More homemade buns

Better looking and tastier.

Piggy buns

I have been trying to make Chinese buns.
The first batch I made, I mixecd in some steamed pumpkin for an extra vegetable kick. To avoid mentioning the P word (Sam is not a fan of pumpkin), I called them 'Happy buns'. The buns were quite tasty, but they clapsed in the oven so they didn't have that nice "bun" shape. Sam can definitely tell it had something he didn't like in it :(
For the second batch, I filled the buns with chicken mince, vermicelli noodles, carrots and tofu pieces. To make them appeal to the kiddies more, I tried to make them look like pigs and called them "Piggy buns". Kids liked this version, but the buns didn't look like "pigs" after they came out of the steamer:(

I am keen to make some more and hope to learn to make "real" piggy buns soon!

Baked & stuffed pumpkin

Every Christmas, I like to try to make something new, something a little special and different. Simon find this strange and couldn't believe I do this at stressful times like x'mas. I don't know why but doing a new dish makes the dinner more intresting for me and I often try new things on people. Not all things I did came out great of course. This year my experiment was the stuffed pumpkin (Jamie Olive's Hamilton pumpkin in one of his earlier cookbooks).



I cut the pumpkin in half, scooped out the flesh(this took me about an hour of hard work!!), fried the onions and mushrooms, roasted the pine nuts, ground spices, mixed the rice in and put everything together the day before x'mas. Luckily I did it the day before because it was quite a lot of work. It smelt beautiful after baking for 1and a quarter hours on x'mas day. I left it out to rest for some time. Initally I thought the hard bits were the spices then I realised it was uncooked rice! Most of the rice was well cooked. I don't believe cooking longer would make any difference. In fact, I think the pumpkin was overcooked as the colour was very dull and texture very soft (I didn't weight the pumpkin, my pumpkin possibly was smaller than the recipe's). I think the uncooked rice was due to uneven moisture even though the book says not to worry about rice not being cooked as the mostiure in the pumpkin will keep the rice moist. It was editable and most of the rice was alright. But any amount of hard rice every so often still ruined the dish. It was not a great sucess like I hoped it would be.



I would not try this dish again in a hurry. It was too much work for someone with two little kids like me. But will I try something else new next x'mas? The bet is I probably will!

Pumpkin and sultana scone

Made these scones the other day, only have two table spoons of sugar per batch.

Potato & garlic bread

I've made a lot of bread in the last 2 months. Most of the loaves (8 or 9 loaves) were the "Soft American-style white bread" (page 204 in 'Artisan bread in 5 minutes a day'). The first 2-3 loaves I used the exact recipe. I forgot butter in the next lot of dough, the difference was less rich and more sandwitch-like. I omit butter altoghter from the recipe after that.

I decided to try a differnt bread last week - 'Roasted garlic potato bread' (page 118). I mixed the dough on Saturday morning, baked it that night. Next door had their daughter's 21st party, the music was too loud to sleep so I was forced to stay up late and ate some bread. It was very nice warm from the oven. We had more bread the following day for lunch with sausages, meat balls and salad. I think the potato somehow gave the bread a very nice texture and made it surprisingly soft. It'll be interesting to see if the bread taste the same after the dough is refrigerated.

Monday night dinner

I work on Mondays now so Simon's in charge of the cooking on Monday nights. He made a nice stew last week. I came home earlier last night so this dinner was a joint efforts - grilled chicken wingettes, fried potatoes, stir-fried garlic baby spinach and crispy fennel.

I got a fennel in my vege bag and was wondered what to do with it, then I found a nice fennel recipes that both Simon and Lara liked (well ... Lara ate it).

This is how I do it. Trim fennel bulbs and remove outer hard layers. Cut fennel into half then cut each halves into threes or quarters. Boil for a couple of minutes until just tender. Dip fennel segments into an egg/milk mixture then a bread crumb/parmasen mixture. Shallow fry until crispy. Yum!

This post was written on 12/07, I didn't process the photos until a couple of days ago.

Sunday baking

There were lemons in my vege bag two weeks in a row. To use them up, I made a couple of "lemon-styled" cakes. I didn't bake much in June as there were some sort of illness in the family almost every weekend. Now that the rain has stopped and the sun is out, it feels more like cake-eating weather!

Last week's lemon and poppy seeds cake.


This week's lemon and chocolate cake.

Singapore noodles

It was 9.30 on Monday night. The kids were asleep. I was drinking a cup of hot coco while cooking for tomorrow's dinner. I prepared the ingredients already and thought I would have time to cook it ealier. However, the day's plans suddenly changed to accommodate an unexpected doctor's appointment and all the extra work to do with an unwell child, including clean up vomit(Sam's 3rd morning vomit), running nappies and extra laundary.

Of course we didn't know it at the time but the vomits signalled the start of another ear infection (or was it the same one he had 5 weeks ago?) and that Samuel would feel a lot worse 2 days later!

Sunday roast

Roasted pork loin fillet with roasted potatoes and vegetables (beans with bacons, peas, corn on the cob, carrots and brussel sprouts with cheese and pine nuts).

Monday night dinner

Deep fried white baits

Saturday night dinner

two weeks ago - Fried Chicken strips coated with herbs and breadcrumbs. Fried potatoes. Avocado and cucumber salad. Cauliflower & corn with cheese.

I only cooked a couple of times in the last week or two. Mum and Dad are here at the moment, and Mum did most of the cooking. It's great to have help with the kids too!

Chinese NYE feast

We never had a big Chinese New Year's dinner with Grandparents when I was growing up. Mum, being a 'girl' could not spend Chinese New Year with her parents and Dad's parents were not around. However, Mum always made a lot of food for the four of us. Now in my family of four, to keep up the Chinese tradition, I decided to make more food than we could finish so we 'have more than enough' for the New Year. I normally make two dishes (one meat one vegetable dish) when I cook Chinese so making six dishes is a little of a stretch for me. This is my version of a 'feast' this Chinese New Rabbit Year.



Whole steamed fish (snapper) with ginger and shallot. BBQ pork (I tried to cut the tender meat still hot after it came out of the oven and it turned into pieces!). Coconut prawns*. Boiled pork dumplings. Marbled tea eggs. 100 Blossoming flowers*.
*Recipes from Steaming kitchen.

Vegetable box

I started ordering organic fruit and vegetables again now that Sam is on meshed food. This is this week's box. This is the second time I ordered Russian curly kale (pitctured in the middle next to bananas and yellow squash) becasue even Lara eat it. All I did was simmer it in water and then stir fry with a little butter, pepper and salt. From the dark green look of it, you know it is packed with nutritions and antioxidants.

The other vegetable that we tried and liked is the yellow button squash. We also had it sliced thinly and fried in butter and seasonings as suggested and it was very nice. The rhubarb (you can't see it in the photo, it's at the bottom of the box) I plan to mesh some for Sam and make the rest into an apple and rhubarb crumble. Sam will also have some of the beetroot, zucchini, broccoli and all of the Asian white sweet potato. The bananas can go into the coconut and banana bread that Simon likes. Any left-over vegetables will all go into a soup or fried rice later on.

I still need to go and buy other vegetables in the shop. I find it very hard to pay $20 a kilo for mushrooms for example. But a box delivered means I've got some of the food covered so we are alright even if I'm too lazy to leave the house sometimes.

Steamboat

A new Taiwanese friend invited me over for steamboat last Saturday. It was very nice sharing steaming hot food in the middle of the table in a cold winter day. I decided to try it at home. Simon suggested we use the electric frying pan instead of burners and proper steamboat pots that we don't have. We bought a variety of pre-made frozen ingredients earlier that day and started cooking at 6pm. Lara was very excited watching raw ingredients being cooked and thought it was a great 'tea party'! We all had lots of food and were very full at the end of the night.

Monday night dinner

Chicken pie. I added leek, carrot, beans, sweet potato and peas to the chicken pieces. A good way to use up left-over veggies.

Trying different bread

I usually bake two small loaves of bread a week for breakfast and weekend lunches. My normal recipe is the traditional white bread recipe from my breadmaker book. It uses 3 & 1/4 cups of flour with yeast, sugar, salt, water and a little margarine. Just put all ingredients in breadmaker, let it knead and rise once (around 2 hours). Divid dough in two and let them rise for another 1/2 hour (more if cold) in tins (they don't shape well otherwise). Bake in 200C oven for 1/2 hour and voila it's ready!

I tried some new recipes in the last few weeks. Firstly, the 'soft American-style white bread' (pg 204 from 'Artisan bread in 5 minutes a day'). In addition to the usual ingredients, it had 100g of unsalted butter. This bread requied no kneading and it was baked in 180C oven for 45 minutes. The resulting bread had softer crust. I also tried the Challah dough (pg 180 from the same book) with 4 eggs and 1/2 cup of honey(for 4 loaves) in addition to the usual ingredients.



With the leftover Challah dough, I made spinach and marinated fetta bread for lunch- details here. I didn't add pine nuts and used flake almond instead of black sesame (improvised based on what I had in the pantry). The braiding was easy, it came out of the oven looking nice and tasted delicious. Nice cold too. I'm keen to try again following the recipe properly and also try other fillings. Time to make another batch of dough!

Monday night dinner

Mushroom risotto with baby spinach leaves and cherry tomatoes.

Surprise sashimi

I picked up some seafood after work from the local vegetable man last week. He went to the fish market earlier that day and brought salmon fillets, flathead fillets and some tiger prawns for me. I was told that the salmon was of sashimi quality so I decided to try part of it raw. I added sushi vinegar mix to cooked rice to have with our raw fish. The salmon was beautiful - buttery and melt in our mouths. The raw king fish was of a lesser quality. My (lack of) knife skill and the blunt knife didn't help either. It was a real surprise for Simon to come home to a sashimi meal! A light but satisfying meal with minimum cooking, just how I liked it as a week-day meal.

Julia Child's lamb stew and strawberry jam

I made Julia Child's lamb stew last week, recipe from her book 'Mastering the art of French cooking'. I didn't follow the recipe exactly - I cooked everying in one pot on the stovetop (who needs the extra washing up and our oven is broken) and I used a can of tomatoes rather than fresh ones. I think the main difference comes from using various cuts of meat -I used a mixture of lamb chops and lamb forequarters. I also browned the meat with sugar and flour as the recipe said. It was delicious! I am keen to try other recipes from the book.



I couldn't walk away from these strawberries on sale, and they became jars of jam using my trusted bread-maker. I made 4 batches in two days, each with a slightly different sugar content. I meant to write it all down straight away but didn't. Luckily they didn't taste that different. After giving away 3 jars, I still have 5 left in the fridge. The jam can be improved upon but it tastes a lot 'fresher' than your average supermarket varieties. Lara and parents-in-law like them on toasts for breakfast. I can't wait to try other summer fruit (eg plum)!

Cooking day

I had last Wednesday off and had a relaxing cooking day.
Pictured from left: chocolate cookies with ginger, curry powder, almond cake with coffee icing and white bread.



The cookies were made with chocolate buttons and crystallized ginger(recipe by Louise Pickford 'Fresh Baked'). The butter & sugar were creamed first therefore they are resonably 'light'.

The curry powder was made from scratch (my first) and it was delicious (Simon didn't want to get any curry paste from any jars any more!) I improvised a Delicious magazine recipe and dry-fried coriander seeds, cumin seeds, mustard seeds, cardamom seeds, cinnamon and dried chillies before grinding them in a mortar and pestle (my hands were sore!) Garlic, ginger, turmeric, nutmeg and curry leaves were added before cooking. The beef chuck steak was cooked in the curry sauce for about an hour the day before. I added milk and continued the cooking process the following day. The result was a very tender and tasty dish. Even though the spices/seeds I used are very 'old' (bought them a few years ago!) but the curry dish still tasted 'fresher' than supermarket-bought packets.

I've also been making bread ... I made a bread roll loaf (with an egg), banana walnut bread, and 3 loaves of white bread. They are frozen after cooking and can be used slowly later. I now use the breadmaker to make dough only but do all my baking in the oven. I found the breadmaker often under-bake the bread. I have more control over the cooking time when baking in the oven and the bread tastes better.

ps The oven stopped working again....
It looks like we will need a new oven after all :(