Back Again

After a lovely break back in Malaysia, I'm finally back in London. Struck down with a cold bug whilst on transit in Dubai, I'm still feeling like a miserable little bunny but life has to go on - work to go back to, work to slack off from ;)

There is of course the matter of my blog, which has sadly not seen an ounce of my attention in the last few weeks. To be honest, I lost much of my enthusiasm for updating it after I found out that someone had stole my photos and blog entries. However, now that I've had a little time to think things over.... I've decided that I'm not going to let some petty thief take away my enjoyment of writing my blog or taking photos of food. Hey, it sure didn't stop me from stuffing myself all this time :)

Whilst I leisurely go through my photos from my holiday, I will leave you with something I ate before the Christmas holidays. A rather delicious hot smoked honey salmon mousse.

Quite excellent served on individual baby gem leaves. Not at all salty with just a hint of honey coming through. Finished with a slight squeeze of lemon juice over each leaf.

Sautéed Prawns and Scallops in Garlic Butter

Awhile ago I mentioned that Stuart's mother was coming up for Sunday lunch, which I was admittedly a little worried about. However, it went off without a hitch and I do hope the food was up to scratch :) There was quite alot of food but I always think there should be a bit too much than to have too little. Of all the food we had that day, which included Malaysian beef rendang, Thai red chicken curry, long bean omelette; I only took this one photo - the starter of sautéed prawns and scallops in garlic butter served with a mix green salad with a soy and ginger dressing. Ohh so simple and very good, if I may say so :)

Prawns and Scallops in Garlic Butter served with a mix green salad with a soy and ginger dressing

Fresh scallops - about 3 per person
Fresh prawns - about 3 per person
Garlic - finely chopped
Butter - a very generous knob
Oil - just a touch

• Put a shallow pan on a medium-high heat until it's very hot. Add a touch of oil into the pan - just to lightly coat it.
• Lay the scallops in a circle around the pan, flat side down. Cook for about 1 1/2 minutes or until lightly caramelised on one side.
• Turn the scallops over, starting from the first scallop added to the pan until all the scallops in the circle have been turned
• Add the prawns into the middle of the pan, along with the garlic. Cook for about a minute before tossing to cook the prawns on the other side.
• Put in a generous knob of butter and season. Toss the prawns, scallops and garlic together. Cook for no more than a minute longer - you don't want rubbery seafood.
• Place on a plate and add the tossed green salad to the side.

A bag of mixed salad leaves - or whatever salad leaves you fancy
4 tbsp vegetable oil
2 tbsp Japanese rice vinegar
2 tbsp soy sauce
A few drops of roasted sesame oil
1/2 inch ginger - grated
1/2 clove garlic - grated

• Wash the salad leaves
• Put all the other ingredients into an old jam jar (or any other jar) with a tight screw top
• Shake the jar vigorously to mix the dressing. If it's left to stand, the dressing ingredients will separate - so another shake before pouring over the leaves is advisable.
• Toss the salad with the dressing in a large bowl - but do not do this until the prawns and scallops are ready to be plated.
  

Theft!

I have very recently found out that my photographs and blog contents have been copied off my Flickr account and from this blog to be featured on another blog - WITHOUT my permission or knowledge. Needless to say I was very angry when I found out....it really is just plain theft. I did visit the site (which I'm not going to promote by giving out the address) but apart from it being written in what I believe is Burmese, there is absolutely no contact information on the blog. After my initial anger had died down, I was going to pen a very polite message to this person asking for the removal of all copied material - a heck of lot more courtesy than this person ever showed me! But with no means of contacting this person, I seem to have hit a bit of a dead end.

However, an interesting view did come out of all this. On the day I found out my material had been copied, I was letting my frustration flow out to Stuart (alright - having a bit of a rant and rave) and he said I should be flattered that someone wanted to copy my work. Interesting viewpoint but I still rather sticky hands be kept away. I take the photos and write my blog purely out of enjoyment and love for the subject matter. I don't particularly go out of my way to advertise my blog but if others do come upon it, I hope they enjoy it as much as I do. I have, however, decided to mark the photographs that I post through my Flickr account. I never thought I would have to, but hopefully it will act as a slight deterrent to those terribly syrupy sticky (honey or golden syrup?) fingers from flinching any more of my stuff.

Pancake Sunday

Thanks to Betty Crocker, we had a really nice but very late lunch last Sunday. Late because I slept well past noon ... it was Sunday, so it can be overlooked ;)

I've had a box of Betty Crocker's Bisquick All Purpose Baking Mix sitting in my pantry for a few weeks now, just waiting for the right Sunday to cook up a batch of American style fluffy pancakes. It's just one of those things I've been dying to try and I finally bought a box - it even had a great picture of American pancakes on the box, oozing over with syrup. Just add milk and an egg .... cook over a pan on a medium heat. Brilliant! According to the instructions, half a packet makes about 16 smallish pancakes. I managed about 10 pancakes of various sizes :)

Serves doused in maple syrup with a small mountain of crispy streaky bacon and ... black pudding. Stuart went out to buy milk and bacon but also brought back a tube of black pudding - just to try. Haha he's such a food wuss sometimes. He seemed to enjoy the meal. I think he sometimes misses the big American breakfasts he used to get when he lived in Vancouver - he wolfed down 7 pancakes :D

Spanish Inspired Chicken Stew

Keeping with the theme of comforting winter food, I made a Spanish inspired chicken stew over the weekend. I had a whole chicken to use up and a roast (again!) just wasn't calling out to me. The stew was really quite lovely, lots of flavour and a good amount of sauce to be soaked up with crusty bread, buttery mash or good old steamed rice.

Putting it all together:

A whole medium chicken - cut into 8 pieces with the bones and skin left on
Chorizo (spicy) - cut into a small dice
1 medium white onion
3-4 large cloves of garlic - peeled and crushed
A good glug of red wine
1 tin chopped tomatoes
1 tbsp tomato paste
A large pinch of sugar
Olives - green or black
Finely chopped parsley from about 5-6 stalks

• Heat a little oil in a deep pan on medium-high heat. Lay the chicken pieces into the pan, skin side down. Cook the chicken in batches to ensure the pan is not over-crowded. Turn the pieces over once the skin has turned golden brown. Lift the chicken out once they are golden brown and set aside.
• Turning the heat down to a medium-low and add a little more oil. Cook the onion and garlic until the onions turn slightly translucent. Add the tomato paste and wine. Let the alcohol cook off before stirring in the tin of tomatoes and the sugar.
• Return the chicken to pan. Stir to coat the chicken with the sauce. If it looks a little dry, add about half a tomato tin full of water. Stir and cover. Let the chicken simmer for about half an hour.
• Stir in the olives and season. Cover and bubble for another 5 minutes.
• Stir in the chopped parsley. This does seem like quite a lot of parsley but I've used it as flavouring rather than garnish.
  
• Serve with crusty bread, potatoes or rice.
  

Warming Beef Stew

A nice stew to keep me warm and fuzzy inside as the winter winds howl outside. This was actually me trying to copy the zegni, a spiced beef stew, I had the Eritrean restaurant Asmara in Brixton a few weeks back. It ended up tasting wildly different but still good. There must be a secret ingredient that went into the zegni that made it terribly delicious :)

Beef Stew

800g braising or stewing beef
3 - 4 large white onions
5 tbsp tomato paste
2 cups of water
2 tsp chili powder - hot or mild

• Cut the beef into a very small dice, into about half centimeter cubes. Set aside.
  
• Mince the onions into a pulp (or just diced). Separate the solids and the liquid. Save both and set aside.
• Heat about 2 tbsp a pot on a medium high heat.
• Add the onions and cook until they are lightly translucent. Add the beef, tomato paste, chili powder and seasoning to the pot, mixing to combine with the onions. Cook the mixture until the tomato paste starts to stick slightly to the bottom of the pot.
  
• Add the water and reserved onion liquid. Stir and cover the pot. Leave it to bubble away happily for about 2 hours or until the beef is very tender and the sauce is rich and thick.*
• Served with hot steamed rice or mash potato.
  

*Or cheat as I did - use a pressure cooker to cut down the cooking time to about 40 minutes. Alternatively, use a slow cooker - putting it on in the morning and having a nice dinner waiting when you get home.

In the Mood for Muffins

I've been having bitten by the cupcake bug and they are all I can think about lately, food wise that is. I trawled the web for recipes, discovering new blogs along the way:)And I found myself going back to the yummy CupcakeBlog by Chockylit. All those delicious cupcakes... where on earth should I start? A classic chocolate? Oh yes, but let's jazz it up by adding matcha (green tea) icing! Using the Adzuki Bean Paste Filled Chocolate Cupcakes with Matcha Green Tea Frosting recipe, I omitted the adzuki bean (red bean) paste. I couldn't stand the stuff as a child and I still dislike it now.

I really liked the cupcakes and I loved the green matcha contrast against the dark chocolate. I haven't made icing in years and I think I added a little too much matcha but otherwise it was yummy .. and different. However, my cupcake excitement was severely dampened when I offered the little cakes around at work. I think the expressions I encountered most was .. "disgusting". Disgusting colour, disgusting flavour. I must admit I was rather taken aback. In the past the chocolate cake, chocolate cookies, banana cake ... have always gone down well. Ok, I admit matcha is an unusual flavour ... but still ... the comments were rather harsh and perhaps even uncalled for.

However, it seems I still have a bit of a cupcake fever left. I made toffee apple muffins using a Gordon Ramsey recipe, which I found on Times Online. So totally easy to make and pretty darn delicious. As much as I find Gordon Ramsey's TV shows entertaining, I've always balked at attempting one of his recipes. I'm a huge Nigel Slater fan... which probably says something about what I think of the Ramsey cooking style. Don't get me wrong ... I would love to go to one of his restaurants but my cooking style is a tad bit different. I did love these cupcakes though. They were so light.

Toffee Apple Muffins
Adapted from a Gordon Ramsey recipe found on Times Online, published on 3 November 2007

Recipe makes 10 large muffins

350g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
2 tsp ground cinnamon
100g caster sugar
140g soft dark brown sugar
2 large cooking apples, peeled, cored and finely chopped
3 large eggs, beaten
120ml vegetable oil
100ml milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
50g soft toffees, chopped into small pieces

• Preheat the oven to 180C/Gas 4 and line a 6-hole muffin tray with paper cases. Sift the flour, baking powder and cinnamon into a large bowl and stir in the sugar. Make a well in the dry ingredients.
• Add the chopped apples, eggs, oil, vanilla extract and milk in the middle of the well, and fold the mixture together with a large metal spoon, using as few strokes as possible. Don’t worry if the mixture is lumpy, the trick behind the lightest muffins is not to overwork the batter.
• Half-fill the paper cases with the mixture, then sprinkle over the chopped toffee pieces. Cover the toffee with the remaining batter, then bake for 25-30 minutes or until the muffins are well risen and golden.
  
  
  
  
  
  As usual I changed bits of the recipe - the above is what I changed it to. For example, the original recipe actually called for all spice but I only had cinnamon; dessert apples but I bought cooking apples by mistake, which I found lends a refreshing tang to the muffins; golden caster sugar but I used normal white and slightly more than half soft dark brown sugar - mainly because I prefer the stronger caramel tones of dark brown sugar. I think the recipe is a keeper and I definitely won't be sharing any of these at work tomorrow! Ha... what can I say? I'm still feeling sore :)
  

Princi - Soho, London

It's been one very long week. And I'm just glad it's the weekend. Really glad, actually :)

There were a few good meals and a few bad ones this week. One of the highlights was the discovery of Princi, an Italian bakery on Wardour Street, which I read about at World Foodie Guide. I don't usually venture into Soho for food - mainly because there's just too much choice and my mind goes numb with having to make decisions. The few times I have eaten eaten in Soho have been pretty bad experiences. Example - Meze on Wardour Street. I went there a few years ago and experienced some terrible service. When I had the audacity to send back a dish where the bacon was still raw (not pink, raw!), I was treated with contempt by the staff who very nicely made sure the bacon was burnt when they brought the dish back. Ahh yes, it wasn't even replaced.

I know there are some really good places to eat in Soho and I think I'm going on a mission to find out for myself. First stop, Princi. I was really impressed when we arrived. The floor to ceiling glass exterior showcased the stone and granite interior - very chic, very modern. But the real beauties lay on the long counters. Trays upon trays and bountiful baskets of pastries, breads, salads and further along, the hot food counter. Ooo where to start? What to order? To eat in or to take out? I had originally planned to grab lunch from Pinci one day, so this trip was really to see what they had on offer. And the worst decision of the evening was to buy a few pastries and move on somewhere else for dinner. As we were still clueless on where to head to, with so many restaurants with queues during the dinner peak, we walked into Amalfi. Such a bad, bad move. The meal was atrocious. Unsatisfied and disgruntled (the meal wasn't cheap!) we headed back to Princi for dessert.

At 7PM, Princi was bustling with some who come in for dinner, some who had stopped by for an after work drink. At 9PM, it was even more crowded - mainly with those who were having leisurely drinks, a bit of a chinwag and were none too keen on vacating their seats. Tactics came into play here. One person keeps a lookout (preferably from one of the 'perching' granite tables, no seats just standing - just in case a seat does not avail itself) and another goes to the food. When a table does become available, well... you know what to do.. grab it! Yes, a little extreme but I guess I can't help it. Years of training in hot, crowded coffeeshops in Malaysia will teach anyone to bag a table.

First up, a savoury order of rustici (£1.20 for 3). Little puff pastry bites filled with either spinach and cheese or ham and cheese. They were both dissapointing but the spinach ones did fare slightly better than the ham bites, which were overly salty and not much else. They had been lying around for some time and had gone cold.

The passion fruit cheesecake (£3.50) on the other hand was really quite divine. The fragrance and the tartness of the passion fruit filled the mouth with every bite. The cheese filling was light as air (I had actually forgotten it was supposed to be a cheesecake - there I kept thinking it was a passion fruit mousse!).

We had originally bought the pear and chocolate tart (£3.00) to go earlier in the evening. It did go and it come back again :) The pear still had a bite to it and the chocolate it was set in reminded me of a brownie, a slightly nutty brownie - made with ground hazelnut. The nuttiness was only ever so slight. It was a good tart but definitely took second place to the passion fruit cheesecake.

I also bought myself a pain au chocolat for breakfast the next day, which I heated up on to of the toaster at work. Ohh sooo good! Crisp and flaky with oozy chocolate. Emm!

Verdict?
Will I be going back? Hell ya! Haha... I'm already planning what I'll be ordering and a slice of courgette pizza will probably be one of the items. It did look awfully good!

Princi
135 Wardour Street, London, W1F 0UT

Grilled Crispy Skinned Teriyaki Salmon Belly

I'm freaking out! Stuart's mother is coming to lunch in less than 24 hours and I haven't a clue what to cook. This is her first proper visit up to the flat (let's not count the time she had to bring Stuart back from hospital after knee surgery, shall we?) and my first time cooking for her. Hmmmm should I cook to impress? Seafood? Or maybe stick to something Malaysian? Asian? Arghhh!!!

Anyway, whilst my brain is in overdrive thinking up recipes and wondering which corner of the flat I haven't touched in the last two years, I'll share something I made a few nights ago. Grilled teriyaki salmon. Ok... that doesn't sound particularly special but I got really excited when I found a mound of fatty salmon belly for only £3 from Japan Centre in Piccadilly. I had gone to pick up some cheap sushi for lunch and found the salmon from the sashimi counter at the front of the shop. Very likely all the meaty bits had gone into making the sushi, leaving them with the belly. I marinated the pieces of fish (all 8 pieces - the 5 smaller pieces shown in the photo) in Kikoman teriyaki marinade for about an hour and grilled them under a very hot pre-heated grill. The skin crisped up beautifully, helped by the thin layer of fat underneath it. As the skin crisped, the fat melted into the flesh ensuring wonderfully succulent pink meat. I also managed to cook it just right this time - cooked through and taken out of the grill just at the right time. Drizzled with it's own juices and served with boiled white rice.

A Dinner of Spam Sandwiches

Yes, SPAM!!! Despite the mockery I face (how silly I was to tell any English person I eat the stuff!), I dearly love the wobbly, pink tinned meat. Maybe it's an Asian thing ... Spam definitely played a great role in my childhood diet - fried rice, sandwiches, noodle soup. Oh no, I would never eat it "raw"... now that would just be wrong! Haha. Actually back then it wasn't Spam, it was Ma Ling. A brand from China (that tastes exactly like Spam I later found out!) that came in a square tin with rounded edges and a little turn key that was stuck at the top with cellophane. Later Ma Ling would branch out and sell its luncheon meat in a round tin (same taste but easier to open) but the stuff in the square tin and rounded edges will always have a place in my heart ... and diet.

I don't actually eat Spam all that often. The tin I used in this meal had sat in my cupboard a good few weeks before I cranked it open last weekend for dinner. Finally I decided it was time for my all time favourite sandwich (much, much better than a ham salad), Spam and cucumber on white with lots of ketchup. Ohhhhhhhh soooooooooooooo good! Slices of Spam fried until it's moderately browned and slightly crisp on the edges layered on fresh white bread (it can also be lightly toasted white bread) with freshly sliced cucumber. Served with the ketchup bottle next to it for easy access for additional squeezes during chow time. The photo of the sandwich above is Stuart's. He's probably one of the few who didn't screw their faces up when I mentioned Spam. I fried an extra egg for him sunny side up. We both had side salads with roasted homegrown tomatoes and a grilled field mushroom each.