mixture has softened, taste to check the level of saltiness and sweetness. Ignore the tartness, the vineger will mature with the pickle in a few weeks. Add more sugar/salt as needed.

To seal the recycled jars (hack-style), tighten the covers on the jars immediately. Place this in the oven on a baking tray, with hot water up to 1/2 the height of the jars. Turn the oven on at 150 for 20 minutes. This will suck out air from inside the jar, effectively sucking in the pop-up indicator on the jar.

Wait for a few weeks

Enjoy with cheese, crackers, sandwich…ect!!!

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This batch will be going out to bacon’s ‘two’ moms for Mother’s Day, plus a jar of my delish Caramelized Red Onion Chutney!

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When I was in high school, lunchtime would be only me and my mom as I finished school at 1.30pm. We mostly have leftovers from the night before, but very often she would send me to the local hawker stores (street food) to take away some chicken rice. As she did not speak cantonese, I was sent in to place the order. There are usually a variety of meats available , from the traditional ‘white’ chicken to char xiu and roasted duck. I only ever go for one. Without a doubt, I would always order the roasted chicken breast with extra chilli dipping sauce. Every single time. Even now. I drench my roast chicken breast with the sweet, tangy and spicy light chili sauce, which pairs up wonderfully with the rice cooked in chicken stock and lightly uplifted by a drizzle of soya sauce.

Living in the UK, Hainanese Chicken rice was one of the first item that was added to my repertoire. I have ordered it from a takeaway here before, but it does not even come anywhere near. And now that I’ve got the hang of it, I can make this from scratch under an hour, making it an easy enough weekday dinner when I feel a pang of homesickness, or just need to turn a whole chicken into something wonderful.

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Roasted Hainanese Chicken Rice
serves 4

1 whole chicken
4 inch ginger
1.5 tbs 5-spice powder
flaked sea salt
1 stalk spring onion
1 cucumber
soya sauce

Rice
3.5 cup jasmine rice
4 cup stock
1 inch ginger
2 pandanus leaves, tied in a knot
1 tbs butter

Soup
1 carrot
1 celery stalk
2 cabbage leaves
cracked white pepper

Chili sauce
2 inch ginger
1 clove garlic
2 chilli
splash of rice vineger
1/3 cup water
2 tbs sugar

1) Get prepared. Turn the kettle on (around 1.5l water); place the chicken and ginger in the pot. Chop up the veggies, put them in the pot with the chicken and pour the boiling water in until it just covers the chicken. Let it boil rapidly for 10 minutes, skimming surface scum. You want a light stock, but the veggies can continue to simmer after you’ve removed the chicken.

2) Meanwhile, place all the ingredients for the chilli sauce in a food processor, and whiz away. Bear in mind that chillies vary in amount of heat, so please ensure you keep tasting it to ensure that it is to your taste. If it is too spicy, add sugar/water. Preheat the oven to 220 C.

3) Wash the rice, place the pandanus leaves and ginger. Slice some spring onions and cucumber

4) Take out the chicken, and plunge in ice cold water to stop cooking. Pat dry. Rub ginger slices on the skin, tucking in pieces between the chicken drumsticks, wings ect. Gently rub the 5-spice powder on the skin of the chicken, and sprinkle flaked sea salt all over the skin. This will crisp up the chicken. Pop in oven.

5) Scoop in 4 cups of the chicken soup in the rice cooker (or pot) to cook the rice in. Turn it on to cook. When rice is cooked (roughly 20 mins) , rest covered for 5 minutes, and then stir in the butter. Replace cover.

6) Test the chicken for cook-ness after 40 minutes. Leave to sit for 5 minutes, before slicing it up.

7) Serve it up with rice topped with soya sauce and spring onion, cucumber on the side. Chilli sauce and the sliced chicken can be served family-styled or individually. Serve up the remaining chicken soup in individual bowls

Enjoy!!!

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PS: Traditionally, Hainanese Chicken Rice is just white chicken. You can do this by skipping the roasting part. Boil the chicken in the soup for 30 minutes, and plunge into ice cold water to tighten the skin up. Leave to rest, keeping warm before serving.

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Love it or hate it, Marmite divides the culinary world into half. I am an exception – I don’t mind marmite/vegemite, but I don’t yearn for it like some people. I’ll have it if it’s there, but would very rarely venture out and get myself a jar. Used in a cooking though, marmite takes on a completely different character completely.

I had previously made marmite ribs, which caramalised baby back ribs into a lip-smacking finger-lickin dish. Marmite chicken is a dish that is popular in Malaysia and Singapore in chinese ‘tai chou’ places – where families and friends usually orders a couple of dishes to share with their party with steamed white rice. I find that ‘tai chou’ chefs are an inventive and creative lot, I’ve had other odd dishes before like watermelon pork. Hmm.

The dish itself is fairly simple in composition; however the flavours are complex but light. Chicken pieces are usually deep-fried, and then tossed in a thick sauce made of marmite and honey. That’s it. But when you use marmite in cooking, it takes on a completely different character and loses its yeasty smell that puts so many people off. Paired with steamed white rice and a side of stirfried vegetables, this is a perfect weekday dinner whipped up in 30 minutes. I panfried my chicken instead of deep-frying, but that’s just because I ran out of oil .

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Marmite chicken serves 2

500g chicken, cut into bite-sized pieces
1/2 inch minced ginger
1 clove minced garlic
2 tbs marmite
1 tbs honey (more if you prefer it sweeter)
1/2 cup water
1 tsp toasted sesame

marinade
1 tbs cooking wine (shaoxing wine)
1 tbs light soy sauce
1 tsp marmite
1 tbs cornflour

1) Marinade the chicken for at least 1 hour. I usually do this overnight; just put it on the night before and it is ready to cook when I get home from work the next day. Deep fry or pan fry chicken until golden brown. Drain the oil and set chicken aside.

2) Fry the ginger and garlic in a little oil until fragant. Add the rest of the ingredients (except sesame), plus leftover marinade. Simmer until the sauce thickens, stirring constantly to ensure that the honey in the sauce does not cause it to burn to the pan. This should be a few minutes.

3) Add in chicken, completely coating it with the sauce. Sprinkle in sesame seeds. Serve up with a simple vegetable stirfry and freshly steamed white rice.

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