serene’s posterous

I like having muesli soaked in milk for breakfast.  I much prefer muesli over granola because weirdly, I don't like crunchy breakfasts.  One of my favorite pre-mixed muesli is the unsweetened fruit and bran muesli from Marks and Spencer, but it is not easily available here.  Currently, I have been eating TJ's Blueberry Muesli, with a bit of flax seed with blueberries added.  It's okay but a little lower on the oats (and the other healthy stuff) and sweeter than I would like.  I think maybe it is time to create my own muesli mix to make sure I get what I want.

I always liked eating tea eggs, because the smell (a mix of tea and herbs) wafting from big vats of steaming tea eggs is almost irresistible.  I made some tea eggs recently roughly based upon this recipe.  I didn't really follow the recipe exactly.  After boiling the eggs and cracking the shell to allow the sauce to seep in, I tossed in guesstimated amounts of dark soy sauce (plus a bit of light soy sauce), black tea leaves (English breakfast?), star anise, cloves, cassia bark, pepper seeds, tangerine peel and a touch of sugar.  And I simmered the eggs for a few hours at low heat.

Last week, I felt that I needed some Singaporean food.  Since we had bean sprouts, thick rice noodles, and most importantly, Laksa sauce paste, we decided to make Laksa.  This is the Singaporean version, which has coconut based curry, and dried shrimp paste.  The sauce box also came with sambal belacan and dried laksa leaves.  In Singapore I would have ordered my Laksa with cockles, but here I made do with shrimp.  Eu-Jin had his with two hard boiled eggs since he doesn't eat shrimp.

I was somewhat curious how Mark Bittman's soup broth from this week's Minimalist column would taste, with its special ingredient of ketchup(!). 

Ketchup is not an alien ingredient in noodle dishes from Singapore.  Hawkers in Singapore do serve wanton noodles with a soy sauce/chili/ketchup mix, and it is a fantastic combination of sweet, sour, spicy and salty, especially if you grow up eating the noodles in this style.  When I was young kid, one of my favorite lunch treats was drained ramen with a sauce of ketchup and chili (and perhaps some dark soy sauce too).  Yes it was terribly unhealthy...

Working off from Bittman's recipe, I made the noodle soup tonight.  I used soba noodles instead of egg noodles.  For the broth, I started with quartered roma tomatoes (to amp up the tomatoey taste), 2 cloves of garlic and a small slice of ginger in the water.  After cooking for a while, I added a small amount of sesame oil, some rice wine, soy sauce and ketchup to taste.  Also added some chopped up thai chilies - for some heat.  To make it a complete meal, I added some silken tofu, xiao bai chai, enoki mushrooms and scallions.  It was quite satisfying - and a lot less unhealthy than ramen with ketchup and chili sauce.

I am trying to limit the eating of meat to only one meal per day, because I don't really like cooking meat and I think it is better for the environment to limit the consumption of meat.  The main problem with not eating meat is that I seem to get hungrier more quickly so I try to combat that with a bigger variety of food.

This lunch from a week or so ago was freshly cooked quinoa mixed with leftover baked beans, potatoes and sweet potatoes.  I also added some steamed broccoli for greens.

After splurging on Fraiche again, I decided I needed to make my own frozen yogurt.  It is actually amazingly easy if you start with Greek style yogurt.  The recipe is from 101 Cookbooks.  I used one tub of Trader Joe's plain Greek style yogurt and stirred in a bit more than 1/3 cup of sugar.  The frozen yogurt's texture gets a bit better if I stick it into the freezer for another hour or so after churning for about 25 minutes.

I forsee that our ice-cream maker is going to get a lot use in the coming weeks until I get sick of frozen yogurt.

   

Egg Salad with greek yogurt mixed with curry powder, and steamed green peas for the color.

I had bought a head of green cauliflower from Sigona's on Sunday for only 99 cents.  It is too bad the orange and purple ones there were already moldy, otherwise I would have also bought some at the same price. 

I had only about half a head of the cauliflower left and it was starting to show signs of mold, so I decided to roast the cauliflower with garlic, yellow sweet potatoes, and some carrots for color.  I think I like the green cauliflower better than the regular white ones because it is slightly sweeter.

The 3 cups refer to equal amounts of sesame oil, rice wine and soy sauce.  Eu-Jin and I cooked this over the weekend. 

We fried about 10 cloves of garlic, several slices of ginger, the white parts of scallions and some chopped up Thai chilies in sesame oil.  We then added about a pound of chicken thighs to the wok to stir fry.  After frying for a bit, we added about 1.5Tbsp of Shaoxing wine, 1.5Tbsp of soy sauce, 0.5Tbsp of dark soy sauce and a bit of sugar.  When the pieces of chicken looks mostly cooked, we added some water and then left the chicken covered, stewing at low heat for about 30min.  Finally, we added some basil and the green parts of the scallions.  It smelt good!

On Friday, we headed over to Ray's for the sort-of Chinese New Year dinner that we have done several years in a row.  It is a smaller group this year - only 4 persons, and a last minute thing.  I cooked the noodle dish (for long life!), which is essentially egg noodles fried with dried Chinese mushrooms, napa cabbage and red bell peppers (plus lots of garlic and onions and some chili).  I also cooked the shrimp in chili-egg sauce, which is sort of a cheat because the sauce came from Prima Taste's "Singapore Chili Crab" sauce paste.  Ray cooked the rest of the dishes: sugar snap peas, steamed orange roughy with tofu and tomatoes, and grilled salmon, plus the most excellent molten chocolate cake dessert with strawberries. 

The evening concluded with the viewing of the exciting BSG episode on SciFi.  I don't really follow BSG and I only vaguely know what's going on in the storyline.  Nevertheless I found this episode particularly gripping.