Kiki's Midnight Bakery

kikismidnightbakery.tumblr.com

2013-09-26T03:17:00.003+10:00

This blog now has a sister site at http://kikismidnightbakery.tumblr.com/
See you there! :)

Scallop Splendor with Frank

2012-05-08T00:49:00.001+10:00

Scallop Splendor

Hey fellow food lover, it’s been a while but all is well and good in Kiki land. Today I’m bringing you a dish that I created to welcome 2012 in style with my friend Frank.
Frank and I met not so long ago at an institute in Sydney where we both worked. We were best friends at third sight (or maybe it was 12th?). Fate had it that we both landed in opposite coasts of the USA for work and we had the good opportunity to celebrate the end of 2011 and the start of 2012 together. Needless to say, good company deserves good food, so off to the kitchen we went. We made up some fancy name for this dish and scribbled it down on a piece of napkin, but I can’t read it for the life of me. So I’m going to rename it as Scallop Splendor.

Serving it in stemless wine glass allows guests to appreciate the dish from all angle

The dish makes a great hors d’oeuvre/entrée and takes barely anytime in preparation. I served it in stemless wine glasses so guests can appreciate the elements that compose the understated elegance of the dish from all angle. Aside from the ingredients, you will need a smile, a glass of champagne in hand and standard chopstick skills.

To make Kiki’s Midnight Bakery’s Scallop Splendor you will need

Large scallops, 1 per serving, halved lengthway
Keffir lime leaves, scrunched up just before cooking
Microgreens
Japanese seaweed
Grape tomatoes, sliced lengthway
Soy sauce, balsamic vinegar and sesame oil for dressing

(Not sure where to find some of these ingredients? I got them all from Wholefoods)

First assemble the greens: microgreen bedding, topped with japanese seaweed and sliced grape tomatoes arranged on one side. They can be sealed and refrigerated at this stage while we prepare the scallops. To make the dressing, mix 1 part each of soy sauce, balsamic vinegar and sesame oil. Sugar may be added to the dressing. Add to salad just before topping it with the scallops.

Have the scallops halved and patted dry. Heat butter and lime leaves in a medium pan on high heat. The idea is to sear the scallops on the outside briefly, while maintaining the tender interior, so do not overcook it. Wait for the butter to start to sizzle and spit, add the scallops and sear for about 1.5 minutes on each side. Discard the lime leaves and rest the scallops on paper towel to absorb extra fat, season with salt and pepper and allow it to cool briefly before seating them on the bed of greens with dressing. Top with salmon roe and serve immediately. Bon Appétit!

And for the main, seared lobster tail on rice and greens. See my previous lobster recipe

Hello San Francisco!

2011-11-07T09:47:00.002+10:00

I baked this in my new kitchen. Yes, I have relocated. I contained my life in 2 suitcases more or less and I arrived in land of the free and home of the brave to receive further training in my scientific career!

Will post more soon. By the way, San Franciscans, you lots are really friendly and I'm loving the cheese selections in Bristol Farm!

Boeuf Bourguignon

2010-11-18T19:24:00.012+10:00

The Eiffel Tower right at 11 PM at night. The whole tower sparkled for 5 minutes

We were in Paris a few months ago and stayed at Arts et Metiers at the 3rd arrondisement. For 5 days we roamed the street of Paris, stuffed ourselves silly with Parisian bread and fell in love with jambon... at least during breakfast every morning.

View from across the Seine river

One night my sister and I wandered into a little cafe to get dinner where we were served our first boeuf bourguignon. Truly it was delicious; the beef was tender and oh it was just unforgettable. No where else did we encountered anything the surpassed that particular dinner. Ah Paris...

Inscription at the bottom of the Charles de Gaulle statue

Now after a few hard working months at the lab, I decided to reward myself by cooking my own boeuf bourguignon. I downloaded recipes from the internet and used my French recipe book for the first time (Merci Laurence). This is my revised version of many people's recipes, je vous presente boeuf bourguignon.

A beautiful mess of a lunch

Ingredients

Roughly 1 kg of beef. Don’t use expensive cuts. I don’t know what I used (to be honest I've only started eating meat) but mine was $9/kg. The idea is to use a tough meat and get it to become tender by the long cooking time
1 bottle of red wine. I used Penfold’s Koonunga 2008 Cabernet Sauvignon ($13)
2 big onions, roughly chopped
2-3 carrots. If they're fat, halve them lengthwise prior, but otherwise just cut into roughly 1.5 cm thickness
1 pack of Masterfood bouquet garni (find this in the dried herbs section, there are 4 sachets in each pack)
3-4 tablespoons of white flour
150g of butter (get the good stuff and that quantity is roughly half a block that you get in the supermarket), divide it into 4
Olive oil
Diced bacon, 100g (or use speck if you like)
3 cloves of garlic, remove skin and bash, but leave whole
10 shallots, skin removed and left as whole
3 tomatoes, quartered
2 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar
300g button mushroom
Fresh parsley (optional… I hate it)

A fresh loaf of bread to serve it with

First cut up the beef to bite size. Arrange onion, carrot and beef in a big bowl and add 2 sachets of the bouquet garni and add wine. Marinate overnight or 24 hours.

Bubble bubble bubble

Next day, drain the wine into another container. Separate the beef into another container and coat lightly with 3 tablespoon of white flour. Heat a deep bottomed pot and add 2 tablespoon of olive oil with ¼ of the butter. Add the diced bacon and fry until it’s crispy then drain on to a paper towel-lined plate. Now add another 2 tablespoon of olive oil and ½ of the butter. When it’s hot and sizzling add the flour coated beef and quickly brown them. At this stage you need to toss it around with a solid spatula, preferably wooden and none of those weak bendable gadgets, to try to prevent the flour from burning the bottom of your pot. When you have achieved even browning of the beef, drain them on another paper towel-lined plate. Heat another 2 tablespoon of the oil with the rest of the butter and when hot, add the garlic and shallots. Toss them around and then add the onion, the carrot and tomatoes. Stir that around. When your pot sound like it’s hissing excessively (meaning that it’s super hot and your veggies have ceased to seep out liquid), this is when you chuck in your red wine from the overnight marinate. Yeah take that! I always get a sense of satisfaction when I do this with whatever I cook.

First I plated it neatly (or tried to)...

Next, in goes the beef and the bacon. Add the balsamic vinegar and another 2 sachets of the bouquet garni and season with salt and black pepper (Note. the sauce will continue to reduce so don't over-salt at this point). Continue to stir from time to time to prevent the bottom of the pan from burning from sinking flour residues. If you have a decent size oven, you can bake this at 150 degree, otherwise stove top worked fine for me.

... but on second though, I think it looked and tasted better messy

While that’s going, heat a pan with butter (okay so you need a bit more than 150g, but trust me it’s worth it). When the butter sizzles and gets all frothy, add in your mushroom and just toss them around into they’re sort of brown and shiny on the outside. Add that to the pot of beef. Leave for at least another 30 minutes before serving it with parsley and fresh bread. Bon appétit and may your beef be as tender as mine and may your apartment be as pleasant smelling as mine.

Sambal cabe hijau

2010-07-11T20:25:00.006+10:00

Ground up steamed green chillies

I feel that this recipe may not be suitable for blogging, but I've decided to share it with you all anyway because I think chili is too too underrated. So, for the love of chili this is my recipe for sambel cabe hijau (green chilli sambal) which you could use simply as a chutney or accompaniment to raw vegetables (lalapan) or you could make it as a base to another dish like grilled fish, fried chicken or stewed beef. You will notice that I use the word "roughly" a lot in this recipe and I really think that the roughness of it imparts a free-spirited complexity that complete the identity of this sambal or any sambal for that matter. That said, it doesn't only make an awesome sidekick to another dish, but served on its own with steamed rice, it makes a kick-ass dish of its own. :D It certainly rocks my world.

Green chilies give out an aroma distinct from their ripe siblings, red chillies

To make the Midnight Bakery's Sambel Cabe Hijau, you'll need:

400 g of green chilli
150 g of shallots
a handful of dried Asian anchovies (available at supermarkets or Asian grocer)
juice of 1 lime
1 teaspoon of sugar

Cut to the length of finger segments before grinding

First wash and remove stems from green chili and steam for roughly 15 minutes. Meanwhile, soak up the anchovies in hot boiling water and leave on the side. Chop up the shallots roughly and pound using a mortar and pestle. A food processor will not serve this purpose. You really need to bruise these guys and you don't need to grind them to pulp, you'll want some bits and pieces to stick out from them.

Shallow fry rehydrated anchovies

Once the 15 minutes are up, drain the chili and cut roughly to the size of the segments on your fingers. Grind in the mortar and pestle. Drain anchovies and heat about 1/3 cup of vegetable oil in a wok or pan. Shallow fry the anchovies and remove from pan. Next with the remaining oil, shallow fry the shallots until it's fragrant. Add the ground chilli and mix. Add the anchovies. Season with sugar and salt and lime juice. Simmer for another half an hour on low heat. It's best to allow the flavor to develop further overnight before serving.

Simmer the chilli for 30 minutes before serving

You can double the recipe by doubling up on all the ingredients. I like to make double the recipe so I have enough to keep myself happy for a week. If you like your chili hot, I suggest adding jalapeno that you find in jars in supermarkets. Grab a handful and rinse out the vinegar before adding to this happy family while simmering.

Vietnamese prawn rolls

2010-07-11T19:20:00.010+10:00

Vietnamese prawn rolls

Hello hello!! I hope you've all missed me very much, as much as I have missed blogging about my kitchen actions. This time I've been feeding myself with the very carb-conscious version of Vietnamese prawn rolls, omitting the vermicelli (which is already very healthy and low in fat) and substituting it with salads, tonnes of it! You don't only get the crunch from the bits and pieces of the dressing, the leaves, cucumber and carrots, but also prawns. You can use either freshly peeled prawns or like me, you could use frozen prawns which is of course very versatile and easy to source. This dish is super healthy and gives you a wholesome punch of goodness and it's so easy to make!

Lime juice as part of the awesome dressing

First and foremost, the soul of the dish is in the dressing. I promise you, this dressing is so delicious you're going to want to have it with anything and everything! I have in fact trialed this dish on my friends and I'm really glad to report that they devoured it. I'm not sure how close my recipe is to the authentic Vietnamese dressings but please if you have suggestions, I would be so happy if you could share it with me. Have a look at my recipe below! :)

Dressing

For the Midnight Bakery's Vietnamese prawn roll dressing, you'll need:

2 cloves of garlic, minced
1 small shallots, finely chopped
the roots of a bunch of coriander, wash it clean, bash it and chop finely
1 teaspoon of sugar (even better if you have palm sugar)
the juice of 1 small lime
1/4 cup of fish sauce
2 bird eye chilli (chilli padi/cabe rawit)
2 tablespoons of peanuts, roasted and ground

Mix all ingredients in a small bowl. If you don't have a mortar and pestle to ground the peanuts, fret not. What I do is put the peanuts in the cup and crush it with the end of the rolling pin.

Easy and fun to assemble

For the Midnight Bakery's Vietnamese prawn roll, you'll need:

rice paper (available in supermarkets or Asian grocers)
prawns, boiled
cucumber, julienned
carrots, seeds (middle bit) discarded and julienned
mint
coriander
loose salad leaves

Alright, once you have everything on hand, you're well to the fun bits, assembling! Get a big bowl and fill it half with boiling water and half cool water. Test that it is not too hot that it'd burn your hand. A good rule for this is that if you can keep your index finger in there for 30 seconds comfortably, it's good to go. Next, take 1 rice paper sheet and dunk it in the warm water until it's all soft. Take it out and lay it on a plate, try to smooth it out as much as you can and avoid it folding over on itself.

Now, you can go nuts on laying your fillings on one part of the rice paper as illustrated above. Lay the prawns, salads, mint and coriander leaves, top it up with carrots and cucumber. Fold over the top bit of the rice paper and the sides. Then holding the roll with both hands, roll it as tightly as you can. Don't worry if it doesn't look too fantastic. It's the taste that matters and with practice, your rolls will look more and more attractive.

Serving/eating suggestion:
Take a small bite off the top, then top with a teaspoon of the dressing, take a bite, add dressing, take a bite, and so on until you bit your own fingers. Enjoy!

Tom Yum stuffed Calamari

2010-05-03T23:59:00.004+10:00

Tom Yum-stuffed calamari

Alright folks, this is going to be a quick post to assure you that I am still alive and causing havoc in my lab. Hahaha. Recently, Harris Farm Market opened up a store near me and upon checking it out one night I was overjoyed to find a fresh seafood market that featured awesome goodness like sashimi-grade fishes, sea urchin, lots of fresh whole fishes and all those yummy goodness that I could only dream of finding in the usual supermarkets.

This week I made Tom Yum Stuffed Calamari and it's dead easy to make!

To make it you will need:

1 fresh calamari tubes, ask you fish monger to clean it
2 handfull of marinara mix, diced
1 shallots, diced
1 clove of garlic, diced
2 rashers of bacon, diced
10 kaffir lime leaves, cut into strips.
2 teaspoon of Tom Yum paste

Heat 2 teaspoons of oil on the pan and toss in the shallots and garlic. When the garlic goes lightly brown, add the bacon and fry until crispy. Next chuck in the Tom Yum paste and stir it around until fragrant. Chuck in the diced marinara mix and stir fry to mix everything around. Season with salt and pepper, fish sauce too if you like, and chuck in the kaffir lime leaves last. Leave to cool for a little.

Tom Yum-stuffed calamari close up

Rinse the calamari tubes and stuff it with the Tom Yum marinara mixes. Pan fry the calamari tube, turning it around regularly so that it cooks evenly. Finally, cut and serve. :D Happy cooking!

PS. You could also chuck in some diced vegetables like bamboo shoots, carrot, or water chesnut into the marinara mix to add some crunch.

Prawn ravioli with green curry dressing

2010-03-30T20:52:00.019+10:00

Midnight Bakery original

In South-East Asia it is not uncommon to find a peaceful marriage between noodles with various versions of curry and raviolli is certainly not too distant a cousin from noodles. Dear friends, I present to you the dish that broke my mortar: Prawn ravioli with green curry dressing.

Prawn ravioli with green curry dressing

Indeed, it was a risky adventure, nevertheless it promised a lot of fun and excitement to be had in the kitchen not to mention a great exercise opportunity. Those who have not yet made fresh pasta by hand (no pasta maker required), you should give it a go. This experiment threw my kitchen into an absolute painful state, what with a broken mortar and a new one too. Rest assured, the result makes this adventure well worth it!

Fresh hand-made pasta

To make the Midnight Bakery pasta, you will need:

3 large eggs
300 g of wheat flour
3 teaspoon of salt for flavour

Knead the pasta until elastic and rest for at least 30 minutes in room temperature. Meanwhile, you could start preparing the raviolli filling.

Crispy bacon and curry leaves as part of the ravioli filling

To make the Midnight Bakery prawn raviolli filling:

1 1/2 tablespoon of minced garlic in olive oil
500g of garlic prawns, roughly diced
200g of bacon, diced
2 stems of curry leaves, stem removed

Heat 2 tablespoons of oil and fry bacon and curry leaves until fragrant and the bacon crispy. Cool, mix with diced garlic prawns and keep in the fridge until required.

Step by step guid to making ravioli by hand

When you're ready to make the ravioli, dust the dough and the work surface with extra flour. With a rolling pin roll out pasta dough, flipping it and turning it around to ensure that you roll the dough evenly. Put a teaspoon-full of prawn stirfry on pasta dough roughly 4 cm apart. Top with pasta dough. Press down the edges gently so it looks like a little sombrero/Mexican hat. You could "stencil" it with a little tea cup if you have one. Cut out with knife and press again on the edges to ensure that the filling doesn't leak out during cooking. Keep them on a plate, generously dusted with flour to avoid them sticking to each other. Now on to that green curry dressing.

Green curry made from freshly hand ground ingredients
(the curry that killed my mortar)

To make the Midnight Bakery's green curry sauce, you will need:

1 bunch of basil
1 bunch of coriander (including roots)3 stems of curry leaves, stems removed
1 knob of tumeric
2 knobs of ginger
2 medium shallots, diced
2 large red chillis, sliced
2 teaspoons of belachan (fermented shrimp paste)
3 medium shallots, sliced
1 tablespoon of minced garlic
200 ml of coconut cream
1 handful of fresh kaffir lime leaves, scrunch until you could smell that beautiful citrusy scent
Lime juice and salt for seasoning

Pound the basil, coriander, curry leaves, tumeric, ginger, diced shallots, chilli and belachan paste. Heat a pan with oil and minced garlic and sliced shallots until translucent and the garlic slightly browning. Add pounded spices and stir fry until fragrant. Add coconut cream and lime leaves. Season with salt and lime juice to taste. Reduce heat and let to simmer.

A taste bud wonderland

Get a pot of salty water boiling and cook ravioli for 7-8 minutes then drain. Heat a pan with 1/2 teaspoon of oil and toss the ravioli with green curry sauce. For 5 ravioli, add 5 tablespoons of the curry sauce. The idea is not to have a soup (although you could), but just to have a glaze of the sauce over the surface of the raviolli. Serve with extra basil.

Mix and match dry and soupy dishes

Extra notes

You could make stir-fry out of the prawn filling by adding diced capsicums, basil leaves and coriander and combining them together in a quick hot toss in a wok.
You could combine the ravioli with a lot more green curry if you like. After cooking the ravioli in salty water, just serve in a bowl with curry sauce, or in this case, curry soup. Place the ravioli into the soup just before serving to avoid soggy pasta.
Make fettucinne with leftover pasta dough. Dust pasta sheet generously on both sides with flour and roll into a log. Cut 1 cm thickness, unroll and voila! Cook in salty boiling water for 7-8 minutes and dress with any sauce you like.

Assam Laksa

2010-03-20T19:59:00.014+10:00

Kiki's Assam Laksa

Hello all! It's been a while since my last post and believe me I have been brewing ideas for the next post, this post. I was inspired by an episode of Poh's show that featured Thai cuisine. In that show, a visiting chef made curry paste from scratch. That, combined with the increasingly limited space in my bar fridge (as a result of ever growing number of jars) pushes me to embark on my new experiment: Assam Laksa!

Assam laksa is not the same thing as laksa. As I understand it, assam laksa is one of many delicious Nyonya dishes originating from Penang island, Malaysia. This dish is FRESH!, flavorsome and fantastic served on a hot day with a glass of iced tea or chilled glass of white wine. Its main star ingredient is assam or tamarind, among a crew of many other spices: fresh tumeric root, galangal, lemon grass, mint leaves, shallots, garlic, belachan and chilli. Rest assured, all ingredients are not impossible to find in your local grocer in Sydney. Assam/tamarind paste is available in the supermarket in a jar; the rest can be found in your local vegetable and fruit store or farmer's markets in excellent fresh forms, at least I did.

It's worth it, I promise

This afternoon I found in a local farmer's market what I thought was ginger flower or a version of galangal and I excitedly brought it, among other fresh ingredients, home. On to my mortar and pestle and beyonnndddd!!! If like me you've never used mortar and pestle before, don't be afraid. It's really quite soothing to be pounding away mindlessly especially bearing in mind the promise of a delicious end product. Food processor is another option for those without said equipments and though I have been warned that the end product is not the same, I understand that these days it's more common to find food processors than the prehistoric mortar and pestle in most homes. So go ahead and press that button, bzzz bzzzzz. :D

Don't let the ingredients scare you, they're available in most grocery stores

To make my version of assam laksa, you will need the following ingredients.

Paste:

3 shallots
2 teaspoon if minced garlic
8 bird eye chillies
3 teaspoon of belachan (fermented prawn paste)
1thumb size of tumeric root
3 stalks of lemon grass, just the white bits
1 fist size of galangal

Broth and Soup:

3 tbsp of tamarind puree
1 bunch of pakchoy, washed thoroughly
a bunch of enoki mushrooms (straw mushroom), cleaned and remove roots
500g of white fish (I used Ling fillets)
2 large handfuls of fish tofu or marinara mix
Fish sauce
2 limes
1 ginger flower, sliced

Garnish:

1 shallots, sliced
1 lime, halved
mint leaves
2 chillies, chopped

Admittedly there are a lot of ingredients involved, even for the paste alone, so I have increased the super-sized this recipe to make the effort worth it for people like myself who don't have a lot of time on hand. Do this recipe on a weekend and you can freeze the leftovers for a week worth of lunch!

Pound the paste ingredients separately if you have a small mortar

Now let's get down to business. First and foremost, pound all the paste ingredients in a mortar and pestle and you want to do this nice and early. As I learned from TV, you want to chop the ingredients as finely as you could, because it would save you a lot of work in the pounding step.

Chop up the paste ingredients as this will make the pounding step a lot easier

Get a pot of water (about 3 liters) boiling with 2 pinches of salt & tamarind puree. Blanch bunches of pakchoy for 2 minutes, then drain and arrange on serving bowls. Boil fish and fish tofu/marinara mix for 10 minutes, remove the fishes while reserving the broth. Flake the fish fillets.

Bubble bubble...

Stir fry the paste in 3 tablespoons of vegetable oil until fragrant. Add the reserved fish broth plus 1 liter of boiling water, fish fillets, fish tofu/marinara mix, enoki mushroom, juice of 2 limes. Season with fish sauce and salt, adding the sliced ginger flower last. Simmer for an hour before serving in bowls with garnishes and steamed jasmine rice.

Not just a pretty face, garnish adds extra dimension in flavor

Some extra notes:

Tumeric is will stain anything and everything except porcelain in my personal observation. So before you chop/pound away, spread your kitchen counter top with old newspaper and be prepared to have yellow hands for the next few days. Oh, and wear an apron!

Warning: Tumeric stains!
Use a deep-welled mortar for pounding to avoid the paste ingredients on your shirt, face and every corner of your kitchen.

Potato & seafood curries

2010-01-02T16:23:00.008+10:00

Rice and two curries

One thing that I miss about Brisbane is the food. Sure it's not as deeply populated by little exotic food corners as Sydney or Melbourne but it is my second home. There's this great restaurant that serves Malaysian and Singaporean fares called Little Singapore. Little Singapore started off in a little shop in Sunnybank's Market Square (before the square burnt down a few years ago) but since the opening, business has been thriving and they now have a branch in the city. My absolute favourite from this place is the butter chicken, which is deep fried chicken chunks accompanied by... wait for it... crispy curry leaves. Yeah, those green goodness rocked my world. Anyway, so when I saw curry leaves in the market the other day, I knew I had to have them despite not having any real plan on what to make. I'm sure they taste great with anything.

Fried curry leaves, mmmm...

So today, I got my act together and decided to make 2 types of curries with them and some potatoes and seafood. The first curry is Japanese curry. What exactly is Japanese curry? " (Japanese) Curry sauce (カレーソース karē sōsu) is served on top of cooked rice to make curry rice. Curry sauce is made by frying together curry powder, flour and oil, along with other ingredients, to make roux (ルー rū); the roux is then added to stewed meat and vegetables, and then simmered until thickened" (Wikipedia).

Japanese curry

Like most people, I used a curry sauce mix that are readily available in the supermarkets and it cuts out most of the work. All I needed to do was cube the carrot and potato, caramelize some sliced onions and add in the mix and fresh seafood. In other words, follow the instruction on the packet. :P

The second is a dry potato and seafood curry and this one is a quick easy to make do-it-your-self curry.

Ingredients

a handful of curry leaves, rinsed and dried
1 teaspoon of dried chilli (you could increase the amount if you like your food spicy)
1 big potato, cubed
200 g of marinara mix
2 teaspoons of curry powder
salt and white pepper for seasoning
a handful of chopped spring onions
a handful of fresh coriander, torn

First, boil potatoes and drain. Then heat up your pan or wok on medium high heat and chuck in 2 tablespoons of oil and 2 teaspoons of butter. It will start to froth up. Chuck in the curry leaves and dried chilli and just fry them for about a minute or so, after which you can chuck in the marinara mix and curry powder. Stir fry until the fish is done (they become opaque when done), add potatoes. Continue to stir fry and season with salt and white pepper, making sure that the potatoes are well mixed. Add spring onion and turn off the fire after 1 minute. Serve hot and top with coriander.

Rice and two curries

I made a neat mango skin bowl to contain the dry curry. Aesthetic aside, I think it adds an extra flavour to the dish and they're in season. Here's how to make one. Slice off the cheeks of a mango, then score criss-cross pattern on the flesh and scoop out the flesh using a tablespoon. Next, slit one side of the mango skin and pierce a little hole on each side of the slit. Thread a curry leave through it to form a bowl. Voila!

Mango cheek bowl

Lobster chawan mushi

2010-01-01T18:13:00.009+10:00

A little side dish: chawan mushi (savoury steamed egg custard)
From my last lobster recipe, I had a little bit of leftover raw lobster meat which I decided to turn into savoury steamed egg otherwise known as chawan mushi. I think chawan mushi is quite healthy and low in fat. There is no added fat and you can toy with the salt/sodium content as you season the dish. It's virtually healthy whole protein and it's really quite easy to make and it tastes great. You can use any fish or prawns for this recipe. For my other version of chawan mushi, have a look at my previous post on steamed fritatta.

Extra trimmings of the lobster tail

The essential ingredient in chawan mushi is egg which needs to be beaten up lightly and mixed with broth. 1 egg will make 2 small servings of the dish. Remeber, chawan mushi is made and served in teacups so they're small. I used about 4:3 ratio of egg and broth to which I add 2 teaspoons of good white wine. Season with salt.

Place the chunks of lobster meat in a tea cup and steam it in the teacups for 5 minutes until you can see juice in the cup.

Beat the egg mixture again lightly and add it into the teacups. Steam a further few minutes until you see that the top of the savoury egg custard is starting to go puffy. Continue to steam the egg custard on low heat for another 1 minute or so, then serve with chopped spring onions on top. I happen to have spring onion mixed with miso paste in my fridge so I used that for mine and it tastes great. :) Happy cooking!

Pan-fried lobster tail in butter and black truffle infused oil

2010-01-01T17:34:00.009+10:00

Pan fried lobster tailon a bed of rice

Welcome to 2010! This holiday has given me a fresh chance to relax and just be. Yesterday, I took my little self to the Sydney Fish Market and I snooped all the shops. It was stinky, super crowded, wet and I loved it. What I also love is my little discovery: lobster tails. The holidays and Australians' love affair with seafood gave seafood vendors an excuse to skyrocket their prices, but even outside the holiday season lobsters are pricey. In one corner of a very crowded shop, near the entrace, I saw frozen lobster tails for $69.99 per kilo. The friendly shop attendant at Claudio's told me that one tail, depending on the weight varies between $15-17, which is a huge price gap away from whole lobster with the head attached. So I got her to grab me a small tail and oh what a beautiful tail.

My discovery of the last day of 2009

After a little bit of research on Google, I decided to make panfried lobster with butter and black truffle infused oil from Simon Johnson, the one that I'm too shy to use, but hey, it's New Year's Day. This cooking process is a lot of trial and error. I jabbed my hands plenty of times on the prickly shell and I learnt that you can't grab the meat out as a whole without first cooking it somewhat. I dunk it into hot boiling water for not more than 2 minutes before having another attempt at taking the meat out. The rest is a lot easier. Here is my recipe.

Ingredients

1 lobster tail, blanched and meat removed whole
1 teaspoon of butter
1 teaspoon of oil (black truffle infused oil)

Heat oil and butter in pan on medium high heat. Pan fry the lobster tail. Season with salt. Slice and top on a bed of hot freshly steamed white rice. :) Simple yet delicious, buon appetito and Happy new year!

Spring onion pancake

2009-12-27T12:49:00.010+10:00

What to do when all you need is a handfull of spring onions, but the smallest quantity on offer at the shops are fat bunches of leavey stalks of spring onions? Such is a question that often plaques society today but the Taiwanese have the perfect solution for that: spring onion pancakes! A few years ago, a mother of a friend of mine took me under her wings and showed me how to make these savoury pancakes from scratch and ever since then I've toyed and experimented with the recipes and today I believe that I have perfected the recipe to suit my taste buds and hopefully those of many others. I incorporated yeast in the dough to avoid tough texture and I use chicken broth to maximize the savoury flavour.

The basic flavour that dominates these pancakes are spring onion and sesame oil. Another great thing about it is that you really only need the green bits from that big fat bunch of spring onions, so you could reserve the white bits (my favourite bit of green onions) for soups. All the ingredients that you need are basic staples that can be found in most pantries and these are

Flour, 500 g
Salt, 5 tbsp
Sugar, 2 tbsp
Instant yeast, 1/2 tsp
Sesame oil
Chicken broth, 375 ml (could be replaced by water and stock powder)
Spring onions, chopped
Eggs

So here's what to do. First, we want to make a dough so mix the flour, salt, sugar, instant yeast together and make a little well in the middle to pour in the chicken stock. Mix and knead, slowly incorporate sesame oil. You could add any the amount as you like, depending on the dough. Mine was quite sticky (and I used about ~100 ml of sesame oil) unlike the texture of normal bread dough and I'm not quite sure why this is, but the end product turned out better than I expected. Rest the dough for at least 30 minutes (I rested mine overnight) and cover with wet tea towel.

Flatten dough

Punch down the raised dough and divide into half-fist portions. Roll out each individual portions and top with spring onions, again you could add as much or as little as you like. Roll up the spring onion topped dough into a log and twist into little snails as pictured and rest for another 30 minutes.

Top flattened dough with spring onions

Roll up the spring onion topped dough into a log...

... and twist into little snails

To cook, heat up your pan on medium high heat with a teaspoon of vegetable oil. Meanwhile, flatten the snail dough and try to maintain the circular shape. If you have a small pan like me, try to roll out the dough to fit the size of your pan. Decrease the heat to medium and pan fry the dough on both sides and watch the little air pockets rise and turn the flat dough into a puffy pancake. When the pancake is browned on both sides, put it aside and in the same pan, crack an egg and put the pancake on top. Serve hot with light soy sauce, bon apetit!

Flatten the snail dough and try to maintain the circular shape

Pan fry the dough and watch it turn into puffy pancake

Serve hot with light soy sauce, bon apetit!

Bakcang/肉粽

2009-11-29T19:31:00.010+10:00

Be careful when handling bamboo leaves
as they are quite sharp and may leave you with paper cuts, or bamboo cuts

It’s been a while dear readers. I have again been occupied by my beloved research project and after a long time, rather than finding the time, I made the time to make another attempt at making bakcang and thereby taking the chance to capture my mother’s recipe in photographs for anyone who happens to stumble into my cooking blog and intrigued enough to recreate this in their own kitchen. Come on, if i can do this in my miniscule kitchen you can too!

After gathering all the ingredients that I could recall from our last cooking session together, I decided to call my mom to confirm that I had indeed got all the right and necessary ingredients, but as it turns out daddy knows best. Mom was napping and the next best option was to ask my dad on how to prepare a few ingredients to these bamboo leaves wrapped goodies. He sounded surprised when I told him what I was about to do and I could just see him raising his eyebrows in amusement as he asked “妳會做粽子?” (You know how to make bakcang?) … Well, not exactly but practice makes perfect, no?

I’m okay at making the filling, the glutinous rice, preparing the bamboo leaves but assembling needs refining. :P so I will share with you my mom’s recipe for bakcang.

For glutinous rice
you will need to soak 3 cups of glutinous rice at least overnight, then steam it for roughly 45 minutes in medium fire.

For the filling
you will need:

1 ½ bulb of garlic, minced
Two handfuls of dried shitake mushroom, soak in hot water then squeeze as much as the water
A handful of dried prawns, soaked in hot water twice, drained
A handful of dried scallops, soaked in hot water twice, drained
Peanut, soaked in hot water, drained
A handful of dried chestnut, boiled, drained
100g chicken, diced (I prefer tenderloins but breast meat or thigh meat would also do)
3 teaspoon of five spice powder (which you can get in the herb section of your supermarket)
3 tbs of dark soy sauce
2 teaspoon of sugar
1 tbs of balsamic vinegar

First heat about ½ a cup of olive oil or vegetable oil in your wok until it’s smoking then stir fry the shitake mushroom until slightly browned. Add garlic, again stir and take care to decrease the heat so you don’t burn the garlic. Add the dried prawns, scallops, chestnut and peanut and stirfry again until fragrant. Add in diced chicken and continue to stir fry and season with five spice powder, dark soy sauce, sugar balsamic vinegar, Chinese cooking wine and salt and pepper to taste. Evaporate liquid and let cool before assembling.

So here’s the difficult part. Take two bamboo leaves that had been pre-boiled in water and a few droplets of oil, and overlap them longitudinally then fold as pictured. Fill with glutinous rice and fillings then top with rice. Now the folding bit is a bit too complicated to describe in words so the best I could do is to direct you to this youtube video. Unfortunately for non-Indonesian speakers, you will need to just watch, but really watching is all you really need to do. Good luck!

Prevention & Treatment

2009-10-26T21:47:00.007+10:00

Packed lunch for a day of work and research

Tuna with chili and mayonaise, white bait,
cucumber, rice and a flower of Japanese preserved radish and eggplant

Brunetti's chocolate mousse

Pahlawan tanpa tanda jasa... nasi

2009-09-28T19:41:00.008+10:00

Nasi adalah pemeran latar belakang utama di berjuta-juta makanan yang dihidangkan di meja keluarga terutama di Asia. Namun, tanpanya untaian rasa asin, manis, asem, pahit kehilangan jati diri mereka. Hampir mustahil bila kita mencari satu saja rumah moderen yang tidak dihiasi dengan rice cooker. Kehadirannya meringankan perkerjaan ibu-ibu dan, let's face it, pembatu rumah tangga di seantero nusantara. Tapi hari ini aku menolak untuk memakai rice cooker. Hari ini aku berhasil masak, eh salah, menanak nasi tanpa rice cooker. Ajaib? Tidak juga, hanya saja mukzizat seperti ini sampai saat ini bukan kejadian sehari-hari di dapur sekarang di mana waktu menjelma menjadi komoditas yang langka dan sangat mahal.

Eniwei.... ini bekal makanku besok. Semuanya aku usahakan serba sehat. Di tengah atas dan bawah adalah lemper nasi isi tuna dan mayones. Bedanya, yang hitam itu dibungkus dengan rumput laut yang biasanya digunakan di sushi. Di samping kiri terdapat potongan timun dan wortel segar dan di sebelah kanan, asinan lobak dan ikan teri saus tauco (botolan).

Nguing nguing nguing

2009-09-27T13:47:00.008+10:00

Chocolate rollie (pre-baking)

This is my new experiment. I placed a flat layer of chocolate dough on top of the soy milk dough I made last night and rolled them together into a log which I then cut into little wheels. I could almost shape them into little rose buds but I'll leave that to next time.

Chocolate rollie (post-baking)

The chocolate dough has almost 50-50 ratio of wheat flour and cocoa powder, to which I added a teaspoon of yeast (and a tonne of brown sugar). Overnight, it did little raising so I didn't want to bake it on its own. Surprisingly, despite the high content of sugar, it isn't too sweet or very sweet at all.

The panda bread, whose snout fell off during baking

I also made an attempt at making panda bread with the same doughs, unfortunately the snout fell off during baking. There are much optimization to be done but once done, I will post the recipe up together with some tips on assembling in anticipation of falling snouts. :)

Imagine me and you

2009-09-27T00:55:00.003+10:00

Croissant-shaped soy milk brioche

I couldn't wait until tomorrow to bake my little croissant wannabes (see previous post). I really should have just done one to see what time does to the dough. Anyhow, baking a soy bread really morphs the aroma that lurks around as a very welcome by product. The scent is dominated by a nutty tone which trully surprised me because I didn't think this one ingredient would make such a big difference.

Anyhoo, I'll leave the tasting to Sunday morning breakfast. Good night world. :)

月亮代表我的心

2009-09-26T20:49:00.007+10:00

Croissant shaped soy brioche

Hoooiiii, I am still alive and well (^^). I've been rather busy in the lab, thus the absence of new posts in my Midnight Bakery blog. Nevertheless, the Midnight bakery is still chugging some steam at (some) nights.

I'm currently experimenting with soy milk as an ingredient in my bread if not to substitute milk to counter my lactose intolerance , then for novelty's sake. Most of you would be familiar with milk bread, but have not heard of soy milk bread. Well, me neither. I've made the dough with butter and to contain quite a bit of sugar and I've shaped the dough into croissant style. The dough is currently rested and I'll bake it first thing tomorrow. Watch the next post for the final product.

In the meanwhile, I thought I'd share with you some other breads that I had been baking all these while.

Cheese clogged heart

My attempt at brioche à tête

Savoury oat porridge with century egg and pickled eggplant

2009-08-17T21:24:00.008+10:00

I love the versatility of oats. You could incorporate it in cookies and muffins to which it adds a new dimension to the texture. Oats also offer many health benefits. It has been said that oats help lower cholesterol re-absorption and therefore promote cardiovascular well-being. Oats are rich source of both soluable and insoluable fibres, the stuff that keeps you regular and help make you feel full longer so that you don't overeat. In fact, oats fall into the category of low GI foods. In lay term this means that oats are more slowly digested, resulting in a gradual rise of blood glucose. This is good news for diabetics and all ye who are battling the waist line.

All those are really fantastic (and they make me sound like a salesperson), but they're not the real reason why I love oats. I love oats because I can whip up congee in 10% the amount of time needed if I was to make congee from rice. So what is this wonderful thing I refer to as congee? It's essentially porridge that is traditionally made from rice and served with anything from shredded chicken to exotic things like meat floss. Congee can be plain, it can be savoury but no, it may not be sweet. On the other hand, many of you are familiar with only the sweet forms of oats. This recipe will challenge your perception and hopefully introduce something delicious and interesting to your palate.

To make rice congee from start would take many hours as the rice needs to be broken down to gruel like consistency, but not with oats. It's so easy to make you'd think I'm lying. To make this savoury oat porridge you will need:

a cup of rolled oat
2 and a half cup of chicken stock
chopped spring onion/scallion
deep fried garlic & shallots (get these in the Asian isle of your supermarket)
century egg (these you'll need to find in an Asian grocer and read the label or you'd risk buying salted duck egg instead... although they're yummy too)
Japanese pickled eggplant

Boil the oat in stock until it's done, season with salt. Spoon into a bowl. Top with spring onion, garlic and shallots. Halve the century egg and arrange one half on the congee. Arrange pickled eggplant on the congee. Eat.

Dinner party

2009-08-02T10:49:00.011+10:00

I decided to throw a little dinner party with a few of my friends last night and what better opportunity to experiment. :P One little trouble, one of the boys is not a fan of seafood and fish to which I'm accustomed to cooking. I didn't feel ready to embark on cooking red meat, so I brought home two whole chicken to toy with. Admittedly, I'm a bit squirmish when it comes to touching raw meat especially when it still looks like a whole carcass, but I was deeply intrigued by the anatomy of a whole chicken since last week when I cooked a whole baked chicken encased in salt crust.

Prosciutto lemon parcels of chicken thighs

Prosciutto lemon parcels of chicken thighs
I borrowed Julie's idea (Masterchef Australia) of deboning chicken thighs, rolled and poaching them in its own broth (made using the bones) then baked wrapped with a slice of prosciutto and lemon. I tied mine up with a piece of string to keep them all together and of course adhering with the fancy idea of dinner party, it's always fun to cut off the string upon serving.

Truffled baked chicken breast

Truffled baked chicken breast
First I divided out the chicken into breast portions and thigh portions. I slipped truffle butter between the skin of the breast and baked it in my toaster sized oven. I sincerely do not recommend doing it with a small oven. There were some serious hissing and fire balls inside mine, festive yes but there might be more important safety issue. Anyway, this chicken goes well with aioli with just a touch of sesame oil, too much will overpower the delicate flavour of the truffle. The same sauce is also suitable for the thigh parcels.

Chocolate pot with grissini and fruit

Chocolate pot with grissini and fruit
For dessert, I made a lazy chocolate pot with strawberries and grissini made with some leftover from pizza dough. For the chocolate pot, I used about 200g of dark chocolate, finely chopped. Mix the chocolate with roughly 1 1/2 cup of cream and just heat while stirring with a balloon whisk until you get a smooth consistency. The chocolate will be between drinking chocolate and dipping chocolate thickness when warm but if you give it a little bit of time to cool it will be thicker. Serve with strawberries and banana.

Creme caramel for two

2009-07-20T21:22:00.007+10:00

Making creme caramel I believe is fueled by an unforgetable experience and may take a little dash of curiousity and a whole of courage. How could it not? I mean, who has the time (let alone patience) to sit there and ponder when the sugar solution looks like it's about the right color, and wait... did we know that caramel is essentially burnt sugar (to a degree)? I for one certainly didn't know this until my obsession with food pushed me to the culinary section of book stores and internet corners. So... if you had read my previous entry, you'd know that I had the intention of making smoked salmon roll, sharing one ingredient with creme caramel. No ready made creme caramel could emit that genuine caramel flavour of a home made and certainly no store bought could beat the satisfaction of making it yourself.

I did my research and found two base recipes that I think I could trust: one of Jamie Oliver and another of Neil Perry. I made some necessary adjustment to make precisely two pots of creme caramels and my ingredients are:

For the caramel

100 g caster sugar
80 g brown sugar
100 ml water

For the pudding

1 cup of milk
1/2 cup of cream
1 tablespoon of frangelico
180 g sugar
2 whole eggs
2 egg yolks

Lining the bain marie with tea towel prevents the bottom from overheating

First off, the caramel. Combine the sugar and water in a pan on a medium heat and feel free to stir all you like until the sugar is all dissolved. Once that happens, I suggest hands off stirring and let it just bubble away. One of the recipes I read said to take it off the heat once it turns chestnut color, but I'm not quite sure what chestnut looks like so I went purely with feelings. Bear in mind that after you take the pan off the fire, the caramel will still continue to burn/color courtesy of residual heat. Divide the caramel into two ramekins. If you don't have them, use coffee mugs. Make sure they're oven proof or at least don't use your favourite mug.

Now the pudding. Beat egg and leave aside (preferably in the fridge). Combine sugar, milk, cream and Frangelico into a saucepan and heat until sugar is all dissolved then let it cool. My rule is that if you can dip you (clean) finger in the solution for 30 seconds comfortably without being burnt, it's good to go with the egg. Whisk just until combined and strain into the ramekins.

Preheat oven at 170 degree Celcius and in the meanwhile prepare a bain marie. Take a baking dish that would fit your two ramekins/mugs and line the bottom with a tea towel. Put in your two ramekins and fill the baking dish with boiling water until it reaches half the height of the ramekins/mugs and bake for about 45-50 minutes until the pudding sets. Once done, cool the pudding for about 3 hours. Now just before you serve it, immerse the ramekins/mugs in boiling water to warm the caramel. Slide a palette knife (I used a very fine fruit knife) around the edge of the ramekins/mugs to loosen up the pudding. Invert the ramekins/mugs on a plate and serve. :) Good luck!

Smoked salmon & dill roll

2009-07-20T20:17:00.005+10:00

I had inheritted a whole block of smoked salmon from Tassal at the Sydney good food and wine show. A block of salmon, can I say that? Smoked salmon is hardly a staple pantry ingredient but with this quantity around, I feel that I have the privillige to exhaust every known recipe without fear, but when it comes to naming names... what exactly could I do with smoked salmon apart from old bagel, cream cheese and smoked salmon? Or Salmon tossed around in salad, or pasta dish? For once, I put on my eye cover, resist the temptation of Google search and hey, what about an sushi like egg roll with salmon and its classic best friend dill and cream cheese? Alright so that took a little bit more than just voila, I meditated over lunch. It helps that I have a tonne of eggs that I want to get rid of and I'm attempting another go at making creme caramel.

I think this is as simple as it would get. You'll need

one whole egg
two egg whites (or you could just add a whole egg into this)
1 spring of dill, chopped
1 teaspoon of cream cheese

Mix the eggs together and season with salt and pepper. Heat an oiled frying pan and laddle about 2 tablespoons of the egg mixture, topping it with smoked salmon after carefully spreading the egg mixture evenly on the pan. After adding the salmon, add another 2 tablespoons of egg mixture and sprinkle dill. Fry the egg on one side for about 5 minutes on medium heat, then flip carefully and remove from fire after another 2 minutes or so. While still hot, spread cream cheese mixture on the omellete, roll up and sliced into four. Garnish with mayonaisse and dill sprig or you could also top it with caviar if your budget allows. Bon apetit!

Dumplings

2009-06-22T22:55:00.007+10:00

Fresh dumplings

My next holiday destination is China. Yes, it is indeed true and sad, I am a Chinese who has never stepped foot in China. I was invited to lunch by two of my colleagues who had passed their medical exam after only 8 weeks of preparation which if I may say is trully an exceptional achievement. The table was filled with happy dialogues and exchanges in Chinese in which I found my self lost after 15 minutes or so, unable to catch up with the conversations and jokes that were thrown around. Nevertheless, I was happy to have a place on the table amongst the esteemed senior scientists. A thought often tickles my mind, how about China after PhD or even after PostDoc? I do miss Asia, especially the food.

Dumpling dough, a love affair of water and wheat flour

Another colleague of mine had invited me to her home about a year ago and her mother and her had so kindly taught me of the art of 水餃 (shui jiao), which was the most amazing dumpling I had ever tasted. The texture of their home made dumpling skin turned me into a dumpling-skin snob so much that I would look down upon any ready made dumpling skins. I thought it would be appropriate to make some dumplings tonight.

Dumpling

Uglicious

2009-06-21T22:29:00.007+10:00

Pizza A la Midnight Bakery

They say pictures say a thousand words and in this particular case, it is terribly true. I spent the weekend cooking from Indonesian Nasi Tumpeng, to red bean filled bread, chocolate tart and... pizza. Pizza has evolved in its definition and meaning to me from Pizza Hut products which was the only pizza I was familiar with when I was FOB (fresh of the boat) to a respectful savoury Italian pie dish to a dish that I frequently violate. By violate, I don't mean to make a mockery of it, but like anything else that I make, I make it my own, my way.

I made the base with the bread dough that I had reserved, topped with a sauce that I concocted out of tomato paste, basil pesto, cracked pepper and chilli flakes. I blanketted the pizza with prosciutto which I had painfully carved myself, halved kalamata olives, mixed antipasto and finally mozzarella and a bit of parmesan.

It was uglicious.