Ikura/Salmon roe I bought from a store opposite our place.

When I was a child, fish is a regular feature on our dining table. Milkfish, Tilapia, red grouper and mackerel scad are the regulars but there’d be a lot more served dry, with sauce, smoked and grilled. My favorite part of the Milkfish would be…the belly. Unfortunately, my older brother loves it too so we would often engage in a fork-war to get to them first. ^_^

But for most fishes, I would always save the roe/eggs (not to be confused with milt) if they have those intact, my mom knew how I love them and she would often pick those with a lot o eggs just for me. Then, I never ate them raw…I could not and I think my mom wouldn’t allow it for fear of the unknown. We rarely eat raw food unless it’s sushi, not even ceviche nor kinilaw (cooked in vinegar alone not with fire). And because then I don’t really have a say on what food to serve, I can’t experiment. ^_^

Now that I am the diva of my own kitchen, raw food has become a regular. Aside from greens and other munch-ready vegetables, caviar and sushi ingredients, which I can make on my own now, found themselves in our kitchen.

Roe and Salmon on pasta.

So today’s dish is similar to a pasta dish, I think, I’ve already featured years ago sans salmon roe. This is almost the same as the simple carbonara recipe but instead of using bacon, we use salmon and we substituted the bacon fat with butter.

Ingredients:

Butter
1 medium Shallot, chopped

Spaghetti
Smoked Salmon, cut into strips
Ikura/Cured Salmon roe
1 Egg
a teaspoon Pepper
pinch of salt

Optional:

Parsley
Cooking cream

Procedure:

Cook Spaghetti per package directions but minus 1-2 minutes the usual cooking time.

In a pan, melt butter and saute shallots until translucent. Remove from heat and add smoked salmon (cook minimally and leave some for topping).

In a separate bowl, beat the egg, add pepper and salt.

Drain spaghetti and add to the butter, shallot, salmon in pan and on very low heat. Add egg mixture and stir immediately. Here, you can opt to add cooking cream or not. I prefer not to add it because of the egg which makes the pasta creamy already.

Remove the pan from stove and serve pasta on plates, top with remaining smoked salmon, salmon roe and parsley.

This is great with a glass of champagne or perhaps some bruschetta drizzled with olive oil. Perfect for a hurried lunch or dinner!

Love popping those caviar!

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Sin city, it’s a heavy word connoting what a city allows or caters to vices that are legalized but are anyway morally questioned. Of these cities, Las Vegas would first come to mind. Though eating is not necessarily a vice, gluttony is. Las Vegas offers buffets and there you can binge all you want while enjoying other things that the city offers while on a holiday; attractions, shopping, real games you play at bingopalace.com,  night-life and whatever things you can enjoy that I will not mention here.

After hours of shopping and sight seeing and perhaps shouting for almost winning that most coveted game, it is but natural to head to one of the restaurants around and indulge. Las Vegas Buffets offer a wide-range of cuisines and would fit one’s budget, whether when you want to splurge or limit your expenses.

Garden Court Buffet

There are hundreds of restaurants around the Las Vegas Strip and most of them offers buffet dining or simply a la carte. Your stay won’t be enough to try all of them so before you go, scout reliable online review sites and compare prices and ratings from customers.

Tally down which restaurants offer your favorite cuisine. There’s Japanese, Korean, French, Italian, Greek and for sure Spanish, Mediterranean and whatever flavor you fancy. Make sure you get to list down which and where the restaurant is located to save you time from going about.

Bellagio buffet, photo via http://www.flickr.com/photos/terenceleezy/6912836462/

Dessert Buffet

If you’re a sweet tooth like me, Dessert Buffets are for you, you’re sure to find macarons, sweet tarts, panna cotta and other never-before tasted sweets in one of the hundred dessert tables…there’s even ice cream tasting of the oddest flavor!

Also, if the food is great, if the service is awesome, one thing is for sure, you’ll have to wait being seated because the patrons and all those who’ve been to the best buffets know where their money is worth spending on.

Bellagio Buffet, dessert - http://www.flickr.com/photos/m_a_k_i_/3409158291/

photo credits: hubby, google, respective owners

Sunny side up for breakfast.

After months of hiding behind the clouds, Mr. Sun is finally out. It means like the blossoms starting to come out of hibernation, I’d be enthusiastic to go to the groceries and cook more. Like every time I pick the kids up we would buy a loaf of bread or two before going home. There’s that Billa store near the school where we get our stuff and at the end of the month that’s also where I would take a free recipe magazine from the cashier stand for cooking inspiration. I’ve long wanted to try the recipes but I never really did until last week. This fried eggs on mango-leek-cashew salad was just so attractive to pass up and to not share so here’s my first attempt at following a recipe by the book…errr magazine.

(Incomplete photo of ingredients here.)

Ingredients

1 stalk of leeks
1 mango
a clove of garlic
1 tablepoon olive oil

1 lemon
pinch of chili
4 tablepoons soy sauce
1 teaspoon honey
roasted cashew
1 tablespoon vegetable oil

4 eggs
1 teaspoon brown sugar
1 tablespoon sesame oil
salt
coriander

You’ll need:

a small pan
egg shaper (optional)
glass containers

For the salad, wash leeks and cut into 1cm pieces. If you’re using fresh mangoes, peel them up and cube, if you’re using canned — not really recommended albeit simpler – just cut them to cubes. Mince garlic. Heat up a teaspoon of olive oil on pan and put in the leeks, saute for a minute and remove from heat.

Remove the remaining olive oil from pan and save it for later. Wash the lemons with warm water, dry up and grate a bit of the peel into a small dish. Squeeze the juice. Combine 1 tablespoon soy sauce, a pinch of chili, half of the minced garlic, honey and 2 teaspoons of lemon juice. Meanwhile, mix leeks, mango and cashew and sprinkle with salt to taste. Combine with soysauce mix.

For the sunny-side up eggs, put vegetable oil in pan and let warm on medium heat. If you have those metal egg rings, put 4 of them on pan and break each egg on one…fry the eggs for about 3 minutes.

While cooking the eggs combine remaining soy sauce (3 tablespoons), chili, brown sugar, sesame oil and remaining garlic and cook for a minute in a separate pan. Set aside. Remove the eggs carefully from the rings…wash the coriander and snip into small stalks.

Arrange the leek salad in four glass containers,  put an egg on top of each and drizzle with the cooked say sauce concoction. Garnish with coriander and serve.

Parsley may be substituted for coriander.

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Soy-butter grilled Salmon.

The week past was a a whirlwind, I was out of the house everyday despite allergy attacks. Despite being called Ferien (holidays), we were most busiest and wasn’t able to stay much at home. Some days you’d see us lugging our neck and shoulder-breakers around, shooting here and there. Some days I went with the dawty out as far as an hour away from home as she familiarize herself with what to do at the play rehearsals. Yes, I’m a stagemom once again. ^_^

In between, I rarely got the time to cook…which I’ve been missing out on a lot too.

So on Sunday we were finally able to have a peaceful lunch at home. I bought this salmon fillet Saturday (stores being closed on Sundays) on our way home from rehearsal. weew!

Salmon is what I consider the king of all fish. (lol) If there’s even such a thing. You know how I’d go and throw down the drain the hard-earned 2-kilos-lost-from-dieting  if salmon is served…really don’t care.

There are quite a few recipes I enjoy with salmon and I love every bit of them. When in a hurry, this filet soy-butter, that’s simply soy sauce and butter is the easiest I can prepare.

Ingredients:

Salmon Filets
Butter, melted
Soy sauce
Lemon
Pepper

needs:

Grill Pan or griller
brush
spatula

Clean and prepare filets. In a small bowl, combine melted butter and soy sauce. Brush filets with soy-butter and sprinkle with pepper and lemon.

Place filets, skin side, on your grill pan. Grill for 6-8 minutes depending on thickness. Flip once. Brush with soy-butter again. You can try flaking it with a fork, salmon is done then. Serve with rice and miso soup and veggies.

Serve with rice and veggies or soup.

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Join us on Food Friday

Breakfasts. They’re supposedly the foundation of everyday and yet I fail to prepare one that would energize the kids, hubby and myself. It has been my goal to wake up earlier so I can have all the time to make a decent meal. I fail…all the time. The easiest I can prepare are toasts which the kids normally like with just butter.  For hubby an egg and coffee with the toasts would suffice. So to spice those bread on some days, here’s my cinnamon toast for easy fix. Four ingredients and a toaster and here’s your comfort food.

What you need:

• Bread
• Butter
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 4 teaspoons of ground cinnamon

1. For the bread, choose ones that doesn’t have butter in them already. I find these cheap loaves from the grocery across our place, they’re at 0.40 cents. They’re not the best tasting bread when eaten alone but when made into cinnamon toasts or spread with nutella, they’re the best. So get some slices off for buttering.

2. Toast a few pieces on low…better use the grill-toaster than the pop-ups. While waiting, mix brown sugar and ground cinnamon. I prefer brown sugar but granulated would do. Take the bread slices out, be careful: they’re hot! Spread butter  and sprinkle some of the sugar-cinnamon mix.

3. Toast them again until sugar melts and your done.

Best served with milk+honey for kids and coffee for hubby.

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Food Friday, Yummy Sunday

There are a lot of baked goodies that son1 would request from time to time. I could easily make almost all of them except for doughnuts…I found this recipe from youtube but I changed it a slightly. My dilemma was    I deep fried it instead of baking so maybe it was not a good idea after all. The next time my son requests for donuts, I’ll bake this.

Ingredients:

1 egg
3/4 cup castor sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/2 cup of milk
50g melted butter

2 cups plain flour
2 tsp baking powder

Glaze:

chocolate bars
white chocolate bars

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1. In a bowl beat eggs using a hand mixer. Put in castor sugar, vanilla extract, milk and melted butter. Mix well.

2. Fold in flour and baking powder into the egg mixture and mix again, when it gets tough to mix, use a wooden spatula. Let the dough sit in half an hour or so.

3. Heat up oil for deep frying.

4. Flour surface (table or countertop) and flatten dough…not so thick so that they cook easily.

5. Shape your doughnuts, I use a small glass to shape the doughnut and I make use of a piping tip for the small hole.

6. When oil is hot enough, drop dough one by one, just when there’s enough space for them. Flip after 30-40 seconds using a wooden stick. If you think that they aren’t cooked through leave for some seconds more.

7. Let oil drip, leave doughnuts on cooling rack.

To make glaze:

I make glaze out of laziness; simply melt the chocolates and dip the dough one by one. You can add color to the white chocolate too, I made use of matcha powder for it. Decorate with assorted candy sprinkles. Serve.

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Food Friday

To be happy over someone’s misfortune is not my thing but to be thankful that I am one who doesn’t have allergy with shrimps must be the same thing.

We’re all shrimp lovers at home. It doesn’t matter which dish, as long as there’s shrimp, expect that there’d be none left.

This entry is almost the same (but different) from my Tempura post I did before…because I didn’t made incisions to straighten the shrimps. I basically used the same recipe though, please click here.

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We first got to savor a slice of Oreo Cake from a cafê that daughter and I frequent. We really liked it, even my older son who is very particular with cakes liked it too…When we visited mom-in-law at my brother-in-law’s place my son saw a box of ready-to-make Oreo Cookie cake. The idea is to make a cake that resembles an Oreo cookie…white filling – ‘cream’ or ‘creme’, sandwiched between two circular chocolate or golden cookie pieces, here that would be layers of chocolate cookie crust.

This cake is very simple I believe the packaged ingredients are the same with the original recipe. I saw that most have the same ingredients but this one is something I’ll try.

Ingredients

1 (20 ounce) package oreo cookies
1/2 cup melted butter

500 grams cream cheese (Philadelphia)
500 grams Mascarpone cheese
230 grams confectioners sugar, sifted
2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
720 ml  cold heavy whipping cream

Directions

1. Crush cookies, leave some as bite size pieces or reserve some of the crushed cookies for the top. Combine melted butter and crushed cookies. Press the mixture into 9×13 pan. Leave in freezer for 5 minutes.

2. Beat half of cream cheese and half mascarpone in a bowl, pour half of sugar and mix in remaining cream cheese and mascarpone.

3. Include vanilla extract and slowly put in whipping cream, mix until smooth and thick.

4. Spread the cream cheese mixture evenly on crust and top with remaining crushed cookies or if you prefer bite size pieces, top the cream cheese with those. Put in the fridge for an hour or two.

 Carefully remove from pan, slice and serve. Voila, one happy lil’ kid…

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Food Friday

At first look you’ll know that this is like Morcon, a rolled meat with fillings of vegetables, cheese, hard-boiled eggs, hotdogs and pickles served on special occasions back home. Rouladen simply means rolled meat. The German and Austrian counterpart has less filling and has a different sauce from what I remember my mom makes. Well, I don’t expect them to be the same, that’s one good thing about food, there are similarities and differences that you get to enjoy whichever you like.

Roulade:
4-5 Beef Roulade (thin strips)
8-10 slices of bacon
2-3 onions
1-2 tablespoons spicy mustard from Dijon
1 tablespoon butter
2 tablespoons butter
freshly ground white or black pepper
Sea salt or coarse salt ground pepper

Sauce:
2-3 onions
1  carrot (cut in half)
1 / 4 celeriac
1 clove of garlic
1 large tomato
1 tablespoon tomato paste
1/2 l beef stock, chicken stock, veal stock, vegetable stock, broth or bouillon cubes
1 sprig of thyme
1 bay leaf
freshly ground white or black pepper
Sea salt or coarse salt ground pepper
butter

Preparation:
1. Peel the onions and cut into rings.
2. Wash the roulades and pat dry with kitchen paper.
3. Clean the carrots, peel and cut half of it into thin strips.
4. Sprinkle roulades with salt and pepper, brush with mustard and top with two slices of bacon, onion rings and carrot strips.
5. Roll up and fasten with toothpicks or roulade needles.

Procedure:
1. Wash tomato with hot water and quarter them.
2. The fat can be extremely hot, fry the roulades on all sides, add salt and pepper.
3. Dice the remaining carrots.
4. Remove the roulades from the pan and pour off most of the fat.
5. Fry the diced vegetables and herbs (onions, carrots, garlic, celeriac, thyme, bay leaf) in butter. Let contents of the pot thicken with tomato paste.
6. Scrape off the browned bits with a wooden spoon from pan bottom.
7. Bring the sauce to a boil and place the roulades.
8. Then add in chopped tomato.
9. Let boil and let simmer for about 1 hour and 50 minutes.
10. Pour sauce and season to taste.

Serve with rice or pasta.

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Food Friday, Yummy Sunday