Popiah

This was our competition dish and we won! We were judged on presentation, portion and concept. Kudos to my team for doing such a great job, and thanks to myself for the masterpiece chilli flower carving! :P

Ingredients (serves 4)

Filling
2 tbsp oil
1 tsp garlic, chopped finely
1 tsp preserved soya bean paste
1 bamboo shoot, shredded
200g turnip, shredded finely
1 piece soya bean cake, cut into strips and deep fried
4 popiah skins
1 tsp salt

Garnish
1 tsp sweet flour sauce
1 tsp chilli past
1 tsp garlic paste
1 bunch chinese lettuce (pang chye), washed and drained
50g bean sprouts, blanched
1 hard boiled egg, peeled and cut into strips
100g prawns, steamed and deshelled
1/4 spring coriander leaves (cilantro)
1/4 cucumber, peeled, deseeded and cut into strips
1 cup water

Method
1) Use 2 tbls oil. Stir fry garlic at low heat until slightly fragrant, then turn up heat and add salted soya bean and fry until fragrant.
2) Add in the bamboo shoots and turnip and stir fry for 2 minutes.
3) Add in the water and cook for 5 minutes.
4) Add in the bean cake and season with salt.
5) Fry until water has evaporated. Remember to stir frequently so as not to burn.
6) To assemble, place 1 piece of popiah skin on a flat surface and overlap another piece on top, leaving a portion intersecting. This is so that the popiah skin doesn't break so easily and gives you more surface area to work with. The 'smooth' surface of the popiah skin lies on the flat surface.
7) Spread 1/4 tsp each of garlic and chilli paste and sweet flour sauce in the middle of the skin (the intersecting portion).
8) Lay on the lettuce (remove the stem), bean sprouts and 2 heaped tbls of drained turnip filling onto the centre.
9) Add eggs, prawns and coriander leaf and cucumber according to preference.
10) Roll away from you twice, tuck in the ends and finish to obtain a tight cylinder. Place the roll on its seam. Continue with the rest of the wrappings and filings, place the rolls on a flat dish.
11) Slice cross-wise into 4 portions and serve warm.

Laksa

Ingredients (serves 4)

Paste
3 stalks lemon grass, finely shredded (just the white portion)
2cm galangal, peeled
3 candlenuts
12 dried red chilli, soaked in hot water
6 shallots, finely chopped
1 tsp shrimp paste (balachan)
1 cm fresh tumeric
1 tsp coriander powder

Laksa ingredients
3 tbsp oil
2 tbsp dried prawns, soaked in hot water for 30 mins, drained and pounded
3 cups water
2 tsp sugar
2 tsp salt
2 cups coconut milk (packet type)
400g fresh laksa noddles
100g bean spourts, blanched in boiling water for 15 seconds
4 medium sized prawns, blanched and peeled
50 g fish cake, fried and finely sliced
1 boiled egg, cut into quarters
1/4 cucumber, peeled, deseeded and shredded
5 laksa leaves, shredded (or use a whole stalk, washed and knotted)

Method
1) Start by making the spice paste. Pound all the ingredients to obtain a fine paste. Start with lemongrass, galangal and tumeric, then candlenuts, shallots and dried chillis, and lastly, balachan and add the coriander powder.
2) Heat 4 tbls oil in a frying pan over medium heat. Fry until fragrant for about 10 minutes. It becomes very dry at this point, so be careful not to burn it. You can add 1 more tsp of oil. It should look glossy at this point.
3) Add the pounded dried prawns and stir fry for another minute.
4) Increase the heat to high, add in 3 cups of water and bring to a boil. You should see the oil sort of separate.
5) Lower the heat to medium and add in the coconut milk; simmer for 10 minutes, stirring frequently. There should be a thin layer of oil on top, not too much oil!
6) Add in sugar and salt. (it can be slightly more salty to compensate for the noodles which absorb the taste and are bland)
7) If you find the gravy too thin, let it cool for 10 mins, then warm it up again on medium. Bring it to a simmer and it would have thickened.
8) Blanch the noddles, beanspourts and place in serving bowl. Arrange the fish cakes and egg on top.
9) Pour over the gravy and serve with sliced cucumber.

Sambal String Ray

Went for cooking lessons as part of a team bonding workshop at Sunrice, a culinary academy at Fort Canning. Learnt 3 Singaporean favourites - Sambal Sting Ray, Laksa and Popiah. Never knew it was so easy!

Ingredients (serves 4)

600g sting ray
5g salt
Oil to baste

Sambal chilli tumis
20g dried prawns
75g shallots (about 2)
3 cloves garlic
15 dried red chilli - deseeded and soaked
1/2tsp prawn paste (balachan)

Method

1) Marinate the sting ray with salt and set aside.

2)Pound all the ingredients for the paste together to obtain a fine paste. Start with prawns, garlic and shallots, then chilli and lastly, balachan. To make it easier, you can chop the ingredients up first before pounding.
3) Heat the 4 tbls oil in a pan. Add the paste and stir fry until fragrant. It will turn dry, so keep adding water slowly tsp by tsp and fry until the mixture becomes wet and 'shiny'. The paste should be moist but not like a gravy!
4) Spoon the sambal over the sting ray and pat down, ensuring that the whole surface is covered.
5) Heat a grill and grill the sting ray on each side for 5 mins or until cooked.
6) Alternatively, put sting ray on banana leaf and bake at 180 degrees for 15 mins or until cooked.
7) Garnish with lime and serve hot.

Cornflake cookies

That dratted festival will soon be upon us! Yes, CNY again. I remember getting all excited about the festival - coming home from school and helping Gran make cookies. She'll always make 2 kinds - her delicious butter cookies and also her kueh bankit. No where else have I tasted kueh bankit which quite compares. I'd help her cut the dough with the cookie cutters, crimp out the designs, etc. My aunt would make her delicious pineapple tarts and love letters and never failed to give us at least a tin of each.

Sadly, Gran's receipes are lost to us now. As for my aunt, she's getting on in years and can't bake as much as she used to.

However, in the spirit of baking something festive, I've started my own traditions of baking simple cookies. This year however, the spirit escapes me. Maybe it's the environment, at least in the past in an 'auntie' environment, I was spurred to bake my own goodies and bring them to work, sharing in the season. Everyone would be in on it, baking their own goodies and bringing them to work. I miss those times.

This is the prized receipe of my ex-colleague, a super duper baker.

Ingredients
10 oz self-raising flour
1 egg
8 oz butter
6 oz fine sugar
1 tsp vanilla
1 box cornflakes

Method
1) Cream butter, sugar & egg till sugar has melted.
2) Add vanilla, flour slowly bit by bit.
3) Finally add the crushed cornflakes.
4) Press together hard into a ball and fit them into tiny paper cups. U can coat some cornflakes on the outside too.
5) Bake at 120 degrees for about 45 mins.

Honey pepper beef Fajita Tortilla

In the lexicon of food, a fajita generically refers to grilled meat served on a flour tortilla with condiments. Popular meats are beef, chicken, pork and shrimp. They are often cooked with onions and bell peppers. Popular condiments are sour cream, guacamole, salsa, pico de gallo, cheese, lettuce, and tomato. (courtesy of Wiki)
Oh dear, my fridge has run out of bell peppers and tomatoes. Oh well, improvise...
Ingredients
2 rump steaks, sliced

1/2 Pepper, deseeded and sliced into squares (optional)

Small onion, chopped

1 tsp English mustard (Djion's fine too but I like the 'kick' of English)
1 tbls honey
1 tbls chinese dark soya sauce
1 tsp corn flour
2 tsp tomato paste
Plenty of freshly ground black pepper

Method
1) Put the slices of steak, peppers and onions into a deep bowl.
2) Marinate by mixing with honey, dark soya sauce, corn flour, mustard and black pepper.
3) Once well marinated, drain away the marinade and set aside the marinade for later.
4) Grill the beef between 3 to 6 mins (depending on how rare you like your steak) on a very hot grill. Remove.
5) The peppers and onions take longer and have juices oozing out, so should be grilled after the beef. You don't want to 'stew' your beef by having the juices ooze out and bringing down the temp of your grill. These vegs can be grilled until the onions are nice and caramelized and the peppers have nice char marks on their skin.
6) Warm up some tortillas in a microwave, 10 seconds on High. Alternatively, warm on a dry frying pan, turning over to warm both sides. Remove tortillas and brush with the tomato paste.
7) Microwave the marinade to cook it (15 seconds on high should be sufficient). I use this as a salad dressing for my salad.
8) Wrap the beef, peppers and onions with the tortilla, and serve with salad.

Simple and nice for a hot summer's day!

Alternatives to bread

Wanted to try Mex food and went to the supermarket. Was mind-boggled by the types of warps available ...tortilla, taco, pita arrrgggghhhh! What's the diff?

(Courtesy of old Wikipedia - Wiki's your friend :P)

Tortilla (Mex) - It is made by curing maize in lime water, grinding and pre-cooking it, kneading it into a dough called masa nixtamalera, pressing it flat into thin patties, and cooking it on a very hot comal (a type of light sheet-metal griddle).

Enchilada (Mex) - An enchilada is a traditional Mexican dish. Enchilada literally means "seasoned with chiles". The traditional enchilada sauce is just that—dried red chile peppers soaked and ground into a sauce with other seasonings. The enchilada is typically made with a corn (maize) tortilla which is fried briefly in hot lard or oil to soften it, and then dipped in the chosen enchilada sauce. The tortillas are filled and rolled up, placed in a casserole, then layered with sauce and possibly other additions such as cheese and chopped onions. Fillings may be almost anything, depending on the cook's taste and means.

Quesadilla (Mex) - (from "queso", Spanish for "cheese") is a tortilla folded over shredded cheese or a cheese slice (often a Mexican-style soft farmer's cheese such as Chihuahua cheese or other light colored melting cheese), which might also include cooked meat and/or bean filling. It is then fried, deep fried or toasted using a broiler, griddle, or open fire, and sometimes spiced with salsa. The term can also be used for a pair of tortillas, with the cheese and other fillings between them, similarly cooked.

Taco (Mex) - A taco is a traditional Mexican dish comprising a rolled or folded, pliable tortilla (of either maize or wheat flour) filled with meat (generally grilled beef or pork), chili-based salsa, guacamole, and garnishes such as pico de gallo or cilantro. It may also contain just about any other filling that lends itself to it — generally meats or vegetables that are chopped and fairly dry.

Pita (Turk/Greek) - (also called pitta or pita bread or Turkish pide bread) is a round flat wheat bread made with yeast. Pita and other flat or pocket bread is traditional in many Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cuisines from North Africa through the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula to India and Afghanistan and is believed to have originated in Ancient Syria. It is also commonly called Lebanese, Syrian or Arabic bread, especially in the Arab world, Israel and communities with Arab immigrant populations.

Naan (Indian) - a round flatbread made of wheat flour. Naans are a staple accompaniment to hot savoury meals in Central and South Asia, including the Punjab and Rajasthan and Gujarat regions in north-west India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Uzbekistan and the surrounding region. In Turkic languages (such as Uzbek and Uyghur) the bread is known as nan.

Snails!

Dad outdid himself at dinner again. Of all the exotic stuff he chose to serve up, tonight was (sea) snails! It's served steamed with a chilli/garlic/lime sauce. To eat, it's got a little claw and just jab a toothpick into the flesh and lightly tug, and the whole thing comes out. Even Tara loved it. (without chilli of course!)

Sausages

My favourite food! And I know I'm not alone. There are so many variations - the Germans have their Weiners and Frankfurters, the Italians have their salami, the British have their bangers and chipolatas (affectionately also known as 'chips'), the Mexicans have their chorizo and us Chinese have our unimaginatively-named Chinese sausages (or lap cheong).

Doing a Wikipedia search boggles the mind - there are so many types (it runs in the hundreds) of sausages and they are actually classified into categories such as cooked, cooked smoked, fresh, fresh smoked, dry etc!

But throwing that all aside, I've had a long association with sausages. Since that 1st morsel I tasted in my school canteen - the lady pan fried what looked like normal canned cocktail sausages, but she was always able to make the crispy on the outside but not burnt, and melts-in-the-mouth on the inside. I began my life long search for the perfect sausage. To this day, I have never found the brand or the cooking method (does she boil them first?) that produces quite the same effect.

Thru the years, I used to think that all sausages looked the same - what I knew of as canned cocktail sausages. But then I went to UK and started eating their bangers which totally disgusted me. It had a horrible 'piggy' smell, was raw and liked to 'explode' (hence the name) and sacriledge of all sacriledge - they called them sausages too! I longed for a frankfurter!

Today I found my perfect chipolata - all this time I've been buying the wrong thing. I've been buying chicken chipolatas but by chance today I saw pork and tried them and I'm in heaven!

For me, I've had a life long love affair with frankfurters, can't go wrong with any one, but just the brand - have yet to find a brand that isn't overly salty when eaten neat. I remember in my ex-company, after a particularly tiring morning, all that I need to perk me up was to toss my frankfurters into the toaster oven with some hotdog bread, slap on the butter, cheese and mustard, toast the bread until the cheese melts, slap on the frankfurters and glugs of tomato and chilli and bring to mouth - absolute bliss! Enough to drive away any dark clouds.

But my life long quest for the perfect cocktail sausages isn't over. I hope to be rewarded one day.

Meanwhile, just to finish off with a bit of trivia:
The difference between a Full English Breakfast and a Big American Breakfast:

Full English: bacon, eggs, toast, bangers, baked beans, kidneys, grilled tomato, mushrooms, potatoes/hash brown/bubble & sqeak. The Scots vary it with black pudding or haggis.
Big American: bacon, eggs, sausages and toast with baked beans and hash brown

Hungry eh? ;)

Teriyaki salmon

The thing about teriyaki sauce is that it's so simple to make yet. A lot is a matter of taste, so just adjust the quantities till you get a taste that you like. I learnt this from (of all places) British telly! The basics are these:
Ingredients
3 tbls dark soya sauce
3 tbls light soya sauce
5 tbls dark brown sugar
3 tbls sherry/Japanese mirin wine/Chinese rice wine
6 tbls water
1 salmon steak

Method
1) Mix everything except the water and microwave for 30 seconds and stir until the sugar dissolves.
2) Marinate the steak (works well with beef steak or chicken wings too)
3) Brush with oil and grill or bake at 200 degrees C for 20 minutes. To prevent splatter all over the oven, I wrap my salmon/steak/chicken wings in some foil as a foil packet. The downside of course is that the skin (for wings even salmon skin) will not get crispy.

Rumballs by Mag

Okok I admit I've been somewhat neglecting my cooking recently. The other day, opened my cupboard and saw my baking tins and brand new jelly mould (thanks ZH!) sitting there sadly in a corner and felt guilty about not using them. Work has been bothering me a lot lately, whoever said Dec was a lull period??!!

Anyhow, Mags posted this superbly easy recipe, really inspiring to try, if I can haul my lazy ass off to the supermarket to get the ingredients!

ME Rumballs(serves 30)Ingredients
1 dark fruit cake (supermarket variety)
1 x 250g dark cooking chocolate
50g butter/margarine
Real Rum (recommended brand: Bundaberg Rum, of course!)

Instructions1. In a deep bowl, break up dark fruit cake using fingers. Pour 1/2 cup of rum over mixture. Mix it well. Cover with cling wrap. Set aside for overnight if you can. (I was too impatient and only left it alone for 2 hours, but still GOOD!)

2. In a microwave bowl, cook the cooking chocolate in the microwave according to instructions on pack. In a seperate microwave container, melt margarine/butter in the microwave for 15 seconds.

3. Pour melted chocolate and margarine/butter into dark fruit cake and rum mixture. Mix very well.

4. Take a tablespoon of mixture and shape it with the palm of your hands until they resemble golf balls. Place each rumball into small paper cake cups to prevent each rumballs froms sticking together. Refrigerate overnight to allow the rum to infuse.

5. You may also choose to roll your rumballs in dessicated coconut or chocolate bits for texture and presentation. I left mine au natural. It is simply divine!

Tip: The rumballs keep very well because they are alcohol laden. If you love your rum, add more to the mixture. They freeze well for a long time. So make plenty now and freeze them. When friends come over, thaw them out on your kitchen benchtop and they would compliment you to no end!

Verdict:
1) Finally tried out the receipe and realised that it's not really suitable for humid weather! :( The mixture started to melt pretty fast so you gotta work fast. Towards the end, everything was just a river of rummy choc and my balls weren't spherical at all. Alternatively, after adding the hot stuff and mixing properly (the melted butter and cooking choc), return to the fridge for just 20 mins to firm up again. Not too long or it sets as a blob and you can't work it into balls either!
2) I added left over choc chips to the mixture. Simply divine! Adds crunch to the bite. By the same token, u could add nuts too, altho that's not very 'rumball-ish'.

Updated: another recipe http://simmetra.blogspot.com.au/2012/12/rum-balls.html