Tilapia à la nectarine salsa

The great thing about food blogging is getting to know all the other incredibly creative food bloggers out there and then stealing being inspired by their ideas. After seeing Jaden from SteamyKitchen’s delightful mango-melon salsa and also EastMeetsWestKitchen’s equally luscious lychee salsa (thank you ladies!), I wanted to make a fruit salsa too!

The only thing standing in my way was the lack of quality fresh mangos or lychees in Frankfurt. What to do? Well, substitute!

I’m terrible at creating (and following) recipes so here’s what I roughly used for my fruit salsa:
2 very ripe and super sweet nectarines
1 tsp olive oil
1 tsp lime juice
¼ Spanish onion diced (I like raw onion!)
fresh coriander chopped
pinch of salt
pinch of chilli powder

Mix all ingredients, mash the mixture a little and voila, there you have it – a nice sweet, salty and spicy salsa.

The other thing that I didn’t really think about is what to have the salsa with! I was so keen on the salsa that I didn’t think about what to serve the salsa with. Luckily I had some Tilapia (that almost sounds dirty!) filets on hand.

I don’t ever remember seeing Tilapia in France or in Australia so I have no idea what kind of fish this is. When I bought it, I just pointed, said “Ja, ja, ja” and paid! Anyway, the fish is just simply seasoned with a salt, pepper and olive oil mixture.

I love fried fish but I’m not big on the frying part as the apartment tends to be filled with super fishy odours for days on end. So to make the frying time shorter, I zapped the fish in the microwave for a few minutes till semi-cooked, then lightly fried it to brown the sides.

I piled everything on top of some rocket and that was last night’s meal! I am still eating semi-healthily to compensate for all the German beer that I’ve been drinking. Only 3 weeks till we leave for Melbourne so I need to keep the spare tyre under control!

Anyway, I really loved the fruit salsa with the fish but the Hubs inhaled the salsa quickly so he could squirt ketchup all over the fish! Hmmmpfff! Some people have no taste!

Ginger Tuna Patties with Wakame Salad and Wasabi

I think the lack of sugar and fat in my food has been robbing me of any little creativity that I had in the kitchen, plus I’m still stuck in wakame land! On top of that, I love canned tuna so what better to make then tuna patties to sit on top of yet more wakame!

Making tuna patties is pretty basic and I’m sure everyone’s tried them at least once. Here’s what I used:

Tuna Patties
2 eggs
2 x 200g canned tuna
1/4 cup flour
3 stalks green onions diced finely
2 tsp ginger minced
1/4 capsicum
1/3 tsp salt

Combine all ingredients.
Drop spoonfuls onto a heated and oiled frying pan. Flatten the spoonfuls into patties and fry both sides until browned and cooked.

For the salad, I used cucumber, wakame and sesame seeds. I also recycled the salad dressing recipe that I used in my last wakame adventure.

However this time, once the tuna patties and the salad had been assembled, I drizzled a slightly runny wasabi paste over the whole dish! It definitely gave the meal a bit of a kick!

I usually buy wasabi in powder form. A Japanese friend once told me that I should only prepare the paste just before using as the flavour tends to evaporate. For this meal, I made my wasabi paste runnier that I usually have it when I’m eating sushi or sashimi.

Runny wasabi paste
½ tsp wasabi powerpowder
3 tsp water

Mix well and spoon into mouth…hehe..no, drizzle on the tuna patties and salad!

Voila, another healthy meal! (I don’t think I can take this salad eating much longer!)

Wakame salad topped with smoked salmon

Even though it feels like an eternity, it’s only been about 2-and-a-half-weeks since I started trying to eat a little more healthily (is that a word?). Why the healthy eating? No, I’m not one of those women who live perpetually on rice cakes and salad, and for whom “diet” is a lifestyle not some tortuous ritual.

However, I am heading home to Melbourne for a holiday in August and expect to be eating up a storm then! Plus, I’m not willing to incur any of the “oh you look so….healthy” type remarks from my relatives when they see that I have been enjoying all those German beers! (Ok, my relatives are not that tactful. They usually just get right to the point and say “oh, you’ve put on weight”!)

Anyway, it’s definitely been a pain challenge trying to come up with healthy yet interesting meals. All I want to do is eat lots of rice, fried noodles and cookies!

On top of that, I already lacked creativity in the kitchen before the healthy eating thing! Take away the rice, noodles, oil, fat and sugar….it doesn’t leave much for me to play with!

Anyway, luckily, I found a lifesaver: wakame. Wakame is basically a type of edible seaweed. It’s usually the green stuff that’s floating around in your miso soup at Japanese restaurants (well, in Parisian“Japanese” restaurants anyway).

According to Wikipedia, wakame is supposed to be pretty good for you but I just like it for its semi-crunchy consistency, which gives a little texture to boring ol’ salads. Plus, it’s also pretty easy to prepare (extra points there!).

I buy dried unsalted wakame in packets and all I need to do is soak a handful in water for about 3 minutes then drain. My Japanese friends tell me that in Japan, wakame is also sold fresh.

Anyway, here’s what Hubs and I have been eating for 2 days in a row: Wakame salad topped with smoked salmon. Yum.

To prepare the dried wakame, I soaked it in a bowl of water for 3-5 minutes then drained. I then lightly squeezed the wakame with my hands to remove the water. Be careful not to over soak the wakame otherwise it becomes too soft and loses its crunch.

The time that the wakame needs to soak in water tends to depend on the brand. I’ve found that while one brand only took about 1-2 minutes, another brand took 5 minutes.

This is what I used for the salad:
Cucumber
Rocket
Wakame (I used roughly 1/3 a cup of dried unsalted wakame for 2 people)
Cherry tomatoes
Dried cranberries (left over from those cookies!)
Sesame seeds
Smoked salmon (store bought)

For the salad dressing, I just made a simple and commonly used Asian-type dressing:
1 tbs soy sauce
1 tbs rice vinegar
1 tsp brown sugar
a splash of sesame oil
½ tsp ginger
½ tsp chilli flakes (I love my chilli)


And ta-da – dinner for 2! I found that the sweetness of the dried cranberries went really well with the salty smoked salmon.

Now all I have to do is find something interesting and low-fat to make for the next 4 weeks!

Do-not-try-this-yourself Apple Crumble Muffins

Ok, I’m going to firstly put the following disclaimer:
“Please do not try the following in your own homes”

You might risk having to eat dry muffins (not the English kind)/cupcakes for 4 days in a row!

Yes, I have been baking again. This time, I made muffins (or cupcakes if you prefer). Lots of muffins (What’s the difference between muffins and cupcakes anyway?).

I have this muffin recipe that I’ve been using to make banana choc chip muffins for years now. And it used to work well every single time. The problem is, I recently decided to try to adapt the recipe to make other muffins. Not so wise a choice unfortunately!

I saw this recipe and thought that I’d make pretty much the same thing only it seemed to be more like an apple crumble muffin to me. So, I made apple-crumble-muffins.

So I used my own basic muffin recipe, added 1 diced apple and topped it with the crumble topping found in this recipe (Note that I only used the crumble topping from this recipe, not the rest of the recipe).

Sure, the idea seemed great…and the results are ok…for the first day at least. However, on the second day, the muffins started to get a little dry (ok, very dry!), and by the third day, every time I took a bite, I ended up spluttering and choking on dry crumbs!

I won’t post my dry apple muffin recipe because there are definitely some better recipes around. However, the crumble topping that I adapted from the recipe turned out great!

Crumble Topping (adapted from Allrecipes.com)
5 tbs brown sugar
2 tbs butter melted
½ tsp cinnamon
3 tbs flour
5 tbs rolled oats

And voila, the results! I can’t make them look good no matter how hard I try. They look a little like they have a skin disease! But trust me – they were really good for 1 day!
Anyway, all that was before I found this great site:
http://www.joyofbaking.com/muffins/muffins.html

I think I’ll just stick to the recipe in future!

Oatmeal cranberry cookie heaven!

All this healthy eating lately has left me with a huge sugar craving! Plus, there’s been a lot of foodie blogger baking and cookie stacking as well. Inspired by both Tigerfish and Lynn’s latest efforts, I’ve decided to go where I don’t usually go…the baking zone!

The truth is, I’m not a great baker. Hubs has suffered through lots of dry muffins and super-hard-teeth-breaking cookies! I just can’t follow recipes properly.

First of all, I don’t read properly, that is, I miss lines and forget to add ingredients. Then I get bored measuring things and end up just adding a little too much sugar or flour because I think the batter needs it!

Also, to add to the problem, I also don’t have proper measuring utensils (cups, spoons etc) at the moment and just tend to guess. When a recipe calls for 1 cup of flour, I literally use 1 cup … any cup that I find in the kitchen!

Anyway, I decided to try Lynn’s oatmeal raisin cookie recipe, it looked pretty fool-proof to me, plus she had lots of helpful advice for the novice baker like me.

You’ll find the recipe here.

A few things though. I substituted the raisins with cranberries as I love cranberries. Also, I couldn’t find vanilla essence in my local supermarket and so had to use “vanilla sugar” (never seen this before!)!

On top of that, I couldn’t find any “quick-cooking” oats and so just used the normal oats that I found in the supermarket. And, I couldn’t find any baking soda either so I used baking powder. The oven in our current apartment isn’t great so the cookies took about 15 minutes to bake. Oh, and I have only 1 tray so I had to bake the cookies in 3 batches!

The end result was fantastic (no complains from Hubs either!)! Here’s my cookie stack!

I’ve eaten so many cookies today that I think I’m going to have to go for a big loooonggg run tomorrow ;-)

Ps.
Pay careful attention to Lynn’s advice about taking the cookies out while they’re still slightly underbaked. I left my first batch in for too long and they were slightly too hard. I made sure I took my other batches out early!

Asian Tuna and Sweet Potato Shepard’s Pie

Why?
I know, I know, I keep making variations of the same thing! I’m going through a slight sweet potato obsession at the moment and have been making just anything and everything I can with it (I’ll stop soon I promise!).

Shepard’s pie is a pretty basic dish – usually it’s just a minced meat (beef or lamb) layer topped with a layer of potato and baked until crusty. This used to be one of my favourite dishes…until I stopped liking red meat (don’t know why, I just went off it! Too many Shepard’s Pies perhaps?).

Anyway, I tried combining an old favourite (Shepard’s pie) and a new favourite (sweet potato!) and ended up with a tuna and sweet potato Shepard’s pie!


What?
Bottom layer
3x 200g canned tuna in spring water (flaked)
2 1/2 tsp ready-made red curry paste
2 eggs
1/2 red capsicum diced and lightly fried
1 onion diced and lightly fried
1 tsp garlic minced

Top Layer
2 medium sweet potatoes
1/4 tsp salt
3 spring onions chopped
3 tbs coconut milk


How?
1. Bottom layer: Mix all ingredients and spread in an greased baking dish. I used a (roughly) 26cm x 16cm x 4cm baking dish.
2. Top layer: Cook sweet potatoes then mash in a bowl. Mix all ingredients and spread on top of the tuna layer.
3. Put the baking dish in the oven at roughly 220C for around 40 minutes (I think…I forgot to time it!).


I didn’t add any salt to the tuna as canned tuna tends to be already salty and I used store-bought red curry paste which also had salt in it. The bottom layer ended up slightly salty but this was ok as it balanced out with the sweet potato. I would probably use home-made red curry paste next time – less salt!

I was also too impatient (and hungry) and didn’t wait till the top got slightly burnt and crusty. The dish turned out great and the sweet potato-coconut milk combination is absolutely delectable!

Hmm…maybe my sweet potato obsession is due to the fact that I’m not eating enough chocolate! You know, not enough sugar in my body! ;-)

Third-time-lucky Roti canal

One thing about being so far away from Malaysia and Australia (where you can find decent Asian food!), I have to make my own whenever I get a craving!

I’ve been eating loads of healthy food lately and that probably explains my craving for oily and fatty calorie-laden Roti Canai! My body is deprived from its fat input ;-) I suppose it doesn’t help that the hubby loves this as well and when I mentioned that I wanted to try to make it, he didn’t let me forget about it!

Roti canai, as most of you probably already know, is a Malaysian speciality. However, I think in India and Indonesia, it is also known as roti paratha. There’s probably a whole history behind Malaysian roti canai but but I’m too lazy to do the research so there's more information here.

Anyway, this is my third attempt in making roti canai! The first time, I used Amy Beh’s roti canai recipe but for some reason, it just didn’t work for me. First of all, I had trouble stretching out the dough from the recipe, and then when cooked, my roti canai, instead of being crispy on the outside and slightly chewy on the inside, turned out a weird dry-crispy-doughy-flat biscuit! Urghgh.

For my second attempt, I dug up a different recipe. This time after days and days (ok…only 1 day!) of searching the Internet, I found a different recipe by MamaFaMi here. This time, the results were a lot closer to the real thing…but still not quite there. The cooked roti was still a little doughy. Probably because I still didn’t stretch the dough out enough. By then, both the Hubby and I were starting to get very excited by the prospect of having almost-real roti canai!

This brings me to my third attempt. Using the same recipe as a base, I made a few minor modifications and this is so far my most edible attempt!

Here’s what I used:

3 cups flour
roughly 1 cup of water (enough to make a slightly sticky dough)
2 tbs margarine (the original recipe only used 1 tbs)
1 ¼ tsp salt (or to taste)
1 ¼ tsp sugar (or to taste)
2 tbs milk (the original recipe uses condensed milk. I used ordinary low fat milk)
1 tbs oil
Extra oil for frying

1. Mix the salt, sugar and flour in a bowl.
2. Add the milk to the mixture and mix.
3. Add the water bit by bit while mixing (or kneading). Stop when you have a slightly sticky dough. If you add too much water, the dough gets too sticky and it’s a real pain to handle.
4. Add in margarine.
5. Add in the cooking oil.
6. Once the margarine and cooking oil has been well integrated into a smooth dough, divide the dough into small balls (I got about 6 balls out of the dough).
7. Coat the balls with oil and cover. I left them to rest for about an hour.
8. Lightly oil your kitchen workbench and hands.
9. Flatten each ball and slowly stretch the dough to a thin, almost transparent layer. For my first 2 attempts, I used a rolling pin to do this but for the last attempt, I found it was just as easy to just carefully stretch the dough out with my fingers.
10. Fold in 2 opposite sides of the stretched out dough to the middle. Then fold in the other 2 opposite sides to the middle.
11. Fry in a pan.
12. Serve with your favourite curry!

This time, the roti came out really well. However, I think I would add a bit more oil to the dough, as well as when I was cooking it, as it wasn’t as oily as it should be.

Still….mmmmm! Talk about a diet breaker!

Slow-grilled vegetables on a bed of sweet potato mash

I’m still on a health kick but that doesn’t have to mean boring food! Well, not all of the time anyway.

I find it takes a lot of effort to plan fresh, healthy and interesting meals! For example, if I were to say, eat a relatively unhealthy meal…meat patty and chips. I’d just go to the supermarket, get myself a bag of frozen chips and frozen patties (or even fresh patties from the deli section), fry it all up quickly and call that a meal. OR, I could just hop over to the nearest fast food outlet!

A fresh and healthy (ie. full of vegetables) meal on the other hand means that I have to check to see if I have fresh veggies in the fridge, and also how to spice up the veggies and make them more interesting! If I can’t find any decent vegetables (that are still alive!) in the fridge, I would have to decide which vegetables I would like to have and what spices I would need. I would then have to head to the fruit and vegetable shop or the market, which is only open on certain days (more planning involved there!)!

I’ve therefore learnt to keep some basic vegetables always on hand, eg. courgettes (zucchini), broccoli, tomatoes, capsicum, mushrooms and sweet potatoes! The problem is not forgetting about the vegetables and finding out 1 week later that I have 10 black mushrooms and 3 mushy tomatoes with nice green mould on them!

Anyway, this brings me to my last concoction: Slow-grilled vegetables on a bed of sweet potato mash. Well, actually, the vegetables were just grilled not slow-grilled. Slow-grilled just sounds fancier! (I suppose if I turned the heat down, they would be slow-grilled!)

Sweet potato mash
2 stalks spring onions (green onions or scallions, however you call them!) chopped
2 medium sweet potatoes
1 tsp coconut milk
¼ tsp salt

I diced the sweet potatoes, boiled them then mashed them with a fork (I need to buy a proper potato masher). I then added the spring onions, coconut milk and salt to the sweet potatoes and mixed away. The coconut milk and salt nicely contrasted the sweetness of the sweet potatoes. I found myself sneaking little bits while mixing it up!

Grilled Vegetables
½ zucchini sliced thinly lengthwise
½ capsicum sliced
3 mushrooms sliced
a few florets of broccoli
1 tsp garlic roughly

I mixed the garlic in with the vegetables before grilling. You could even stir-fry the vegetables!

I also made a quick and easy light curry sauce (I love curry!) to drown the nice healthy meal in but I didn’t really need to use it.

Curry sauce
½ tsp chill powder
1 tsp ground cumin
½ tsp ground tumeric
1 ½ tbs ground coriander
pinch of salt
½ cup coconut milk
pinch sugar
1tsp tomato paste

Mix all ingredients together and heat until boiling.

Last but not least, spread your mash on your plate and top with grilled vegetables! The ingredients above were just right for 2 people.

I also decided to add a bit of protein to the meal and had some leftover store-bought smoked tofu (I didn’t smoke it myself!) so I plonked the tofu on top of it all.

I felt all nice and healthy after the meal!

Poivrons farcis

Ok, that’s just a fancy name for plain ol’ Stuffed Capsicum. I just wanted to make it sound more exotic by using French!

Anyway, it’s not easy coming up with healthy meals when all I want to eat is fat and carbohydrate-laden stir fry noodles and chips! Big fat golden chips glistening with oil and lightly sprinkled with salt…to be precise!

Basically, I had a bit of leftover rice and wanted to use it up, while having a healthy meal at the same time. So I dug out 3 whole red capsicums (or peppers – is that what you call it in the US?) that were starting to get a bit wrinkly and old (things get pushed to the back of the fridge and then I forget about them!), stuffed them and stuck them in the oven.

The result came out better than I thought! The only problem was eating them! There is no easy way to eat these things. No matter how you try, it ends up being a big (but yummy) mess on your plate!

Here’s what I used:

3 red peppers
3/4 cup cooked rice (I had leftovers!)
250g canned tuna
1 egg
1/4 tsp salt
1 onion lightly fried
2 tsp mayonnaise
1 tsp sweet chili sauce
1 tsp garlic
sesame seeds

1. Mix the rice, tuna, egg, salt, mayonnaise and sweet chili sauce in a bowl.
2. Lightly fry the onion and garlic before adding them to mixture.
3. Mix the ingredients well.
4. Remove the stalk, top and seeds from the capsicums. Also slightly trim the bottom of the capsicums to make the bottom level so that they stand up.
5. Oil a baking dish and stand the capsicums in the dish.
6. Stuff away with the tuna-rice mixture!
7. Top with sesame seeds.
8. Bake for roughly 20-25 minutes (or until cooked) at 220C.


Quick and easy!

Spicy Asian tofu burgers

While I did enjoy the German spätzle, I wasn’t too keen on eating it as a main dish, smothered by cheese as they serve in the restaurants here. So, inspired by Melting Wok’s tofu burgers and having just enough left-over ingredients, this seemed like the perfect accompaniment to the spätzle (or was the spätzle accompanying the burgers?).

These are extremely healthy (I’m still trying to be on a diet!) semi-spicy tofu burgers which are much easier to make if you have an electric mixer thing and not just a handheld fork powered by chocolate carrot sticks as in my case!

Ingredients
1/2 onion diced
250g plain firm tofu mashed
1/2 cup flour
1 egg
2 tbsp sesame seeds
2 tbsp rolled oats
1 tbsp fresh coriander chopped
1 tsp ginger minced
1 tbsp garlic minced
1/2 tsp salt
pepper to taste
1/2 tsp sugar
1 tbsp red curry paste

I mashed the tofu with my handheld fork, mixed in all ingredients, shaped the patties and popped them into the freezer for 5-10 minutes. The wonderfully healthy patties were then grilled (with very little oil!) and served up with the not so healthy spätzle!

This dish probably best reflects my beliefs in yin-yang eating…combining the fat and not-so-fat on 1 plate ;-)

Ps.
I didn’t serve any buns with the burgers; I figured there were enough carbohydrates in the spätzle!

Vegetable-tofu bake crumble

I’m on a diet.

Well, at least I’m trying to be on a diet. But it’s not really working. Well, take last night for example. Having lots of carrots left over, I figured I’d make a low-fat vegetable bake.

So I started chopping away, carrots, a bit of broccoli, cherry tomatoes, onions, and garlic. I then lightly stir fried the vegetables to give them a little flavour.

I then decided I’d make it a curry vegetable-tofu bake. So I added curry power mix and about a cup-and-a-half of water to the baking dish. And then topped it all off with tofu. Only problem, I had only what was a sliver of tofu left! So the baking dish looked a little bare on the top.

Anyway, I decided to make a topping to make it look a little nicer. A crumble topping. I had wholemeal flour, butter and sesame seeds. I mixed the sesame seeds and flour, added a bit of salt and rubbed in the butter, then whacked the mixture onto the bake and stuck the whole thing into the oven. And there you have it: a vegetable-tofu curry crumble!

So much for my creativity as Hubs said it was just a curry that I stuck in the oven!
Taste-wise, it was yum although the crumble topping was a little weird. Sort of like eating pastry with your curry.

Calorie-wise, all that butter didn’t help my diet!

Ingredients:
Lots of vegetables!
Onions
Garlic
Salt

Curry Powder mix:
1 tsp ground turmeric
1 tsp ground cumin
2 tbs ground coriander
½ tsp chilli powder

Sushi craving

Sushi is definitely another one of my favourite foods. I love how you can stuff yourself silly and because it’s not oily, you can still feel healthy after a heavy meal of fish, rice and vegetables. However, you have to watch out for all that rice and sugar (in the vinegar mixture!) if you’re on a diet.

Sushi is one of those foods that you either absolutely love or hate. I know people who can’t get enough of it, and others who won’t go near it with a 500metre pole! But even my French in-laws love it and try to make it themselves. Though I have to admit that I was shocked to see my father in-law make handrolls with cheese (how French is that!) one day. Yuck!

Anyway, I had a craving for sushi the other day, and having not yet sussed out the whereabouts of decent Japanese restaurants in Frankfurt, I decided to make my own. Nothing complicated, just simple hand rolls (I think these are called futomaki). I wanted to make some nigiri but unfortunately, I haven’t found a decent fish shop near our place yet and didn’t want to give myself food poisoning by buying stale fish at the supermarket.

Here’s what I used for the hand roll ingredients:
Japanese short grained rice (+rice vinegar mixture)

Nori
Smoked salmon slices
Carrot
Cucumber
Sesame seed

The best part about hand rolls is that you can add anything that you want (please don’t add cheese! That should be outlawed!).

As for the vinegar mixture for the rice, I never know how much salt and sugar to add in, I just tend to guess! However, most of the time, it comes out tasting alright. I should probably find a recipe for this as I might be doing it all wrong.

So for the rice vinegar mixture, I used 1 cup of Japanese short grain rice, roughly 100ml of vinegar, 1-2 tablespoons of sugar and about 1 teaspoon of salt.

I ended up with a bit too much rice and ended up making giant hand rolls! The results definitely satisfied my craving!

Semi-homemade pesto pizza with feta (dedicated to JoeBob)

At the moment, my life is scattered between 3 countries! Hubs and I have personal belongings in storage in Melbourne, at my mum’s in Melbourne, in storage in Paris, in La Rochelle (Hubs’ parents’ place), and also with us! While we’ve got our essentials such as underwear, laptop (I can’t live without my laptop) and passports (!), what we don’t have are my cooking utensils. I’m talking basic things such as a vegetable peeler, baking trays, and even knives – what I wouldn’t give for decent knives!

As we’ve just moved into a “furnished” apartment, we do have some basics such as a very rusty vegetable peeler and a very blunt serrated edged knife. So, we’ve had to invest in a few more (cheap) basics (given that we already have this stuff somewhere between France and Australia) for the time being.

So yesterday, having a craving for semi-homemade pizza, I went on a hunt for a simple tray that I could stick in the oven. Either I’m not looking in the right places or Frankfurt is out of trays. I found one round pizza tray for 33EUR (that almost seems like robbery to me!), which of course, I didn’t buy. But that was about it.

So after much thought (about 5 minutes), I decided to buy a muffin tray (we already have 2!). I figured I could use it to make muffins, and also put a pizza on it. It worked like a charm but we just had to remember that we couldn’t actually cut the pizza on the tray!

I have to give credit to my good friend JoeBob from Nebraska, who introduced me to the joys of pesto and feta on pizza way back in snowy Québec (yes, that’s another story)! And no, I didn’t make the pizza base (I’m too lazy and the breadmaker is in Melbourne).

Pizza topping
Broccoli (I love broccoli)
Cherry tomatoes
Onion
Red capsicum
Ready-made pesto sauce

I usually add chili flakes on to give it a bit of a kick, but unfortunately, didn’t have any.

This is what it looked like perched on the muffin tray before it went into the oven.

Super-quick-throw-everything-in-1-pot chickpea curry

Because I often nibble on snacks that I shouldn’t really be touching with a 10-metre pole (ie. Crisps/chips and chocolate!), most of the time, I feel like I should be eating something healthy when it comes to the main meals. Only problem, I just can’t eat a salad for a main meal. No matter how hard I try.

When I try, I start off eating a salad, then 30 minutes later, raid the kitchen eating everything in sight. So I figure, it’s better to eat something that appeals to me, and try to make that healthy, than have salad as “starters” to a huge meal of junk later.

So here’s another quick and lazy meal that I whipped up in less than 10 minutes with only very very basic spices (I have nothing left in the kitchen!). I added lots of broccoli so that I felt better about having eaten a big packet of chips 2 hours earlier!

This is what I put in:

• 1 tbs curry powder (mixed in ½ cup of water)
• 1 tbs ground coriander (mixed with the curry powder paste above)
• 1 ½ cups water
• ½ teaspoon salt (or to taste)
• 1 onion diced
• 1 tomato diced
• lots of garlic (minced)
• Sliver of ginger (minced)
• 400g can chickpeas
• broccoli
• mushrooms

I first mixed the curry powder and ground coriander in about ½ a cup of water.
I fried the onion till brown, and then added the garlic, ginger, tomato and curry paste. I then cooked the tomato until soft, added the water and threw everything else in.
10 minutes later – it’s all done.

Not exactly an extremely original or creative dish but at least it stopped me from having more chips as dessert!

Palm Sugar and Coconut Milk Agar-agar

What happens when I have leftover coconut milk and pandan leaves? I make agar-agar!
I remember sneaking mouthfuls of this jelly during (or more precisely, before) family dinners when I was little until I was too full to have any dinner.

It’s very easy to eat but extremely high in calories – what with the coconut milk and sugar! And I’m supposed to be on a diet!

This is simple and quick to make. It’s also especially nice for hot summer days.
Once again, I pirated this recipe off the Internet a while ago and can’t remember exactly where.

· 1 pandan leaf (tied into a knot)
· 2 cups water (500 ml)
· 1 ¼ (180g) cups palm sugar (chopped)
· 3 teaspoons agar-agar powder
· 1 ¼ cups (300ml) thick coconut milk
· Pinch of salt

Place the water, palm sugar, agar-agar power and pandan leaf in a pot. Heat until it starts to boil. Lower heat and simmer until the sugar and agar-agar powder have completely dissolved.

In another bowl, mix the coconut milk and salt. Add this mixture to the agar-agar mixture in the pot. Bring the liquid to the boil then immediately remove from heat.

Pour the mixture into a 16 cm round shallow tin. Leave to cool. Do not move until the agar-agar has set (takes around 1-2 hours). Chill in refrigerator when cool. The agar-agar should separate into 2 distinct layers: a palm sugar layer and a coconut milk layer.
Cut, serve and enjoy.

Chickpea seeni sambal

A while ago, my mum was introduced to “seeni sambal” by a Sri Lankan friend and loved the spicy hot flavour. It has since been a family staple!

Having never been to Sri Lanka, I’m not really sure how it’s cooked over there but it’s basically a spice mix of maldive fish chips/flakes and chilli. A Sri Lankan ex-colleague said that his wife cooked it with diced potatoes. My mum and I cook it using a ready-made seeni sambal spice mix and add it to fried diced onions and tomatoes to make a hot and incredibly tasty sambal that we eat with rice.

Seeing as eating fried onions, chilli and rice is like eating oil, chilli and carbohydrates – not exactly nutritious (but very very tasty), I’ve modified the recipe to add some protein to make chickpea seeni sambal.

Here’s my recipe for chickpea seeni sambal. In Melbourne, we get the spice mix from an Asian grocery shop. I haven’t seen it sold in Paris, but then again, I probably haven’t been looking as Mum actually sends me packets from Melbourne!

· Oil for frying
· 1 big onion
· 400g can chickpeas
· 2 ripe tomatoes (diced)
· 2 tablespoons (or more if you like it HOT!) seeni sambal spice mix
· Salt to taste
· A squirt of tomato ketchup (it sounds weird but it makes a difference)

Fry onions until soft and brown in a pan.
Add the diced tomatoes and cook till soft.
Add the seeni sambal spice mix to the pan and stir.
Add a squirt of tomato ketchup.
Drain the chickpeas and add to the pan.
Serve hot with rice.

Hubs tends to complain when I cook this, as it’s too spicy for his delicate French tastebuds! Hehe!

Serimuka

For some reason, my French parents-in-law absolutely love serimuka after having tried it in Australia at my aunty’s place. So I decided to make some as they dropped by last weekend.

I have to say, it takes lots of patience and practise. I still haven’t completely gotten the hang of how to make perfect serimuka. Still, the end results were completely edible and were polished off before I could even take a photo!

Here’s the recipe that I used (copied off the internet from I-can’t-remember-where).

The White Layer
· 1 ½ cups glutinous rice (washed and soaked overnight)
· 2/3 cup thin coconut milk
· 1 pandan leaf (knotted)
· 1 teaspoon salt

Wash the rice well then cover with water and soak overnight. I have to admit that I’m not 100% sure why this must be done but I always do it.
Place the rice into a round or square cake tin (roughly 20cm in diameter).
Mix the coconut milk and salt in the rice.
Place pandan leaf in the rice
Steam over boiling water until the rice is cooked (roughly 20-30minutes).
Remove pandan leaf and fluff up rice with a fork, and then press down the rice to form a compact and even layer. I tend to use the back of a wet spoon to do this.
Steam the rice for another 15 minutes.

The Green Layer
· 3 eggs
· ¾ cup coconut milk
· ¾ cup caster sugar
· 4 teaspoons cornflour
· 2 ½ tablespoons plain flour
· ½ cup pandan juice (to make this, use roughly 5-6 pandan leaves, blend with roughly 2/3 cup of water and strain. Keep the juice)

To make the green layer, add eggs, coconut milk and sugar in a bowl. Mix well with a fork or whisk. Add the cornflour, plain flour and pandan juice. Mix well until smooth and no lumps exist. Strain the mixture into a metal bowl. Place the metal bowl over a pan of simmering water and stir continuously until the mixture begins to thicken.




Bringing it together
Pour the green pandan mixture over the rice layer. Steam over a very gentle heat (apparently steaming over a high heat will result in a bubbly surface).

As you can see, I still get bubbles in my serimuka!

(This makes enough for 1 set of hungry French parents in-law and 1 Malaysian-Australian who really only likes the green layer)

Char Kuay Teow

One of my most favourite foods in the world is char kuay teow. This is basically a super mouth-watering greasy tasty Malaysian hawker-style wok fried rice noodles (Penang, my mum’s home town in Malaysia, has the best char kuay teow!).

In Melbourne, fresh rice noodles (and I mean the ultra fresh slimy noodles, not just your dried variety) can be found in any local Asian store (most suburbs have at least 1 Asian grocery store) or even the local supermarket, making it easy to just whip up some char kuay teow when I feel like it.

Over here, Asian grocery stores are only found in the Quartier Chinois (China Town) in the 13th arrondissement. This is a pain as it means at least a precious weekend morning spent elbowing little old Chinese ladies out of the way in the overcrowded Tang Frères grocery store every time (which is pretty often) I get a craving for char kuay teow.

Last weekend, we braved the little old Chinese ladies in the Quartier Chinois.
Look what I made! Mmmmmmmm.

When it comes to cooking char kuay teow, I have to say that I don’t stick to any particular recipe and I use the “agak-agak” (in Malay, this means “approximate” or “rough estimation”) rule when it comes to ingredients.

Anyway, here’s a basic recipe (for about 4 people). Feel free to add more or less of the ingredients that tickle your fancy. (I tend to add LOADS of garlic and chilli).

· Oil for cooking (hawker stalls in Malaysia tend to use lard)
· Garlic (roughly 1 teaspoon)
· Prawns
· 500g bean sprouts (I love bean sprouts so I tend to add more)
· 400-500g fresh flat white rice noodles (kuay teow)
· A good handful of chinese garlic chives (ku chai), chopped to 2cm bits
· 3 – 4 eggs
· Dark soy sauce
· Light soy sauce (Optional. I find that adding the dark soy sauce gives it enough flavour)
· Dark thick sweet soy sauce (or a pinch of sugar)
· Dried chilli flakes, chilli powder or fresh chilli paste
· Lap cheong (chinese sausage. Optional)
· See ham (cockles. Optional)

Start off by heating the oil in the wok or large frying pan.
Once the oil is heated, add eggs and fry till cooked.
Remove the eggs (I get lazy sometimes and just leave the eggs in, adding all other ingredients to the wok).
Add garlic and prawns.
Add lap cheong and see ham (Optional).
Add the rice noodles. (Remember to separate the rice noodles before adding into the wok.)
Add the bean sprouts.
Add the eggs back in.
Add dark soy sauce for colour and the light soy sauce for taste.
Add the dark thick sweet soy sauce or a pinch of sugar to taste.
Add chilli according to taste.

Tip 1: I tend to use kuay teow (bought fresh), which has been kept in the fridge for a day or two. I find that frying ultra-fresh kuay teow makes the char kuay teow slightly sticky. After a day or two in the fridge, the rice noodles stiffen up a little, making it ideal for frying.

Tip 2: Keep the heat high when frying ingredients.

Tip 3: Divide the ingredients into 2 batches and fry batches separately. I find that it makes it easier to handle in the wok, plus the ingredients cook faster. Having small batches therefore avoids overcooking.

Tip 4: Most of all, experiment with the portions of ingredients to create your own version of char kuay teow.