Gaji namul

Taken from Maangchi http://www.maangchi.com/recipe/gaji-namul

Tamarind prawn

Been cooking a lot of prawn recipes recently because we bought a kilo few weeks as a treat. Prawns usually go on sale after Christmas because it's a must eat food for Christmas lunches in Aust.

This recipe is adapted from Rasa Malaysia
http://rasamalaysia.com/tamarind-prawn-assam-prawn/ and really easy! Prawns are my new favourite protein to cook!

Ingredients

300g prawns, shelled

1 tbsp tamarind paste

1 tbsp sugar

1 tbsp corn starch

½ tbsp soya sauce

1 tsp garlic, minced

Method

1) Marinade in the sauces and sugar for 15 minutes.

2) Heat up HCP. Fry the garlic till aromatic but not brown.

3) Add prawns and fry till slightly charred.

4) Garnish with optional chilli.

Oyakodon おやこどん

I used JOC's recipe http://www.justonecookbook.com/recipes/oyakodon/ and it worked a treat, altho its a bit too sweet for my liking. I adapted the recipe, eg doubled the portions and added some corn starch (I'm chinese, I can't help it!) so I would have leftovers. So easy to make! I'll do this again.

Ingredients (serves 4)

6 chicken thigh fillets (approx 700g)

6 tbsp mirin

2 tbsp sake

5 tbsp soya sauce

2 tbsp sugar

2 cups dashi

4 eggs

1 white onion, sliced

1 tbsp corn starch 

4 stalks spring onions, sliced into 2 inch slices (I omitted this as I don't like spring onions)

Dash pepper

4 portions of rice

Method

1) Slice the chicken thighs into bite sized chunks. Try to cut them into slivers rather than cubes so that it would cook faster.

2) Marinade with pepper, 1 tbsp of soya and corn starch. Mix well and set aside to marinade, at least for ½ hour.

3) In a shallow and wide pot (I used a paella pan), pour in the mirin and sake and bring to a boil to evaporate the alcohol. At this point, beat the eggs and set aside. I started cooking the rice in the microwave too.

4) Add the remaining soya, dashi and sugar. Bring to a boil, and add in the onions. Arrange them in a single layer. Place the chicken on top in a single layer. Cover and bring to a boil.

5) Skim off the scum and oil. Cover and let it cook for 10 minutes at medium flame, agitating the pot periodically.

6) Open the lid, sprinkle on the spring onions and drizzle on the egg. Turn off the flame and cover for 2 minutes or slightly longer if your like the eggs harder. I like my eggs soupy.

7) Ladle on top of rice.

Dorayaki どらやき

Got this from cooking with dog: http://youtu.be/11rMEA0_L8c and basically doubled the recipe. There were some replacements: I didn't have cake flour or bicarb, but this didn't seem to adversely affect the recipe. Since I didn't have anko, I replaced it with a can of blueberries. I didn't use raw sugar either, just regular sugar and thank goodness I didn't add the honey, too sweet already!

Ingredients (1 scoop makes 10 pancakes)

100ml water

260g flour

1 tsp baking powder

Pinch salt

4 eggs

160g sugar (reduce this next time)

½ tsp vanilla essence
1 can of blueberries or substitute with anko or other filling.

Method

1) Use balloon whisk to whisk the eggs. Add the sugar and salt and whisk till combined.

2) Sift the baking powder and flour together. Using the whisk, fold in a little bit at a time till combined and no lumps of flour. Do not over beat.

3) Cover with cling film and leave to rest.

4) Adjust consistency 1 tbsp of water at a time till it flows but not too watery.

5) Heat up a non stick pan. Pour on some oil and using a paper towel, oil the pan and wipe off the excess so that each pancake is evenly browned.

6) Ladle on the batter from a height and without swirling the pan, let it form natural rounds.

7) When the top is ¾ dry, gentle ease around the edges and underneath, then flip. The second side should take about half a minute.

8) Spoon on the filling and top with a second pancake.

Feedback on the recipe: Heat control and how much to ladle on are essential. I had 2 badly burnt pancakes initially till I got it right. Too hot and outside burns without cooking the inside, I suspect the sugar doesn't help. Too low a fire and pancake gets tough rather than cakey. Also, I might make it less watery in future (no additional water) so the the pancake doesn't spread as much and is thicker like a flapjack. Overall a good recipe for more cake-like flapjacks.

Garlic chilli prawn

HCP is my saviour. This is a supremely easy stir fry dish yet the returns are great. Most important is to use fresh prawns, nothing else will do.

Ingredients 

300g fresh prawns, shelled and deveined

1 tsp chopped garlic

1 tsp chopped ginger

1 tbsp chopped onion

3 chillis, sliced and deseeded if wanted

1 tsp fish sauce

1 tbsp chinese wine

1 tbsp corn starch

Method

1) Prepare and marinade prawns with sauces and corn starch. Set aside for at least half an hour.

2) Heat up the HCP. Fry the aromatics including chillis till soft. I don't usually use oil but I do grease the pan very lightly then wipe it off with a kitchen towel.

3) Add prawns and close the lid. Wait about 2 mins, then flip pan. After another 2 minutes, turn back and check if cooked. If not cooked, snap close lid and cook a 20 to 30 more couple more seconds till cooked.

4) Serve immediately.

Gaeran mari

My first attempt using this recipe:

http://www.maangchi.com/recipe/egg-side-dishes

This is deceptively difficult. The main factors are: 

1) amount of oil. Too much and it browns

2) heat: too little and it doesn't cook; too much and it browns

3) pouring egg: too much and the layer is too thick or takes too long to cook. Too little and it can burn or tears when handling 

I used 6 eggs because the recipe calls for 4 large eggs. This is the easiest basic version. Once I master this, then I can put fillings like vegs or nori, because all these complicate the cooking times.

Thai red fish curry and tomato rice

There's a japanese tomato rice recipe going around. Basically the idea is toss veg, rice and meat into a rice cooker and cook. Embed a whole tomato in the rice and voila. But reduce the amount of water added by about ½ cup for each tomato added. I totally forgot about this so my rice was too soggy, but that will work out since I tend to make enough leftovers, where the rice can get pretty dry if the right amt of water was added initially. The trick with the meat was also to leave it in big enough pieces to cook during the time it takes to cook white rice. Not too small or it will over cook. Decided rice was boring so I switched up to Thai red curry.

Ingredients 

3 cups rice

4 basa fillets, sliced in half

8 white mushrooms, quartered 

3 tomatoes, uncut

1 can coconut milk (400ml)

600ml water

4 tbsp Thai red curry paste

Method

1) Place washed rice at the bottom of the rice cooker pot. Insert the fish pieces upright into the rice. Place tomatoes whole in between the fish slices. Do the same with vegs.

2) Dollop on tsps of the curry paste.

3) Pour in the coconut milk. I used the the rice measuring cup and topped up the rest with water. Since I used 3 tomatoes, I should reduce the total liquid volume by about a cup.

 

4) turn on the rice cooker and cook! Note that my cooker isn't the 'dumb' type so instead of 20 minutes to cook rice, it takes between 40 to 90 minutes! Not great for cooking rice but great fo these one pot meals!

Peanut soup for 冬至

This is ah balling, tang yuan in peanut soup for winter solstice. No brainer for tang yuan, comes out of a packet. But the peanut took lots of work. I read on the internet that no matter how long you slow cook peanuts, they remain hard. I came across this recipe and thought I'd give it a try:

http://lilyng2000.blogspot.com.au/2008/08/introductory-text-picture-goes-here.html

Problem is that despite following the instructions, I still lacked the pressure cooker, so it didn't work! So even though I soaked the peanuts overnight, soaked them in alkaline water, but without the pressure cooker, it's all useless. Nonetheless, it's a great accompaniment for the tang yuan for Dong Zhi, which was really the whole point of the exercise anyway.

Ingredients
300g peanuts
10 cups of water
1/2 cup of rock sugar (top up to taste)
1 tbsp baking powder (perhaps I should have used pure bicarb like the recipe?)

Method

1) Soak the peanuts overnight.

2) Soak the peanuts in the alkali solution for at least 4 hours. Rinse and soak for half hour to remove the alkali, then rinse and soak again. Repeat once more.

3) Here, I slow cooked with 6 hours. The recipe recommends pressure cooking for 30 to 40 minutes from pressurisation. Unfortunately the volume of my pressure cooking is quite small but next time I'll give it a try.

4) Serve with tang yuan!

Milo raisin and Oreo frappe ice creams

I thought I would try a new ice cream recipe that I came across on Cooking with Dog called the milk gelato. The interesting thing was that it didn't use condensed milk but used milk. Really, would milk work? Wouldn't it freeze solid? The impetus for the idea came about because I had almost 4 or 5 litres of fresh milk in my fridge. I abhor milk. However, by the time I dilly dallied and wanted to use up the milk for this recipe, I had already finished drinking it with my coffee, milo, etc. So I ended up using UHT milk.

Maybe that's why this recipe crashed and bombed. First, I used my original recipe of condensed milk and cream, but I halved it and topped up with milk to make 2 portions instead of 1. Bad idea because the oreo frappe came out almost rock solid, very hard to 'dig' out with my ice cream scooper. My milo raisin however was ok (not soft serve but not rock hard), I wonder why? Maybe a higher amount of milk solids? I'm also wondering if the usage of UHT rather than fresh milk had any difference. UHT may have a lower fat content (and I used skimmed milk too!) and that makes it freeze more solidly, whereas the milo one has milk solids in it so it makes it creamier. I don't know, food science does my head in sometimes! So to be fair to Cooking with Dog's recipe, perhaps if I had followed it to the letter (i.e. not used condensed milk but used sugar, not used UHT but used fresh milk), perhaps, it wouldn't have frozen so hard.

Anyway here's the recipe. Taste-wise, it's ok so it's really food science wrecking havoc!

Ice cream ingredients (makes approx 1.75l of ice cream)

300 ml cream suitable for whipping, also called thickened cream

1 tin condensed milk

400 ml milk

For milo raisin: 1/2 cup raisins; 4 tbsp milo, dissolved in 3 tbsp of hot water. Let the mixture cool.

For oreo frappe: 6 oreo biscuits; 2 tbsp instant coffee dissolved in 3 tbsp of hot water. Let the coffee cool.

Method

1) Prepare the toppings by mixing the milo and coffee. Set aside to cool. 

2) In a sealed zip loc bag, break up the oreos with a rolling pin. Leave some big chunks for texture.

3) Using a hand or electric whisk, whisk the cream till soft peaks. Distribute into 2 bowls.

4) Distribute equal portions of condensed milk and milk into each of the 2 bowls. Gently fold in so that you don't knock the air out of the cream.

5) To one bowl, add the raisins and milo and gently fold in. To the other bowl, add the oreo chunks and coffee.

6) Pour each bowl into an ice cream container and put them in the freezer.

7) After 3 hours, using a electric whisk or fork, break up the chunks of ice. Repeat every hour subsequently. I did it till I went to bed, i.e. only a further 2 times at hourly intervals. It is especially important to bring up the solids (i.e. raisins and oreos) from the bottom as they tend to settle there.

Soju lime tonic

Drawing inspiration from Internet recipes that pair soju with fruit juices, I bought a bottle of tonic water and was pleasantly surprised. Since soju tastes like vodka, this would probably work too.

Ingredients

1 glass of tonic water

1 tsp lime juice

1 shot soju

Method

Mix and drink!