Bread with Raisins and Almond Slivers

This is a case where I "ng kam sum" which means "not satisfied". Since I started playing with my bread machine, I have yet to get the right recipe for soft bread with my machine. Of course the latest attempt was using bread improver but babe pointed me to Yochana's Cake Delight's blog, with specific reference to her Roti Keset. Wah.. the bread looks so cottony soft that I decided to give it a try. I was not going to attempt the full roti keset which Aunty Yochana did as I would be too embarrassed when the bread turn out looking nothing like her Roti Keset but what I did was to use her dough recipe and added raisins and almond slivers to the bread.

My sole intention was to see if my bread machine could turn out a bread very close to Aunty Yochana's as it was my theory that hand made bread will always have a better texture and bread machine-made breads will always be a close second only, at best.

I used the exact ingredients for the dough as Aunty Yochana except for the margarine. I didn't have margarine at home. Instead, I used shortening. I have reproduced the list of ingredients here and have placed it in the order of loading them into the bread machine.

Ingredients

130g of cold water
2 large eggs
75g of shortening (or margarine)
300g of Bread flour (sieved)
100g of Plain flour (sieved)
20g of milk powder
1tsp salt
75g of sugar
11g of Instant Yeast
100g of golden raisins
100g of almond slivers

All the ingredients (except for the raisins and the almonds) were placed into the bread machine pan and I selected Menu Option 3 for wholemeal grains. I did that as I had to add the raisins and the almond only when the machine started on the 2nd kneading cycle.



My opinion? This is the best tasting and the best bread texture I have gotten out of my machine todate and I am quite happy (finally haha). However, I still think that handmade bread will always have the superior texture over machine-made bread. But I love fresh bread (oooo especially the smell of fresh bread) but lazy to do all the work, the bread machine is the closest thing to fresh bread for me :)

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Baking Class - Orange Muffins, Royal Icing & Fondant

Orange Muffins

The weekend had just gone by in a blink of an eye but I had fun. Didn't have much time to play "masak-masak" (cooking) at home as I signed up for a beginners class in baking with Apple Kitchen. To show you how "raw" I was in this kind of thing, when the instructor Melinda mailed me to ask me to bring a pair of scissors and a cutter, I really didn't know what kind she meant. So, what I did was to bring me the biggest pair of scissors I could find in the house and a dough cutter. Luckily when I was there, she didn't ask me to bring out my equipment since she had sufficient cutters and scissors for us to use. We were using a sharp tipped small scissors and a blade *embarassed*.


The classes are normally kept very small and this Satarday, there was only Susan and myself. Got there with minimal hassle as the directions given by Melinda was clear. Started almost on the dot at 9:30am.

The lessons for the day included Orange Muffins, Royal Icing and Fondant. I must say it was tremendously fun for me. Melinda is very down to earth and for a total beginner like myself, she explains everything very clearly. And never once did I feel small or stupid for not knowing what she mean by some of ingredients. (I always thought the glycerin was what you put on you skin, not in your food.. there you see, I did learn some thing in class besides just salivating the entire time waiting for the muffins to cook *heehee*).

Susan was a great classmate. She has a slight advantage over me as she has helped and also watched her mother make moon cakes, chiffon cakes and a gamut of other stuff. We clicked quite well as we could chat, and laugh whilst creating our fondant monsters. Our first time efforts are nothing really to shout about but we did learn what we set out to and the best part of it is that we "baked up" a new friendship. Looking forward to the next class.

Took this home to be placed on the family altar for "Dad"... not that he is going to eat them..but to be honest, the stuff on top of the cake is made of just mainly icing sugar and tastes horrible.

PS. This is really a simple no frills class. If you are going to expect Wilton type of posh posh set up, then I reckon you might be disappointed. However, if you are like me, who would really like to learn the basics, no frills and no pressure, then Apple Kitchen is a great place to start.

By the way, the Baking Class Schedule for May is already out. I am considering the Cheesecake & Tiramisu class :)

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Tom Yam Soup (Kung)

I had a sudden craving for tom yam soup and I blame it on the weather. I was looking for the simplest recipe that I could find over the next and in recipe books and other than using those pre-packed tom yam paste, I found several. What I did was improvised as some of them had ingredients that I didn't know what they were, let alone where to get them. So, made a list of the ingredients and went to the wet market, towing babe and JW with me. Managed to pick up all the stuff that I needed but the best part of shopping in a wet market is that you get free stuffs. I was as the vegetable stall to buy 6 extra large fresh red chillies (not for the soup, but for something else) and asked to have a stalk of spring onions. The auntie said "RM2 for the chillies. The spring onion auntie *chia lu* (belanja/gift)". See, I don't see any of the hypermarkets giving me free spring onions even when the grocery bill runs up to several hundred ringgit :(.

This is about the simplest soup plus the quickest I have ever made. I cooked it in a pot over the stove but the leftovers were just chucked into the slow cooker to preserve. Maybe there will still be some left when I come home tonite.

Ingredients

10 fresh prawns (cleaned and trim off feelers, legs and all sharp bits
2 white squids (cut into bite size)
100g of chicken breast meat (cubed)
2 stalks of lemon grass
2 inches of galangal (lengkuas)
6 pieces of kaffir leaves
6 pieces of chilli padi
2 tomatoes
2 1/2 tbsp of lemon juice
2 tbsp of fish sauce
1 tsp of chillie oil
600ml of water
spring onions for garnishing

Method

1. Heat up a little oil in a pot and if you have the clay pot, it is even better.
2. Throw in the galangal and lemon grass. Stir them around and when they turn fragrant, pour in the water.
3. When the water starts to boil, put in the all the rest of the ingredients and keep stirring until it boils.
4. Add a little salt and sugar for taste.
5. Ready for consumption anytime.

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Prawns with Mango & Fruits

When you have lots of fruits in the house and they are going to rot faster than you could eat them, the best way to get rid of them would be to cook them up into a dish and if that is the only other dish available for the meal, people you invite to have dinner with you will have no choice but to down them... haha.. it is either that or plain rice with soya sauce or marmite soup.

I bought some lovely mangoes recently and they are pretty cheap, if not very cheap. They are almost 20cm in length, very sweet and going at RM10 for 5 pieces. There are lots of fruits in the fridge that were becoming over ripe pretty fast so I decided to cook up this super unusual dish which I call Prawns with Mango & Fruits.

Ingredients

20 pieces of White Prawns, deveined, cleaned and drained.
Sugar
2 tbsp cornflour
1/2 Big Onion (diced)
2 Oranges (only the juice is used)
5 Water Chestnuts (diced)
3 Jambu Air (apparently this is call Water Apple) (diced)
1 mango (diced)
1 tsp of lemon juice
1 tsp Olive Oil

Method

1. Put in 2 tsp of sugar into the clean prawns and leave aside for a short while. The sugar will make the prawns nice and "crunchy" (for want of a better word).
2. Just before cooking, a quick rinse of the prawns or the dish might be very sweet. Put in the cornflour and toss the prawns in it.
3. Heat up some oil in the wok and when the oil is hot, put in the prawns.
4. Stir the prawns around until they turn pink and starts to curl up. Dish them up and set them aside.
5. Meanwhile, squeeze the juice out of the oranges.
6. Add in a tsp of lemon juice to give it that little tartness (optional)
   
7. Heat a the olive oil in a non-stick pan. When the oil is hot, put in the onion.
8. Add the orange (with lemon) juice and put to boil on a low heat.
9. Add in all the fruits except the mango. Put the mango last as they are very soft and too much cooking will make them squishy
10. Add in the prawns and make sure the orange juice covered all the ingredients in the pan.
11. Add 1 tsp of cornflour if there is too much liquid in the pan (certain oranges produces more juice)
12. Put in the mango last before dishing up.
13. Garnish with some parsley and serve.

Mission accomplished... managed to get rid of some of the items cluttering up the fridge but also resulted in this comment which I overheard whilst I was washing up in the kitchen... "I think we should convince her not to watch too much AFC - Asia Food Channel episodes. Her dishes are turning wierd lah".... hahaha

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Pau Dough

I was chatting with suesue of Cooking Momster-My Kitchen on Friday night on MSN and we were talking of our respect failures in making the perfect bread dough. That was when she recommended that I tried the pau recipe that given inside the box of Blue Key brand of Pau Flour. I wasn't sure if I was confident enough to make paus but then I thought to myself, don't try don't know wor :).

So, on Saturday night (don't know why but I seem to have inspirations to bake after dark. Maybe I was some kind of nocturnal animal in my past life or something) I went to the kitchen armed with the pau recipe to check if I have all the necessary ingredients. Goody, I have but also because it is a very simple recipe, which I reproduced below.

Basic Pau Dough

Blue Key Pau Dough 500g (1/2 a box)
Instant Yeast 6g (1tsp)
Sugar 100g (1/2 cup)
Shortening/Corn Oil 50g (1/4 cup)
Water 250g (1 1/2 cups)

I was too lazy to do this by hand so what I did was to dump everything into the bread machine. The pau dough turned out ok, soft and all. I used the red bean paste that I bought from the bake ware shop last week and I also cooked some meat for the filling for the following day.

The meat fillings

Ingredients for the meat filling

600g of minced meat
4 chopped water chestnuts
2 stalks of chinese parsley (chopped)
1 tsp of chicken stock granules
salt and pepper to taste
2 tbsp of corn starch
1tsp of sesame oil

All the ingredients for the meat filling were mixed together and left overnight in the fridge ready for the paus the following day.

My only complain is my own pau folding technique. These paus are definitely not ready for public consumption yet as they are don't have that commercial look. Suesue advised me to do it often as this technique takes a lot of practice. Okie.. suesue.. will do as you advise and hopefully the next batch of paus will be a improvement to look at :)

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When We Plagiarize Other's Recipes....

I love food blogs and yeah, there are many instances where the recipes looks very similar over various blogs, but never word for word. I suppose there is only so many ways to cook Stew Chicken in Potatoes or Spaghetti Carbonara :). Anyway, I was feeling extremely bored after I had finished a section of the document that I was supposed to be updating that I decided to go on the web and search for more blog sites. And guess what I found.....

I am sure that by now with the US elections thingy going on, most of us will know who Mr John McCain is. If you don't know, he is currently one of the candidate for the US Presidential post. But how many of us know of Mrs Cindy McCain, his missus? Well, I for one didn't until I stumbled upon this writeup. It read "McCain "Family Recipes" Lifted from the Food Network". Apparently Mrs McCain has been caught plagiarizing recipes from the Food Network sites. Several of Mrs McCain's recipes which she called her "Family Recipes" were lifted word for word off the Food Network. Read the report here.

Naughty..naughty...

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Braised Pork Belly

This is a dish where my mum will fix up for us when she cannot think of anything else better to feed us with when we were kids. She knows that we will eat rice by the bowlfuls as this dish is rather sweet and all kids if not most love sweet foods. This is really a no-frill home-cooked dish. I am not sure if you made it with other sorts of meat, the outcome will be the same. It is just the texture of pork is different from chicken and beef. I suppose if some one is game to try it with beef, do let me know the results :)

Ingredients

600g pork belly (uncut)
250g superior dark sauce
250ml of water
100g sugar
3 cloves of garlic, chopped

Method

1. Heat up the non-stick pot and put in the chopped garlic.
2. Stir it a bit and add in the superior dark sauce
3. Add in the water and the sugar and turn off the heat.
4. Put in the pork belly into the pot and coat the pork with the sauce.
5. Leave the pork in the pot for an hour to marinade.
6. After 1 hour, heat up the pot and turn the pork around.
7. Leave on very low fire and let the pork simmer in the sauce.
8. Cook the pork for another hour. Turn it around every now and then to make sure that the pork is cooked evenly.
9. Remove the pork and when it is cool enough to be handled, cut it into slices about 1/2 cm thick (or you could have it thicker if you want).
10. Serve with piping hot rice would be nice.

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