Canard à l'orange and why not Julia Child's

It's been 2 months since my last post. Yes I've been lazy. Lazy to experiment in the kitchen, lazy to dress up my food, lazy to take photos, and even lazier to update the blog.

Not sure when my next post will be, but here's a French duck stew recipe that I thought I'll share, since it's so yummy and easy to make.

Les Classiques de Camille is still my favourite French cookbook because it's really one that caters for the lazy home cook. After watching Julie and Julia, I had the impulse to buy Julia Child's cookbook. Thankfully, I was deterred by 1) price; 2) imperial rather than metric measurements; 3) lack of pictures. Now I found a new reason why I would not buy it.

It began with my quest to improve my Boeuf Bourguignon, which on previous attempts, yielded rather dry meat.  Since the movie made the dish even more famous, I googled for Julia Child's recipe. So many steps! And an article I found on the New York Times rightly explained:

"Ms. Child’s recipe is not the boeuf bourguignon that most French cooks would make. Mastering the Art of French Cooking” is actually a translation of French restaurant technique to American home kitchens. Ms. Child learned at a professional culinary school, not from home cooks. Her stew’s painstaking multistep method — cooking all the vegetables separately, straining the sauce, etc. — has chefly fingerprints all over it"

And so I stuck to my Camille's much easier version, cook the dish one day in advance, reheat it the next day and made some improvements. In fact, the beef stew tasted the best on the third day. Still room for improvements but I'm afterall not a chef.

Enough of cow talk. Last weekend, I decided to cook duck the French way. Again referring to Camille's cookbook, she has all but 3 recipes involving duck. So I chose the classical Orange Duck stew. Not too incidentally, Julia Child has her own version and once again, I found her multistep method too complicated.

Here's Camille's easy, uncomplicated though not so quick (it's a stew afterall) version, which I've translated and adjusted to a 2 servings portion.

Canard à l'Orange
Serves 2

2 big duck drumsticks
half tablespoon butter
half a carrot (or use one if you like, always good to have more veges)
half onion (as above)
about 100ml white wine
2 oranges
about half cup of chicken stock
salt and pepper to taste

Sliced onion and carrot thinly. In a casserole, brown duck in butter on all sides with onion and carrot. Add salt and pepper.

When the meat is well-coloured, moisten with white wine. After about 10 minutes, add the stock. Cover and simmer for 1 hour.

Remove the zest of half an orange (without the bitter white pith) and blanch with boiling water for 1 minute. Squeeze the juice from one orange and cut the other orange into thin slices.

After the duck has simmered for 1 hour, pour the juice, zest and orange slices into the pan and stir gently.

Cook everything for another 15 minutes in high fire to reduce the juice, caramelise the orange and duck skin.

Serve with smashed celeriac (this recipe from Jamie Oliver's website is yummy).

Note: For bigger serving (say 6 persons), use:
1 whole duck (2.5kg)
Double the quantity of the rest of ingredients except use 3 oranges (1 for zest and juice, 2 for slices)

Mustard Chicken, cooked the Rabbit way

We saw a little hedgehog outside our house about two weeks ago. Looked like a baby and it was so cute Rémi couldn't resist putting it in his hands and touching it. Of course, that made the little creature even more scared and curled up.

It's the first time I've come up close and seen a hedgehog alive in Wellington. There's plenty of them here but they are nocturnal. So I've only seen dead ones on the road from inside the car, and will almost immediately turn my head in the other direction. Like the possums, hedgehogs are considered a pest that threaten native plants and birds, so their being smashed by vehicles are not sympathised by environmentalists.

Well, this is not a recipe post of possum pies or hedgehog tarts. I'm going on to talk about rabbit. They are cute, so cute that I refused to eat them as a kid when my grandmother made a nutritious stew out of rabbit meat. So I've never eaten rabbit meat in my life even though I've also never kept rabbits as pets.

But now I am told that rabbits are pests too. They destroy meadows in Europe, and here in New Zealand, they are like possums and hedgehogs. Ok, guilt factor removed, we're already planning to ask Rémi's mom to cook a rabbit dish when we go back to France. It's traditional French dish.

I am also told that rabbit meat taste like chicken. So before I get to try real rabbit meat, I found this recipe on Camille's classic French cooking cookbook: Lapin à la moutarde, meaning Rabbit cooked with mustard. So we decided to try it out, substituting rabbit with chicken.

It's so easy to make, yet so delicious that I think I will do this again and again. Enjoy.

Mustard Chicken (Poulet à la Moutarde)
serves two

2 pieces of chicken (choose your own cut or portion size. we're small eater, so we had a drumstick each. I think thigh or even chicken breast works well, if not better. or use rabbit meat like in original recipe)
2 pieces of bacon
2 sage leaves (I may experiment with other herbs next time)
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
About 60ml of liquid cream

Preheat oven to 190 degrees Celsius.

Remove chicken skin. Spread mustard over the chicken. Wrap the bacon around the chicken, with the sage leaves in between. Put in a roasting tin and add about 1 tablespoon of water before putting into the hot oven.

Bake for about 35 minutes.

When the chicken is cooked, take out and transfer the chicken to serving plates. Quickly put the cream into the hot roasting tin and mix with all the juices/fats in the tin to make a creamy sauce. Pour over the chicken.

There's no need to add salt or pepper.

Serve with salad and boiled potatoes.

Parisian designer style Quiche Lorraine

I didn't make this up. This recipe was inspired by a Parisian designer friend. Tall, slender, pretty and fashionable, she exudes the type of style that we imagine all fashionable Parisian ladies to be. And she proves that fashionable big city Frenchwomen are just as good cooks as moms and grannies. You can also rightly imagine her to cook in super sleek modern kitchen.

We had the pleasure to taste her Quiche Lorraine, to which she added a strong goat cheese. I normally find goat cheese too strong for my liking, but the quiche just brings out the taste of the cheese perfectly.

So I was determined to replicate her Quiche Lorraine. Using Camille's traditional Quiche Lorraine recipe (cheese is not an ingredient of original quiche Lorraine recipes), I experimented with goat feta and sheep feta on separate occasions and liked both very much.

Quiche Lorraine with goat cheese
Serves four

1 portion of pâte brisée tart dough
approx 200g bacon
3 eggs
200ml crème fraiche
goat feta (or be daring to experiment with different types of goat cheese)
salt and pepper

Prepare the tart dough and leave in fridge for half and hour.

Preheat oven at 180ºC. Roll out tart thinly and line on a prepared tin (either floured or greased). Using a fork, poke holes all over the base.

Cut the bacon into small slices and sprinkle all over the uncooked tart base. Put into oven and bake for 10 minutes. I like Camille's way of crisping the bacon without using an additional frying pan.

Meanwhile, beat the eggs with the cream together. Add salt and pepper. Pour into the precooked tart.

Here's why I left out specifying the quantity of the cheese earlier. Cut the feta into small cubes, just enough to spread all over the tart.

Bake the quiche in the oven for 25 to 30 minutes. Serve hot.

Balinese style satay with Tumeric Rice

We went to Tonga recently for holiday. If you don't know where's Tonga, you're not alone. We had to google to find that it is somewhere in the South Pacific, somewhere close to  Fiji and Samoa, not too far from the equator...but give me an unlabeled map of the world now, I still won't be able to tell the extremely tweeny islands of Tonga from those of Fiji or Cook or the likes or maybe even locate it in the vast ocean.

The South Pacific is a different tropical paradise from the one I have come from. The sea is always greener on the other side, so my friends from back home in sunny Singapore are green with envy about my trip. But one striking similarity is the abundance of coconut trees. There's definitely more coconut trees in tiny Tonga than there are in little Singapore. And so, the number one souvenir I brought back is not any of the beautiful handicrafts woven by the local women out of grass, but a coconut grater done by a village man. And the number one skill acquired by Rémi from the locals was how to open a coconut without making a big mess.

Yes, I'm still sore by the absence of freshly grated coconut in Wellington. But the grater I bought would only be useful if I mount it on a wooden bench. Even then, I still don't have the Tongan convenience of plucking a coconut from the tree whenever I need one. So up till now, the grater remains unused, and for making the satay, I conveniently substituted freshly grated coconut with dessicated coconut. Not quite the same, but for a satay deprived person, the taste buds are less picky.

Balinese style satay is different from the meat satay I'm used to in Singapore, mainly because it uses ground meat. I don't recall having it when I went to Bali years ago. As I have bought ground lamb meat by mistake, I decided to try the recipe I found in "Authentic Recipes from Indonesia" even though it is a recipe for chicken/duck satay.

Balinese style Satay
Makes about 10 sticks

About 250g ground chicken or duck (or in my case, I used lamb)
1 cup (100g) freshly grated coconut (I used dessicated coconut and added some coconut milk to hydrate the coconut flakes)
2 kaffir lime leaves, thinly sliced
1 tablespoon shaved palm sugar
some salt
10 bamboo skewers. The stem of lemongrass can be used as skewer too.

Spice Paste
2 candlenuts
1 cm fresh galangal, peeled and sliced
1 cm kencur root (another kind of ginger which I can't find and so left out)
1 cm tumeric, peeled and sliced, or half teaspoon ground tumeric
1 red finger-length chili, deseeded
3 shallots, peeled
2 cloves garlic, peeled
1 clove
1 teaspoon coriander seeds
half teaspoon black pepper
pinch of ground nutmeg
half teaspoon dried shrimp paste
1 tablespoon oil

Make the spice paste by grinding everything except the oil into a smooth paste. Even though I've bought myself a blender now, I still like to use the pestle and mortar for making spice paste, as it helps to release the fragrance of all the spices.

Heat oil over medium heat and stir fry the ground spice paste for 3-5 minutes until fragrant. Remove from heat and set aside to cool.

When cooled, mix the spice paste with ground meat and all the other ingredients (logically not the skewers). Set aside to marinate for 2 hours in the refrigerator.

If using the bamboo skewers, soak them in water for 4 hours before using. Press the meat mixture onto each skewer firmly to form a kebab. Repeat until all the meat mixture is used up.

Grill in preheated oven for about 3 minutes or more on each side, basting with the marinade, until cooked and the meat is browned but not burned.

Served with sambal kecap (sweet soy sauce sambal), made by combining sliced shallots, sliced red chillies and sweet Indonesian soy sauce (kecap manis). I used normal sambal chili sauce and they go well together too.

As a meal, serve with tumeric rice and another vegetables (like stir fried bean sprouts) and tempeh.

Tumeric rice
Serves two

1 cup long-grained rice, washed
1 level teaspoon tumeric powder (it's very overpowering, so always better to start with less than more and adjust to the taste you like the next time you cook)
1 onion, diced
1 cm piece ginger
1 star anise
2 cloves
3 cm piece cinnamon
1 pandan leaf

In a rice cooker, place all ingredients together. Add 1 and half cup water and switch on the rice cooker. Well, being a Chinese, who grow up on a daily diet of rice, an electric rice cooker is the most useful appliance in each household and I don't know any Singaporean family who doesn't own a rice cooker or cook rice over the stove.

Sup Kambing in slow cooker

My slow cooker has introduced me to an American boxing champion. Even more awesome, my slow cooker actually carries his autograph and has his smiling face gleaming at me from the instruction manual and cookbook. I've never been so up close with the boxing world. Boxer celebrity names are always alien to me, unless he has made a name for himself in some sensational murder or rape trials that hit newspaper headlines so often I can't avoid not reading about them.

So I was quite surprised when Wikipedia told me the namesake of my slow cooker - George Foreman - was a former boxing champ. I know a boxer has lean muscles, but a boxer's lean muscles are not quite alike the lean meat I stew in my slow cooker.

What's even more amazing about this slow cooker is that I am supposed to preheat the device for 20 minutes before I should start using it. That's also new to me.

Nevertheless, I have to live with my choice (though I think next time I will not jump at every boxer endorsed cooking products), and besides the nuisance of having to preheat it, this slow cooker has served me well enough.

My Sup Kambing (mutton soup) recipe comes from "Indonesian Kitchen" by Pancy Seng. I have adapted it to my slow cooker's strange habit and opted to cook everything all in one pot to save on washing, as usual.

Sup Kambing (Mutton Soup)
Serves two

About 500g mutton or lamb (I found this spare ribs cut that was so tender after the slow cooking), chopped into pieces
5-6 shallots
3 cloves garlic
1 inch length of ginger
some 800ml water
cooking oil
1 pandan leaf tied in a knot
salt and black pepper to taste
fried sliced shallots and Chinese coriander leaves or spring onions to garnish

Mixed Spices:
half teaspoon cumin powder
half teaspoon fennel powder
half teaspoon coriander powder
1 cm cinnamon stick
half star anise
2 cloves
2 cardamons

You may like to use a separate pan for browning the meat with the spices first, but what I do is to preheat my celebrity slow cooker for 15 minutes, then throw some oil, cover and wait for the oil to heat up.

While waiting for all the preheating and heating, I slowly chopped the shallots, ginger and garlic, tears leaking all the way such that by the time I finished with the chopping and mixing of spices, the oil is reasonably hot enough for me to throw the shallots, garlic and ginger in.

Fry them briefly, add the mixed spices and fry until fragrant. Toss in the lamb or mutton and fry for a few minutes. If you're using normal pan on normal fire, pour in water and bring to boil before throwing everything into the slow cooker. If using the all in one pot shortcut like me, add the water, salt and pepper and pandan leaf and leave everything to cook slowly for hours until the meat is tender and it is lunch or dinner time.

Before serving, you may like to consider thickening the soup with flour or corn starch. And also to scoop out the sinful layer of oil floating on the surface.

Otherwise, just add the garnishing and serve with plain rice.

Ikea meatballs hack

I found out that there's a group of Ikea hackers out there, who takes pride and pleasure in refurbishing or personalising their Ikea furniture. Like reupholstering their tired sofa with designer fabric, or reconfiguring a LACK shelving unit into a bench.

Now there's no Ikea in New Zealand to turn me into another Ikea hack, but I have half a dozen Ikea's cheapo pine photo frames bought from Singapore, those that has filmsy cardboard backing such that they won't stand properly. So I was inspired by the hackers' DIY spirit to modify my photo frames into something like what you see on the right. Just as in cooking when I try to use as few utensils as possible to reduce washing, my reborn photo frames minimises the number of hooks used. That's important, since staying in a rented apartment restricts your freedom in hammering hooks onto the wall.

Besides modifying Ikea products, I also managed to 'hack' the famous Ikea meatball recipe. Or rather, improvised it according to whatever ingredients my fridge was able to cough out, plus incorporating ideas from other Swedish meatball recipes.

Of course, Swedish meatballs would not be complete without the all important lingonberry jam. Similarly, my jar of lingonberry jam given with love by my bro and carried with due care by yours truly all the way from Sweden would never be satisfied until I eat them with the meatballs.

Ikea meatballs hack
Serves two

After buying only minced beef, I found out that Swedish meatballs actually uses a mixture of beef and pork, and the proportion of beef to pork varies from region to region. As for amount of meat used, I reckoned each person shall have about 10 meatballs, hence apportioning 20 heap teaspoons of minced meat.
1 onion, chopped finely
about 5 tablespoons of breadcrumbs
enough milk for soaking the breadcrumbs so it just covers
about 1 tablespoon chopped parsley (I like to jump at all opportunities to pluck parsley from my pot of herbs)
1 egg to bind everything together
salt and black pepper for seasoning
Butter for frying

For the cream sauce:
about 50ml cream, don't have to be precise about exactly how much. same with stock
about 100ml chicken stock (or beef stock) - made quickly with ready stock cube
1 teaspoon corn starch or flour to thicken
salt and pepper to season

Soak breadcrumbs in milk so it softens.

Heat a little butter and stir fry the onions until soften but not brown. Mix all ingredients for meatballs together.

Using your hands or 2 spoons, shape the meat mixture into balls about the size of a ping pong.

Heat some more butter. Fry the meatlballs in batches if necessary until cooked on all sides.

Prepare the sauce by boiling the stock. Add cream, thicken with the flour and season to taste.

Serve meatballs with the cream sauce, uncooked lingonberry jam and a salad (or boiled vegetables like what I did). It seems Common traditional to serve with potatoes (mashed, baked or fried) but I have no potatoes. What the heck.

Breast of Duck with Cepes Mushrooms

One more French duck recipe from Camille, but it is not duck confit. We have considered trying to make our own duck confit, but after checking on youtube, we saw, horrors of all horrors, that you need almost one pot of fat to cook that already very fatty duck meat. Oh no, no way we're going to make cassoulet.

A friend once asked, after enjoying a hearty meal of fatty cassoulet in France, how do French ladies stay slim on a rich French diet.

I'm afraid I have no perfect answer since I'm not French, never lived in France, don't survive on a purely French diet and have not read the book French Women Don't Get fat.

I think it's because French value the quality of their food more than quantity. They eat for pleasure, preferring to enjoy their food slowly rather than gobbling them just to fill their stomach. And portion control. But that's still too generalising.

Rémi thinks that typical French eat a lot of boiled vegetables at home. As well as yoghurt for breakfast, and as desserts. French gourmet cuisine like duck confit and foi gras are for tourists who dine in restaurants while French people tend to eat home-cooked food everyday. The 3-hour lunch and 4-hour dinner marathon feasts we're being fed by the parents whenever we go back to France are not normal everyday fare, but more homecoming reunion treats.

Other reasons I found when googling this topic include: French women are slender but thinks they are fat (while British women are fat but believe they are slim); intense pressure from French men to stay slim (AGREE!!!); stay clear of fast food (eat REAL food); maintain active lifestyle (even the French great grandmother may be doing more sports than me)...

Breast of Duck with Cèpes Mushrooms (Magrets de Canard aux Cèpes)
Serves two

2 nice fillets of duck breast
2 or more handfuls cépes mushrooms (they are very flavoursome. use porcini if you can't find cépes. or mix forest mushrooms. as they are more expensive, I mixed with fresh button mushrooms)
1 clove garlic, chopped
2 teaspoon chopped parsley
olive oil
salt and pepper

Clean the cèpes. Heat some olive oil and cook the mushrooms for a few minutes until they start rejecting water. Drain and set aside.

Put half of the chopped garlic and parsley under the skin of the duck breast.

On a frying pan, using medium heat, cook the duck breast, skin side first. As the duck is very fatty, you do not have to add oil to the frying pan. Rather, the duck fat will ooze out. Cook for about 7 minutes, discard the extra oil, turn the fillet and cook for 5 minutes. Now, duck breast cooked this way is like steak, so adjust the cooking time if you like the meat more rare, or more cooked.

When the duck is done, remove and cover.

Heat olive oil, throw in the mushrooms, add garlic, parsley, salt and pepper and brown for a few minutes.

Slice the duck breast fillet and serve with the mushrooms.

As a side, try roasting potatoes with duck fat.

Fragrant Glutinous Rice

Time for me to start understanding how to use glutinous rice, in case I decide to make rice dumplings to celebrate Duanwu Festival (端午节), known otherwise as Dragon Boat Festival (even though dragon boat is just one of the traditional activities to celebrate this festival marking the summer solstice).

My cousin's grandma is very good at making steam glutinous rice. While I do not have her recipe, I found one in Reviving Local Dialect Cuisines. Yes, this is a traditional Hokkien dish that my family always have during festivities like commemorating the death anniversaries of ancestors.

I've tweaked the recipe a bit to suit the ingredients I had at hand. And as usual, I'm lacking in spring onion, coriander and chillies to make the dish more attractive looking.

Fragrant Glutinous Rice (油香糯米饭)
Serves two

1 cup glutinous rice
2 pieces of deboned chicken thigh (can also use pork)
2 tablespoons dried shrimps
2-3 large dried Shitake mushrooms
3 garlic, minced
6-8 chestnuts

Seasonings
light soy sauce
oyster sauce
dark soy sauce
sugar
salt
pepper

Rinse glutinous rice and soak in water for at least 6 hours. I did it overnight. Drain.

On preparing chestnuts, slit a cross on the shell. Boil violently for about 10 minutes. Remove the shells and the second layer of skin, as well as any rotten parts.

Cut the meat into shreds. Soak dried shrimps and mushrooms separately until soft. Slice the mushrooms.

Heat about 1 big tablespoon of oil and fry the minced garlic until fragrant. Add the dried shrimps. After about 1 minute, add the meat, chestnuts and mushrooms. Stir for about 2 minutes and add in the glutinous rice.

Season according to taste. As a rough gauge, about 1 tablespoon or less each of the sauces and sugar and just a little bit of salt and pepper. Mix well.

Dish onto a steaming plate or bowl and steam for about 40 minutes.

Garnish with fried shallots, coriander, spring onion and chillies before serving.

More on pork and saucisson

In my humble opinion (not that it counts for anything), saucisson ranks very highly in French food culture, besides wine and cheese.

Saucisson is large dried sausage, normally pork cured with salt, and eaten sliced as a cold cut. Sounds straightforward? Until you go to a saucisson gourmet shop and you'll be spoilt for choice with the varieties available. Like cured with Provencal herbs, garlic, nuts, peppercorn...or from pork to wild boar to donkey meat!

Yeap, we tried the donkey meat saucisson in Meribel, right in the Savoie region famous for its saucisson, it's powerful! I think Corsica is another region famous for its delicious varieties of saucisson, particularly the wild boar ones and we enjoyed it just as much.

Besides eating it sliced as appetisers, saucisson is handy in picnics and makes excellent sandwiches in between long hikes. We also tried fusion, by adding it to Chinese pork porridge with pork floss and ham. Just for fun.

Our affinity for 'pungent' food probably explains our obliviousness to the testosterone raging smell of nz pork.



I also remember fondly of the butcher shops we visited in Barcelona two years ago. The Spanish may be more obsessed with their ham than the French of their saucisson. Seeing so many hanging legs (complete with the trotters) straight in your face can be a bit off-putting, but the thinly sliced ham never disappointed us during our trip. Prices vary widely too, according to the breeds of the pig, their feeds, the region of origins, age etc. Just ask the butcher and he'll rant off all the subtle differences that possibly could only be picked up by a local or gourmet.

It's a pity we can't bring saucisson or ham from our trips back to New Zealand.

Dissecting Pork

All my Singaporean friends swear that the pork in New Zealand has a strong smell, unlike those in Singapore. Me and Rémi are quite oblivious to this 'smell' so far. But even my brother in faraway Sweden complains about the 'smelly' pork there. Hmmm...is this due to different breeds of pig or feeds used in Western countries? But wait, Singapore imports frozen pork from Australia.

My father, a retired pig farmer, solves the mystery for us.
Male pigs are inherently smelly due to the testosterone raging in their balls.

I further quote from Wikipedia:
"In domestic pigs the taint is caused by androstenone and skatole concentrations stored in the fat tissues of the animal after sexual maturity. It is released when the fat is heated and has a distinct odor and flavor that is widely considered unpalatable to consumers."

So male pigs, before they reach puberty, are castrated by Asian farmers (at least in Malaysia or Indonesia, where Singapore gets its pork supply), making them barrows! Well, when I see pigs in farms or zoos, I do not particularly check how their male anatomy looks like, but according to my father, pigs that can't be castrated due to, say inward growth of their balls are usually sold at steep discounts to the butchery, and used for making smoked sausages or ham.

What about Australian pork? As the Chinese are so picky about the odour, butcher in Singapore only imports female pigs from Australia, since they may not be able to influence the farmers there to remove the male pigs' manhood.

Maybe that's why it leaves only male pigs for sale in the Western market, if all the female ones have been exported.

Since I can't tell the butcher in kiwi supermarkets I only want female or castrated pork, my father has this advice: buy cuts that steer clear of the hind of the pig.

Which comes to the next problem: which cuts should I buy? Especially since pork sold here are cut more for cooking chops. And that I'm more used to Chinese names for different cuts for Chinese cooking.

Here's my suggestion for Chinese cooking, some of which are still subjected to further trials and experiments:
Fillet or Tenderloin (腰柳，腰嫩肉，小里脊): The long thin muscle, that is the most tender and more expensive cut in Singapore. Called premium cut fillet on supermarket shelves here, it is excellent for slicing into thin strips for stir-fry or in soup. It is much better than the already sliced pork which is from possibly a lesser cut of the pork and usually less tender.

Loin chop (里脊肉): Being located on the back, they are by default far from the testosterone raging part of the male pig. And lean too.

Shoulder/Blade(肩胛肉，梅花肉): Same as above. Supposed to be good for mincing or dicing for stews. That's also where the spare ribs come from.

Pork belly (五花肉): Fatty, but we love it stew the Hokkien way, richly seasoned with five spice powder, dark soy sauce....never mind smell or no smell.

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.

French Crepe Party Ideas

The happy problem with French crêpe party is that there is no limitations in terms of the type of fillings you can enjoy, and you end up eating more than everything.

The northwest region of France in Brittany is famous for their crêpes, but nowadays, you see French crêperies everywhere, even in Wellington. And they serve yummy crêpes!

The biggest difference between a French crêpe and an American pancake is their thickness. A French crêpe is so much thinner that you get to enjoy more, with different types of fillings, from savoury to sweet ones.

So, you can imagine that when we hold crêpe parties, there's more fillings than your stomach can hold. It's not a lot of work or pre-cooking, as we use basic ingredients like butter, sugar, nutella, bananas, strawberries, bacon, mushrooms, shredded cheese, walnuts, blue cheese, lemon juice, eggs, almonds, liquor, orange, cinnamon...

One problem with making crêpes is that, they are best enjoyed when they are hot. So if you're making crêpe on your frying pan, it makes serving everyone at the same time difficult. The French (or rather Tefal) have found a happy solution to this problem with the Multi Crêpe Party device. You basically plug it and put on your dining table, and everyone surrounds it like a steamboat and makes their own crêpe together. It makes 6 much smaller crêpes at the same time. It's fun, and useful even for parties of more than 10. Everyone just end up standing around the table, cooking and eating. However, this electronic device may be hard to find outside France, but they are widely available in stores like Carrefour or Darty in France (we actually went to the trouble of carrying one back from France).

Crêpe batter
Serves about six

250g flour
3 eggs
500ml milk
pinch of salt
about 1 teaspoon of melted butter
water

Mix flour and egg. The mixture gets very thick and dry. Add milk slowly until you get a smooth batter. Add butter and salt.

We find that the batter could be thinner, and usually add about half a cup of water and more milk, so that the crêpe spreads thinner.

Chill in fridge for about half an hour.

To cook, spread a thin layer, one at a time, on frying pan or use a multi crêpe party device.

To serve, add fillings, fold into half or quarter, or just simply roll up.



Simple Crêpe Fillings suggestions

Savoury
Bacon: This is always a winner. Fry them until they are crispy. Top with shredded cheese or mix with mushrooms.

Mushrooms: You can stir fry mixed button mushrooms (diced into small cubes) with olive oil, garlic and chopped fresh parsley (seasoned with salt and black pepper). Another alternative is to fry with bacon (and chopped onions), add some fresh cream, season with herbs, salt and black pepper).

Eggs: Beat an egg into the multi crêpe party, you get a perfect round sunny side up. Put it on top of the crêpe and add bacon and cheese if desired.

Blue cheese and Walnut: For the slightly more exotic taste buds. Popular with our crêpe party guests so far.

Sweet
Butter, sugar and cinnamon: My all time favourite! Melt them altogether on the crêpe and eat it while it's hot. Sinfully good.

Sugar with lemon juice: For some tangy punch, squeeze some lemon juice onto sugar.

Banana or strawberries with melted chocolate: Always pair well together.

Banana with milo: A great pair here too

Banana with orange: We tried cooking banana with orange juice/pulp. Something new for a change.

Banana and honey: Classic

Strawberries with sugar: Tried it yesterday and it's good.

Ice-cream: If you're fast to eat before it melts on the hot crêpe.

Liqueur: You can make a Crêpe Suzette by putting sugar and liqueur such as rum on it (with fruits like bananas), and setting it on fire. Sure to capture everyone's attention.

Jam: Or basically, just scour through your pantry for anything that you find suitable. It will ensure a successful crêpe party with a big spread of fillings to satisfy every palate.


note: Crêpes in pictures shown are made this morning with leftover batter from our crêpe party last night, using a normal frying pan.

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.

Jamie's incredible baked lamb shanks

Jamie described his baked lamb shanks "incredible", and I'll say the taste is quite truly so. The first time I baked this, I may have baked a tad too long, as the vegetables were all melted into almost nothingness. Last night, on my second try, I'd shortened the cooking time, so the lamb was less brown, but it tasted as good nonetheless.

The lamb was baked for so long in its own fats, as well as butter and olive oil, that it was almost like a confit. The onions and carrots added a sweet twist to the otherwise savoury dish. I omitted leek, simply because I didn't have it in the fridge.

I find Jamie overly generous with oil, so I've reduced the amount of butter and olive oil used. My version may be less good than his for sure, but it'll be less sinful as well. Especially as I also exercised portion control and shared one shank between two persons.

To maximise oven usage, throw 1-2 potatoes to bake together (but for half the time). Serve the lamb with mashed potatoes or just simply baked ones. Below is his recipe done it my way, as I remember it.

Jamie's incredible lamb shanks
for 1 shank

1 lamb shank
2 sprigs of fresh rosemary
1 sprig of thyme
1 spoon of cold butter, quantity according to conscience
4 cloves of garlic, unpeeled
1 carrot
1 onion
extra virgin olive oil
salt and black pepper
white wine

1-2 potatoes
fresh cream or milk
salt and black pepper

Preheat oven at 200C.

Chopped 1 small sprig of rosemary and the thyme into small pieces if you're using fresh ones. Yeah, my rosemary and thyme plants are still surviving after battling gales and storms. Original recipe also uses sage leaves, which I omitted. So please use if you have them. Mix with butter, salt and pepper.

Make incisions into the lamb shank and stuff the flavoured butter into the cut pockets. Rub the lamb with olive oil, salt and pepper.

Finely sliced carrot and onion (and leek if you have). Cut an A3 sheet of aluminum foil, place the vegetables, remaining rosemary (and sage leaves) and whole garlic in the centre. Put the lamb shank, bone upright on top. Splash some white wine over and wrap up entirely in foil.

Bake for about 2 hours or longer, until the meat is tender. Halfway through the baking, throw the potatoes into the oven. When the potatoes are done, mash with some milk or cream, salt and pepper.

The five fragrances of Ngoh Hiang

The Hokkien Five Spice Meat Roll is more commonly known as Ngoh Hiang in Hokkien or Wu Xiang in Mandarin, literally meaning "five fragrances". Well, the famous Five Spice Powder (Wu Xiang Fen) used in Chinese cuisine is also literally translated as "five fragrances" from Chinese.

Five spice powder is so named as it contains all the five flavours (or should we say fragrance) - sour, bitter, sweet, pungent, and salty. Although the specific combination of spices varies nowadays, two standard combination are: 1) Chinese Tung Hing cinnamon (a type of cassia), powdered cassia buds, powdered star anise and anise seed, ginger root, and ground cloves. 2) huajiao (Sichuan pepper), bajiao (star anise), rougui (cassia), cloves, and fennel seeds.

The powder is the key spice in making the Ngoh Hiang. As the meat roll is quite tedious to make, it is a festive dish in Hokkien households (from my observation of my extended family and friends). Besides death anniversaries of ancestors (this may sound strange to foreigners, but anniversaries are celebrated with rich offerings of food in traditional prayers, and the extended family gather together to offer their respect. I see it more as an occasion for family gathering), Chinese New Year is the main period when grandmothers, mothers, aunts etc make this meat roll, along with a big feast of other traditional goodies.

Of course, you can easily find Ngoh Hiang in hawker centres nowadays, but nothing beats the homemade one. Especially when those commercially-made-in-factory ones taste more flour than meat (just like chicken nuggets from MacDonald).

I got the below recipe from my friend PY's mom, who make one of the best Ngoh Hiang. As with most Chinese home cooks, the proportion of ingredients is more by instinct than precision, so use your discretion, as I do when I reduce the quantity in making it. The quantity is huge, as this is a festive dish and so, cooked to feed many many mouths and to last over several meals during the Chinese New Year period.

Yesterday was my first try. There's room for improvement.

Ngoh Hiang (Hokkien five spice meat roll)
makes perhaps 12 rolls

1 large sheet of bean skin
1kg minced pork
300g prawns
20 water chestnuts
2 large onions
2 carrots
10-15 dried shitake mushrooms, soaked
5 stalks coriander leaves
2 tbsp light soy sauce
1 tsp salt
pepper
corn flour
1 packet of five spice powder (I'm not sure how much is this, but use generously, possibly 1 tbsp)
2 eggs

Grate carrots and chopped all ingredients finely. Marinate and set aside for one hour.

Cut the bean skin into smaller squares (or rectangular). Clean them with a damp cloth. It's very fragile, so be careful not to tear it.

Divide up the minced mixture accordingly and roll as tightly as possible like a sausage.

Deep fry in hot oil until cooked (I prefer to use less oil and turn the meat rolls until all sides are cooked). Cut diagonally into 1 inch slices.

Serve as a side dish with rice.

Of Morilles, Poularde and cream of chicken with forest mushrooms

Poularde de Bresse Aux Morilles is an interesting dish, that gives me a chance to introduce two very French food culture.

First is the Morel (or Morille in French), a very tasty but expensive mushroom popular in French cuisine. I remember buying a small bottle, say 20g for 20 euros a couple of years back. It is small compared to the big button or portobello mushrooms that we're used to, but just a little is enough to give a distinctive taste to your dish. So it's common to mix them with other cheaper variety of mushrooms.

And mushroom picking is perhaps unique to France, an autumn 'hobby' which I have unfortunately not had the chance to participate in yet. It is a convenient marriage of their love for hiking and food (They also have season for plucking wild berries). So a typical French household would have a book on mushrooms to help them identify edible and poisonous mushrooms. If in doubt, ask the local pharmacists. They are supposed to be trained to identify poisonous mushrooms as well.

Local knowledge is also essential in determining where are the best places to find mushrooms, and what is permissible by law so that one does not intrude into other people's private property. And not everyone is lucky, as there are about 30 deaths a year from eating the wrong mushrooms. Read more about this peculiar French hobby here.

A poularde, I learnt today from this blog, "is a fatty chicken that is grown in a particular way to avoid that it reaches sexual maturity. It consists of a young hen which is raised free range for the first part of its life and fed with corn, cereals and milk. Then just before it reaches sexual maturity, it is placed in a cage and maintained in the dark to be fattened for few weeks. In this way, the young hen do not reach sexual maturity, resulting in a very meaty bird (around 1.8Kg), covered of an important layer of fat, with a very tender, moist and milky flesh, but slightly on the bland side". Another distorted French way of rearing poultry, like what they do to geese for foi gras. The Bresse region of France is famous for poulardes.

I found this recipe of cooking "poularde from Bresse region with morels" in Camille's cookbook of classic French dishes. The word poularde caught my eye, because it is somewhat different from poulet, which is a "normal" chicken, and also because the recipe asks for a "beautiful" poularde. Weird isn't it? Maybe it's just a stupid French romanticism for their food.

Me and Remi have cooked this dish several times in Singapore to great compliments. And of course, we use a normal chicken, or chicken thigh pieces, to be precise. Having morels certainly helps to enhance the taste, but an assortment of dried forest mushrooms (which may be found in Carrefour or Cold Storage, though we had "imported" our mushrooms from France then) can be used in place of the morels.

I translate below the original recipe from Camille but give the dish another name more befitting what a non-French would understand and cook according to.

Cream of chicken with forest mushrooms (Poularde de Bresse Aux Morilles)

1 beautiful poularde from Bresse (or a young hen), cut into pieces
200g fresh morels (or use an assortment of forest mushrooms, fresh or dried, or just simply button mushrooms)
30g butter
glass of yellow wine of Jura region
200ml fresh cream
salt and pepper

In a frying pan, heat the butter and cook the chicken pieces without browning them.

Add salt, pepper and cover. After about 15 minutes, drizzle with the wine, cover again and simmer for 20 minutes.

Put the cleaned mushrooms in the pan with cream. Simmer half covered for 10-15 minutes until the broth has been reduced. Serve immediately, with rice or potatoes.

And trust me, despite the crappy picture above, this dish is easy to make, very tasty, even if you do not use chicken from Bresse, or wine from Jura, or mushrooms from Paris (button mushrooms is incidentally known as champignons de Paris).

Tips:
- To prepare mushrooms, cut the foot and plunge them for 10 minutes in cool water to remove sand.
- If using dried mushrooms, soak in warm water for 30 minutes. As the water is bursting with the flavour of mushrooms, you may add them in together with the cream.
- For a proportion of about 6-7 drumsticks, I finished my 30g bottle of dried mushrooms.
- Yes, yellow wine does exist, although a Singaporean friend of mine has been sneered by a French lady for saying that. It is unique to the Jura wine region of eastern France. Can use white wine in place of the yellow one.
- The suggested proportion in the recipe is just a guide. Adjusting the amount of cream, mushrooms, wine and butter according to your own instincts works too.

The colourful world of gingers, and the secret ingredient to fabulous nasi lemak

Until recently, I was absolutely confused by the colours of ginger, thanks to Enda. As she gave me verbal instructions on her various specialty dishes, even herself was colour-blinded by different species of ginger.

You see, blue ginger (also known as galangal, or lengkuas in Malay, or 南姜 in Chinese) is actually pinkish in colour. Yellow ginger (turmeric, or kunyit in Malay, or 姜黄 in Chinese) is more orange than yellow, while the common ginger is truly yellow.

Blue ginger is a key ingredient in Indonesian cuisine. And I must mention that Enda makes the most fragrant Nasi Lemak cooconut rice, and she attributes the taste to the blue ginger.

So I was determined to stock up on blue ginger and delighted to find frozen ones in Wellingtonian Asian stores. I even found fresh ones sold by this young Asian man peddling herbs and spices like lemon grass and lime leaves at the Sunday market.

In Enda fashion, my Nasi Lemak here is served with Opor Ayam, an Indonesian stewed chicken in turmeric gravy. Accompanying vegetables are simple stir fried bean sprouts. And also the addictive Emping Melingo I brought back from Singapore, a type of cracker made from the seeds of gnetum tree. It ihas a slight bitter taste, so I got a sweet variety, that has been coated in palm sugar syrup.

As my handwritten recipe is very unprecise, I adapted the Opor Ayam recipe from my newly acquired cookbook, Indonesian Kitchen by Pancy Seng. Nasi Lemak recipe comes from Enda. Thumbnail picture below shows the Turmeric Chicken done by Enda. Note that instead of pounding up the lemongrass etc, she just sliced them.

Opor Ayam (Stewed Chicken in Turmeric Gravy)
Serves 2

Half chicken or 4-6 pieces of chicken (I only use thigh or drumbsticks)
1 tomato (optional)
200ml thin coconut milk
100ml thick coconut milk (I ran out of coconut milk, so I had skipped this part, but would have been good to follow through)
salt and sugar to taste

Paste:
2 candlenuts (buah keras)
1 stalk lemon grass
half thumb size blue ginger (galangal), about 15g
2 cloves garlic
1 small-medium size onion

Mixed spices
1 tbsp coriander powder
1 tsp cumin powder
1 tsp pepper
1/2 tsp turmeric powder
(In Enda's recipe, she uses only turmeric powder and pepper, so I'm sure it's alright if you skip the other 2 C powders)

Grind the paste ingredients.

Heat cooking oil and saute the ground paste until fragrant. Add mixed spices (add a little water to form a paste) and stir fry evenly.

Toss in chicken and stir fry for 2-3 minutes. Pour in think coconut milk and bring to boil. Switch to low heat, cover and simmer until chicken is cooked.

Add salt, sugar and thick coconut milk and cook until chicken is tender. Add tomatoes and stir briefly. Serve hot with plain or coconut rice.


Nasi Lemak (Coconut Rice)
Serves two

1 cup rice
3/4 cup water
3/4 cup coconut milk
a few slices of galangal
1 pandan leaves, tie into a knot
a pinch of salt

According to Enda, the proportion of water must be more than that of coconut milk. So adjust accordingly, also to the type of rice you use.
Steam in rice cooker.

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.