Charring For Perfection

Alright folks, here's a tip if you are making the Spanish Tortilla.

Burn the sucker. That's right, you heard right. The few times I have tried making tortilla, I faced the sad fate of watching my creation crumble when I attempt to flip it. Can't finish it in the oven, or else it'll become an Italian Fritata.

So after some online research, the advice, as it turns out, is to cook all the ingredients first, take them all OUT of the pan and dunk them all into the egg. After which, let rip with the flame on the pan, until the pan is smoking, THEN put everything back in again.

The end result, is that the egg has a really nice crust that does not stick to the pan, and makes for easy flipping. Point to note though, when it's a big saucepan, the frigging tortilla is frigging heavy. Get help. I'm considering burning the other side as well, just to make sure that the tortilla is nicely sealed before service.

PS. bacon bits for salt is not enough, and if you're adding thyme, mix it all into the egg mixture.

PPS I'm wondering whether it's a good idea to add my usual fried egg condiment mix into the mixture. I'll try that next.

Reaction From Questions

My mother was so happy when I got her recipe for mushrooms with mince meat... I think I shall go ask her recipes more often... heh heh heh... It's pretty easy!

Shall try it tonight at Lee's. Get ready ya buggers!

Catering For Soliloquy

So we finally did our first catering gig, Lee and I.

It's pretty fun to throw out ideas of what might work and what might not. But we finally decided on 3 items for the canapes. You know, what the HELL is the difference between hors d'oeuvres and canapes anyways? And Tapas? Maybe just different languages describing the same thing rather than something different.

Anyway, the menu.
1. cold cha soba in sauce, with some wasabi and seaweed on top
2. grilled Sukiyaki beef wrapped around shittake mushrooms with mirin
3. onigiri rice balls rolled in saboro (a sweet, pink coloured fishy smelling powder)

Honestly the cha soba is dead easy. The sauce is diluted from concentrate, and the soba noodles are even easier to handle than pasta. Hot water, boil for about 2 minutes. plunge into ice.

The beef is a lot more work to prep.
Sliced beef, Lawry's salt/pepper, a couple of pieces of fresh shitake mushroom. Once they're all done, grill and add mirin after about 30 seconds to make sure the mushrooms are cooked through.

Rice balls? We found out (accidentally) that using mirin in the soak beats vinegar hands down. However, I have yet to try it with the vinegar so it's hard to gauge. I wonder what'll happen if we added some of the seaweed when we're cooking. It should taste better. Next time, Lee, we're trying this. Don't care! Oh and add some black sesame to the whole thing as well.

Next up, I want to experiment with handrolls, maybe with the sliced beef and mushrooms stir fried and put at the top? Hey wait a minute, isn't that the Mos Burger rice bun thing?

Quick and Easy "Beef" Stew

My stomach decided to give me a reason to try a new recipe today. Read about a new recipe online, and have been wanting to try it out. The fact I was attempting to clear out the freezer gives me more compelling reason to just whack the recipe. So anyways, this recipe was inspired by this. Eventually, this is what I did.

1 Carrot
2 Small Potatoes
1 Packet of Bonito Flavouring
Chicken Bones
1 medium sized onion.
Sliced pork
3 dried shitake mushrooms

Fry the sliced onion in the pot with some oil and then add the sliced carrot and potatoes. Saute for a while and then add water, about 500 ml and then and the packet of bonito flavouring. Add the chicken bones and the shitake mushrooms too.

After bringing the whole pot to a boil, simmer and wait.

Half an hour later, add a little soy sauce to taste, salt and pepper. Finally, boil the pork for a couple of minute and you're done!

I felt the soup was a little too sweet, maybe cos of the chicken bone and bonito flavouring. But overall a pretty easy dish to cook and eat with plain white rice.

Update: Did the same thing, but ditched the bonito flavouring. Added cubes of beef instead of pork. The broth ish GOOD.

Blender Weekend

Let's start with the verdict on the Indon flavoured chicken. Generally good, though I had to make a few changes.

We didn't get kecup manis and so replaced it with 生抽 from Malaysia.
Didn't get tumeric powder, and used tumeric paste.
Used fresh candlenut instead of candlenut powder.

Other than that, the ingredient was more or less the same, albeit a little more salty. Yummy nonetheless.

Thank goodness Lee's place has a blender. It would have been painful to chop up all the ingredients and blended them by hand.

Now, we wait for Nick for the photos of the chicken.

Note to self: next time we have a bbq, have a hot side and a cooler side. Really helps with the heat control. It was good when I can decide how long the chicken can be cooked for and for it to come out nicely browned.

Which brings us to Sunday. Advocado shake, but it's a little too sweet. Guess too much honey, and the milk itself is a little sweeter than the usual Meiji. Blender again.

And dinner was pesto chicken. Although we're not really suppose to add water to help with the blending, did it anyway. Pretty decent I gotta say. Peanuts, basil, permasan cheese, salt and pepper and roasted garlic left over from lunch. It's pretty nice.

Although I gotta say, that the pesto by itself is probably not salty enough as a marinade. The Parmasan is salty, but not THAT salty. So, I actually salt the plate before I put the chicken on. That way, can control the saltiness. Works pretty well.

And then it's blending the watermelon with the soy milk. Not bad. Too bad I can't have a blender that handles ice. Nevertheless, it's all good.

Right. So that's it for the weekend. Till next time.

Next Project On The Line

Well now that the sup buntut went down pretty well, I think I'm gonna try another recipe over the weekend for the BBQ coming up.

Time for a little twist on the classic BBQ chicken recipe. This is ayam bakar that I have tried before and actually quite enjoyed. So now I guess I'm gonna try and emulate this for the BBQ on Saturday. Not exactly the same recipe but hey, the recipe looks pretty decent, so I'm gonna give it a go.

I'll paste my verdict later.

PS had a request for pesto chicken this weekend again. w00t!

Stretching The Imagination

Warning: Do NOT bring anyone there you do not seriously intend to shag. The food there is da SEX.

There is a reason why I don't like fusion food in general. Because more often than not, I just find the food too.. contrived. Trying too hard, and in the end, not only does it end up neither here nor there, it doesn't really taste good.When TK invited to the Tiffin Club, he never really told me what was in store. Honestly, my hopes weren't all that high. Tiffin Club. I was expecting everything to be served in plastic or metal tins. Maybe traditional fare.

Boy was I wrong.

When we first sat down and waited for TK, we got a nice little table at the corner of a rustically decorated 2nd floor restaurant in the corner of Jiak Chuan Road. So close to my office, yet I never had any idea.

Appetizers were Chicken satay platter, and an otah salad.

The satay chicken satay tasted just like great chicken satay. But more. More tender. More juicy. The peanut sauce more flavourful. And now usually I don't quite like the rice that comes with my chicken satay. This time round, I gobbled everything down. It's every great chicken satay experience rolled into one, and refined.
The otah salad was obviously a fusion. A thin layer of otah spread onto the plate like the fish paste you sometimes get at steamboat restaurants and topped with salad leaves (no i don't know the technical terms) and Parmesan chips. Wow. The otah was not hot. But the flavour was at the same time, intense, lemak and not at all overpowering. The chips gave a little crunch and saltiness, and the leaves just kinda pulled everything together. Did I mention that I don't usually like fusion? This, I really liked.

And then the mains came. Braised beef ribs with very possibly the fluffiest, lightest mashed potatoes you've ever tasted. 2 cuts of pork (bbqed pork belly and pork loin and spinach roll topped with a sauce made from dried scallops). And smoked beef tenderloin with a coffee bean crust, done medium rare.

I'm getting hungry just thinking about the dishes again.

The problem with braised beef, is that you either have the tender texture but little taste, or more often than not, some taste and tough as old boots. The braised beef ribs in this case, was awesome. Siren, Ting and TK tried giving their feedback to chef Iskandar. I just concentrated on eating. The meat was succulent. Juicy, soft, just chewy enough to let your mouth knows it's a hearty meal, but so tender that it breaks apart into rich, lovely flavour.

The mashed potatoes that came with the meal deserves a paragraph by itself. It's literally, so fluffy I'm gonna die. It's creamy, light, soaks up the sauce from the ribs so well, and get this. It really isn't heavy. Not at all. Not jelak. Not overwhelming.

The pork dish came with 2 different cuts of meat. The pork belly was charcoal grilled and it literally melted in my mouth. Wow. The pork loin wrap was topped with a special dried scallop sauce and it was, in Siren's words, "tastes like home, familiar, yet so yummy." It's mommy's cooking, 5 star style. It's flavour that we're all familiar with, refined, made sexy.

The last main that chef Iskandar served was a smoked beef tenderloin that was coated and worked with ground coffee beans so there was a crust on it. It's nothing short of perfection. The coffee infused flavour was intense, but not overwhelming. The meat had no sauce. Didn't need sauce. It was tender, flavourful, succulent. I was floored. Literally floored. If I wasn't busy chewing, and savouring the meal, my jaw would have dropped onto the floor.

Dessert was spectacular. Chocolate pear tart and a lemongrass infused panne cotta with berry compote.

The chocolate pear tart was rich, and the chocolate taste was pretty amazing. I guess when you use chocolate that's 70% cocoa that's the result. The crust was crumbly, the pear bits cut the richness of the chocolate nicely.

Now, the panne cotta though. I was surprised. I'm not a big italian dessert person. But when I first cut into the dessert with my spoon, it was dense. Not hard, dense. Put it in my mouth, and it stays in a soft wobbly block in on my tongue. But when I press it against the top of my mouth, it bursts and dissolves into the fragrance of lemongrass. And then you think maybe it's just a sweet, delicious dream, and take another bite. and another, and another...

One thing to note though, I kinda wish the berry compote was on the side, because while it was really nice, the panne cotta is a statement by itself.

Thank you TK for introducing us to this hole in the wall that served up such amazing food.

Thank you chef Iskandar. The hospitality is only second to a superlative meal.

And now that I know just how far I have to go before I make people pay for my food, I better get back to my day job.

The Tiffin Club is at 16 Jiak Chuan Road. Call 6323 3189 for a reservation. That's just off Neil Road. Map is here