Red earth flood plains

In a bid to finish remaining stock of fresh produce in fridge before a trip, we hatched a recipe for carrot , beetroot and dill soup with crème fraîche.

In an accidental botched seasoning , apple cider vinegar also featured in the soup! It was an appetizing and heartening meal !

Fish head soup (and noodles)

This is one of my comfort food in Singapore ! It is usually served as fish slices , fried or simply boiled in a milky or clear soup. This is our home made version from a 30p salmon head which was sufficient for 5 meals ! Simple and economical ;)

*added ingredients- sliced yam, tofu, leek, greens and lots of ginger !

French country loaf

We have been learning to make bread on our own and slowly improving over the years. Recently we invested in a number of bread paraphernalia, including loaf tin, bread basket, an oven stone, and weighing machine, and started reading the excellent Bread Matters by Andrew Whitley. They have really improved the bread we have been making.

Veggie meats

The idea of vegetarian meat or mock meat is an estrangement if we think about why we choose not to eat it. Ethical, environmental, health, religious etc. Or perhaps leaving moralities aside it can simply be seen as an ingredient- a veggie alternative? Spotted this at a local Vietnamese supermarket, the widest variety of veggie meat I've seen. Their base ingredient is all gluten with different seasoning simulating the different animals - as gathered from their labels .

Humus rouge

Kidney beans, tahini, olive oil and lime juice with a clove of garlic. Dash of Salt, pepper, cumin powder and paprika to season. Fridge and yummy pink humus sandwich for lunch ;)

We Found out just how important the citrus juice is to carry the earthy flavours and make it sing ! Squirrel preferences also dictated chopped walnuts mixed into humus for a bit more bite. Parsley brightens up the taste too ;) A first humus experiment without chickpeas.

Stir Fried Radish Cake

We were recently feeling a bit homesick and decided to make a little stir fried radish cake (菜头糕)
from back home.  This is a popular street food in Singapore and Malaysia, and we used a recipe from Little Teochew guest blogging for Rasa Malaysia.  Aka Chai Tow Kueh, it is like a fried noodle, except that instead of noodles made of wheat flour, we use little chunks of cakes made of steamed Chinese radish and rice flour.   If the chunks were made of wheat they would have been kinda tough and chewy, but with the radish and rice flour they were nice and soft (but not gooey), and the radish gives a nice subtle fresh taste to the chunks too.  Further they were first fried til crispy on the outside, so the contrast in textures is great.

This is a pretty simple dish with about 6 ingredients, but the preparation time was quite time consuming as the radish cake has to be steamed (best overnight).  Simplicity does come with considerable efforts!

For our first attempt, we tried two versions, a white one (fish sauce) and a black one (dark soy sauce).  It turned out a bit dry, so for our second attempt we used mushroom stock and added sliced mushroom and cabbage.  Pretty good, M2 dare say.  S2 however feels that its still a far cry from the breakfast ta-pau(take away) she gets back home, but ok for a home made first attempt.  

If you talk to any Malaysian or Singaporean living overseas, the topic of food will come up sooner or later, and almost always s/he will be missing the street or hawker food back home.  There really is a wide variety of great hawker food, though nowadays they can just as commonly be found in coffee shops, food courts, and shopping malls.

Though we wonder/worry sometimes about the future of street food.  Although many people love these food, almost nobody who have the means will want to be in this line of work: it is backbreaking work, having to work very long hours, and the pay is not great---people are still expecting that street food should be cheap, and won't pay restaurant prices for them, though the food might be tastier than at the restaurants!

HUAT AH !!!!

HUAT AH !!!!!!! :)
A rather belated entry about our Chinese New Year celebration(s), as we were quite busy the past few weeks.  For us it began before sunrise with a visit to Billingsgate Market, London's seafood wholesaler.  And we were not alone, as 65% of the crowd that day were chinese.  It was hard to decide where to begin as each stall seemed to have their specialities while stocking some of the same.  We did a quick survey before embarking on the first purchase, as the stock was moving really fast!  We got squid, salmon, seabass, shrimp and scallops for the hotpot that night.  (we had so much fun eating and preparing, we forgot to take pictures of the actual hotpot!) And as per normal, we had enough ingredients left from the hotpot to feed is for 3 days after till 初四！(4th day of CNY)

CNY is all about family, friends, fun and food- consisting of multiple get-together meals and snacks during house visits.  Since most of our family were in Malaysia and Singapore,  our get-togethers were via skype, chatting and checking out what's the latest going ons at home.  To create some atmosphere, we tried our hand at paper cutting to decorate the house with!  There's a funny mistake with the 2 goldfishes as the head/body division was cut in the wrong direction resulting in what looks like a pair of frowning frogs! Nonetheless, we were still quite happy with this first attempt and up it went on the front door. (the correct version of the goldfish is right above the 'frogs')

A CNY tea with lots of friends, who were mostly from other parts of the world became a wonderful opportunity to share local snacks!  Regimented longans ensured that every piece of agar-agar served was egalitarian.  Making ondeh ondeh for the first time turned out quite well, after we got over the initial intimidation- we thought of it as tangyuan coated with coconut.  We requested all our guests to bring oranges/clementines/mandarins and what a lovely surprise from an artistic friend! Her mendhi design on the clementines are ace! And strangely, these tiny fruit yielded 19 seeds in one and none in the other !  We had a huge assortment of citrus fruits after the tea, even though we had exchanged them with guests as per traditional custom.

Mid-CNY, we had fun adapting the hotpot for our indian vegetarian friends; using a szechuan spicy soup base, had tofu, beancurd skin, yam, chinese cabbage, long beans, taupok, some kind of gourd, mustard greens, xiaobaicai,  snow peas and freshly made 面粉果 (meehoon kueh - a sort of 'chinese pasta') ...... I guess festivals usually evoke homesickness and memories of all the little traditions and customs carried out during our growing up days.. On the 元宵（15th and last day of CNY）, we utilized the last of the vege hotpot ingredients for a really simple dinner of chaiporneng ( preserved turnip omelette), longbeans and TTT ( tauge,tanghoon,taukwa) -( bean sprouts, glassnoodles, firm tofu).  Nothing extravagant but ohh so yummy!  And no  元宵 dinner is complete without 汤圆！Whipping up a homemade version filled with available ingredients - rice dumping filled with gula melaka in a ginger osmanthus soup - heavenly!

As you probably noticed, we are still working our way through the snacks and new year food.  We are making good progress and just last night devised an appetizer incorporating all out usual ingredients for 年糕 (a sweet new year cake) . It turned out really strange- yam and leengor omelette! But as we are commited to posting our cooking adventures here, you'll be seeing multiple facets of it !