Month: Jul 2012

Yelly Eats

Perfect rice!

Yelly

Rice is a staple in the Filipino diet.  I think the first thing a Filipino does when they move to another country is to find out the nearest place they can get rice from.  Most of our dishes are best served with rice.  It’s no wonder that quite possibly, the first thing one learns to cook is rice.

I’ve been cooking rice since I was 11 years old and I’ve had my fair share of burnt, overcooked and undercooked rice episodes.  But for the past 10 or so years, I’ve managed to figure out how to NOT burn rice–without using a rice cooker.  This is cooking rice over a hob WITHOUT HAVING TO LIFT THE LID 🙂 and you should be able to produce bowl after bowl of fluffy, white, perfectly steamed rice!

  1. Measure your rice and place it in the pot.  Wash the rice twice, each time draining as much water as you can from the pot.
  2. Using the cup that you measured your rice with, use this rice to water ratio:  for every 1 measured cup of rice, use 1 1/2 cup of water minus 1/2 cup of water.  Confusing?  Let me try to make it clearer, for 2 cups of rice use 2 1/2 cups of water (1 1/2 cups water x 2 = 3, then subtract 1/2 a cup = 2 1/2; for 1 1/2 cups of rice use 1 3/4 cups of water, etc.).
  3. Place the pot over a hob on medium high heat until it reaches a rolling boil (the stage when it starts to bubble, at the lid starts making a rattling noise and you start to see steam coming out from under the lid.  this is usually 4-5 mins after placing the pot over the hob).  Remove from heat for 5 mins.
  4. Turn down the hob to a medium low setting and return the pot to cook for a further 5 mins.  Then remove the pot from the heat and allow to rest for 5 mins.
  5. The next step, really, is to enjoy your fluffy, steamed rice 🙂

Note to self:  take a picture of the rice when you cook it again.

Yelly Eats

Food for the gods

Yelly

I’ve always loved these chewy bars.  When I was younger, you could only get food for the gods at Christmas time.  It was a favourite Christmas giveaway.  Or at least that’s how I remembered it.  I think they’re now more available in shopes and one doesn’t have to wait for Christmas to enjoy these date and walnut filled bars (although in hindsight, I think in the Philippines they used raisins or prunes and instead of walnuts they used pili)!

I thought I’d try my hand at making them myself (like I always say, necessity is the mother of invention!).  I looked for the simplest recipe and hit the jackpot with the one I’m sharing.  It’s not as moist as I thought it would be (but that might be because I forgot to add the 1 tablespoon of honey that’s required or it might be that the oven was a tiny bit too hot!  Practice makes perfect and I have enough dates for a few more attempts.  I will revise the recipe when I’ve found MY perfect medium) but it certainly tasted the way I remembered it.

If you try the recipe, let me know how you get on, please!  I definitely welcome sharing trade secrets! 🙂

Adapted from: http://gourmeted.com/2007/12/12/food-for-the-gods/

Ingredients:

Makes 16 – 20 bars

  • 1 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1 cup pitted dates, chopped
  • 1 cup unsalted butter, melted
  • 2/3 cup brown sugar
  • 2/3 cup caster sugar
  • 1 tablespoon honey
  • 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 cup walnuts, coarsely chopped

Directions:

  1. Preheat oven to 350F or 180C.  Line a brownie pan with parchment paper (wax paper will do just fine).  You can use a 13.5″ x 8″ pan.
  2. Sift flour, baking powder, and salt together.  Add chopped dates and chopped walnuts and mix until dates and walnuts are coated with flour and evenly distributed in the flour mixture.  Set aside.
  3. Beat eggs and sugars until well-incorporated.  Add vanilla extract (Ina Garten aka the Barefoot Contessa, says to use the best that you can because the better ingredients you have because the product turns out better) and the honey.  Add the melted butter until well-incorporated.
  4. Fold in the flour-date-walnut mixture until batter is uniform and everything is mixed well.
  5. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and spread evenly.  Bake for 30-40 minutes (depending on the oven).  Test with a toothpick.  It should be done if the toothpick comes out clean.
  6. Cool completely before slicing into bars or squares.
Yelly Writes

Nocturnal musings

Yelly

In an effort to stop myself from performing a Nigella-esque night-time raid on my fridge (which at the moment is stocked with rice, tomato and bagoong, perfect comfort food triumvirate!), I have switched on my lappy and am tiptapping on my keyboard instead of preparing a bowl of rice and tomato salad with bagoong.

Bagoong is basically fermented shrimp paste that has been sauteed.

I am tired and wide-awake at the same time.  If you could see me now: I’m sitting near the edge of my bed, near the window, with legs crossed under the duvet.  I don’t think I feel well.  I’m not too certain that I’m ill (I don’t have a fever, low-grade or otherwise, but not having a fever has never stopped a hypochondriac from worrying).  My eyes are squinting against the weird non-bright light from my laptop screen.  I wonder if I should take a paracetamol or an ibuprofen tablet, just in case?

I think I might just switch the lappy off as verbal diarrhea gets worse when one gets sleepier and I think tapping away has achieved its purpose, to make me sleepy.  Although I don’t think that was the plan originally.  I think I wanted to write about reading Her Fearful Symmetry, which I haven’t finished yet and how the book I’m reading affects the way I write.

Maybe that’s why I haven’t written that novel which is supposed to make me a millionaire?  I haven’t found a personal writing style yet.  I haven’t found the voice with which to tell my story…

Right.  I’m beginning to sound fanciful…time to publish this blog, do a bit of self-promotion on Twitter about this (idiotic) entry and drift off to the Land of Nod.

Nuh-night!

Yelly Eats

Salt Beef Heaven

Yelly

I have been looking for a really good salt beef with pickle and mustard on rye and found it.

If you’re in London, find out where Bel Shapiro.  She absolutely will NOT disappoint.  My salt beef sandwich was bee-yoo-tee-ful and absolutely delicious.

Salt beef, pickle and mustard on rye, The Bell & Brisket

Yelly Eats

A Working Girl’s Mapo Tofu Don

Yelly

I started writing this entry with the words “When I think of home…” and started laughing.  Because in my head I started singing “…I think of a place where there’s love overflowing…”  If you don’t know the song I’m singing, well, your musical education isn’t as good as you think it is.  Well, either that or you weren’t alive in the 80’s (that’s when I first saw it, on RPN9 on a Saturday evening), or you’ve never heard of The Wiz.  It’s the Michael Jackson-Diana Ross adaptation of The Wizard of Oz.

And as usual, I digress!

I miss home and the little comforts that are so close (that or I can easily jump into the family car–our trusty Revo–and drive to where I want to go get things).  I miss having nail bars everywhere, I miss Ditas of David’s Salon in SM Fairview who does my hair perfectly, I miss Starbucks and the occasional green tea latte frap, I miss tocino, Purefoods corned beef.  I miss eating at the eat-all-you-can lunches (and dinners) of Saisaki (although, it may not be the same now), I miss the shawarma place in Fairlane (also in Fairview), I miss Mercury Drug (because buying things over the counter is sometimes quicker).  I miss my Tita Rescy’s cafe called Indulgence on…(argh! I can’t remember!) Perea.  I miss Ineng’s barbecue and I miss Teriyaki Boy!  Apart from their sushi, I miss their mapo tofu don.

Mapo tofu was one of the first dishes that I learned to replicate when I moved to the UK.  I loved it a lot (I think it loved me too, because I KNOW I gained weight because I ate a lot of mapo tofu don from Teriyaki Boy) and missed it so much that I looked for a recipe and searched for ingredients.  I can now, and I say this with absolute confidence, whip up mapo tofu in minutes.  I now have what I call the working girl’s version of this wonderful tofu-pork-black bean sauce dish.  It’s quick, and really easy.  I also like to think that it’s really healthy (because of the tofu! :)).  And all the ingredients are things you can get at the supermarket!

Ingredients:
Serves 4 people

  • 1 block soft tofu (about 350g), drained and diced
  • 3 tablespoons vegetable oil
  • 500g minced pork
  • 1 Blue Dragon black bean stirfry sauce packet
  • 2-3 spring onions, sliced into thin diagonals and separate the white sections from the green leafier bits
  • 1 packet coriander chopped finely
  • 1-2 teaspoons chili oil (depending on how hot you want it, you can include the chili paste at the bottom of the jar)
  • 1 pork stock cube (I use Knorr)
  • 2 teaspoons light soy sauce
  • Salt to taste

Directions:

  1. Heat oil in the pan and brown minced pork.  Add blackbean stirfry sauce and pork stock cube.  Allow to simmer for 3 minutes.
  2. Add chili oil (and paste, if you want it hot, hot, hot!) and allow to simmer for 3 minutes.
  3. Add the chopped white sections fo the spring onions, the soy sauce and two-thirds of the coriander.  Add salt to taste (I like to make it salty, according to my taste as the tofu hasn’t been added to the pork mince at this stage).
  4. Add the diced tofu and mix gently, making sure the tofu isn’t mashed but is distributed well.  Allow to simmer for 5 mins.
  5. Serve over a bowl of steamed rice.
Yelly Eats

Wannabe Domestic Goddess Pancakes

Yelly

When I was growing up, hotcakes, or pancakes, were a breakfast staple.  For some reason, my mom would almost always cook them on a Saturday.  It was pancakes out of a packet but I thought it was the bees’ knees!  How my mom could make so many pancakes from one egg and a smallish looking packet of dry ingredients was beyond me.  I think all you had to add was either water or fat…I can’t remember now.  But I know that the brands we used to have at home were Maya and White King.  Eventually we did try to use Pillsbury…but I think Maya or White King was still the best.

When I was older, and fancied myself the capable cook, I experimented and tried making apple pancakes.  It was a DISASTER with a capital D.  My baby sister, Duckie, was ever so polite and she said it was okay…I don’t know if she remembers that day, but it was the first time I had given Duckie something to eat that she didn’t immediately finish (well that and anything aubergine!)!  So for a while I stopped experimenting with pancake recipes.  I’d given it up as a lost cause…for the meantime.

My favourite TV Chef is Nigella Lawson (stay with me, I’m not digressing! mentioning Nigella will eventually serve its purpose!).  While a lot of her recipes are absolutely rich and wonderfully calorific, some of them are absolutely practical and really quick to do.  Forever Summer is the Nigella series that, I think is, my favourite.  It’s where I got 2 of my favourite recipes.  A tamarind-based fish curry that’s absolutely deeee-vine over rice (ayayayayay!!  over rice again!  but then again, I am Filipino!) and pancakes from scratch.  Here’s my version of her recipe.  I’m finally learning to cook in smaller portions.  Hurrah!

This version is made with cream cheese.

Ingredients:

Makes 8 – 10 6-inch pancakeswannabe domestic goddess pancakes

  • 150 grams cream cheese (you can use full fat, low fat, non-fat)
  • 200 ml skim milk (the fattier the milk, the richer the pancake! butter milk is the best! yum yum!)
  • 3 eggs
  • 1/3 cup sugar (you can add more, but if you’re topping pancakes with syrup this is enough)
  • 2/3 cup self-raising flour (I use this so I don’t have to add baking powder)
  • 1 tsp vanilla (the better the vanilla, the better the pancakes 🙂 also, I’m very liberal with the vanilla!)
  • butter for greasing the pan

Directions:

  • Separate the egg yolks from the egg whites, and set aside.
  • Add the sugar to the egg yolks and beat until the egg yolk and sugar mixture turns very pale yellow.  Add the vanilla.  Add the cream cheese and mix until well-incorporated.  Add the flour slowly, making sure that there are no lumps.  Add the milk.  Set aside.
  • Beat the egg whites until soft peaks form.  Add 1/3 of the egg whites into the egg yolk mixture until well incorporated and then fold in the rest of the egg whites gently
  • Grease a non-stick pan with a little butter (don’t put too much butter as this will FRY the pancake—you don’t really want that).  Ladel pancake batter.  Wait until the larger bubbles burst before flipping over, this should take 1-2 minutes, depending on how hot the hob is.  The pancake is relatively ready if you shake the pan and the pancake moves around relatively easily (if you’re not using a non-stick pan, you may have to check if the pancake’s bubble-side is cooked).
  • You can garnish with whatever fruit tickles your heart strings and drizzle whatever flavoured syrup you want.
  • You can also cook a non-cream cheese version and just do away with the cream-cheese.  It still works! 🙂
Yelly Eats

Salted Duck Egg and Tomato Salad

Yelly

itlog na maalatItlog na maalat (Filipino for salty egg) or itlog na pula (Filipino for red egg) is not something that I can get from my local Morrisons, Tesco or Sainsbury’s.  And I missed it terribly.  I missed just being able to pop down to the market and buy a couple of eggs, one-fourth kilo of tomatoes and run back home and pick a few basil leaves from my dad’s garden.

It’s one of the simplest Filipino dishes ever.  You just cut the salted duck eggs (they’re hard-boiled) into cubes, cube the tomatoes, chop the basil leaves finely and mix them together.  It’s a great accompaniment to rice and fried fish or a roasted chicken or roasted pork (liempo to us Pinoys).  Sometimes, when I can’t think of what to cook to accompany my rice, this is the quickest viand to put together, no cooking required.  Since I’ve moved to the UK, I’ve made variations.  I’ve added an onion in the mix.  Another version of this salad is to add dill (fresh or dried) instead of basil.

I can’t go down to Chinatown in London all the time or head to the Filipino store in Colchester.  It’s not every day that I can get duck eggs but I daresay, it’s easier to get duck eggs from somewhere than it is to go down to London!  So I had to find out how to make my own salted eggs.  And this is the recipe.  It’s the one that works for me best.

As found in: http://www.lilligren.com/homestead/duckeggs.htm

Ingredients:
1 dozen duck eggs (any breed of duck will work)
1 to 1-1/2 cups of sea salt
5 cups water
1 gallon glass or plastic container

What you should do:
1. To make the brine solution, dissolve salt in warm water.
2. Wash eggs thoroughly and put them in the container.
3. Pour in the brine solution. Cover the container with a towel.
4. Let stand at room temperature for 30 days. Turn the eggs every 4 days.
5. After 30 days, remove the eggs from the brine solution. Wash with water.
6. Cook the eggs by boiling in water for 30 minutes.

BUT if you can’t wait for the 30 days, you can do this:

1. Boil the eggs in the brine solution.
2. Make a fresh batch of the brine solution. Peel cooked duck eggs. Place them in the fresh brine solution and soak for 24 hours.

**Note that it won’t turn out as good as the ones made to soak for 30 days, but sometimes, instant gratification is good too! 🙂 I also don’t use that many eggs (I did 2 for my tomato salad)! So the brine solution can be scaled down to about 3 tbsp of salt to 500ml of water is good 🙂

Yelly Eats

Recipe: Sautéed Aubergines

Yelly

True story:  I was looking for eggplants in the market because eggplants are one of my favourite vegetables.  I knew I could buy it anywhere so I thought I’d look.  Eggplants in the UK are like eggplants in the US.  They’re big and fat.  I think they’re called Japanese eggplants in Philippine supermarkets.  But, I digress.  I can’t remember if it was actually in the Ipswich market or if it was at the shops, but I remember asking someone where the eggplants were.  All I got was a blank stare.  Then I remembered.  They don’t call eggplants here eggplants.  They call them AUBERGINES!  To make things complicated, this is the phonetic spelling:  br-zhn, br-jn

The easiest eggplant recipe (apart from slice thinly and fry and dip into soy sauce with garlic) is to sauté the eggplant in garlic, onion and tomatoes.  I find comfort in cooking this because it reminds me of home.  I think this became a quick favourite at home (my mom likes it, my brother loves it, my sister hates it and my dad can’t eat eggplant—even stevens!) because it works well as a rice topping.  It’s quick, it’s easy and it’s a vegetable!  I remember eating it with shrimp paste and rice.  Yum! 🙂

I cooked this on Sunday because Sunday was Day 1 of The Challenge.  Since I moved to the UK, I usually cook this with pork mince.  But in true challenge-facing spirit, I cooked it the way I used to cook it in the Philippines, sautéed with oyster sauce!

Ingredients:

  • 1 medium-sized eggplant, diced
  • 2 medium-sized salad tomatoes, diced
  • 1 large onion, diced
  • 2 cloves garlic, minced
  • 1 tablespoon oyster sauce
  • 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
  • 1 teaspoon sesame oil (optional)
  • salt and pepper to taste

Directions:

  1. Heat the vegetable oil in a shallow pan.  Once the oil is relatively hot (not smoking hot though!), add onions.  Sauté until the onions are transluscent, then add the tomatoes.  The tomatoes should turn slightly mushy (if at this stage the tomatoes and onions look slightly dry, add a 2-3 tablespoons of water).  Add the garlic (my mom always taught me that you should add garlic first when sautéing, but so many chefs say that you add garlic last because garlic burns fairly quickly and adding garlic near the end of the sautéing allows you to control the intensity of the garlic taste in the dish).
  2. Once the garlic is slightly browned this is usually the stage where you add your meat (in my case, due to the challenge, I didn’t add any meat) and brown it.  Once the meat is browned, add your oyster sauce.  Simmer for 3 minutes.
  3. Add the aubergine and simmer, stirring occasionally for 7-10 minutes.  The dark purple of the aubergine skin should turn slightly brown and the flesh should take on the colour of the tomatoes.
  4. Add salt and pepper to taste (if the oyster sauce hasn’t made it salty enough for you).  To finish, add the sesame oil.

Serving suggestion:   Serve over a bowl of steamed rice.

Yelly Writes

Choices, choices

Yelly

I had written down this woeful entry about how tired I was, and how I wished I could just go to work tomorrow (as it is 8 minutes after midnight, I guess I should say later!) and just say, I’m going now, toodle pip!  But I’m not a quitter.  I may whine and cry about how hard it is but I try my best to get things done…with a smile on my face.  I guess I’m just feeling the pressure at work and needed a good cry to relieve the tension.  I hit the delete button and trashed the entry.  It’s a good thing to vent, but not a good thing to send out negativity into the cosmos!

In my heart of hearts, I’d love a job where I can read, cook, bake and write.  Does anyone need anyone to do just that?  I’d love to do that, and, because we live in the real world, with real needs and real bills, I’d love to get paid for it too!  But when I seriously consider what I want to do in this dream job of mine, the pesky self-doubt creeps in:  Am I a good enough writer?  Will people want to read what I want to say?  Are my thoughts even interesting enough?  Am I interesting enough?  After I’ve wallowed in my self-doubt long enough for my hands and feet to go all pruney, I go back to my dream job drawing board, not to rethink, but to plan how I’m going to find a way to find that job that lets me do what I want and make money out of it!  There has got to be a way for me to do what I love the most!  But until I figure out how to do just that, I shall go back to the grind!

Now how’s that for verbal diarrhea?

I’m trying to decide which cookbook to write about:  Lorraine Pascale’s Home Cooking Made Easy or Rachel Khoo’s Little Paris Kitchen.  Any thoughts?

Yelly Eats

Blueberry Crumble Pie from Edd Kimber

Yelly


I think I chose the perfect recipe from Edd Kimber’s book.  The book was a gift from Alan (who enables my cookbook addiction!).  I am diabetic which means that I can’t have as much sugar as the next person, so I figured trying a fruit recipe would be the safest bet.  I reduced the amount of sugar by about 50 grams and I was quite fortunate that the blueberries that I bought had a good sweetness and tart ratio!  Also, the crumble topping allowed me to use my pastry mixer (which I called a pastry cutter for ages, but I was told it was called a pastry mixer in bonny old England! yes, me and my Americanisms, eh?)!

Edd Kimber was the first ever winner of the Great British Bake Off.  Mind you I was rooting for Ruth Clemens but it was a completely undeniable truth that Edd had the gift!

The book is lovely and the pictures are gorgeous!  They seem scream out to you, “Bake me!  Bake me!”  Plus Edd’s hands looked really gentle and elegant…soooo different from my chipolata sausage fingers!  But I digress.  This is really about this lovely book!  The instructions are clear and concise and very easy to follow.  I love the way everything was described systematically: what you had to do, when you had to do it, how long you had to do it for.  I also love the layout of the book and how everything looks pristine and clean.

What I love the most is how my pie, seeing that it was the first time I’d made the pie and seeing how I’d tweaked the recipe, looked almost identical to the photo in the book.  I was beaming with pride!  Edd Kimber was happy enough to retweet the photo of the pie I posted on Twitter (yes, it was a fan girl moment, bless my giddy heart!).

You MUST try Edd’s recipes.  I’ve got a challenge set up for myself to try the macaron recipes next.  But if  you want a wonderful fruit pie recipe that’s easy to make and comes out beautifully, this book should become one of your regulars in your recipe arsenal!  It is absolutely YUM!