food intro of the week

In glorious Harbin I fell in love with the humble carbohydrate.

A potato.

A piece of bread.

Unpretentious peasant food, worthy of royalty.


Allow me to introduce...


Shredded Potato (variously known as Manchurian Shredded Potato, Green Chilli Potato Shreds, etc) tu dou si 土豆丝 in Chinese.

This glistening dish arrived on my table by way of a happy accident - the hubby and I were dining at Dong Cai Jiao Zi Wang on Zhongyang Da Jie (a gem of a street) in Harbin and we actually ordered a tofu dish or summat (who cares? who cares now???) The waitress, geniable and affable though she appeared, mistakenly plonked down a plastic plate of transcluscent whitish-greenish shreds shining weakly with oil. We thought it was an appetizer on the house, who knows? Besides, it didn't look too promising, really.


You see what I mean.

Oh, but the taste.

Light. Crunchy. Sour. Juicy. Savory. So many, many things, unlike ANYTHING that had ever entered my maws of hell. I went back to the same restaurant days later, not for the jiaozi but really, just to hold that god-given crunchy, vinegary goodness in my mouth once again.


Later on, I encountered it for the last time at the Beijing Airport's Bisun Lounge, not as exquisitely prepared but still full of flavor and bursting with potential.

I realise I am not alone. If you want the recipe, I've found it on Prince Roy's Realm http://www.princeroy.org/?p=43 and Tasty Treats http://tastytreats.wordpress.com/2007/08/01/chinese-treats-from-the-north/. I've not tried either one yet, though, and will certainly update when I do. I should mention that Jiaozi Wang's version contained shredded carrots and capsicums as well, which worked a treat.

Go feast. More on the bread another day.

New Year Family Dinner@Saturday

New Year Family Dinner@Saturday

To honor the tradition of Saturday family dinner, I have decided to name it Family Dinner@Saturday. It’s become a tradition for the entire extended family to gather every Saturday. I’ve been variously pitied and envied when I tell others about this. I don’t take offense – after all those WERE emotions I variously felt over the years, depending very much on which stage of my life I was at. Of the 25 years I have lived, I’ve been variously:

v Cute and adored and precious – Stage 1, Aged 0-3
v Somewhat sidelined but still adored – Stage 2, Aged 3-8
v Increasingly weird and anti-social. Wearing of hobo-like clothes a regularity. Refusal to smile at family photos a tradition – Stage 3, Aged 9-13
v Full-on whack fucked up and terribly unhappy and misfit-ted – Stage 4, Aged 13-15
v More socially normalized (smiles at family photos out of increasing vanity) but still at war with parents and sister – Stage 5, Aged 15-16
v Would-be rebel: Tattoos, smoking, clubbing, drunkenness (don’t wet your pants – still VERY mild compared to… er, “people” I know) – Stage 6, Aged 17-19
v Normalized due to first serious boyfriend, plus like what the fuck? Aren’t you a bit too old for this shit anymore? – Stage 7, Aged 19-20
v Successful at school and other endeavors, as a result of finding true calling at uni, thus resulting in ever-bettering of relationship with parents; trying to improve with sister; at peace with extended family – Stage 8, Aged 20-22
v Furious and hateful at family for being fucked up about breakup with aforementioned trophy boyfriend, characteristic of not wanting to attend F.Dinner@Saturday –Stage 9, Aged 22+
v Quickly détente-d resulting from even-more-wonderful new boyfriend, characterized by frenzied attendance of F.Dinner@Saturday – Stage 10, Aged 22plus-23
v Official entered to adulthood on selling my body and soul to the societal machine OH I MEAN settling down in “holy” matrimony – Stage 11, Aged 23 to present

As you can see, I am currently in Stage 11. The progress into Stage 12 (a repeat if Stage 9, but this time because of refusal to pop out the sprogs) is imminent, unless one party (guess which) backs-the-FUCK-off or the other (guess which) goes into hiding in, like, Lithuania. On a slight deviation (but considering how far we’ve so far deviated from the topic of New Year’s Dinner, there is nothing more to lose) why is squeezing squalling wrinkled heads out of one’s vagina (erm… I do suspect that came out the wrong way) seems to be the next logical step after getting married. Like how marriage after dating someone after, like, seventy-billion years is the next logical step. (From the little timeline provided above, a brief explanatory note – I got married after 7-8 months of “dating” stupid, stupid word. That doesn’t make me any different or more special/ deviant/ whatever rocks your boat from any other conventional human being. That makes me incredibly eager to move out of the rents’ and not get nagged at.) One’s life is full of next logical steps, no? I’m not entirely lambasting this. It could be a good thing for people too lazy or stupid to really think of what they truly desire out of their lives. It just irks me that these people choose to impose their laziness or stupidity on others.

I obviously have nothing very intelligent to say on such matters, so let us get back to the main point.

New Year’s Family Dinner@Saturday Menu for 23+ human beings. Including add-ons, thank you so much relevant people!

Spiced rice boiled in pineapple paste, cloves, ginger, garlic salt and tossed with pinenuts and peppers (recipe of own devising)
Angelhair pasta in green-peppers-and-mushroom tomato sauce with greens and fresh peppers (ditto)
Potato balls with tuna flake centers (adapted from Jocasta Innes’ recipes for potato latkes)
Chicken wings marinated in garlic-lemon sauce and black pepper sauce (separated, fool!) baked with onions (own devising)
Bok choy stir-fried with shiitake and oyster mushrooms in soy sauce (adapted from goddess Nigella)
Fish nuggets (generic store brand – to shut the kids up)
Homemade Onion “rings” (from Jocasta’s The Pauper’s Cookbook, thank you, Ms Innes)
Chicken and mutton Satay (hastily bought from coffee-shop one block away)
Apple and grape (sigh, YES, YES) crumble (tiredly: thank you, BBC)

Add-ons:
Roast Ham from god-knows-where (thanks, aunt! It er, sure looked juicy!)
Cousin’s mini vanilla cupcakes

Yes, a lot of food. But happily, achieved on a shoe-string budget and very little wastage (Darling and I ate the leftovers – not a lot – for lunch the next day). The ingredients capitalized on what I already had at home, and additional ones came up to a reasonable cost of $46.50 at the not-always-appropriately-named Shop-N-Save. The satay cost $20. A very reasonable bill for stuffing 23-24 people to near-bursting. I suspect the two carbo dishes played a large part.

Anyhow, success! The family loved the food and said so many times.

Forget whatever fucking stage I’m at – I always bind my soul to their acceptance and approval.

Happy New Year!

31 December 2007, 3.42am

Why it's never really wise to write so late in the night (early in the morning, if you're one of those annoying prats)

Alright!! My lovely Christmas present from my unsurpassingly lovely darling was a tome of Nigella’s sweet secrets. (Well not so secret really considering the commercial success of the Nig world empire.) This lovely acquisition thus gives the trusty beloved Jamie a good shelf/ breakfast table mate.

And, because I’m so like that, these are the recipes I’d love to try.

Bitter Orange Ice-cream
Chocolate Hotpots
All Halloumi recipes
Mozarella in carrozza
Linguini with garlic oil and pancetta
Lemon risotto
Salt and pepper squid

And this excludes the usual i-should-really-attempt-to-make-this types, like the crème brulee. Spatchcocked birds and asparagus soldiers. For this coming Saturday (the coming of the rents, rents’ rents, rents’ siblings, their offspring and the loyal league of domestic slaves (otherwise known as maids).

Random strings of thought (brain has disconnected)
I am a Dark God, smartass, a 1400AD Monk, most likely to die at 77yrs from cancer. (I appreciate the feedback, OKcupid testgods and goddesses.)

All teachers have to go for NAPFA and pass it so that the school can win CHERISH Award, most inappropriately named if you ask me.

All teachers have to fork over $100 for ten school calendars and $500 for carnival fund-raising-for-indoor-sports-hall-nobody-asked-for.

Nearby got hugged by VP horrifying. Must maintain more of a distance in future.

Will be back when am more capable of writing prose of more than one sentence per paragraph.

28 dec 2007 1.19am

the "necessary" explanations, so on and so forth

so i've gone and done it.

started a goddamned BLOG, for goodness sake. (yes, this post should have arrived before the previous one.)

so, some explanations are in order - to myself, and to whoever stumbles across this little space in the bewildering giga-world out there.

this really started off as an attempt to document my cooking (am a fledgling little cook) and some of my largely worthless thoughts. they've been posted online (i wrote everything on ms word) scantily edited, as a form of safekeeping against the untimely crashing of my computer, already teetering on the edge of existence, it seems to me.

have fun ;)

the virgine post

Christmas Eve Dinner Party 2007

To my darling’s anguish, I do enjoy entertaining. I love being filled with that surge of drive and purpose while pottering about (or dashing, screaming, about) in the kitchen for a few hours. Cooking for many does give me the opportunity to fulfill the leftover dictatorial ambitions I find lurking distressingly about me sometimes. In any case, I often have a chronic ill-advised habit of buying food in quantities that do not denote any form of restraint, which leaves the fridge and larder bursting at the seams with pouting, unloved bits of this and that. Dinner parties are therefore a great way to clear the fridge and make me feel virtuous. Read: less wasteful and guilty.

Pre-cursor to Monday’s Christmas Eve dinner was 19 dec which saw a brief cooking up of the leftover apples in the fridge. And by leftover, I do mean, leftover… from like 5 months ago. (I kid you not) Apparently - !! – they are still crunchy and unrotted. Truly a Christmas miracle. Also, there was the over-supply of pasta in the larder, courtesy of – yes – TWO years of StanChart half marathons. Oo-er. But as if I ever needed a reason to make a drama of things, the apples alone were enough to send me to Shop-n-Save. Or rather, NTUC this time, as I had to use up the fast-expiring NTUC vouchers.

Dinner-for-two (with impromptu guests as onlookers)

1. Pasta with pesto, roasted pinenuts and white button mushrooms (the whole world’s recipe)
2. Baby *something* lettuce salad with avocado, capers, olives and vinegar-and-olive oil dressing (inspired by the lovely Nigella)
3. Apple crumble with 5-month-old apples. (courtesy of BBC recipes, although possibly not followed to the letter)

Result/ Analysis

Pasta lacked pesto – I should have (based on past experiences) realized that pesto pasta needs to be practically swimming in the thing to be a true success. If so, then NONE of the supermarkets I’ve been to ever stocked a big enough bottle to feed like, more than 1.75 human beings. Another thing, the colour looked…. Uninspiring. Brown. Green-brown. Bleah. Roasted pinenuts and fried mushrooms have – in the after-thought it makes perfect sense – a somewhat similar colour. Sigh.

Salad: The avocado was surprisingly HARD. Hard, plus hard to dislodge. Hard to open. I mean, I knew the little buggers had tough shells, but by golly I didn’t know I was dealing with some frozen granite here. Taste-wise, I have found that following the 1:3 vinegar:oil combo (thank you Jamie!) works pretty well. Plus, well, lettuce+capers+olives is always a winner for me.

Apple crumble: Easy to make, and edible. Note from a few days later: Ages well! Although, seriously, what is up with my oven? Will have to learn how to regulate the ole temp to achieve a less burnt-to-hell-but-insides-still-stone-cold effect. Well, I exaggerate, naturally (it’s practically my middle name) but you get the idea.

Well as I was slumping home from driving class that very fateful day, an idea struck me. Actually, it had been festering in the corner of my cluttered and semi-rotted mind since the afternoon, when I’d strung up the Christmas decorations in a hopeful (but artless) manner. I’d set up the palm sized tree… er, shrub on the tall mosaic-print stool and tossed over the only decent cloth covering I own, which of course is the cow-print fur. Then I installed all presents, mostly real, one or two fakes – by which I mean the real stuff had already been liberated – by which I mean that real stuff was most likely chocolate. I lined up the little so-called “luxe” (note to makers: not bad!) gift tags on a gold Santa-clip laundry line (there’s no sane way of describing this; let us skip to the next point) and I hung up a lovely tacky silver Merry Christmas across the doorway in the most inconvenient way possible. I added to that a fantastic silvery-blue pair of bells wonderfully positioned to strike the heads of entrants taller than 5 feet. (That is, taller than me.)

How can such diligence and brave effort go unnoticed?

Thus, a Christmas Eve party!

Mass smses are such a gift. Surprisingly, most of my uni friends (whom I invited) had not made plans for the 24th. A sign of old age? A sign of work stress? A sign of… god forbid, growing disillusion with the festive season? Truly, I could begin to understand that. The jingle we hear most often these days does emanate strongest from the cash register. But I’m never one to let the issue of over-commercialism, over-consumption, sweatshop labor, third world poverty, the growing carbon footprint etc etc distract me from a good ole par-tay. This dreary world needs all the love, cheer and festivity it can get. Besides, the food in the fridge and larder would begin to rot soon, and THEN where would we be?

Thus, a party of ten-nish was duly rounded up and summoned to the humble abode. The actual prep of the fateful day was not terribly problematic. Most in part due to my darling little darling who got off work early (yay!) and got ferry me around/ run errands/ clean up the goddamned house and kitchen/ chop up various things. And in some small part, it was also due to the choice of menu for the night. Behold, the wonder of store bought goodies.

Dinner for ten or so

1. Angel hair pasta in tomato sauce with button and shimeiji mushrooms and snap peas (whatever recipe)
2. Killer tomato salad seasoned with sea salt (thanks be to Jamie O)
3. Warm potato salad with smoked salmon and capers (thank you JO again)
4. Chicken wings marinated in black pepper sauce, lemongrass marinade and honey rib sauce and oven-roasted with sesame seeds
5. Fish nuggets from NTUC fried up 5 mins before
6. Ball of ham from NTUC with 2 kinds of mustard
7. Ye olde Apple Crumble (modified from the BBC’s – added grapes and cooked longer) with vanilla ice-cream
8. Spiced red wine with cloves, cinnamon and orange peel

This all took only a couple of hours of not-very-hurried and somewhat-distracted cooking. The flavours were all good – only I ran out of olive oil and thus failed to adhere to JamO’s 3:1 ratio. Plus, silly me, overboiled the ‘taters and they turned mushy ohbutwhocares!!! The spiced/ mulled wine was particularly good. Don’t tell the friends, but I did empty half a tub of sugar into it. Ah well. The sacrifices one makes for gastronomia. Apple Crumble was much sweeter, naturally, with the addition of grapes, but that’s because I was cooking for the masses (who I assume do not come from a diabetic-sensitive family). Happily, everything was edible and then some. Very little leftovers, except for the pasta (which I knew I cooked too much of in the first place) but even then there was less left then I’d expected.

Thus, success I think.

Christmas Day brought a lovely surprise in the rectangular shape of a pretty, PRETTY Nigella. The goddess! In my hands! Happiness.

This naturally brings me to what I should cater for Saturday’s dinner for Die Familie. Of 23, eeps. There’s a whole panful of apple-and-grape crumble undisturbed, which I’ve popped into the freezer. It should last 4 days without much mishap. And there’s still half a jar of capers despite the determined usage. And there’s still – would you believe it? I can’t – packs of pasta left. Fusili and spaghetti. So.

Fusili in cream sauce, unless darling wants to rehash his lovely pasta salad
Spaghetti in tomato-based sauce (specifics can always be ironed out later)
Potato salad with smoked salmon and capers
Apple-and-grape crumble

And… (the rest will be MRT fodder. Since I have to return to school the next three days, there WILL be MRT fodder. Sigh.)

25/12/07-26/12/07 (2.34am)