Rosemary roasted potato cubes with quick beef stir frys

Before I take a month long break from my food blogging, I thought I'll post something quick and simple, good when you're cooking for one.

Unfortunately, my rosemary pot has died, after being eaten by bugs, and suffering from 2 weeks of drought. So I had to use dried ones, which is not so bad though.

The roasted potato recipe comes from Jamie's guide to making me a better cook. It's quite straightforward, so after cooking it once, you can almost remember how to do it without referring back to the recipe.

To complete the meal, I did a quick stir fry of beef and onion, in the same pot used for boiling potatoes. In this way, I minimised my washing.

Rosemary Roasted Potato Cubes with Quick Beef Stirfry
Serves one

2 small washed potatoes, cut into 1 cm cubes. Keep skin if they're washed
Rosemary
olive oil
3 cloves garlic, crushed
a handful of sliced beef
1 onion
salt and black pepper

Preheat oven to 220 degree Celsius.

Cut potatoes into cubes. Put them into a pan of cold water and boil. When potatoes are boiling, drain in colander and leave to steam for a while.

Meanwhile, put olive oil on a roasting tray (or oven proof pyrex dish) and put into the oven to heat up the oil.

When the oil is hot, take out the tray and toss potatoes, rosemary, crushed garlic. It'll sizzle like teppanyaki which is kinda fun. Season with salt and pepper. Return to oven and bake for 20-25 minutes. Stir or shake the potato cubes once in a while to help in achieving a golden crispy texture.

Just before the potatoes are done, heat a little olive oil in pan. Fry onions until they are soften and a little brown. Add beef and fry for about 2 minutes. Season with salt and black pepper. Add a little water if you find it drying too much.

Toss the beef stir fry into the potatoes and serve.

And of course, you could cook something else to go with the potatoes.

Black Pepper Beef and Aubergine Roll

I must have been possessed last night to have tried to create this dish.

It started with some recipes cutouts from a Chinese magazine (probably UW), given to me by PY. I was possessed by this Black Pepper Beef and Enoki Mushroom Roll recipe. But wait, enoki mushrooms (looking like golden needles, thus its alternate name) in New Zealand are classified as "exotic mushrooms", hence six times more expensive than in Singapore.

So, I fancied coming up with my own black pepper beef roll, magically paired with aubergine (eggplant). Except that I forgot it requires much more work. But still, Rémi and I had enjoyed the resulting dish very much.

Black Pepper Beef and Aubergine Roll
Serves 2-3

1 large aubergine (eggplant)
100g beef, thinly sliced (quantity varies, depending on how meaty you want it to be)
half to one red chilli, chopped (I have low tolerance for chilli)
2-3 cloves garlic, chopped
few dashes of ground black pepper (recipe in the magazine asks for 3g! Who in his right mind will measure 3g of black pepper?!? First and foremost, you need a very fancy digital kitchen scale.)

Seasoning:
3 teaspoon light soya sauce
1 teaspoon tomato sauce
1 teaspoon dark soya sauce
1 teaspoon Chinese rice wine
1 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon corn starch
water (start with 2 tablespoon, but you'll find yourself adjusting the consistency of the sauce along the way)


Slice the aubergine lengthwise, about 1/2 cm thick (this is one of the most difficult part for me). Sprinkle salt and leave for half an hour in a colander. Pat dry with paper towel after that.

The aubergine has to be stir fried separately first, and I'm improving on my healthy way of doing this. A recipe has asked for lots of oil, but I find that it resulted in the first slice of aubergine soaking up most of the oil, leaving the rest unevenly coated in oil.

What I've found effective (and healthier) is to add a little oil to heat in the frying pan. Using a brush, brush the oil across the pan. Also, brush all the aubergine slices individually, on both sides with oil. Pan fry about 3-4 slices at a time, turning so both sides are browned and cooked. Set aside on a plate lined with paper towel.

With just a little oil, fry the beef slices quickly until cooked (or medium done). Takes about 2-3 minutes. Set aside to cool too. If you decide on a beef-enoki mushroom combi, you could roll them two up before frying. If using aubergine, the beef gets hidden inside the aubergine and doesn't cook evenly, hence I fry them separately.

The beef would have oozed out meat juices. Add garlic and chopped chilli. Stir fry until fragrant. Add seasoning and black pepper. Add about half cup more water for more sauce and allow sauce to thicken.

Meanwhile, roll up the beef and aubergine slices together. I rolled aubergine slices around the beef, but feel free to be creative here.

Add the beef rolls into the sauce.

You can serve with plain rice or cous cous. This could be a party food. Simply pin up the aubergine and beef roll with toothpick to secure and serve, and with sauce served separately.

Veal in white sauce (Blanquette de Veau)

Quite a few very traditional French dishes actually go well with rice, and Blanquette de Veau is one of them.

I always thought that rice is very Asian, and in Camille's classic French cookbook, she has recommended rice as the accompanying side dish for several recipes, which left me wondering. It's quite common for Rémi's family to serve rice, but I have always assumed their family is the exception than the rule.

So, I learned that Carmargue in Southern France is actually a rice-producing region. This place is famous for pink flamingos, which incidentally can't read signs telling them to keep off crops and thereby a headache to the French rice growers (there's this interesting book History of Food that gives a fascinating history of rice, among others, google to read extracts of the book).

How do French cook rice? From what I heard, I'm afraid their version of boiled rice is incomparable to that churned by any Asian rice cooker. That they cook rice like pasta, boiling them in water, and straining them.

So, I'll rather serve my delicious veal with Thai rice, cooked with my trusty rice cooker. The white sauce goes very well with rice.

Veal in white sauce (Blanquette de veau)
Serves two

250g veal (meat of young calves)
1 big carrot
1 onion
1 leek (I substituted with asparagus, probably not a good idea, but it's not every week that I have leek in stock)
1 onion
2 sprigs of parsley, 1 sprig of thyme and 1 bay leaf
1 clove

For white sauce:
15g butter
15g flour
1 egg yolk
125ml fresh cream
1/2 lemon
salt and pepper

Stick the clove into the onion. Put vegetables, veal, herbs, salt and pepper into a pan and cover with water. Bring to boil and simmer for about 2 hours. Remove the white froth forming at the surface.

Before serving, melt butter and mix in the flour and 3 big scoops of the vegetable broth. Beat the egg yolk, fresh cream, lemon juice together and stir into the butter and flour mixture. Add in more vegetable broth if necessary. Season with salt and pepper.

To serve, put veal and vegetables on serving plate and pour white sauce over. Serve with rice.

The vegetable broth is very rich and tasty too, I'm currently freezing it as vegetable stock. Not sure how I can use it yet, but it's going to be an experiment.

Drowning Burgundy Beef Stew with Wine

I guess only the French obsession with wine would lead them to drown their meat with it. Or maybe Burgundy has too much red wine, thus they have to find all ways to drink them to the last drop without getting drunk.

So, the Burgundy Beef Stew is born, which involves soaking 1.5kg of beef in 1 whole bottle of red wine overnight, if you're planning on cooking for your whole family of 5-6 people.

Our initial objective was simply to put our newly bought beef casserole to tasty use. When we found out last night that the recipe involved marinating the meat overnight, we hastily plucked parsley from our garden, chopped the vegetables and meat, all at 11pm, so that we could have a nice stew for dinner the next day. And yes, we used up 1/3 of our bottle of red wine. The stew tonight better be good.

Recipe translated from Les Classiques de Camille.

Boeuf Bourguignon (Beef stew Burgundy style)
serves 2

500g beef casserole or stew, cut to chunky pieces
50g bacon
1 carrot, sliced
1 big onion, chopped
1/3 bottle of burgundy red wine (25cl)
1 bay leaf
3 sprigs of parsley
1/3 tablespoon flour
salt and pepper

Marinate beef with carrots, onion with meat, salt, pepper, herbs and wine overnight.

The next day, strain the beef. Stir fry the bacon in a stew pot. Once the fats have broken down, add the beef and cooked until golden on both sides. Set aside.

Add onions into the stew pot. Once cooked and softened, add meat, pour the flour in slowly. When the meat is golden, add the meat marinade. Season with salt and pepper.

Simmer under low fire for 3 hours. Add more water/wine if the juice dries up too much.

Serve with steam potatoes and some parsley. Also possible to serve with rice or cous cous.

Absolutely homemade Ramly burger attempt

Had a craving for Ramly burger, an almost must-have for me whenever I go to Malaysia, and after one cafe failed to give me a satisfying burger, I was determined to go DIY.

Problem was, I couldn't find any Ramly patty recipe at all, and Ramly burger is not known for its uniformity, different stalls tend to use different sauces. So I could only improvise according to my likes and taste.

The beauty of making my own beef patty is I know the patty is 100% real beef, not those factory processed patty that may use more flour than the meat itself.

Fangie's Ramly Improvisation
serves two

Patty:
2 handfuls of minced beef
1-2 shallots, chopped
1 garlic clove, chopped
half egg, beaten
1-2 tbsp breadcrumbs
Maggi seasoning
Black pepper

Other condiments:
1 egg
1 tomato
cabbage, chopped
Tomato sauce
Maggi sauce
ground black pepper
ground paprika

Burger bread

Season beef with shallots, garlic, Maggi seasoning and pepper. Add in breadcrumbs and half a beaten egg slowly and mix well. Adjust quantity of breadcrumbs and egg accordingly, so that the beef is able to hold its patty shape. Using your hands, mold into 2 patty.

Heat butter in frying pan, fry the bread in butter until it is lightly brown and crispy. Put aside.

Put the patty slowly into frying pan. Cook each side for about 5 minutes or until beef is fully cooked. Put aside.

Beat an egg into the still well-oiled frying pan, and quickly toss and turn the pan until the egg fully covers the pan. You may also add in the remaining half beaten egg left from the beef patty. After about 2 minutes, when the egg is more or less cooked, put the 2 beef patty on top, sprinkle with Maggi seasoning and pepper over the beef, and wrap the eggs over the patty. It is also common to add mayonnaise and Worcestershire sauce over the patty.

Cut up the eggs, and serve the egg-covered patty on top of the bun, with tomatoes, cabbage, tomato sauce...or rather, whatever you like to go with your burger.

Photo did not turn up well, and couldn't see the beef, but we had managed to get the eggs to cover the patty pretty well.