“Let’s face it, a nice creamy chocolate cake
does a lot for a lot of people; it does for me.”
~Audrey Hepburn
I agree with Audrey Hepburn completely. Chocolate can and will make things better!
Chick pea-chorizo-pork stew
This recipe evolved because I missed the callos dish that my mom prepared for us. Callos is made with beef tripe and has chorizo and red bell peppers and is served over rice. When I moved to England, I didn’t know where to buy tripe because there weren’t any butchers that were close by and the bigger supermarkets didn’t have tripe on their shelves. I had to figure out how to get my callos fix without having to buy tripe. It was a brainwave when I remembered that oxtail is also used to make kare-kare (which is a peanut-based stew popular in the Philippines). So I figured, if I used oxtail soup, then it would give me the taste of tripe.
This is an excellent soup for the winter months when you need something hearty and hot. It can be served on rice or eaten on its own. If you plan to not have it as a rice topping, I’d suggest adding another can of chick peas or a can of cannellini beans or red kidney beans to make it more substantial. You can choose to add a spicy kick to it by adding either the cayenne pepper or the tabasco sauce. I’ve been known to add both though. It just adds a really comforting heat to the stew during the winter months.
This is a slow-cook recipe but it is definitely worth the wait!
Inspired by a tweet from Daphne Oseña Paez, requesting that I share the recipe, I challenged myself to weigh ingredients and approximate amounts. So here goes(…nothing?!?)!
Ingredients:
- 1 kilo belly pork cut into cubes
- 226 grams of chorizo, cut into 1/4 inch disks
- 2 400g cans of chopped tomato
- 1 400g can of Heinz Oxtail soup
- 1 400g can of chickpeas (or 240g of dried chickpeas soaked in water overnight to soften)
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
- 600g potatoes, peeled and diced
- 2 teaspoons garlic, chopped finely
- 2 large white onions,
- 3 heaping teaspoons paprika
- 1 teaspoon cumin
- 2 pork stock cubes
- 1 litre water
- salt and pepper to taste
- 1 heaping teaspoon cayenne pepper, optional
or - 2 teaspoons tabasco sauce, optional
Directions:
- Heat the olive oil in a stock pot on medium heat. Add the chorizo disks and fry until they crips around the edges. When the chorizo oil turns the bottom of the pan slightly red, add the onions. Reduce the heat slightly Once the onions are softened and slightly translucent, add the garlic sautee for 2 minutes (approximately).
- Add the pork and sautee for about 15 minutes, until fat in the pork belly cubes have rendered slightly and the flesh has lost its pink colour. Add chopped tomatoes, oxtail soup, pork stock cubes, 500 ml of the water and spices. Bring to a boil, stirring occasionally, making sure the pork pieces and chorizo don’t stick to the bottom of the pan.
- Once the stock begins to boil, reduce heat to allow it to simmer for 30 minutes.
- Increase heat again, to add potatoes and chick peas and remaining water. Add salt and pepper to taste. It’s at this point that I add either 1 heaping teaspoon of cayenne pepper or 2 teaspoons of tabasco sauce for a kick. You don’t have to add both if you don’t want it to be too spicy. Bring to a slow boil and reduce heat and allow to slow cook for a further hour, or until the pork is tender.
- This will serve 4-6 greedy people if served as an all-in-one meal or 8-10 if served over a bowl of rice.
Weekend Pudding: Applesauce Cake
I brought applesauce cakes to work once because someone at work had given me cooking apples. Since I got the apples for free, I thought it was only fair for me to share.
I’ve been using this recipe for ages so I know it’s fool-proof. That’s why I feel confident sharing this recipe. This cake batter can be used as a base for any cake with fruit. This works well with bananas (you only have to add 3-4 mashed overripe bananas). You can replace the apples in this recipe with 2 cups of chopped pineapples as well. To make the recipe more festive (for the holidays), add 2 teaspoons nutmeg to the flour mixture in the cake.
Ingredients:
Cake
- 1 1/4 cups sugar
- 1/2 cup butter or margarine, softened
- 2 eggs
- 1/2 cup full cream milk
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 teaspoon salt
Applesauce mixture
- 2-3 medium-sized cooking apples,peeled, cored and diced finely
- 1/2 cup brown sugar
- 1/3 cup lemon juice
- 3 tablespoons cornflour
- 2 tablespoons cinnamon
Directions:
- Preheat oven to 350°F/180°C. Grease 2 loaf pans.
- To make the applesauce mixture, combine ingredients in a saucepan, making sure everything is well-incorporated.
- Over a low heat, bring to a slow boil. When sauce has thickened, remove from heat and set aside.
- Mix flour, baking soda and salt together. Either sift, if required, or mix using a wire whisk. Set aside.
- Cream butter and sugar together. Once butter has turned smooth and fluffy, add eggs, one at a time. making sure everything is well-incorporated. Add the vanilla.
- Fold in flour mixture, adding 1/4 of the mixture each time. Alternate adding the flour mixture with adding the milk, also a 1/4 portions at a time. Add the applesauce mixture and make sure everything is well-combined.
- Pour into pans and bake for 1 hour 15 minutes or until toothpick inserted into the centre of the loaf comes out clean.
- Cool for 15 minutes before removing from pans and cooling completely on wire racks.
- Wrap in cling film and store at room temperature for up to 5 days, or refrigerate up to 10 days.
Weekend Pudding: Amaretto Cake
This was made on Something For The Weekend before the show went off air. Angela Hartnett was filling in for Simon Rimmer as the resident chef. I wanted to try this because months ago, I bought a bag of amaretti biscuits from Gunton’s. It has been there ever since! When I saw this recipe, I thought it would be a great way to use the biscuits (before they go past their best before date!). I have a few tweaks planned for it, but it’s come out quite beautifully, if I may say so myself 🙂
The recipe is on the BBC website 🙂 And if you look at the photo featured on the BBC website and you look at my attempt at the cake, I think I may have done a super job! Haha!
Choi sum in a ginger-garlic-wine sauce
After eating at the HK Diner, I’ve been wanting to duplicate the choi sum dish that we had there. It was stir-fried choi sum in garlic, ginger and rice wine. It was lovely and very light. Something I could snack on really.
So I haven’t really eaten rice in a while. And just eating vegetables was probably not going to be filling enough. I went to the Oriental Supermarket last night and bought a few things. We’ve been wanting to have fried tofu so I thought it would be a good way to fill out the vegetable dish I was planning in my head.
It turned out amazing so I thought I’d share the recipe!
Ingredients
- 400g choi sum (or chinese broccoli) or tenderstem broccoli (or purple sprouting broccoli)
- 200g fried tofu cubes
- 15g ginger root, peeled, cut into thin strips
- 5 large cloves of garlic
- 4 tbsp rice wine
- 1 tbsp oyster sauce
- 1 tbsp vegetable oil
- 100ml water
- salt and pepper to taste
- With a pestle and mortar (or a food processor, but a pestle and mortar is infinitely more cathartic!), pound the ginger and garlic to a paste.
- In a wok or sautee pan, heat the oil. Sautee your garlic-ginger paste until garlic starts turning golden brown.
- Add rice wine and simmer for about 2 minutes. Turn down the heat to medium to low making sure that the rice wine doesn’t dry out completely. Add the oyster sauce and and half the water. Simmer for another minute. Add the broccoli. Cook for about 3 minutes covered.
- When the vegetable turns bright green, add the rest of the water and simmer for 2 minutes. Add the tofu, making sure you toss the vegetables and tofu so that the tofu is covered in the ginger and rice wine sauce.
- Simmer for a further 5 minutes, covered. Serve.
- Will feed 2-3 without rice, 4-5 if served with rice.
Look, Ma! No rice! 🙂
Service is as service does!
I think when you come from a customer service background, you’re quicker to spot customer service booboos and shortcomings. I’m a firm believer that the way customers are treated make the restaurant. It’s mostly the staff and how the staff treat their patrons that tips the balance. I have places that I love that may not necessarily be the best places to eat, but because the service is amazing and, when I go there, I feel important and valued (no matter how much my tab is and no matter how much of a tip I leave), it’s on my list of great places to have a meal at. During my recent London sojourn I ate at 2 different Chinese restaurants and let me just say that one restaurant offered stellar service while the other one has been tossed into my “do not visit ever again” pile.
A Tale of Two Restaurants
HK Diner, Chinatown, London
After I’d done my whistle stop pilgrimage to the Methodist Museum (it was after 5pm, so naturally, the museum was closed and all I had was a measly 7 snapshots!) it was decided that we’d go to Chinatown for dinner. I’d been looking forward to dinner for a long time because it had been decided AGES ago that dinner would be at Tai Ka Lok.
Having dinner at Tai Ka Lok is like having dinner at your Chinese aunt’s place (I’m not Chinese, but in my head having a meal at Tai Ka Lok would be like having a meal at one’s Chinese aunt–stereotyping, I know! Tres guilty!). It’s very pared down and very simple. You get the menu, you get the free soup as an appetiser, they bring you your food, you eat (of course after you finish eating, you pay!). The roasted meats are amazing (my absolute favourite is the crispy pork but their version of the pork mapo tofu is amazing too!) and you can see that a lot of people like eating at Tai Ka Lok because the table turnover is hard and fast (mind you, even though the table turnover is quick, you never really feel that you’re being rushed through your meal and I feel that’s a sign of great customer service!).
But, I digress! Anyway, there we were walking towards Tai Ka Lok when we noticed the front window was different and the name was different. Apparently, the restaurant had changed owners and changed names too! So off we went to HK Diner.
I’d pooh-poohed HK Diner for such a long time because I didn’t really think it was going to be as good as my Chinatown favourites Tai Ka Lok and New World (dimsum on trolleys! YUM!). But as we were hungry and the other option wasn’t something we wanted to try (and it was very forgettable as I can’t remember the name now!), we decided to risk HK Diner. If it was a bad experience, we’d just never come back. But surprise, surprise! The place was light, airy and somehow comforting. We were shown into a huge booth and were handed menus. The chinese tea came right away, steaming hot, and after we’d placed our orders, the food came shortly after! The service was quick and the staff were very friendly and helpful. I loved the fact that they asked us if everything was okay and if we needed anything else (mind you, in hindsight, it might’ve been their way of hurrying us along, but at the time we were none the wiser and it didn’t feel like we were being prodded along).
Also, and this was my favourite bit, when we asked for the leftover food to be wrapped up they gave us chopsticks! They gave us the generic packet that has a plastic soup spoon, chopsticks and a paper napkin. Mind you, it doesn’t take a long time to plonk that into a bag, but the thought process behind that take home packet of utensils was what I admired. Now that is service!
Hung Tao, Queensway, London
I had high hopes for this place. It looked clean, and airy and the food hanging by the window looked well-cooked (I’m a sucker for crispy duck!).
It was clean and airy. But that’s where my commendations stop. We were greeted in a hurried fashion and led to a table, with menus placed on the table unceremoniously. I wasn’t alarmed then because, really, you were in, you were made to sit, and you were given a menu to peruse, you were given food, you ate, you paid, you were out. That was fine. Nothing unusual.
I made a point of asking for a pot of Chinese tea as I was removing my coat. I was thirsty and it was a bit chilly outside as it was just starting to rain. It was a good thing I ordered the tea because it took them ages to take our order.
After looking at the menu, we’d decided to each get a rice plate with our choice of meats. After ages trying to catch the eye of waitstaff (after seeing people who arrived after we did get served first!), they finally deigned to come and take our orders. I still wasn’t disappointed at this point. But the seeds of doubt about the service came when the girl, with pen poised over pad, took note of our choices.
I chose the roasted two combination with rice, which was a plate of rice (it was a huge plate of rice that my brother would’ve devoured I think!) and your choice of roasted meat (I think you can choose from crispy duck, soy chicken, char siu pork and crispy pork). I was waiting for her to ask me which roasted meats I wanted but she didn’t. So I had to ask her to make sure I had crispy duck and soy chicken. She looked at me with this little frown on her face. I guess she expected me to get crispy pork and duck—or whatever was the popular choice. The frown was still there as she wrote down my choice. To go with our rice plates, we asked to have stirfried vegetables.
And then the waiting continued. It took them about 25 minutes to get our orders and it took them nearly twice as long to bring our food. It wasn’t until I noticed that people who had arrived after we did were served first and were given their orders first that I started feeling little niggles of irritation. What was up with that?!? After waiting for agest for our orders, the meats arrived cold, my duck had bones with tiny little shards of shattered duck bone everywhere. I thought the duck was deboned before you got served it?
There was a couple who were seated beside us who looked at the food we got when it arrived. They asked us what we ordered and we described it. When a member of staff came to take their orders it was so painful to hear and watch. There was a language barrier, definitely. But with the customer pointing to what they wanted and the member of staff insisting they wanted something else, it was all I could do to stop myself from getting involved. They finally got their orders, but I don’t know if they really got what they ordered because by the time we’d finished and paid our tab, their food hadn’t arrived yet.
The food was good, albeit being cold (I guess they expected the rice to warm it up. Didn’t happen, buddy!) and I was happy with the flavours. But it really was the service that ruined the experience for me. The waitstaff seemed to have a system of prioritising customers which I couldn’t understand. I’m not asking to be waited on hand and foot. But nearly and hour of waiting to be fed is not funny.
Nuff said.
Photo credits:
HK Diner – RateMyArea.com
Hung Tao – The London Evening Standard
Finally! Kare-kare!
Kare-kare (pronounced kah-reh-kah-reh) is a stew made from peanut sauce with vegetables (string beans, aubergines and white pakchoi), stewed oxtail, beef, and occasionally offal or tripe. Meat variants may include goat meat or (rarely) chicken. It is eaten with steamed rice and served with bagoong (shrimp paste) and patis (fish sauce). The bagoong and fish sauce is used to season it according to the diner’s taste.
I’ve been craving this for absolutely ages. My mom makes the absolute best and she does everything completely from scratch. She grinds the peanuts for the peanut sauce and pounds toasted rice (into powedered submission) to thicken the stew. She uses tripe, but since the kind of tripe she uses is a bit tricky to find, I resolved to find oxtail which Mom says will work just as well.
And, I finally managed to cook kare-kare today. It’s not quite as nice as Mom’s yet (I tried a shortcut that I read on someone’s blog and used glutinous rice flour instead of actual rice grains and used peanut butter instead of grinding my own peanuts and the texture wasn’t quite there. Next time I shall use rice instead of the flour.) but I plan to practice some more so that I can perfect it too! It was smelling exactly like my Mom’s kare-kare and that was good enough for me today.
It was warm enough at lunch today that I could imagine that I was at home (I was sitting on the couch really, watching the Wimbledon finals) eating kare-kare. I even had the prerequisite bagoong to make it really authentic (I was missing the banana heart that’s usually included but that didn’t bother me too! And let me tell you, after not having kare-kare for nearly three years, it was absolute bliss!
Desktop lunching
Sometimes all you need is a pot noodle and a bottle of soda!
This might not be the most healthiest of lunches (the sodium content is quite high, as you can probably imagine and soda is never really healthy, even if you do drink the diet kind because artificial sweeteners can be nasty) but it is the most nostalgic for me. It remindes me of noodle soups that can be bought in the Philippines. I must say I’ve tried the “Anglicised” pot noodles that you can buy in most of the supermarkets but have never really appreciated them. I tend to like the instant noodle soups — pot or otherwise — that you can get in most asian groceries. They seem to have more flavour (aka salt!).
I have a desk job and I do not drive (YET!) so I’m sort of stuck in the office during the day (unless I decide to venture out, which I do, if it’s not raining). So anything that I can plonk into my bag is a good lunch really. Most of the time I’ll have a sandwich or a pot noodle. My desktop lunches are sometimes more adventurous, especially when I can be bothered to pack my lunch the night before or wake up early to put my lunch together. Then I’m lucky because I have a salad or a rice meal.
I remember once walking through the office with my pot noodle and my soda and an officemate said that hot soup and a cold soda was a very weird lunch combination. I wasn’t offended but it made me think. I’ve always had hot food with a cold drink…something to do with what I’ve always had growing up. It was always hot steaming rice, with a viand and a cold drink, be it a fruit juice or a soda, or even just water. I’ve never really thought about how weird a hot-cold lunch combo would be to some people, but now that I think about it, it might be weird after all. Maybe it’s a cultural thing?
Bakewell Tart
This is my second attempt at making a bakewell tart (I so love using my fluted flan tin that any excuse to use it is a brilliant excuse!). The first one I tried had more of a marzipan-y top and someone suggested that I try making a sponge and adding a lot of almond extract and flaked almonds on top. It seemed to work…I just need to make sure I have the jam-sponge ratio correct. But it is looking good, doncha think? 🙂
Once I perfect it, I’ll share the recipe!
Easy-Peasy Chocolate Tart
Mind you, this recipe still needs refining. And I used store-bought pastry. It was too hot today to deal with making my own pastry today (plus I was being slightly lazy!). As a shortcut, I melted the chocolate in the microwave (brilliant tip that I found online, 90 seconds in the microwave on medium heat per 100g of chocolate. 200g should require a bit more than that, about 3 ½ minutes should do quite nicely!). But if you like ooey-gooey chocolatey tarts, this is the one to try!
Ingredients:
- 200g plain chocolate, melted
- 50g plain flour (I added another 25g to make the chocolate more solid as opposed to runny)
- 500g shortcrust pastry pack , rolled out to the thickness of a 20p piece and used to line 23cm flan tin
- 100g golden caster sugar
- 4 eggs
- cocoa, for dusting
Directions:
- Preheat oven to 180°C. Line flan tin with pastry (I used the sweet short crust) and blind bake pastry for 15 minutes (don’t forget your baking beans!!!). Set aside to cool.
- Lower oven temp to 150°C. Melt chocolate and brush about a fourth of the melted chocolate on pastry bottom. Set aside remaining chocolate to cool. In separate bowl, mix eggs, sugar and flour in a mixing bowl. Combine egg mixture and chocolate. Pour into pastry-lined flan tin and bake for 20-25mins (surface might crack a little).
- Cool on a rack and dust with cocoa powder and serve.
Yellywelly 