What Wat? - Part 3 I come from a family that habitually makes strange requests of their kin travelling abroad and if such a thing could be measured, has possibly the most eclectic baggage contents as far as I know.No longer contented with just Duty Free liquor, my mom took the cake months ago when I first hinted at a trip to Bangkok with Boy Scout! When her eyes started to sparkle, mine rolled, in preparation for her request for unreasonable quantities of something edible. I wasn't completely off course of course, but this time her primary desire from Bangkok was something she saw but didn't dare buy last year when we went to Bangkok together for fear of trouble with customs.Oh, right, so I get it, it's OK for Boy Scout and me to get slapped with a fine or jail term if worse came to worst, but it's not OK if it was her! Neat, what a great mom! ;-)This said, I minded much less potential trouble with customs (she'd promised to pay the fine if there was one to be paid) than I minded the complications behind transporting AN ASSORTMENT OF CACTI, which is what my mom asked for from Chatuchak Market!Boy Scout had seen a horizon-widening documentary on TV about Chatuchak and I was intending to show him the little I'd seen of it anyway, so for the last leg of our Bangkok trip, I chose a neat little hotel in the Sukhumvit area, by the name of Citi Chic, which pretty much looked like what it did in the photos on their site. Good start!What a relief upon check-in to see that this wouldn't be a hotel I'd have to endure like the previous one! :) Furthermore, it was a scenic 10 minutes or so from the BTS line that would take us to Chatuchak and the famous MBK Center, so bye bye transport touts! :) It also had free internet that I never managed to use, not only because there were always other guests hogging both terminals, but also for one intimidating little detail:Since there were only two room types - with or without terrace - I decided the 200-baht difference wasn't much to scrimp on, so we had a small cozy terrace that we found so conducive to relaxation we spontaneously reverted to our indolent ways and decided to order room service (which both previous hotels didn't have) practically as soon as our eyes fell on the room service menu, in part to satisfy a joint craving for something NOT Thai:When we were done, we didn't know what to do with the tray, as leaving it outside our room would have meant our neighbour tripping over our dirty dishes, so when Boy Scout dutifully took the tray back to the restaurant, the hotel manager happened to be on duty and was so embarrassed his eyes nearly popped out, haha! It turned out we were supposed to call for someone to pick up the tray.. ;-)It is easy to get accustomed to being on holiday, so when we finally found an iota of will to step outdoors, we failed to realise it would be rush hour for most other mortals, hee hee...We'd only managed a tour of MBK Center, which was sufficiently fatiguing:It wasn't only until the next day that we trudged to Chatuchak for the cacti, but with all the lanes looking alike and most of the shops closed, our tour didn't last long and it didn't quite fit what Boy Scout saw on TV:Unbelievably, I found myself squatting compliantly before the various troughs in the plant section looking for species I'd expect my mom to nod at approvingly, and got pricked and shed a few drops of blood in the process.Besides shopping, I'd circled a number of parks to visit on my maps, in particular Lumphini, but with the oppressive heat as an excuse, we never made it there... ;-) Due to Boy Scout's development of a strange unwavering dependence on Starbucks' iced caffe mocha, though, we found ourselves sipping in various parts of town.When our time in Bangkok was up, I thought we'd successfully managed to escape getting ripped off this time around, but our final taxi ride to the airport made me question the real motives behind the "I love farang" stickers seen on taxi windows:When we'd checked out, the sweet porter helped us get a "Taxi-Meter", which has to charge according to the meter, and indeed, the jerk of a driver had his meter running when the porter was with us. But the moment we were alone with him and turned the street corner, he claimed that his meter wasn't working properly and asked us what we'd intended to pay him.Oh boy. I should have seen it coming! I was in an irritable mood and didn't want to miss our plane, so I asked the creep what he wanted. He said 400 baht, and I said no more than 300. He said OK, but 300 excluding toll charges. I knew that was still rather generous, but I quickly realised I could beat him at his game. ;-)With a wink, I showed Boy Scout in the backseat a couple of bills that amounted to 250 baht that I'd give the driver (which I know is still more than what the meter would have displayed), and made him agree that if the driver made a fuss, we'd tell him that's all the baht we had left. :)So when I slipped the driver the folded bills and he trustingly slipped them into his breast pocket without checking, I felt a minor pang of guilt, but well, if he'd just been honest in the first place, I'd have gladly given him what I really had left in baht! ;-) What Wat? - Part 2 If there were a few qualities I had to laud about the second hotel we stayed in (Boonsiri Place) during our week in Bangkok, it would be their imaginative photography that concealed their otherwise modest capacity for enticement.A pretty telling indicator of my discomfort with this hotel was the speed with which I snapped out of our collective Park 9 lethargy, and the constant desire to go out and see lots of attractions! :) That we managed to wake up in time for breakfast for both mornings we were there, was further proof! I know I'm just being harsh, as there were really lots of other factors for us finally doing some sightseeing - proximity to seeable sights, milder weather, guilt and urgency over the rapidly diminishing time left in Bangkok, etc...First, it must be said that all the late nights I'd spent studying, comparing and superimposing my 3 maps of Bangkok prior to the trip (errr, there must be some kind of international cabby code about all foreigners being easy prey, that I'd aimed to thwart) weren't in vain, although some minor roads not being reflected on the maps created a few tiny headaches at certain intersections. Fortunately it soon became apparent that I was in the company of a former Boy Scout with an innate compass, and he ended up being more reliable than my maps and me combined! :)On my list: The Forensic Museum at the Siriraj Hospital on the other bank of the Chao Phraya, Khao San Road, a dinner cruise, the Giant Swing and several of the legendary temples you'd see on postcards, such as Wat Arun, Wat Traimit and Wat Phra Kaew.Giant Swing - check!Khao San Road - check!Finally, for the first time in my trips to Bangkok, I'm seeing the fabled fried winged things!I wasn't game enough to try any of those, but managed to coax Boy Scout into sharing a box of pad thai with me even though neither of us was really hungry :I was truly delighted that he was willing to try lots of foreign (to him!) stuff in Singapore and in Bangkok, but like me, he could not ignore the inviting smells! I was also swayed by the sight of the different mounds of noodles (my favourite form of carbs!) and the dexterity of the pad thai peddlers! Taste-wise, the noodles turned out to be fantastic, and at 25 baht (SGD 1), if I remember correctly, little wonder why I want to live there!We had to call it a night after our tour of Khao San Road, as I was bent on waking up early to make it to the Forensic Museum the next morning! What a bummer, though, upon arrival, to learn that photography was not allowed! :(What I did get to snap, though, was Wat Arun from the ferry that took us across the Chao Phraya:Never did enter it or even venture close to it, though! How embarrassing! Same goes for Wat Traimit and its general vicinity (Chinatown/Yaowarat).As for Wat Phra Kaew, as Boy Scout and I were about to cross the street to peer in, well-worn map in hand, a genial geriatric came up to offer us help to get to our destination. We could pretty well see it from where we were, but he was insistent, and when he started suggesting other temples to visit and a certain type of tuk-tuk to take at a certain price, I knew it was time to get dismissive, heh heh, something Boy Scout was reluctant to be. :) With a sweeping "It's almost 5pm, I'll see all those temples tomorrow", I managed to send Genial Geriatric on his way. I felt bad about it, but I'd been taken for an idiot tourist enough times in Bangkok and I was just too tired to entertain anymore of it.Thanks to Genial Geriatric's history lesson in decent English, I could better appreciate these pictures I managed to take over the wall surrounding the temple:How sad, really. I'd certainly have enjoyed going in and taking pictures of its interior, but I feared the worst - more touts with more convincing causes, and the idiot in me parting with my life savings out of sympathy.Dinner cruise - almost didn't make it! Whew! What an adventure! I'd noted down from this site the addresses and operating hours of several dinner cruise operators and opted for the Khanam Nab Restaurant. When we'd left our hotel, we decided to take a tuk-tuk for a change to the Krung Thon bridge, but less than a kilometre away from the hotel, our tuk-tuk broke down! The poor driver kept telling us to take another one while he sought help, but it was hard telling him we weren't in a hurry and so we stuck around until another tuk-tuk driver came by and helped him restart his vehicle.I'd been telling Boy Scout for ages about my awe of the Thai art of driving (he used to work diagonally across from me when I lived in France and so was familiar with my driving perils), part of the reason I wanted us to take a tuk-tuk, but no acrobatics were to be witnessed that day. :( The driver seemed versed in the Highway Code and not once swerved or took the lane for oncoming traffic to overtake other motorists, that I actually was quite disappointed with all that courtesy and road safety! ;-)What did annoy me slightly, though, was his repeated advice about there being "nothing to see" at Krung Thon, followed by a suggestion to take us to the Rama IX bridge instead. When in doubt, ignore.Ignore we did and we got to our destination, but we were on the wrong side of the bridge and as we crossed it, we could only marvel at the majestic Rama IX bridge that the tuk-tuk driver kept wanting us to see:As it turned out, Khanab Nam no longer did dinner cruises and so we almost sprinted to Riverside Hotel, whose cruises started at 8, and were in the nick of time! We boarded so quickly neither of us managed to take a picture of the cruise ship, but what we did manage to make up for what we missed because of the touts:Wat Phra Kaew by nightWat Arun by night In between casting admiring glances at Boy Scout and at the monuments, there was not much left for me to do... nonetheless, a parting shot from him, what he thinks would make the perfect Thai postcard:part 3 to be written soon What Wat? - Part 1 What can I say? I have this growing belief that I could seriously live in Bangkok! (and I'm willing - abillity to be determined at some indeterminate future date - to learn Thai just to fit in)It is dangerously naïve to equate a holiday experience with the sinister unknown of actually living in another country, and one whose language I can hardly decipher, but it's only 2 hours from here (make that 48 by rail via Malaysia!)! So I can run home anytime, can't I? ;-)Still on a high from my recent trip there - my third and longest there in more years than I care to admit - I still have that nagging sehnsucht I don't seem to get with other holiday destinations! All this despite the clingy touts, mosquitoes, incomplete sidewalks and lack of good Bloody Marys!Maybe it was the company I had this time, or the places we managed to visit, but definitely no small part of it was thanks to the fortunate choice of hotels!!! :) My back (and upper arms) are still sore from all the self-congratulatory motions, but it was well worth it!The weeks leading up to the Bangkok trip were packed with lots of work, tension, excitement and fatigue, so checking into The Park 9 upon arrival was just such a treat...Tough decision between shopping and lounging around in the hotel pool and jacuzzi!It was far from central Bangkok and the main touristy attractions, and indeed, not even close to the nearest BTS station, so that just added to our list of excuses to not step out before sundown, heh heh..Our sloth was further encouraged by the little hotel buggy that would take us to the nearest mall for free:For someone whose only capacity for a green thumb is a gangrenous one, the lush greenery absolutely helped me forget the concept of "work"... how soothing to watch koi being fed!Suffice it to say that when we had to check out 4 short days after our arrival in Bangkok, we realised that we'd only seen the interior of 2 shopping malls and a few random streets, not even a single wat!Everything was to change with the next hotel, though... an abundance of wats and the removal of luxury, that's what!to be continued... So near and yet so far... My luck positively sucks, I'm fully convinced of it right now.. :(When I saw this about a month back, very soon after I became friends with the owner of a travel agency who told me she could get me great deals to Bangkok, I was jumping for joy and already looking at flights and hotels:And indeed, everything seemed to fall in place, until today... :( I'd been expecting another visit from France for the month of June, but I learned today that apparently the visit wouldn't be before the middle of June when all my favourite stars would already have left and gotten over the awards!!! :(Bangkok is a definite destination with my June visitor, but going there twice within the same month is indulgence, despite the profound affection I have for Bangkok, so a very tough choice had to be made - that of foregoing the IIFAs despite their proximity.. :( :( :(My only consolation is that if my beloved Sonu had not been nominated for a single song, then the awards had to be flawed... ;-)Sigh sigh... Ack, it's happening AGAIN!!! I'm not officially holding a full-time job at the moment, but with my hands full the way they are right now with assorted tasks expected of a major readjustment, in between dinners with long-lost friends (and a week-long visit from one I hadn't lost sight of that long ago), I dread to think how little "me" time I'd get once I start leafing through the classifieds!I'd been meaning to and will eventually write about my enchanting encounter with the lovely Lyrical Lemongrass way back in late February when I made a short trek to Kuala Lumpur, so forgive me, gal, if you're reading this. :)Thanks to my "clan" back in France, who I had yet to thank publicly for their generous farewell gift of a Lumix digital camera, the pictures in the last post were made possible, and permitted me to take many more fabulous ones since. In fact, I'd been taking so many, choosing just a handful for each post becomes a challenge! ;-)So I'll sign off for now with this one I took from inside my capsule when I went up the Singapore Flyer 2 weeks ago. I am now pretty certain that I do not suffer from acrophobia! ;-) Tussles with mussels Island life has its privileges!Right, right, so I'm probably stretching it by associating the image of an idyllic hammock and coconut-sipping existence with the teeming concrete jungle more Singaporeans are familiar with, but no matter where you are on this island, you're never more than 30km from the sea. With some imagination and some very useful friends, remembering that we're living on an island is rather easy! :)A childhood friend of my mom's, formerly a sailor and living less than a 100 metres away from us now, recently retired, and thus indulges regularly in one of his favourite hobbies - fishing. Upon interrogation when I saw him yesterday, I'd found out that he wasn't dabbling in some wimpy tentative fishing from a jetty, but actual braving of waves on a flimsy canoe with real nets and all! Impressive! On top of that, he catches enough for his own family and even has lots to spare for ours (there are 4 of us now - my mom, her mom, her caretaker and myself)!And so it was 2 weeks ago when he came knocking on our door with his catch of the day - severely barnacle-crusted mussels. The last time I'd seen him prior to the mussel delivery must've been when I was 12, so we of course did not recognise each other, and I was particularly wary about opening the gate to some strange guy foisting free mussels on us (what's the catch? mwahaha, sorry for the lousy pun!). It almost took a comical turn when I was about to look for my wallet and pay him for them until T, my grandmother's caretaker came by and told me that he's safe, heh heh! ;-)My, my, he had practically a whole BUCKET of fresh lovely mussels to give, and I gladly accepted what looked like 2 1/2 kilos of them, which T said could be split with our next-door neighbour if necessary. Of course, if I'd known then that I had to assume the consumption of more than a kilo of mussels on my own, I would have given more to my neighbour... (eye roll)my share of the mussels, after removing the barnaclesT and I immediately got down to splitting our share and chiselling off the barnacles with knives of various sizes and it got kinda fun when my mom also joined in the chiselling. Mussels were practically a staple where I'd lived in France, and I took them for granted without ever having bought any to cook at home, having as a result only theoretical knowledge of how to clean and prepare them. When it got down to actually handling them, ulp, I fumbled more than anything.After having gotten rid of the barnacles, T asked me how I intended to cook them, and I realised, ugh, these poor mussels were still alive and that I'd be personally responsible for their slow steamy death. Maybe due to the fact that they don't have eyes that would stare back at me accusingly, I was able to go on with the "deed", but after seeing all the work involved, I doubt I'd accept live mussels again anytime soon!I remembered seeing a chapter on mussels when reading one of my cookbooks by Joel Robuchon, so went and dug it out from my boxes which had just arrived two days earlier. Nice. I immediately went out to get ingredients for these herby breadcrumbed baked mussels:I had more mussels than this trayful!How to: (for about 1kg of mussels) Heat mussels until the shells are ajar, remove upper shell (do not overcook).Fry 5-6 chopped cloves of garlic in butter and olive oil, add 150g of breadcrumbs until golden brown, set aside to cool. Add salt and pepper to taste, 3 tbsp of grated parmesan, and 2tbps each of several chopped fresh herbs (I used thyme, parsley and chives). Top each mussel with a spoonful of breadcrumb mixture, bake for about 20 mins at 180°C. Serve with a wedge of lemon.I'd initially intended to prepare all the mussels in this way, but after realising they wouldn't fit onto a single tray, I was too tired with heating them and struggling to pry them open and wiping up all the drool (despite T being such great help, without whom I might've ended up eating at midnight), so chopped up some mange-tout, asparagus and garlic chives and stir-fried the remaining mussels with them and some garlic and oyster sauce. Pardesi no more The degree of Pardesi-ness is really arguable... :) I am finally back in the place where I was born, but does that really make me feel finally at home? After having lived for more than 6 years in Lille, in Northern France, my most common sentiment was that of being misunderstood or plain anonymous. But in the fashion typical of the way true happiness often escapes me (the Sonu Nigam concert is a perfect example), towards the end of my stay in Lille, I found new reasons to appreciate France and was showered with so much love, attention and affection from the people I least expected to that it broke my heart to leave them behind. Sigh. Nonetheless, I have a whole life ahead of me and aspire to make the best of it... right now, I am only planning on taking it easy (take it easy, Urvasi, as I used to say to another friend... ;-) ) for a while until I get my cards in order... New Year, old habits What a year it has been for me and my blog, which turns 1 today!When I exclaim "Times flies!" I usually mean it with a healthy dose of incredulity, but in looking through some of my older posts yesterday, I was compelled to reflect upon the milestones (and millstones) that have dotted the past year of my life, and for once, it seemed to me realistic that a whole year had gone by, and indeed, for so much to have taken place, unreal that only a year had gone by!Many a lesson I have learnt in such a short time, for which I am thankful, and short of being brainwashed, my mindset has undergone several transformations, for the better, at least to me. I have emerged from the chrysalis that was my youthful lack of confidence, I have strove to denounce negativity, I have learned that no matter how cheesy or clichéd the adage, there is much truth and wisdom to be milked from it. Most of all, I have resolved to live life on my terms. Of course, few things happen overnight and there are still teething problems, but as this new year unfurls, I am filled with an inexorable sense of hope and optimism, and I hope the same goes for you, too.I'm tempted to expand on my inner growth and all but it's hard to do so without mentioning names, so I'll save it.. in a nutshell, a new "me" is in the making, but at the same time, my comfort foods remain constant:Match the word to the ingredient:Sale, pepe, aglio, olioWhere the salt? you may wonder. OK, that was a tricky one, but it was the green mound of powder, matcha salt to be exact, by Mariage Frères. I'd bought it some time back for its snob appeal but never quite knew what to do with it until I'd equated green tea with a herb.How to: Coarsely crush or mill mixed peppercorns, crush several cloves of garlic, stir in a few generous pinches of matcha salt and cover with good quality olive oil. Let steep for about an hour. Good as a variation of the typical aglio-olio pasta dressing, or simply mopped up with fresh soft warm bread, the only way I know how to enjoy it.Just look at that gorgeous deep green! The best things in life are so cheap, abuse is inevitable The things a woman would do for vanity's sake... Three weeks ago, I took a leap of faith and went for a laser operation that essentially stripped my cheeks of their skin. Yowch! I shan't go into detail about the dead skin flakes I saw floating in the air during the op or how they clung on to the laser gun and threatened to invade my nostrils and lungs each time I inhaled, or the SMELL of burnt flesh! And the searing PAIN (which I think I took like a man)! Oh, the horror! Not that that's enough to deter me from doing it again! :)Whetted your appetite yet? ;-)Because I knew it'd be unethical for me to be outdoors while my skin grew back (I didn't want to be held responsible for others' nightmares, haha) my company allowed me to work from home for 2 weeks. Aww.. For the first whole week, I was cooped up at home and forced to rely on the provisions at hand and had to make my cooking as low-risk and splashless as possible (ie, no frying, stir-frying, deep-frying, shallow-frying - you get the drift). The recovery of my skin was speedier than I'd feared, to such an extent that a few times I'd wondered if I'd be able to watch it heal in real time if I looked hard enough!The hideous post-op face obviously distorted my perception of the "after" face in that I felt much more attractive than I must have been to the unknowing eye. ;-) On the first day I finally felt presentable enough to go out for groceries (without makeup at that!), to my utter delight and dismay, I saw one of my favourite actors Jean Réno in the flesh! No way! What are the odds?!?! On the one hand, I wish I had a camera on me, but at the same time, I'd caught a glimpse of my own reflection and realised that I certainly wasn't photogenic as yet, ack!!! Fortunately, I was at a bookshop and had access to ample writing material and was able to get an autograph! Wheeee!! :)Anyhow, grocery shopping after a week of home imprisonment was so liberating it got ridiculous, and on perhaps the fourth day in a row I felt the "need" (yeah, right) to shop, all I had in my bag when checking out were chips and Cherry Coke, which I ordinarily don't even drink much of. :) Deprivation can be such a powerful thing!Of course, I never seemed to buy everything I "needed" on each shopping trip during my convalescence, so on my first day back in the office, after lunch with my pals, I was itching to enter a different supermarket again. A colleague who had to be back at her desk on time asked me what I needed, and when I told her I needed to scarf down some crêpe dentelle, she gasped. Not only at the absurdity of the need, but the lucky coincidence - her guy's mother happens to work in a factory that manufactures them, and told me if I didn't mind broken ones, she'd have a whole bag of crumbs to give me the next day if I could wait. :) It suited me fine since I usually crush them before eating anyway, so gleefully accepted the bag of crumbs she gave me, which came up to more than a kilo:Hardcore indulgence, if you ask meInitially, I ate the crumbs by the cupful, but by Saturday, I was craving a more intense caramel flavour and to make nougatine with crêpe dentelle flakes instead of the usual almond bits. I didn't succeed since I've never made nougatine before and was in experimenting mode, but was pretty pleased to end up with this:Basically, I just dumped some sugar (possibly 300g) in a saucepan and made it melt and darken into a golden brown caramel, then removed the saucepan from the stove and dumped in a generous cube of butter (50g? 75g? no idea) and sprang back in haste while it sizzled. Proceeded to stir until the butter blended evenly into the sugar and drizzled discs and grid patterns on wax paper.The grid patterns were a joy to eat, but the discs, well.. keeping in mind my dental travails, I didn't want to risk any unnecessary chipping and new fillings, and since they were so rock solid and too big to fit into my mouth without being broken or bitten, I ultimately had to dump them back into the saucepan and add crème fraîche (an instinctive move, really) to bring them back to a molten state, taking special care not to burn the caramel. Not surprisingly, they didn't set an hour after I'd made new discs on wax paper, so ended up with these roses des sables, really just a fancy name for cornflakes coated in caramel:Not the ideal daily way to consume cereal!They were too darned good I already feel them creeping onto my hips! But now that they've all been downed, I realise all the stuff that went into making them hardly cost a Euro dollar! I'm not complaining but they're definitely coming back in my kitchen! Yikes Main hoon kaun? main hoon con... I was lamenting last week to a friend my flagging will and inspiration with regards to blogging due to my current preoccupations, and he kindly and rightly pointed out that blogging was supposed to be fun and should not become a "chore or service to others". Without wanting it to, I did let it become a chore, losing sight of my real reason for starting a blog in the first place (err, venting! Just kidding!) and most of all, tried too hard. Idiot.It shouldn't have come as a surprise, really. My blog is hardly a year old and I didn't want it to die in its infancy, but by dint of flaunting it left and right to everyone I knew who would take a look, I didn't want them to come by for nothing. What happened as a result were insane behind-the-scene efforts to impress that ended up in me not posting about my time-consuming disasters at all. Dummy.A few pals aware of my fidgetiness in the professional arena right now have suggested that I made my cooking profitable, to which I often responded with my usual "if it became a chore, I'd no longer enjoy it" (there's also my inability to stick to a theme in my cooking!). Now, why didn't I see that I was doing precisely that with my blog? :)In less than a week from now, my wedded status is slated to undergo a major change, and in a few months (weeks?), so will my location. When my location changes, that will mean I will no longer have my own kitchen to get sloppy in, and along with that, no more digital camera and a more basic computer. To make up for it, I will be so surrounded by cheap and good food in my "new" location, in all likelihood it will be ages before I cook or even buy groceries again!The impact of all that on what I initially intended to be a food blog is that it will impair my ability to blog about stuff I made myself, and worse, will limit the possibility of me uploading pictures since a new camera will not be in my list of priorities (a trip to Bombay is!).Bottomline - it will no longer be just about food... By the way, "con" in French isn't what it is in English (the last word of the first two paragraphs provides an idea), but both apply to my former approach to blogging. :) This said, I recently managed to get my hands on the 1978 version of Don, and have been whiling away lots of time on the music videos.. :) maybe it's time I got myself some Banaraswala paan! :) CTK chronicles Thank you everyone for checking on me throughout the past 2 unintentionally silent months (someone pinch me, did they really go by like that?)! To be perfectly honest without trying to sound like I'm feeling sorry for myself, things hadn't been easy on me on many fronts, and will not get better for another couple of months, so blogging just had to take a backseat.(It was unfortunate that I had to be so bogged down because I definitely had lots to say, in particular with regards to Emon Chatterjee being ousted from Indian Idol!!! No way! The injustice!! The kid is GIFTED! And anyone who sounds like Sonu has an immediate place in my heart! :) So yes, if I'd already been too down to blog, this slid yet another gin tonic between my helpless fingers! Poor Emon! :( )Of course, I could have kept you entertained with pictures of the "ugly" food I had been cooking during my absence, but none of them are quite as worthy as what I have prepared for this post! :) I cannot think of any other dish in my repertoire that surpasses this one in mindboggling simplicity (ahem, for some! ;-) ), affordability and Singaporeanness, but I can bet my bottom Singdollar that few of my Singaporean readers would have attempted making this at home and succeeded, and by that, I mean, while living in Singapore. :) Why would they when it can be procured around the clock in less than half an hour with at most, a few oily forks to wash?It's no myth that few Singaporeans bother to learn how to cook until they become exiles like me, and I help to perpetuate that stereotype, but the things an exile would do for survival when frequent trips back aren't feasible. :)There is nothing inherently exquisite about carrot cake aka chai tow kway but this post is dedicated to my sister (I know you're reading this!) who has attempted and failed it all of 4 times, and mean as it is to snigger, it has been one of my favourite subjects of teasing.. ;-) She lives in Japan, so maybe getting the right ingredients are tricky, or is she just not looking in the right places? ;-) I've tried to help, but my last resort - sending a bag of rice flour - sounds ridiculous, so I'll be contented with letting her savour it only on trips back to Singapore! :) heh heh... What you need:How to: Mix 400g rice flour with 200g tapioca starch. Add 1 grated radish (I added a grated carrot) and about 500ml of water or stock at room temperature. Add another 500ml - 800ml of boiling water or stock and stir until there are no more lumps. Pour mixture into a casserole and cook until all liquid is absorbed (it gets very thick, so the spoon will get stuck) and transfer to a steamer. Steam for about half an hour. It should have a slightly springy consistency because of the tapioca starch. Cut into small cubes when it has completely cooled.This recipe makes enough for 8 - 10, so this plateful of cubes shows only a quarter of the final product.Preserved salted radish (yes, again!) strips, aka chai por.You'll also need fish sauce and crushed garlic, but my bottle of fish sauce is quite a mess, so I'd prefer to keep your appetites intact by not showing it! :)About 3 or 4 of these guys for 2...Not entirely necessary, but to glam up this humble dish, I sometimes add prawns.Lastly, shallot chives for garnish.How to: Heat about 2tbps of oil (purists would recommend lard, but I'm happy enough with sunflower oil) in a wok on high heat and throw in the cubes of carrot cake. Fry until the surfaces are slightly toasted and crisp, then splash 1 - 2 tbsp of fish sauce and add the preserved radish strips. Add garlic now if you don't like it too strong, and fry for about a minute, then add lightly-beaten eggs. When eggs are fully cooked, remove from heat, sprinkle shallot chives and serve with chilli paste.I was too impatient to let mine brown and crisp, so it could have been darker and better. :)Variations: This is the "white" version, which is the only version I like. The "black" version includes a dark sweet sauce which I've never learned to make and can't seem to find ready-made here, but who's asking for any? :)Body count: About 15 prawns. It's about time! Never has a single word made such a difference in my life! Whew!After what seemed like an infinite and ignominious number of hours, kilometres and euros, I have finally been given free rein to DRIVE as of Wednesday!Few people have understood why my "ordeal" lasted as long as it did or why it even took such a toll on me, but an ordeal it was, enough to warrant the only prescriptions I've ever had in my whole life for calmants! Yeah, me, the cool-headed one who most people associate with always taking things TOO easy! Unbelievable! :)It's not that I had a fear of driving! Far from it, I just tended to lose "it" every time I had to prove I knew how to drive!To say my self-confidence took a beating while being instructed by some of the most condescending human specimens allowed to roam the earth barely scratches the itch my knuckles feel to meet the gums of a particularly discouraging instructor who told me about a month back, inter alia, that I wouldn't be able to get that license within the year and who wondered aloud why someone who's chalked up the number of hours I had just couldn't drive better. Now, now, if that was some mind game intended to spur me on to pull up my socks, I definitely didn't take it that way at the time I heard it, and went on to specifically request that I attended NO MORE lessons with him. I'd have loved to attend his funeral, or even contribute to its materialisation, but paying him to insult my intelligence for an hour at the wheel is pure insanity!So it's a relief that I can put it all behind me now, but what is this effusion doing on a food blog? Well, if you've noticed over the past few weeks, my cooking has been erratic, and it's really all driving-stress-related. :) When I'm stressed out, I just don't get very hungry and woe to those around me 'cos without warning, I'll just end up not cooking! :)But on the topic of procrastination, I had been wanting to make these theplas since I saw them on Trupti's blog way back in January, but only managed to the night before the exam in a bout of stress! :)I hope to be back in fine form real real soon!Cheers!S One in the oven Thank you all for your enthusiasm in my previous post, and I hate to be discouraging, but nobody got it right. :)However, the closest answers I got were from Kajal, who guessed that I was preparing Gujarati dhokla, and Poonam who guessed it was polenta.. :) Not bad!This was, in fact, my third attempt, and first successful one, at making panelle al forno, which like dhokla, is made mainly of chickpea flour, and where method of preparation is concerned, is just like polenta.Believe it or not, people do get paid to write crummy recipes in bad faith with the intention of throwing off eager learners like me, which explains my 2 earlier failed attempts. For one, chickpea flour CAN and WILL get lumpy when you toss it into boiling water, no matter how thin the "stream" of flour, and I had to learn that the hard way the first time.On the second attempt, I learned to stir part of the required amount of water (at room temperature) into the chickpea flour and to boil the rest, but guess what? The quantity of water stated in the recipe was so excessive, it was impossible to cut out pretty shapes from the ensuing quivering glob, lumpless though it may have been!I could easily have given up, but I do enjoy my besan and have been fascinated with its use in non-Desi, non-Middle Eastern recipes, thus the perseverence.Nonetheless, success tends to place a cap on that perseverence, so, satisfied with the successful panelle I had in hand, I thought I'd might as well make the best of it and pair it with several different flavours!With parmesan and dried tomatoes: with slices of sausage: or simply with garlic, butter and parsley - I'm not particularly good at recommending wines for particular dishes, but ever since Arles, I have been drinking more wine than I really should, with or without my meals. For this meal, I feel the need to let you in on my latest discovery, haha:The choice was not mine, but my husband's, not only because of the funny label, but because one of the names on the label happens to be his. I'll let you draw your own conclusions! :) Guess who? Hee hee, doesn't this look like a caterpillar-ravaged lunch? Any guesses what this is?Hint: This is just the "base" for another preparation.. answers in the next post! South-bound and spell-bound! Ca y est. Saturday, Bastille Day (14/7/07) marked 6 years that I have lived in France and was also the day I got back from a 2-week break to the furthest south I've ever been in France since I arrived - Arles, home to some breathtaking UNESCO World Heritage sites and beneficiary of some serious lovely weather!Although Vincent van Gogh only lived there for a year (1888- 1889) and a long long time ago, much has been touted in his name for the tourist dollar. Oh alright, so most of his better-known paintings were inspired by the Arlesian landscape (for very good reason!) and he lost an ear there, but if you didn't know better, some of the van Gogh "attractions" and souvenirs were clear-cut rip-offs!My irreverence was short-lived, however, the moment I patronised the local markets! Take for example the biggest, baddest cherries money can buy, the tenderest of figs and up until now, what remained the stuff of cookbook legend to me - zucchini blossoms!The violet-tinged Ail de Garonne (a delicate garlic variety cultivated in the region around the Garonne river), though seasonally available in the North, was something I felt the need to stock up on, and eventually abuse (if you must know what garlic abuse is, it's the violent exfoliation of all mucous membranes in my oral cavity, tastebuds included) before its possible extinction. Woe woe!!Olives were abound as far as the eye could see - preserved, in tapenades (a spread), as a motif on tablecloths and napkins... I wasn't really looking to buy any, but was fascinated by the choice!Tomatoes were a close second in omnipresence. These freaky-looking ones are called coeur de boeuf, meaning "ox heart". One is enough for 2 persons, so I took a yellow and a red one. It's a pity my hands were too full to take pictures of some other equally spectacular dwarf varieties! There were many other fruits and vegetables in my basket, but let me backtrack a bit and deliver a micro geography lesson. I live in Lille (50.38N, 03.03E) and Arles (43.41N, 04.40E), without traffic jams and pee breaks, is at least 10 solid hours away by car at an average speed of 90 km southward all the way. That translates to a constant upward difference of 10°C on average in the afternoons, a main factor in the difference between wan and tan! In lingua culinaria, that also meant redder, juicier tomatoes and just-plucked fruit at a steal as well as greens too fragile to make that 10-hour trip.Different weather, different vegetation, different accent but same language, and even different species of mosquito (their stings were baldly more vicious and insidious) - I was almost sure I'd landed in a different country! Why, even the strangers were chattier and the pigeons less meek!Sigh... in the shade of the majestic Roman-era arena - the view from the house where we'd stayed not far from here - a mustachioed serenader with a wee little violin would not have been out of place... :)Forgive me for not cutting to the chase (ie, ready-to-eat stuff), but I'm getting there!! When I left Lille in a hurry and after a harrowing week at work, I took with me all my perishables and a few cans of preserves. With that, I'd drafted a couple of my lists to give me an idea of what to cook while in Arles, but the lists proved to be sorely inappropriate given that they were adapted for Lille's cold weather!So here is the array of finger food I ended up improvising throughout my 2 weeks there, using local ingredients where I could:Tartines with green olive & garlic tapenade with carpaccio of baby zucchinis and cherry halves, ribboned with stalks of chives.Tartines with black olive & tomato tapenade, egg, parsley and cherry tomato slices.Mini bruschettas with goat's cheese and cherry tomato slices.Tartines with soft St Félicien cheese, Corsican cured ham and fig wedges.Cubes of onion, herb & zucchini blossom frittata. I prepared some of these bites when we had company one evening, and served them with glasses of rosé. I had to hint to my guests that I had nothing else lined up for dinner (these were largely enough for me), so they had to eat the rest of their dinner elsewhere, haha... :)There are so many other lovely pictures I took and much much more to babble about, but I shall keep them for the next post...Coming up next: a brush with Nostradamus, an enjoyable day meeting up with a terribly sweet gal I got to know through this blog, the astounding Baux de Provence valley and what happens to food when you have time on your hands! Mere sapnon ki... maharani! Someone who sort of owns a pressure cooker but is too paranoid about explosions plastering her walls with lentils and regaining consciousness a few weeks later in some hospital bed with molten aluminium shrapnel wedged between her eyes (it can happen, right?), thus letting said cooker gather spider carcasses in the cellar, should not be pitied and should not be allowed to whine about settling for semi-firm microwaved lentils.See, I had one of these cravings for rajma (kidney beans) last week that I could ignore no more and proceeded to attempt replicating the excellent Maharani Dal I had at the Riverwalk Tandoor last month.OK, "replicate" may be slightly arrogant and furthermore, with the passage of time, tastebuds tend to be assaulted with a pliable memory, so on an absolute scale, I'll be most immodest and admit I was thoroughly pleased with my version, firm dal notwithstanding. On a relative scale, well, it looks like I'll have to go back and eat there some day soon to remind me what theirs was like! And of course, overcome my fear of the pressure cooker!How to (for 8, don't ask me why I am incapable of downsizing): Soak 1 cup each of rajma, channa dal (split chick peas) and urad dal (black gram) for a few hours or even overnight, then pressure cook them and lightly mash them.Dice about 3 medium onions, skin and chop 4 large ripe tomatoes and chop 6 green chillis. Grate 1 to 1.5 inches of ginger and crush 6 cloves of garlic. Heat 50g of butter or ghee, and when it starts to sizzle, add 1 tsp each of cumin and mustard seeds and fry until they stop popping.Add ginger and chilli and fry for a minute, then add onions and tomatoes and cook until soft. Mash tomatoes to get a paste. Add cooked beans with 1.5 tsp each of salt and turmeric, stir well. Add water if necessary to get a thick soupy consistency and boil for about 10 minutes. Before serving, add a splash of cream and sprinkle with some chopped fresh coriander. Best with hot naan, which I was too lazy to make! :)Variations: Stir cream into gravy for a richer result. Sprinkle a mixture of mint and coriander. Omit kidney beans to get Amritsari dal.Body Count: 0I apologize for the recent dearth of posts but I have been biting off more than I can chew these past few weeks and it looks set to continue for another month 'cos believe it or not, I will be away on holiday AGAIN for 2 weeks starting this weekend! This time I'll be drifting off to the other extreme end of France - Arles. Hopefully, that means sunshine guaranteed!To make up for my long absence, here's something I made a few weeks back but had no time to blog about - Beef Empanadas: How to - filling: Boil and chop 4 eggs and 2 large potatoes, chop up about 20 black olives and crush several cloves of garlic. Heat some olive oil in a pan and fry 500g of minced beef. Add 1 tsp each of oregano, salt, cumin and paprika. When beef is cooked through, add potatoes, eggs and olives. Remove from heat and stir in the garlic. Let it cool.Cut out circles in a sheet of flaky pastry and put enough of the above mixture to cover a third to half of the surface of each circle. Fold over and pinch sides to create half-moons. Brush with egg (optional) and bake until pastry is golden brown.Variations: I don't see why this can't be made into a dry pie (less work, heh heh)!Body Count: 500g beef mince Jo bhi bane gobhi... (subzi subtitle: whatever becomes of the cauliflower.)Actually, it's "phool-gobhi" ( फूलगोभी), quite literally "cabbage (gobhi) flower (phool)" but if you keep the "phool" and mention just "gobhi" in Indian cuisine, most of the time, people will assume you're talking about cauliflower instead of cabbage.Months back, Aloo Gobhi (potatoes & cauliflower) reared its pretty little head here, but I didn't provide a decent description or recipe then, and am back to remedy that. I'm no authority, but there are loads of ways to prepare cauliflower with potatoes and they will still be legitimately named "aloo gobhi", but I'll just concentrate on the recipe that I like best, based on this one, with a few tips and tweaks.How to (for 4): Break up half a cauliflower into evenly-sized florets and boil for about 4 minutes. Flush cauliflower with cold water so that the florets don't oxydise and darken.I stuck to the first ingredient list, but my spice paste varied according to what I had in the fridge, and goes like this:several tbsp of desiccated coconut1/2 cup chopped coriander1/2 cup chopped green onion4 green chillis1/2 tsp grated ginger4 plump cloves of garlicabout 4 - 5 small spring onions50ml waterThe rest of the steps are just as in the recipe. Notice how they didn't mention salt? Yeah, I always get tricked in this way when making curries! With so many ingredients to juggle, who ever remembers the salt?Variations: I see the same spice paste working well with cabbage or peas but the name will not be the same...Body Count: 0---I've never been to Calcutta but by the grace of Google, could not remain ignorant of this intriguing fusion dish called Gobhi Manchurian... I gathered from various sources that seeking an authentic recipe for this will merely set one up for major disappointment, and that the gist of it is to marry Indian and Chinese flavours, so here's my own contribution to the mass of recipes out there:How to (for 4): Break up half a cauliflower into evenly-sized florets and boil for about 4 minutes. Flush cauliflower with cold water so that the florets don't oxydise and darken (sounds familiar? heh heh).Make a thick batter with wheat & rice flours (3 parts to one?), salt, turmeric, baking soda and water to get preferred consistency. Heat oil for deep-frying, dip florets in batter and deep fry. Set aside.Sauce - Finely chop 1 onion, 2 green + 2 red chillis and 4 cloves of garlic, grate ginger to get 1/2 a tsp and snip some green onions to get half a cup. Heat 2 tbsps each of sesame oil and corn oil and fry onion, garlic and ginger until the onion softens and the raw smell of the ginger fades. Add 1/2 cup of ketchup and a few splashes of soya sauce and stir well. Add in green onions.These cauliflower fritters mollify very quickly, so it's best to eat them fast. I did, however, bake them after deep-frying them, and they stayed crispy though only for a very brief while...You can serve gobhi manchurian either with the sauce as a chunky dip on the side:or mix everything together - soggy satisfaction guaranteed!Variations: Batter - add chilli powder for more zing, cumin for more fragrance, corn flour and/or besan instead of rice flour for more bite. Sauce - fish sauce instead of soya, peanut oil instead of sesame, chopped coriander instead of green onions.Body Count: 0 Holiday round-up - Krung Thep ..or Bangkok. Why, it could even be called "Landfill" and I'd still be equally smitten with it... sigh.What is it with Thais? I haven't had the opportunity of getting to know many personally so far but the conclusion I drew from their driving habits is that they're extremely tolerant and trusting and just for that, I'm impressed. Thai readers, please don't try to dispel a myth if this is one! :) In my 3 fleeting days there, so many times I was sure a potential mangled wreck was craving for my attention, but without fail the driver would slow down enough to let the pedestrian or other motorist pass, without really coming to a complete halt or even honking. What's their secret to keeping so cool?!?Those of you who have been following me from the start would be familiar with my lack of success with driving, or at least with proving that I can drive... my instructors keep telling me to "ANTICIPATE" and Thai drivers must constantly be anticipating the worst of their fellow road users to be the pros that they are at avoiding accidents! :)But enough for now about how Thais use their roads... funny that it left such an impression on me, especially because I took the Skytrain most of the time! Shame on me, but I completely neglected the touristy things like the floating markets, museums and temples. I'd seen them on my first trip there way back in 2001 with my company at the time, but this time I was alone with my mom and it was her first trip to Thailand. Since she fully relied on me to get from point to point, we ended up doing nothing but shopping and eating - things I wanted to do. :)Having the upper hand, I made it a point to eat mainly street food. I saw my mom go pale at some of my suggestions (haha) until we chanced upon a vendor selling something she's had before and could not resist - khanom buang:We revisited this mister on our last night with an empty doughnut box and told him to fill it up, which is why he was practically laughing at us. :)Thereafter my mom saw what I meant about good food and filth going hand in hand! :) Too bad I was too eager to eat some of my purchases that I forgot to take more pictures, but there are still these to go by:A lady selling bai toey-flavoured glutinous rice with shredded fresh coconut..it was a filling snack, but I didn't find it particularly remarkable.Another lady with her huge array of log chub:aren't they just so pretty to look at? Theoretically, I know how to make these things, but at the price this lady was selling them, I wonder why anyone goes to all that trouble! For the uninitiated, these little guys are made of balls of mung bean paste shaped to look like fruits, impaled on a skewer, then pricked (if necessary, for texture, e.g. to look like strawberries) and painted with food colouring to resemble said fruits, and finally dipped into agar-agar to get the glazed look. I picture myself losing my temper after painting the 10th, so I wonder how many people were involved in manufacturing all these!I saw these khanom krok being made, but by the time I managed to find a good angle, they'd put most of them into boxes, so only have this picture of the cavities to account for it:By the way, these are things we ate in addition to meals, so on our last night after we'd packed our bags, we realised there were lots of things that wouldn't fit into our bags and that we had to eat. That included 4 apples. Ulp. I told my mom to deal with them since it was her idea to buy them in the first place, but then felt sorry for her and knew she couldn't do it alone, so promised to eat 2 on the condition she cut them into quarters for me. :) Already I had to cram 3 jam-filled doughnuts and a can of Calpis, so by the time I tried to down the third quarter of an apple, I thought of the new knives I'd bought for fruit carving and bought time for my oesophagus by doing this:I could not bear to eat the leaf I carved, but I eventually did.:) The following picture was not taken in Bangkok, but is related to the above. Party at my mom's place for her birthday and I used the same knives from Bangkok to carve a watermelon and fill it up with melon balls, dragonfruit and starfruit.It could have been better, but I console myself about this being my first attempt and that I'd got home only an hour before the guests - the Japanese extension to my rather international family - were to arrive. :) Holiday round-up - Singapore In my previous post, I mentioned having met 4 bloggers in Singapore, and shall proceed to IDENTIFY them, COMPROMISING PHOTOS INCLUDED!!!!! :)Heh heh, got you there, didn't I, Keropokman? ;-) This cheerful enthusiastic guy wants neither his name nor face to be known, which is just as well because the only photo I took of him was also with him, and I don't intend to "come out" as yet, so I shall have to respect that. :) I met Keropok together with EastCoastLife, whose face we know but not the name, and ditto about the photos I took of/with her. That leaves me with a picture of what we ate - Nasi Padang:Errr, for details on what the individual dishes are called, better to rely on Keropok's post. Like the bhel puri in my previous post, I do not know how to make any of the above dishes.The 3rd blogger I managed to catch specifically told me not to publish his picture, and I'd be more than happy to oblige as he was terribly nice to help take lots of pictures of old buildings for this homesick nostalgic chick and record them on CDs, awww. Unfortunately, I did not take pictures of the food we ate.I almost did not get to meet No. 4 since he travels often for work, but am glad I did, exactly 12 hours before I was supposed to catch my plane back! It completely slipped my mind to send him a photo of myself beforehand and likewise, I didn't know what he looked like, so when I went to Jaan Toofan -- a small bhangra bar on Boat Quay I practically camped at during this trip, with a waiter only I seemed to think was a dead ringer for Aamir Khan -- looking for someone in a green t-shirt of a less than flattering description (his own, not mine), I did not find him (he either changed his t-shirt or his idea of green is different from mine), but he instantly recognised me, heh heh.. was it because of the kurta churidar I wore? possibly... :)Alas, even if he didn't mind his face being shown, I have to admit to using a film camera throughout my trip and have not finished the last roll of film. It is appalling how fast film has become obsolete! When taking my pictures, a lot of people asked me where the preview was, and I had to tell them shamefacedly to look into the eyehole, haha..Although Jaan Toofan dethroned Khazana and Khushi - favourite haunts on my previous trip home in December 2005 - I cannot forgive the band for snubbing my repeated requests for my perennial favourite song (Hum Tumko Nigahon Mein from Garv) so I am taking it out on you by putting it as the first song in my player on the right, heh heh! Sorry!Next post - I'll backtrack to my trip to Bangkok with my mom, which took place before I met a single blogger. Of course, I did no cooking while there, but I had so much to eat, you'll see what I did in a moment of apple surfeit... later, gators! Chicken, goat and bag Hi everyone!! I'm back!! :)As for the title, it is the punchline of an old Malaysian political joke I heard long ago which translates in Malay to "ayam, kambing, beg", and when said with the right accent, should sound like "I am coming back"! ;-)To get to the point, I have been back since Sunday but have been completely incapable of lifting a finger to cook, so help me! I tried cooking when staying with my mom but you know what they say about cooks and their territory... My mom isn't as territorial as she used to be, but I lost my bearings in her kitchen and so was contented with just "directing", heh heh..Not surprisingly, I am severely busy at work and have made several new friends I need to drop notes to (even the guy next to me on the plane swapped e-mail addresses), so if you don't see much food here for the next few weeks, please bear with me. In the meantime, I can't resist posting this shot of some bhel puri I had in Singapore. I pretty much drove my friends nuts by telling them to take me only to places that served stuff I didn't know how to make, so this was one of them! :)Oh, I had the honour of meeting 4 bloggers, but forgot to ask if I could blog about them, so if you know who you are and want some fame, please identify yourselves! :)I oughtta get going! *Hugs*!! WFF 10 - On a bittersweet note... It's finally here, my long-awaited trip home!! I'll have a brand-new nephew to spoil rotten (and pinch), several bloggers to meet, lots of food to stuff my face with and lots of pictures to take! It goes without saying that I'm bursting with excitement, but life being as unfair as it is, something always has to mar my quest for happiness... Thus I have no choice but to start off this post with another mega-rant unrelated to food (well, there will be food at the end! :) ).Ever since I booked my plane tickets, I had been counting down the days to the 29th - the date of my flight (but of course I only arrive in Singapore on the 30th). Last Sunday, I thought I'd check out Sistic's website (Singapore's entertainment ticketing booth) to see if any interesting concerts were in store... Hoping against hope, I typed "Sonu" (for Sonu Nigam) in the search field. My heart raced when there actually was a result!! I started shrieking when I saw the date and was gushing to myself in excitement that I'm going to rush from the airport, dump my bags, freshen up, and dart off to the concert in a yet-to-be-acquired hot pink sari. I was already looking at seating arrangements and trying to decide where I wanted to sit when I looked at the search result again and it sank in - 29th April, 7.30pm. Wait a minute, that would be 1.30pm in France, Sunday, when I'd still be languishing in the boarding area at CDG instead of touching down! I briefly failed to realise that I'd only arrive the day AFTER the concert! Aaaaarggghhh!!!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!My hubby was suitably puzzled when the excited shrieking segued into head-banging (and not in a classy heavy metal way), and took a look at the screen. Long uneasy silence. He promptly reminded me that I'd already seen Sonu 6 months earlier and even managed to grab his hand when I crept up to the stage. I was even seated close enough to the stage to take such pictures:So what? Even though I can watch snatches of his concerts on Youtube, and even if he sang exactly the same songs (which I'm sure he will), something like that is frustrating enough to justify a hunger strike!! To say that I'm really and truly pissed is tantamount to saying I only "like" Sonu Nigam. Sigh. All I'm hoping for now is that he will do some sight-seeing and that I'll bump into him in the streets of Singapore, haha... (3 years ago, on another trip home, the IIFA Awards happened to be held there, and I saw Sanjay Dutt in the flesh, entering his hotel! I was lucky that the year after, it was held in Amsterdam, just 3 hours away from where I am, so got my fill of all my favourite stars!)Other consolation - Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy will also be in S'pore in May, and their performance will be a week later. I might just make it if I can find someone to go with me to drum up the hooting decibels, heh heh. Somehow hooting at a concert when you go alone seems slightly mental to me. :)It has been unseasonally sunny here, so I could not stay mad for long. Besides, I'd gone to the market last Sunday and found some beautiful sun-gorged fruit, so ended up doing this to them:I've always been in awe of people with hands so deft mere fruit become masterpieces, and I suppose if I won the lottery and didn't have to work, I'd flood this blog with nothing but pictures of my attempts at carving, heh heh..As for this week, hmmm, funny how comments from some of you on my last post dug into my conscience.. ;-) apparently, most of you assumed that I was clearing my freezer to make way for new dishes I would whip up and freeze to nourish that hubby while I'm away for a month. The original plan was for him to go out and buy microwavable meals, which I was in fact making space for, but after all the undeserved praises heaped on me about what a good wife I was perceived to be, I felt like pure scum accepting all that credit on credit, and had to do up a few can't-go-wrong favourites of his that were simple and pretty much made from other processed food, so please, don't make me go back to feeling like scum. I didn't really cook this weekend, I merely assembled various ingredients to arrive at a more elaborate end, heh heh. :)The pies - tuna and ham & tomatoGnocchi - chorizo and 2-cheese & hamWhat I did not make from scratch: pie crust, tomato sauce and gnocchi.What I did do: cut ham, tomatoes and chorizo; cook gnocchi; half-fill 1 ice-cream tub with bottled tomato sauce and another with cream, blue cheese and grana padano. As for the tarts, I followed Michael Jackson's advice to "Just Beat It", haha.There's not much "how to" for me to share with you here that doesn't sound like previous posts with tarts, but the tuna tart is one of my hubby's favourites, so apart from the crust, the rest of the ingredients are : mustard (to coat the base of the pie crust), tuna+lemon juice+plain yoghurt and/or cream+grated gruyère or emmental+eggs.I might not blog much during my vacation, but keep writing! :) Thanks for your encouragement, everyone! One and the same salmon You'd think that someone about to go on holiday would be in a peppy mood.. heh heh, well, you're half right, except for a couple of things I'll save for a minor rant right at the end of this post. :)For the past week or so, I have been trying to make space in the freezer for the frozen dinners that will sustain my hubby while I'm away, so that means I didn't (and won't) have to cook much since I DO have a magic freezer containing the fruit of my past immoderate labour. I don't mean to brag, but I won't even be able to finish all that I froze before taking that plane! :)Anyhow, I still had dill left over from last week's sai bhaji, and a couple of eggs that were ageing, so instead of an easy-way-out omelette, I had to do something I had never done before pasta-wise! :) The idea came from a cookbook I'd bought with my very first paycheck on French soil, so seeing mine turn out exactly like those in the cookbook was pure joy:This is what a sheet looks like against the light.Am I twisted, or does this make anyone else think of Braveheart? I don't know, seeing the sprigs of dill broken up by the force of the rollers in the pasta machine somehow reminded me of Mel Gibson as William Wallace being stretched 4 ways... oh, never mind!Since the big thaw was taking place, heck, I also thawed the 1-kg bag of leek I had as well as some salmon filets, to get this extremely simple No-Bake Lasagna:How to: Pasta - Sift 200g of flour in a bowl, make a well in the centre, add 2 small eggs, 1 tbsp of olive oil and 1 tsp of salt. Break yolks and stir, incorporating the flour. Knead the dough until smooth, cover and set aside for at least 30 minutes. When ready, make very thin pasta sheets, place dill sprigs on one sheet and cover with another sheet. Press lightly to remove air bubbles, then pass double sheets though the rollers again to get a sheet as thin as the original sheets. Leave them to dry for at least 2 hours, then cook in salted boiling water.Salmon - Fry about 500g of salmon in hot sizzling butter and flake with a fork. Add salt and white pepper to taste and 100g of cream. Blend to get a smooth paste.Leek - Cook 500g of leek in melted butter until leek is soft. Add about 2 tbsp of flour and stir until flour absorbs leek juices. Blend.Place a sheet of pasta on serving plate. Alternate layers of salmon, pasta, and leek according to your liking. Can be served hot or cold.Variations: Salmon & spinach-ricotta, salmon & broccoli, beef & spinach-ricotta, or really any meat and vegetable pairing!Body Count: Salmon filetsI got impatient with the triangles after a while, so took to making these Double-barrel Cannellonis as well:Another picture of the lasagna, at an angle that the hubby preferred:And now, for the rant... :)I am infinitely grateful to the management in my company for being so wonderful in having let me take most of my leave at one go the way I'll be doing shortly... before Friday, only the people who needed to know I'll be away, knew. From experience, I've learned to stop telling people who don't need to know for one very petty reason - the lame "jokes" or attempts at jokes that follow!!! What am I talking about? You know, "threats" to send me work while I'm away so that I won't be able to enjoy my holiday? I always tell those I A) directly work with or B) report to that I'll be willing to do bits here and there while on vacation, but when this comes from someone who's neither A nor B, I don't know, for some reason, it grates. Besides, that's OLD!!!That's not all.. tell me who still encounters this - on my way back to my desk from the coffee vending machine, someone would extend his/her arms and "thank" me for the coffee. Am I wrong in wanting to give up the coffee, but without the cup?Last but not least, when the administrator does something to my computer, thus sitting at my desk, invariably, someone passing by would say "Hey, D (my real name), you sure look different today!". If I'm in a good mood, I'll be charitable enough to pretend I didn't hear it. And even in a bad mood, I'm relatively charitable by ostensibly rolling my eyes. But I desperately want to do more for society besides just rolling my eyes! It is now the year 2007. Is such lameness still acceptable? How can I do my part for the betterment of human evolution?UPDATE: A few of you have asked me about the cookbook that I have to thank for this pasta idea. Strangely, information on it is rather elusive, there isn't even a name of an author, so I'll just stick its photo here for all to see:I don't even know if it exists in other languages, but it has 2 whole pages dedicated to sheets of pasta with different squashed herbs like the above example, as well as many other nifty ideas! Now you see why I had to buy it with my first paycheck? :) This one's a keeper! WFF 9 : Dill Mangta... sai bhaji and more! The other day when I made Besan dal, I mistakenly said that it should be served with a methi pulao (fenugreek rice). Oops! My bad! The friend who gave me the recipes (including today's, which I'd distorted to my convenience) kindly pointed out that it would be better for Sai Bhaji, aka Sindhi Palak, a spinach dish I definitely didn't do justice to, as it has just come to my attention that it doesn't look one bit like how the Sindhis do it! Eeek!! (hides face in shame)Nonetheless, for my efforts, I'll post a picture!How to: Would you really want to learn it from me? haha!! :)UPDATE:Ingredients (quantities to adjust to taste): 3 tbsp channa dal (soaked), a few cloves of garlic (crushed), ginger paste, green chillis, 1 chopped onion, 1 potato (optional), 2 big tomatoes (chopped), 400 - 500g spinach, a pinch of turmeric.Fry garlic in some oil, then add chopped onion and ginger paste and spinach, fry until fragrant. Add turmeric, channa dal and tomatoes and fry for a few minutes. Add potato and about 1/2 cup of water and transfer everything to a pressure cooker and cover. Cook until channa dal is soft. Add salt to taste and whisk. Garnish with dill weed and serve with a pulao and yoghurt..Body Count: 0I still had some duck leftover from the little I used last week on my mini tartlets, and made these Hachis parmentier aux petits pois et canard. Hachis parmentier is pretty close to a cottage pie, except that pre-cooked leftover meat is usually used, and in recent years, adventurous chefs have replaced the usual beef with other meats, and the potato with other floury vegetables. In my case, I wanted to inject some colour into the dish and made it with a base of garlic, olive oil and potato mash, confit de canard in the middle and a broccoli & garden pea topping, garnished with shallot chives and a pea.Lastly, a desperate attempt at eating light before heading home - a Chinese tofu stir-fry with baby corn and straw mushrooms. The sauce consists of oyster sauce, light soya sauce, water, corn starch and Chinese cooking wine, I believe, THE generic gooey stir-fry sauce. And of course, loads of crushed garlic!Why do I want to start eating light? Some people being the way they are, ie, ill-mannered, on previous trips home, I've had a few of them telling me in my face that I'd put on weight (yes, of course, I no longer weigh what I did in 1995 when I was still a teen, idiots!), in varying degrees of tact and of indiscernible good intentions. While I know deep down that I shouldn't care what people think, negative remarks on my weight, no matter how unjustified, tend to make me self-conscious, and the last person to say something like that to me had his business card scribbled on and deposited in a very strategic location with an unambiguous exhortation to call for services I have no guts to elaborate on in a food blog, haha.So no matter how confident I feel now, I hate to admit that the onset of a holiday mood has brought back in full force a habit I thought I'd dumped - snacking on chips. Sigh. I guess I'll have to stick to wearing black, heh heh.. Easter WFF Part 2 - Not just my stuff I'll try to make this quick since I'd already covered the stuff I made in my previous post. This post merely serves to show what goes on in a typical French 5-hour lunch and how expandable our stomachs really are! :)Before we sat down to eat at this pretty table at my in-laws' place,we gathered for the apéritif, which is not considered part of the official meal - a pre-appetiser if you will - but does its bit to squeeze out stomach space nonetheless, at this table:From top to bottom: My foie gras (duck or goose liver) macarons - with or without alcoholic raisins, smoked salmon and blinis with tarama, crackers with egg and tapenade (a paste made of black olives), and slices of toast with foie gras and grapes. This is not the first time my MIL and I have had coinciding ideas, in this case, foie gras with grapes!with champagne, what else? ;-) Remember, there were only 6 of us adults to eat all this, and we weren't even able to clear all these plates!I had to take a picture of my place setting because no matter how hard I try, I am incapable of such attention to detail, so a round of applause for my MIL! The napkin ring/belt is just precious! As for the little purse next to the green-stemmed glass, it contained a couple of chocolates that mysteriously disappeared when I was attending to my kid!There was still no need for me to loosen my pants when the cold starter was served - a scallop and salmon tartare with cubes of Madeira jelly, courtesy of my sis-in-law and her hubby. It was really good and I would have been contented to end my meal there......but of course the eager beaver that I was, I disobeyed my MIL's instructions to scrap the warm starter, so we had to eat my warm starter (the duck & orange tartlet) AS WELL AS the reason she wanted me to scrap my tartlets - the huge white sausage in the foreground called a "boudin blanc". :) Boudins blancs are made of pork, egg white, mushrooms and I don't know what else, and I like them a lot, but would have been happy to share it with the inquisitive chick instead, hee hee!Did you hear me say "starter" twice? Yeah, a main dish was also waiting in the wings - a tenderloin on a bed of creamy mushrooms and a crispy crêpe. The side dishes from left to right - string beans wrapped in Parma ham, baked carrots & parsnip and a vegetable patty. See the chick-o-meter? My sentiments exactly! heh heh.. the little guy read my mind! :)Just in case those pangs continued to act up, we each had a cake, too! :) When my MIL informed us there was a comprehensive cheese platter to be had, the other 5 of us raised our verbal white flags and voted her off, haha! In fact, I didn't even eat my cake straightaway! I came back for it after a 2-hour break!Errr, it turned out we weren't allowed to leave without having dinner (lunch ended past 4pm), so the cheese platters - I hadn't noticed there were 2 of them, each containing 8 different types of cheese! - made their pungent appearance. My other picture, of the bigger platter, was blurry, what a pity! There were even cold cuts and assorted types of bread to go with it! I have trouble refusing cheese, so indulged in a few of them. Do you know some of those things can contain up to 40% fat?!Whew... such extravagance! I knew my mom-in-law was finally convinced of our satiety when I saw the Périgourdine - basically a coffee and walnut ice-cream cake with bits of meringue and chocolate shavings that my father-in-law fought with to get 6 portions, haha!I couldn't help noticing how thirsty I was at the end of the day, and now that I look back on all the dishes on offer, I'm not surprised - where in my belly could I fit in my daily quota of water?? :) Easter WFF Part 1 - my stuff I'd mentioned earlier in the week that my mom-in-law loves my macarons, and Saturday, she called to tell me not to bother making the warm starter as planned for Easter Sunday since she went overboard on her purchases. Before hanging up, she asked me in a tiny voice if I could make some macarons instead. Heh heh, I found it rather cute and had to tell her she'd just ruined my "surprise". I hadn't made any macarons in ages because the novelty wore off for me long ago and I have little patience for all that sifting biznazz, but knowing she liked them, I was intending to make some ON TOP OF the warm starter and told her as much. Needless to say, she was thrilled, except that I refused to reveal the flavour and was already halfway through making the warm starter.I was flattered by her compliment and happily went on to make the macarons, but that happiness soon gave way to some slamming of kitchen utensils, hurling of assorted instruments, unguarded language and a serious desire to kick in the door of my oven so that it would never open again. People, you have no idea how miffed I get when my macarons look like this:instead of this, according to the laws of nature:Of the two batches I made, only a minority turned out looking like those in the second picture, so my hubby's repeated assurance about his mom liking them for their taste instead of their looks was met with a steely gaze, enhanced by another real and dangerous source of steel - you know, the kind that can cut and cause blood to spill?Hmmph! Anyway, I was in no condition to attempt a third batch, so went on to make them as planned - with a foie gras filling, and a couple of embedded vodka-steeped raisins (by the way, the yellow one was flavoured with saffron and the brown ones with chicory): As for the warm starter, fortunately, it turned out satisfactorily enough to not warrant anger management classes for me! These are my very own Tartelettes au confit de canard et à l'orange."Confit de canard" is duck slow-cooked for hours in a bath of duck fat (its own and from other ducks, I suppose) and herbs until the meat is so tender, it falls off the bone at the slightest prodding. It can easily be found in cans here and is what made me a duck convert. I'm really not all that adventurous when it comes to meat and I've always found duck a bit strong, but when I first tasted confit de canard, I was willing to give duck a second chance and to taste it in its other incarnations! :) It's a mess, though, fishing out the meat from the canful of fat! Not something I buy often!How to: For a change, I made the tart crust myself, but won't bother sharing it with you because it was really oily and crumbly, so I'm not sure I'll use the recipe again! I blind baked the crust in individual tart moulds, topped it off with a mixture of marmelade and lime juice, put it back into the oven to caramelise the marmelade, then garnished each tartlet with shredded duck.Body Count: About 2 duck thighs.My mom-in-law and I certainly have our differences, but one major thing we have in common is our fear of not feeding our guests enough! :) If you think my previous WFFs are excessive for 2 people, wait till you see my next post (whenever that will be!) on all that we had to eat for Easter, keeping in mind that there were only 6 of us adults, two of whom (my sis-in-law and myself) have bird appetites!Oh, it being also spring, my MIL spring-cleaned her fridge, too, and so I am stuck with quite enough leftovers to last me until April 17th, I think if my calculations are correct. Great, since I have been staying later than usual in the office these days and have no time to cook when I get home, but not so great 'cos none of the leftovers can be frozen and I am quite sure some things will turn bad at my hands! :(