5-minute meal

Pretend pizza, using wholemeal bread. Layered with cheese, cherry tomatoes and turkey ham. Spent 5 minutes in the toaster oven. I think this makes a nutritious and reasonably low-fat dinner :) 

Teochew braised pork in HappyCall Pan

I must confess...

The HappyCall pan went into storage for a while. I stopped using it because...I lost interest. After the novelty wore off, I must admit that a wok is still more convenient, and is about all I need! I couldn't get over the fact that HappyCall's double pan feature means that you are washing TWO pans every time you cook. Yes, they are TWO pans, even if they are stuck together. 

But there is one thing which HappyCall does exceptionally well - slow braising. I suppose it works like a tight-fitting dutch oven. When shut, all the steam is trapped within the pan, and the food turns out tender and full of flavor. So one day when I decided to cook a tau-yu bak, aka soy-braised pork, HappyCall was called into duty again :P 

The seasonings are very simple: dark soy sauce+freshly cracked peppercorns

I caramelised some cloves of garlic to give the dish more fragrance. The pork was seared before braising. It turned out very well. 

Salad to feed the family

Salad for the whole family - humans and fur balls.

The humans' salad is powered up with grilled chicken, citron dressing and mayonnaise. The rabbits get a handful of butterhead leaves. The itsy-bitsy pieces of cherry tomato is for the hamster.

Fear Factor - Turtle Soup

If I hadn't tried this as a child, before I developed qualms about what can be considered food, I would never find the courage to eat this now: 

Herbal Turtle Soup

The meat is quite tough and chewy, but the skin is gelatinous. Am I grossing you out? It didn't taste particularly fishy or strange, just strongly herbal. If you can get over the 'yuck factor', it was actually pretty tasty. Anecdotally, turtle meat is supposed to cleanse our blood and strengthen our bodies...hm...couldn't really find more information on it.

No, I didn't butcher Little Bro's turtle for this. A shop at Siang Kuang road serves it.

Let them eat cake

Four Calling Birds
Three French Hens
Two Turtle Doves
and a Partridge in a Pear Tree

The French hen, the stuff of nursery rhymes and Christmas carols, appeared recently as food in the real world, I mean, my heartlander's world.

Chicken used to be just, well, chicken. Now we get to choose from Sakura chicken, cordyceps chicken, kampong chicken, pasar chicken, and French hen! Are we moving up in the world or what? I didn't even know that there is such a species of poultry for our consumption!

Much hand wringing and finger pointing has been going on in our society because of rising costs of living. But it seems to me that at least some of the increased expenditure is due to consumers buying products of higher quality, or more exotic origins. You don't even have to visit an exclusive delicatessen for these items. They are offered in the every(wo)man's supermarket - NTUC.

Luxury goods are easily accessible and are perhaps no longer considered special. We are spoilt by a plethora of choices on the shelves. Isn’t this an indication of general improvement in the quality of our life? I don’t want to trivialise the burden brought about by inflation, but don’t complain if your grocery bills increased because you have put a French hen in your basket.

Mulling Rabbit Food

Now you know how we always joke that vegetables and such are rabbit food? That's just shows how little we know about rabbits' tastebuds. Evidently, looking at my rabbits' behaviour, there are differences between even the various kinds of lettuce. They reject coral lettuce, but romaine lettuce is a favourite. What is the difference? Frankly, I find all kinds of lettuce bland and clammy, but these are the true connoisseurs.  Funny little things.

Whitty likes it so much that she grabbed a huge mouthful and ran off to eat on her own in peace, so that Blackie can't harass her for it.

Ok ok, I get the message. No to coral, yes to romaine. Some lettuce are just more equal. Don't even try to understand why.

Picky rabbits

Hey, the two of you, do you really have to behave like this?

Alas, my new purchase - coral lettuce - evidently isn't tasty enough for the picky rabbits. Blackie and Whitty are showing me how little they like my offering. Blackie is sitting far away, refusing to touch the lettuce, and Whitty turns her back to it and hides in the hay cave.

You can guess what happened to the remaining leaves - the humans had a very healthy dinner the next day.

What the rabbits refuse to eat, they refuse to eat. There is no coaxing or scolding them. As neither V nor I like lettuce, he begs me to stop trying out new vegetables on the rabbits and just stick to what they like.

Open kitchen day

I decided to conduct a "kitchen basics" session for Boon One to encourage her to cook more. After all, home cooked food is so much healthier. So I first showed off my set of Happy call pots and pans, brewed corn soup and stewed Sakura chicken.

Then Boon one tried some super easy dishes - grilled asparagus, steamed fish and pork omelette. With simple substitution of different ingredients, she can easily produce a variety of meals.

Yumyum to think that not too long ago I was struggling to figure out how to cook. I have come a long way! It wasn't too bad after all.

Easy char siew in my Happy Call pan

Ok, my next attempt with the Happy Call is significantly better. I made a healthy version of char siew - with less honey and oil. The pork collar meat was seasoned overnight with oyster sauce+sesame oil+dark soy sauce+fish soy+pepper. Then I slow roasted the meat in Happy Call, taking about 20 minutes. It oozed a pretty amount of juice again (think this is a characteristic of Happy Call), but this time round, I thickened the meat juices with flour and turned it into a dip for the dish.

The HC pan's pressure cooking makes the meat lovely and tender. After that, I brushed on just a smudge of honey and put it on high heat grill for 1-2 mins to get the charred, smokey effect. Easy huh!

Yes your eyes didn't lie, this char siew is brown, not red. Why bother to artificially colour the meat? 

Black Pepper Steak in Happy Call

V wryly observed that to cook steak well, one should probably be colour-blind :(

Cold Storage was selling such wonderfully cheap and attractive steaks, so I bought a pack home. As it was the first time I tried cooking steak, I pounded the meat with a mallet to make sure it remained tender. To my horror, in the pan, the meat kept oozing blood! It was so puzzling! I grilled and grilled the meat for a long time, knowing that it was getting tougher by the minute, but it oozed so much blood still! Finally by the time the blood stopped, the meat was sadly overcooked and chewy, despite the pounding :(

That is why V said, one should probably be colour blind to cook steak well. At least then he won't be so freaked out by the blood.

The consolation is, Happy Call pan is pretty easy to clean. I wiped it with kitchen towels and rinsed it. Nothing stuck.

A Simple Meal

The many rounds of festive feasting has taken its toll, and one night, I woke up clutching my overworked stomach in pain :( Before Chinese New Year, I had better recuperate somewhat. Made for myself a really light but still tasty meal

Ingredients for the Convalescent's Porridge

• Brown rice (for extra nutrition)
• Dried scallops (makes the porridge marvellously unami)
• Ginger slices (for the queasy stomach)
• Carrot (to use up my rabbits' leftovers)
• A dash of chicken stock powder

One of the side dishes was Japanese pickled anchovies, which I picked up one day at Isetan's Hokkaido food fair. The other was a childhood favourite - tinned meat sauce.

East and West

Overheard at KFC during breakfast hours.

A middle-aged 'auntie' remarked to her companion, "KFC is tastier than San Shu Gong." That seems such random comparison!

For the uninitiated, San Shu Gong is a bakery based in Malacca, selling traditional Chinese confectionary like 'Wife biscuits' and 'Chick biscuits'. As she spoke on, we realised that she was comparing KFC's Southern US biscuit with San Shu Gong's 'beh teh soh'. Now that she mentioned it, these two balls do look remarkably similar!

Beh teh soh

Biscuit as the Americans call it:

Some things are universal in appeal - fat, whether in the form of lard or butter, taste so good baked with flour and sugar. Yum yum. This is my new favourite breakfast, by the way.

Hot!

That day our small party of 4 had to pay $18 just to satisfy our craving for BBQ sambal stingray, then I thought, what can be so difficult about grilling fish? Mind you, stingray is such cheap fish too.

At home, I tried to replicate the dish, but well, as you can see, I'm not even using stingray :P couldn't find it anywhere in the supermarket. It doesn't seem like such common fish after all. I got a slab of garouper instead. As for the sambal, I just grabbed a bottle of Glory Nonya Sambal off the shelves. Not sure if I'm supposed to wrap the fish up or put it under the grill either so I wrapped it with baking paper. Hahaha! So you can imagine, in the end, it was nothing like stingray. Just very spicy grilled fish. The taste reasonably ok, but I'm still looking for my BBQ stingray recipe. Please tell me if you know there is actually a ready made sauce for it.

Just a side note, I was pleasantly surprised to find Glory Nonya Sambal delicious though. It doesn't really have a bottled instant food  taste.

5 ways to cook beansprouts

I have become pretty creative about the bags of bean sprouts in my fridge. You see, they are bought specially for the Squeaks, but sprouts don't last long, and how many can a Squeak eat in a day? The only decent thing to do is to consume the rest myself, at least, as much as I can, and then I realized there are so many ways to cook them.

1. Toss them into instant laksa, together with fish cake and fried bean curd. Makes a nice hot dinner for a weeknight. I use Prima laksa noodles.

2. Stir fry with tiny anchovies and fish sauce and mirin.

3. Make omlettes with bean sprouts and minced chicken. An incredibly healthy dish.

4. Soups, with meatballs and carrots. Dashes of scallop concentrate make anything taste good.

5. Boiled briefly, drain, then add soya sauce, sesame oil, wine, and use as a bed for steamed chicken.

Teochew food

 Steamed squid stuffed with pork.

Is it a traditional Teochew dish? Grandmother used to make it, together with her other oddity of a dish - liver stirfried with pineapple. Truth be told, these were not my favourite food when I was young. Children don't like fishy, leathery meats. After she passed away, no one else seems to make them anymore. So when I saw this dish again after so many, many years, I simply had to order it. Maybe as I get older, mostalgia makes me crave the comfort food of my childhood. Our cosmopolitan city offers cusines from all over the world and we are spoilt for choice, but I just want to find the simple fare I used to eat. Why are they getting so elusive these days?

In case you are also a Teochew kampung girl at heart, here's where I found this: Kovan hawker centre. Get it before it goes extinct. Even as I write, another Teochew porridge shop bites the dust. V and I drove to our favourite porridge place to find its shutters down and renovation work going on. What has happened to Soon Soon Restaurant!

Farewell to a bit of history

Was shocked to hear that the Royal Copenhagen tea lounge would be closed down soon. Apparently the parent company in Denmark intends to halt its operations in Singapore. For the uninitiated, it used to be a place where tai tais sip tea out of fine china and enjoy elegant open face sandwiches. Over the years, I did notice a gradual fading of the lustre from its cushioned chairs, and signs of slipping standards. They didn't even serve us with matching crockery that day. Guess, it is all over now. We have to find another place for high tea.