Evil Grinning Bread

We have been baking bread for quite a while now, and still trying to perfect our skills.  Bread making is quite difficult---each week we will try to be as precise and accurate as possible, in terms of our measurements, temperature, timing etc, and yet each week the bread that comes out is different. Nevertheless, it has been fun and tasty, and it is definitely great to know exactly what goes into the food you eat.

Today we seem to have done everything well, except that we forgot to score the dough before they went into the oven, so the bread expanded and "lifted" their top off, creating  fissures at the sides.  One of our loaves, which we baked in a round tin, opened up with a big grin, as you can see :)

Natural food

We recently came across the danish restaurant Noma, where the menu is crafted exclusively from ingredients sourced from the local areas and in accordance with the seasons.  There are quite a number of places that have tuned in to eating both locally and seasonally as a sustainable practice as we become more carbon conscious with our footprints.  What stood out for me about Noma is the extent to which it tries to go beyond that.  They have a dedicated food lab for research and development into furthering the possibilities of their ingredients from foraging in the danish wilderness, e.g., using moss as an ingredient!

As interested 'cookers' ( what my niece calls people who like cooking ), we are equally inquisitive about where our food comes from/could come from.  With Christmas and New Year just past and Chinese New Year round the corner, there has been lots of feasting and dining with family and friends. Food has a very special place in our lifes and culture, so it would make sense to look into the various practices of how we get our food as well.  Reading about these innovative bites made from freeze dried christmas tree leaves by Noma was eye-opening, considering the number of christmas trees unceremoniously chucked after father christmas returns to his workshop. Are we throwing away natural food and queuing at supermarkets for processed ones instead??

お好もも烧き OKONOmomoYAKI

It was one of those days when you get home rather tired and hungry, look into the larder and try to think of something simple yet exciting to make from whatever ingredients you have. We had plain flour, lots of cabbage, some parsnip, onions, eggs, leek and a long expired katsuobushi (bonito flakes) from a previous miso tofu pizza experiment.

' Okonomi ' refers to 'what you like/want' and 'yaki' usually means 'grilled ' or 'fried'. The way we came to make this reminds me of the asian method of dealing with left over rice, frying it with any ingredients you can get your hands on... and also the english bubble and squeak, a panfried cake of left over potato mash and cabbage. And thus we settled on an okonomiyaki with the stuff we had, substituting seafood with dried ikan bilis (anchovies).

The crux of this recipe seems to be the consistency of the batter and also its topping! Not to mention the skill in flipping the rather dense cake over in a nice clean sweep! Depending on how you like it, our take on it was that it should be sticky enough to hold the ingredients together , not too voluminous nor runny. Our most suitable candidate for a topping for the dish appeared to be ketchup, which went quite well with the bonito flakes. The highlight was certainly the waving and fluttering flakes as we sprinkled them on the hot pancake!

Not quite gourmet, but homemade goodness made a very satisfying dinner enjoyed by us both. One of those simple moments when you can smile through each chew. A slightly charred crusty layer and a slightly bouncy juicy vegetable filling with the occasional chewy saltiness of the ikan bilis. mmm.. yummy! Happy improvising :)

beans, mush and us

Today the weather was much nicer than the past week, blue skies and very sunny. We took advantage of this and went for a bike ride, checking out the new Olympics park, and stopped for a lunch at Hackney Pearl, a cafe/bar at Hackney Wick just north of the park. The mezze we had for lunch was excellent: roasted squash, tarka dahl with a strong feta, and a white bean puree, all served with fresh turkish bread. The white bean puree is basically a hummus, but with white bean instead of chickpeas. We never thought you can make hummus with beans, and are inspired to try making it next time with different beans, maybe red kidney beans, or barlotti beans?

TortezillA !

Tried our hand at making pasta today, since we had all the ingredients for a tortellini, we went for that! The filling was inspired by a Jamie Oliver recipe of roasted spiced pumpkin, and we added quorn and onions for a better bite, since the pumpkin was mashed up. Opted for a light sauce of lemon-sage-garlic butter. We didn't have a roller to roll out the pasta in nice thin sheets, so we improvised a used soy sauce bottle and a broken thermos instead :) It was really hard work kneading and rolling it out! A hand operated pasta machine would have been lovely at that point! We tried to get a consistent 1mm thickness as suggested by the recipe books, but the best we could manage was 2mm. And thus, the tortellinis turned out really huge, more like TortezillAs!

Dinner was 5 TortazillAs each, with a bit of cabbage dill salad and homemade sourdough bread :) Tasted great, but slightly undercooked due to the thick TortezillA skin.

We were really surprised at how easy it was to make the pasta dough! Though it was quite challenging rolling it out and cutting it. Proper tools would probably have made it easier but we had lots of fun! We will definitely be trying more pastas in the new year!

Legend has it, tortellinis were inspired by Venus, so we are starting our new year new blog with food made with Love!