Away From Home

Sous-vide Steak

2010-04-02T18:51:00.006+01:00

The trouble with home cooked steak is that you cannot get the meat cooked at the right level: usually it is uncooked or overcooked it. Getting the steak to be cooked at the right level for me is like winning lottery: lot of consolation prizes and none for the big ones. Reading various food blogs, I stumbled across an article that explains how to cook a prefect steak like Michelin chef easily. This article explains a rather peculiar method called "sous-vide" (or "under vaccum"). This requires the steak to be vacuum-packed and soaked in a water at certain temperature over a period of time. Whether it works or not? Well, there is only one way to find out...

Since I have neither a vacuum pack machine nor a sous-vide machine, I have to make do with zip-lock steam bag, a big pot and a thermometer:

oh ya, I marinated the rump steak with garlic, thyme, salt, pepper and a bit of lemon zest over night in the zip-lock steam bag. Sous-vide is not magic. It will not make the steak tasty without marinate.

The most tricky part of the sous-vide business is to maintain the water temperature. For medium-rare steak, it requires the water temperature to be at 60 degree celsius. After several trials, I noticed that big volume of water will make the temperature goes up/down slower. This allows you to control the temperature better especially you are trying to figure out what stove setting you will require. If the water gets too hot, just pour in some cold water. This brings down the temperature, and you might want to turn the stove setting a bit lower. Once you get the right stove setting + water volume, you might want to record the setting down (unless you want to spend your time tweaking it for the next time).

Depending on the size of the steak, the minimum cooking time will vary. For one and half inch steak, it will take at least 1 hour for it to cook thoroughly. Since it is constant temperature, I can always leave it longer if I wanted to. This will give me enough time to prepare elaborate side dishes to go along with the steak.

Once it is ready, take it out from the pot and heat up a heavy-bottom pan with a bit of olive oil. Pan fry the steak till the meat is browned from the outside (This should not take more than 1 minute for both sides, if the pan is very hot.). Here is how it looks like:

Sous-vide steak, mashed potato with fried and fresh leek, and sauté brussels sprouts with smoked bacon :)

Here is how the meat looks like:

I think I hit the jackpot for this one. Every part of the steak is medium-rare. Not even a single part of it was undercooked or overcooked. The meat was tender and succulent. The best part of it, no sauce was needed because it was just perfect! It is definitely the best steak I have ever eaten at home.

This is the article that inspires me to do so: How to sous vide steak

There is a health and safety requirement for sous-vide (undercooked meat will promote dangerous bacteria growth). Please refer to this before you attempt to do anything: Practical guide to sous vide.

If you have some money to spend, you can buy this home edition sous-vide machine:Sous vide supreme. Only 450 USD :)

Project Eden - one year

2010-03-15T23:38:00.007+00:00

It has been a year since the last post for Project Eden. Many things have happened in the one year. I will keep it short and leave you guys with all the exciting updates...

Throughout last year summer, the chili plants produced so many chilies that I could not finish by myself. It was like 4-5 ready-to-eat every day! I ended up giving the surplus to my colleagues. Words spread through the office, and I was known as "chili" man in the office.

Well, good thing never lasts. Remember the "growing" concern from the management? It seems that chili planting is not something that an IT guy should do in the office, and they claimed that the chili plants attracted some flies to the office vicinity. I did not spot any, but the management claimed they had. Probably the fly looks like this:

or this:

I guess it was latter that sealed the fate of the chili plants: Public urination does not exactly fit with the company's image :) and the plants had to go... It was heart wreaking moment, giving all my plants away to people as I did not have any place to keep them. Basically, 4-5 months of growing was down the drain.

Anyway, I managed to moved the remaining to my colleague's place. He has an abandoned green house in the backyard. It sounded ideal initially, but it was lack of sunlight that those plants need. Well, I guess it was better than leaving them in the trash.

Since then, the plants were not doing very good in the new environment. They were not bearing the same amount of fruits as before. When autumn came, all plants were almost dead. It worsen when we got one of the coldest winter in UK last year. These were the last crop of the chili in late summer:

At this point, you might think that I probably gave up on the chili growing idea. I would have if I was alone, but this time I have several "partners" in crime :) I guess I got them hooked with the chili that they could not live without it (the bad quality office canteen food might help the cause; chili just makes it better). This time, we come prepared... and the management will not know what is coming :)

Caffeine Curve

2010-03-08T12:15:00.002+00:00

This picture pretty sums up what I feel about coffee every day :)

Nirwana is achieved after 6th cups of coffee :)

To eat or not to eat?

2010-01-26T13:06:00.004+00:00

I am sure everyone of us has dropped food to the floor before. This workflow might able to help you to sort out the dilemma of eating it or not:

20 things worth knowing about beer

2009-12-01T23:35:00.003+00:00

Stumbled upon this site and the author did a very good job to make beer so informative that I am compelled to share it with the rest of you guys. A sneaky peak of what you about to see:

The rest is over here: To the site

Bacon Pasta

2009-10-22T00:01:00.002+01:00

Bacon is one of the favourite things I love to cook with. It just auto-magically makes anything taste good. Bacon sandwich, bacon salad, roast chicken with bacon, and the list goes on... Here is a simple dish that I like to cook if I am running short of time but still need a good tasty meal. All you need is lots of bacons (prefer smoked bacon), pasta, two cans of chopped tomatoes and few cloves of garlic.

First, heat up two pots. Fill one of them with salt water and let it to boil. Once the other pot is hot enough, dizzle a bit of olive oil and fry those bacons till they are slightly crispy:

Once the bacons are crispy, throw in some finely chopped garlics. Fry it for a while before you add in the chopped tomatoes. Let it simmers. By this time, the pot filled with salt water will be boiling. Add in the pasta:

Stir the pasta and sauce occasionally to prevent them from sticking to the pot. Once the pasta is about right, drain them and put them aside. The sauce should be thicken by then, if not, just wait another 5-10 mins. Season the sauce with salt and pepper when it is ready. Mix the pasta into the sauce and serve it grated parmesan and a bit of oregano:

If do it right, all the prep + cooking will take around 30-35mins. Probably 4-5 servings depending on the amount of pasta you put in.

Beer Can Chicken

2009-10-15T00:13:00.008+01:00

Shawn and I have been talking about this idea for a while now (inspired by various posts on the internet at that time). We thought of giving it a try this summer. The principle is kind of easy, I think it is best to show it in the picture:

Yupe, there where the beer can goes :) and we made sure we used the best beer can we had - Carlsberg Export. If Carlsberg did a beer can chicken, it would be something like this. Oh ya, one more thing , you need to open the can, drink half of the can , and poke holes on the top half of the can. This could spell disaster in your oven if you used an unopen can.

We put some marination under the chicken skin. This way it will make the meat tastier. Once it is done, just pop it into the oven:

This is picture of me trying to justify why a beer can should be up the chicken's arse:

Here is the result:

I cannot remember much of the details of the chicken now. From what can recall, the chicken was beautifully roasted - every part of the skin was golden brown. The meat, hmm, did not taste like beer. It is definitely something I will be doing again for christmas, probably a beer keg turkey :)

What happen if you eat lot of wasabi peas in one go?

2009-10-09T08:00:00.001+01:00

This pic tells it all:

Happy birthday, yeng yee... purposely keep this for your birthday >:)

Project Eden - 17th Week

2009-04-16T17:08:00.004+01:00

I have moved all of the chili plants out from the Aerogarden, after a growing concern from the upper management with my green activity (they were thinking that I was growing something illegal in the office). I even had the director came over and looked at the leaves of all the plants. Probably he was looking for some fresh supply :)

Anyway, with the help of my colleague, we moved everything to pot now:

The jalepeno plant is growing nicely bearing three fruits:

A few more days, these chilies will be ready for consumption :)

Project Eden - 15th week

2009-04-10T02:32:00.001+01:00

It is spring time in UK now, and the chili plants have grown rapidly. It is a jungle of chili plants right now...

I got my first two chilis:

This is another variant of it, but hard to bear fruit without pollination from the bees...

I need to find a way of getting all these flowers pollinated to have chilis

Coffee Chicken

2009-04-05T01:47:00.004+01:00

Coffee is one of the most widely consumed beverages in the world today, and yet, it is hardly used in cooking. Is it that bad to eat it. If so, how bad can it be? Well, there is one way to find out...

Roast some fresh coffee bean:

Marinate the chicken with coffee bean, salt, cumin and paprika. Wrap it up and pop into the oven:

After 20 mins in 250 degree temperature oven, glazes it with some honey. Pop back into the oven for 2 mins:

Serve:

Coffee chicken done! :)

Despite all the efforts and coffee, it still tastes like chicken :) The chicken breast has the smell of smoky, barbecue coffee. The sauce is sweet with a hint of bitterness like espresso, but with savoury taste. It feels like having your main meal and after-meal espresso at the same time. It is weird, but it is somehow rather pleasing, especially when the caffeine kicks in :)

Project Eden - 9th week

2009-02-09T23:46:00.004+00:00

Should have updated this long time ago, when I got back from Malaysia. Well, with lots of things happening in UK (survives the retrenchment exercise, tons of work etc), it is hard to write blog nowadays.. Despite all the bad news, the chili plants are striving under the good care of my colleague, Caroline when I was in Malaysia. Here is how it looks like:

Bacon-wrapped Asparagus

2009-01-07T15:22:00.003+00:00

After having not posted in monkey-years, I just realized how tricky it is to use Blogger's Post Editor especially when it comes to arranging the photos.

Anyway, moving back to the topic at hand... I needed a quick dinner after a long day's work and the only fastfood that I could find in the fridge was frozen beef pie. That wasn't too bad but I decided to supplement my microwave dinner with some fresh food. Lo and behold, I found asparagus, bacon and lemon in the fridge too.

I vaguely remember seeing a dish prepared by Jamie Oliver that used these ingredients plus a clove of garlic. It's really simple. Leave the bacon uncut while finely dicing the garlic. Get some lemon zest by grating the lemon and wash the asparagus.

Wrap about 3-4 asparagus sticks in a bacon. I actually had more asparagus than bacon so I wrapped 5-6 asparagus instead, giving me two bunches. That wasn't such a bad idea considering how greedy I was but the bacon could barely stay on. On a hindsight, I should have secured the bacon and asparagus together with some toothpicks.

Pour some olive oil over the everything and sprinkle the lemon zest and finely diced garlic on them. Chuck the tray into a preheated oven and wait for about 5 minutes before turning it over. Leave it for another 5 minutes or so and it is ready to serve.

Tadaa!! Doesn't look too bad, does it? Apple for desert. Simple yet filling. Have fun!

Project Eden - 3rd week

2008-12-23T00:18:00.004+00:00

Good news! the upper management has not raised any concern with the plant, and it is well into the third week. We have so many little chili plants that we have to put it in several pots:

The chili plant is about 3 inches tall now. It is way faster than those in the pots:

At this growing rate, I shall able to see the fruit of the labour (hardly any effort) within 5 weeks time :)

This probably will be the last post for this year. Anyway, have a wonderful Christmas and a smashing New Year celebration.

Pan frying a steak

2008-12-09T00:13:00.004+00:00

Steak is, by far, the easiest and fastest thing for me. Prep, cook, eat, and wash up within 30 mins. It is ideal for people with busy schedule but refuse to resort to microwave meals and maggie mee.

Well, I must admit that I do cheat a bit during the prep stage, where I pre-marinated the steak with olive oil, salt, pepper, and oregano one day before cooking:

This allows the meat to absorb the favour and tastes better. The tricky bit of cooking a steak is determining how well cook you like your meat. The category ranges from rare, medium rare, medium, and well done.

If you like your steak well done, please do not order it in a fancy restaurant, they will just chuck it in a microwave for you. Seriously, a steak tastes its best with a little bit of juice/blood within it. Personally, I prefer it to be medium rare as the meat is tender enough but not too bloody.

I learnt how to determine how well cook of the meat from this site, and this picture pretty much says it all:

This looks good at first glance. However, this picture has a fundamental flaw - when cooking a steak, you usually using a spatula or something. The feel is total different from what you will be expecting from poking it with your finger. What I usually ended up is poking the spatula to the palm.

Even with this tip, I still did not managed to get the steak at the level that I like (usually slightly overcooked it). After numerous attempts, I managed to get it right. This is how it looks like:

Strangely, seeing this actually gives me more satisfaction than eating it :)

Project Eden

2008-11-30T00:33:00.006+00:00

A while back, a colleague and I were discussing about growing our own plant using Aerogarden. It is kind of indoor hydroponic planting device that allows you to grow your favourite plant twice the speed of planting it in the soil.

Anyway, my colleague got it from EBay and I bought the seed kit. We decided to leave it in the office ( till someone higher up ask us to remove it) Here it is on my working desk. I am using it as a desk light if someone is asking about it:

Since I bought the seed kit, we will be having chilies for the next 6 months if everything goes well. Here is a close up shot of the future chili plant:

oh ya, my colleague named this project as project Eden. Like many projects in the company, it must have a name. Eden is just aptly for what we are about to create.

I went to YouTube and searched for aerogarden. The search result is rather "interesting". I would spoil it for you, go and have a look for yourself... Well, who knows this might be our next project >:)

Mussels With Beer

2008-11-24T23:13:00.005+00:00

A while back, I did a mussel dish with pasta dish. One of the readers suggested white wine instead of water. In classic mussel recipe, white wine is usually the choice. Well, I was a bit crazy and went for Belgium wheat beer instead!

I decided all the live mussels a great send off. Gave them a premium Belgium wheat beer to drink before dunking them into a hot pot.

After 30 mins, I checked on the mussels and they were like this:

Judging by the look of it, I guessed they were pretty smashed up by now. All these drunken mussels were ready for cooking.

This is the end result:

It smelled wonderful while it was cooking, this probably due to using beer instead of water. The stock was sweet with a hint of bitterness. This is probably the reason why white wine is commonly being used and not beer. Despite that, I quite like it though, especially with fresh bread.

Home Made Pasta

2008-11-06T00:28:00.004+00:00

Winter is coming to UK - the day gets shorter, the sky is grey, it rains, the weather is cold and windy. All these give me more reason to stay at home. Well, it is not all bad news too. I finally can find time to do some of the food experiments that I have been wanting to do since beginning of summer...

First off the list, home made pasta! This probably due to my recent trip to Italy. The pasta there tastes so good and fresh that it motivates me to learn how to make it. I learnt how to make it from this link:
http://www.videojug.com/film/how-to-make-fresh-pasta

The setup:

My laptop was in the background just in case I need to watch the video again.. which I did several occasions.

Rest the dough:

My hand was messy and couldn't take any photo for the kneading process.. it was pretty much like the video.. I hope..

Roll the dough:

This is the hardest part of all. Making a consistent thickness throughout the pasta is not easy with rolling pin. This situation gets worse whenI didn't realise that how big can the dough spread... my dough was bigger than the rolling pin, the marble slab, and I was just half way there. Panic set in and just realised that the guy in the video has a bloody huge table.

The pasta:

After 2 hours of labour, this is what I got. Not 5 stars Michelin rating chef's pasta, but it looks alright for a beginner like me.

The taste:

Cooked one portion of it. Had it with pesto and generous portion of parmesan cheese. The texture of the pasta is alright, not as good as the one I had in Italy - a little bit thicker, and missing the silky smooth texture that I like. The taste of the pasta beats any dried pasta you can find in supermarket, probably it is fresh :)

Is it worth making your own pasta? The answer is yes and don't do it with rolling pin like me. Buy yourself a pasta rolling machine, it will take less than 20 mins to roll it!

Pan fried Duck Breast

2008-10-12T11:29:00.005+01:00

Duck meat is one of my favourite meats due to its richness in taste. It takes very little effort to make it tastes good. A well cooked duck should have crispy skin, moist within the meat. The best way of archiving that within a short span of time will be pan frying it.

The duck breast is lightly seasoned with salt, pepper and little bit of olive oil. It is then fried it in a pan the skin side down:

The heat should be not to high, as we want the fat between the skin and meat to be dissolved into oil. As you can see the picture above, the pan is full of oil from the dissolved duck fat.

While the duck is cooking, boils some water in a pot and add some new potatoes into it.

Once the duck breast is cooked, put it into grill with the skin side up. Grill it for a while. In the mean time, cut the cooked potatoes and fry them in the duck fat:

The potatoes will absorb all the flavour of the duck fat, and make them very crispy. Oh ya, while you are frying your potatoes, make sure to take a look at the duck breast in the grill too. The skin gets burned quickly in the grill.

Here is how it looks like in the end:

Simplified Fa Teow Kai

2008-10-09T00:54:00.000+01:00

It has been a while since the last post. Apart from being lazy to write, I have not been experimenting much lately, just the usual pan fried steak with salads. So, there have not been any interesting stuffs to blog about.

Anyway, I learnt this recipe from Shawn when I was at his place (many many months ago). The dish is very simple to make and tastes quite good. Anyway, here are the the ingredients:

Left to right: spring onion, caramelized soya sauce (this is important), light soya sauce, Shao Hsing Wine, chicken thighs.
middle part: dried chillies, peppercorns, bunga cengkeh, garlic, ginger and mushroom.

I took the liberty of modifying Shawn's recipe by adding some mushrooms, and bunga cengkeh. Why I did that? well, I couldn't remember it too.. probably because I had those ingredients in my cupboard kuar...

Next, heat up a pot with some oil. Saute the dried chillies, peppercorns, bunga cengkeh, garlic, and ginger for a while. Add the chicken thighs in, stir fry for a minute. Cover the chicken with enough caramelized soya sauce, light soya sauce and Shao Hsing wine. Add the chopped spring onion on top, and cover the top with a lid.

This dish has to be cooked in a very low heat for a long period of time ( ~2 hours). Oh ya, stir it occasionally . Don't try to switch to high heat to speed thing up, you will burnt it. Here is mine look like after I waited for two hours:

For those in Malaysia, you can avoid this by taking 2 hours drive to Seri Kembangan to have it there... you lucky fellas :)

Flambé

2008-06-17T23:47:00.002+01:00

Last week, while I was cooking my lovely steak, I decided to do a flambé for a change.

Instead of the usual chinese rice wine, I decided to go with my Monkey Shoulder whiskey for extra kick.. and this is the end result:

morale of the story.. never flambé with one shot of 40% proof whiskey or you will end up with 30cm high fire, a traumatized housemate and tons of fun (given that you don't burn down the house)...

kids do not try this at home >:)

Trip to Italy

2008-04-15T23:28:00.004+01:00

Went to Genoa, Italy with Shawn and Jay. The food and drink were great. I am truly amazed with how simple the food is being prepared, but tastes so good!

Stumbled upon this rather "interesting" restaurant during our quest for good food over there:

I hope "Le" is not "water" in Italian :)

Honey Grilled Rabbit

2008-02-24T22:23:00.006+00:00

A while ago, I bought a wild rabbit meat from my colleague (his neighbor was selling it). It was a bargain - 2.50 pounds for a headless, skinless and gutless rabbit.

First thing popped into my mind was Guinness rabbit, so I marinated the cute little rabbit with Guinness, garlic and rosemary:

Put the marinated rabbit on the grill:

Just minute before the rabbit is done, glaze it with some honey:

The meat tastes quite nice, too bad it is too little.

Thick Soya Sauce Pork Hock

2008-02-15T01:20:00.002+00:00

Apparently, I started drafting this entry in July 2007 and only got as far as typing "For lack of a better name, I think...". I honestly can't remember what I was going to ramble about but let's see whether I can remember how I prepared this dish. Keep your fingers crossed that I get to finish the entry this time round.

You'll want to start off with the ingredients seen above. The most important ingredient for this dish is the black vinegar. My first attempt was sorely lacking of something and it didn't occur to me that I forgot the vinegar. For added kick, you could add some dishwashing liquid (Lemon) in case the dish isn't sour enough.

First, marinade the pork (preferably pork belly and pork feet) with salt, pepper, soya sauce, thick soya sauce (for colouring) and a little vinegar. Leave that aside for about 30 minutes.

Chop up a few garlic cloves (not too fine) and chuck that into a pan of hot oil to get the nice garlicky fragrance. Put in the marinaded pork and stir fry every inch of the pork. It doesn't have to be cooked. You just want to seal the flavour in.

Put the stir-fried pork into a electric slow cooker. Add a generous amount of water (enough to cover everything), the black vinegar (a must) and a whole garlic. Set it to cook for about 3 hours. You could use an ordinary pot with a lid instead. The lid ensures that the dish remains soupy (for lack of a better word).

For a healthy compliment to the meat, I whipped up a quick and simple stir-fried vegetable dish.

I also boiled some eggs to be put into the slow cooker an hour before the meat was done. Remove the shell first. At this point, you could add more salt and vinegar to your taste. For me, I like it sour.

After waiting patiently for 3 hours, this is the result of my labour. It doesn't look like much (blame the photographer) but it sure did taste good. I had some

Mussels With Pasta

2007-11-30T00:02:00.000+00:00

Unlike Malaysia, UK is not blessed with abundance king prawns or meaty crabs. Luckily, mussels thrive in the UK water and they are affordable for me to do some food experiments.

Here they are, fresh Scottish mussels with shells all scrubbed clean for cooking:

Ready a big pot, dizzles a bit of olive oil (butter will be better) and saute some chopped garlics (5 cloves) , diced onion ( one small one) and few sticks of celery:

Once they are a little bit brown, add some water into it. Add a pinch of salt, and let it boils for 20 mins. After that, you should a good vegetable stock to cook the mussels with.

Add the mussels, chopped parsley, and fresh grounded pepper:

Mix it with pasta:

Garnish with more parsley and it is ready to serve: