The beautiful Charlotte

With a name as beautiful as its taste, it is still debatable how this classic French moulded dessert or its name come about.

Besides sponge biscuits, bread, sponge bread or biscuits are also used to line the mould, which is then filled with a fruits and whipped cream or custard.

The below Charlotte recipe was done with canned peach, making it very straightforward to make. Just make sure you give yourself plenty of time to set in the fridge.

Recipe source: unknown. It was a recipe Rémi found on some French website long ago and untraceable.


Charlotte with canned peach
serves 4-6

2 packets of sponge fingers biscuits
1 big can of peaches in syrup
250ml fresh cream
pinch of sugar (icing or castor)
pinch of salt
a few drops of vanilla essence

Before starting to whip fresh cream, leave the mixing bowl in freezer for 15 minutes. The fresh cream has to be cold (if you're using packet long-life cream, put into fridge an hour earlier).

Whip the cream until thick. Add the sugar, salt and vanilla essence.

To achieve the above look, you need to have a loose-based round baking tin. Although I didn't think of that when I made it yesterday, place the ring of the tin onto a serving dish.

Next is to start lining the tin with sponge fingers. Each time you do that, dip the biscuit BRIEFLY in the peach syrup.

Cut one end of the sponge fingers, and place them cut-end down to line round side of the tin. Use the leftover pieces and more biscuits if needed to line the bottom until the bottom is tightly packed.

Spread a generous layer of whipped cream over the sponge fingers base. Follow by a layer of sliced peaches. And then follow by another layer of sponge fingers (remember to dip in syrup first).

Top with another layer of whipped cream. And then cover with diced peaches.

Refrigerate for 4-6 hours before serving.

My charlotte didn't collapse when I remove the ring around it. If yours do, tie up with a thick ribbon, that should do the trick in keeping the biscuits in place.

Tips:
1. A big jelly mould can be used instead of ring tin. In this case, end the last layer with the sponge finger biscuits, cover with a plate, and unmould be inverting it.
2. Fruits like strawberries can be used in place of canned peach. In this case, make your own sweet syrup. Like making a syrup out of strawberry jam.
3. Custard can be used in place of whipped cream, though we've never tried that.

Chestnut Jam

Chestnuts feature very much in Corsican cooking (Corsica is an island off the South of France), so much so that they name an entire region after it (la Castagniccia).

I remember on my trip there a couple of years ago, we were delighted to find ourselves camping under a chestnut tree. While it wasn't the season for chestnuts, we picked some leaves, and Rémi's mom made a Corsican cheesecake on the leaves. C'est magnifique.

In French cooking, chestnuts are used in both savoury and sweet dishes. While not a Corsican dish, there is a famous French dessert named after its highest mountain. The Mont Blanc is made of mashed chestnuts shaped like its namesake and topped with chantilly cream at its peak. I guess you have to like chestnuts very much to enjoy this dessert.

One of our favourite toppings with natural plain yoghurt is chestnut jam. Talking about yoghurt, despite the variety of flavours on supermarket shelves, I reckon the healthiest and most versatile option is to buy plain ones, and create your own flavours using jams, honey, fruits etc. Unfortunately, unsweetened plain yoghurt is not always the most popular, and hence there are less brands to choose from.

The below chestnut jam recipe has been translated from the following website. The proportion of peeled chestnuts to sugar is supposed to be 1:1, but we find that overly sweet and halved the proportion. Not sure if it will affect the shelf life of the jam, but it will hopefully extend our lives with a reduced sugar diet.


Chestnut Jam (Confiture de Châtaignes)
makes 2 jars

500g chestnuts (weight after it has been shelled and peeled)
250g sugar (recipe calls for 500g, but we find it too sweet)
180ml water

Make slits on the chestnut shells. Boil for about 10 minutes so that the shells are softened and easier to peel. After removing all the shells, boil the whole chestnuts for another 45 minutes. Peel off the second layer of skin and remove rotten parts.

Weigh the final quantity of chestnuts. Adjust the amount of water and sugar to be used accordingly. Smash the chestnuts, but leave some chunkier pieces if you like a chunkier texture.

Dissolve sugar in water. Add the chestnuts and simmer for 20 minutes. Stir occasionally. Voilah, you now have chestnut jam.

It goes very well with plain natural yoghurt.

Make Bread with Rice Cooker

I love my rice cooker. It's amazing how many things you can cook with it, beside simple plain rice. Steam, stew, boil (for steamboat), and now bread!

Trust the Japanese to come up with this. Rémi tried and it worked!



Although our bread didn't rise to a perfect round, but it tasted soft and freshly good nonetheless.

To do this, you need to have, say an afternoon free. The actual kneading takes probably just half an hour, but you need time for the dough to rise, and to cook very slowly in the rice cooker. We reckon it's faster to pop the dough into the oven, but good for those who doesn't have an oven (aka my sister).

A note on the proportion of liquid used. We were initially confused by the unit of measurement used here -- cc. Found that it actually refers to cubic centimetres which is equivalent to millilitres (ml). Which is different from centilitres which the French are so used to.

And last weekend, we finally found a store selling slotted cutting boards for bread. Now we have a dedicated board for cutting our bread, and more importantly, collecting all those crumbs before they run all over the kitchen.

Steamed Chocolate Cake with Fruits

This recipe is for my sister, who horror of all horrors, doesn't have an oven in her current rented apartment! She does have a dishwasher which I'm hankering after, but I'll choose an oven over a dishwasher if I can only have one. And she has a part time helper to do the washing, so that makes her dishwasher quite redundant too. (Afternote: she doesn't have dishwasher. Worse than that, it's a steriliser!)

I have always thought steamed cake to be very Chinese, like the ones we always see on the altar table for the ancestors, or have auspicious names like 发糕, meaning rise cake (implying that your fortunes will rise like the cake).

So when I was browsing my cookbooks looking for caramelised apple recipe (Rémi bought 2 kgs of apples last Sunday, wanting to make apple tart but now looking more like making rotten apples). And voilah! Saw this steamed chocolate cake with apple recipe. And just nice, as I was steaming glutinous rice, can put my double layer steamer to better use, one heat, 2 dishes!

Actually, the recipe, from this cookbook titled "Appetizers, Finger Food, Buffets & Parties" (aka, a bible on entertaining) calls it a pudding. But the fluffy texture of the chocolate sponge makes it tastes like a cake.

It's very simple to do, just mix all the ingredients together. And fret not if you don't have a cake tin. Ceramic Chinese rice bowls will do the trick (though I used an Ikea bowl and ramekins, which didn't give as nice a round shape as a rice bowl would).

While the chocolate syrup gives the cake a luscious taste, the cake could also be eaten on its own, or topped with icing sugar, or rainbow rice. It's all up to the imagination and improvisation.

Steamed Chocolate Cake with Fruits
Serves 4
(I halved the quantity, and it was enough for 1 medium Ikea bowl and 2 small ramekins)

115g dark muscovado sugar (I used brown sugar)
1 apple (I think mixed berries or pear will go well. Recipe also calls for cranberries which I conveniently omited)
115g soft butter (to soften the cold hard butter in a minute, I 'warmed' my mixing bowl, with the cut butter in it over the steaming hot soup I was cooking)
2 eggs
75g plain flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
3 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder

Chocolate syrup
Alright, we absolutely did not follow the recipe here. Just melt pieces of dark chocolate bar with about 1 tablespoon butter. To make the chocolate more runny, add either cream or milk.

Prepare the steamer. Grease 4 heatproof bowls and sprinkle sugar with a little of sugar to coat all over. Tip out the excess sugar.

If using apple or pear, peel and core and cut into small pieces. Put them in equal portions into the prepared bowls.

To make the cake mixture, put sugar, butter, eggs, flour, baking powder and cocoa powder all together and beat well until combined and smooth. My mixture was quite sticky and didn't flow into the bowl as smoothly as I had wanted, but the cake still turned out well and shapely.

Spoon the mixture into the bowls and cover the top of each with a layer of greaseproof paper, followed by foil, tied securely with string. No rubber bands please.

Steam for about 45 minutes until the cake are well risen and firm. Well, I didn't check before turning off the heat, since the bowls are well covered.

Make the chocolate syrup.

Turn out the cake onto plates and top with the syrup.

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.

Tarte Tatin and ways to break your ceramic tart tin

We love tarts. So you can imagine us having tart tins of varying sizes. And the white ceramic ones are our favourite. They look nicer and tolerate the blade of the knife better.

Well, we are also old enough to know that they are fragile and break into a thousand pieces if we smash them on the floor. Still, in the last 6 months, we managed to break 3 of them. That's at a rate of one every 2 months!

Here's our three suggested ways to break your ceramic tart tin, without smashing it into a thousand pieces. If you do it correctly, it will just crack and break into 2 or 3 parts:

1. After unmoulding your tart straight from the oven, run the still very hot tin under cold water.

2. Put empty tin in a hot oven until it cracks.

3. Use the tin as a cooking pan and put it in direct contact with heat on the stove.


Despite having just mourned for our last broken tin, we still enjoyed the Tarte Tatin done by Rémi today. It is an upside down apple tart, a truly classic French dessert. Surprisingly, Camille's classic French cookbook doesn't have the recipe, so Rémi got the recipe from this website.

According to him, it's easy. Just don't use the ceramic tart tin to cook the caramel on the fire. And be generous with the amount of apple.

To serve, sprinkle cinnamon powder around the plate and add a scoop of vanilla ice cream. But the truly purist way of eating it is to add nothing to it.

Of Taro and Yam, Sweet Potato and Kumara - Yam cake and Onde Onde

Moving to a new country often means learning not just names of new friends, but also new names for familiar foods.

The best example is the prized and hence pricey abalone in Chinese cuisine, of which New Zealand is a key exporter. But on coming here, we didn't hear any mention of the shellfish until many months later, when we were told abalone is actually known by its Maori name Paua here. Now that makes sense.

Then, I decided to make yam cake when I saw yam on sale at the market (even though the tuber look vastly different from what I know and much smaller). The result wasn't encouraging and we fed the bin more than ourselves with it.

So what is known as Yam in Singapore and Malaysia is known here as Taro (although we use the word "taro" back home too). Back home, Taro is used in sweet desserts like the bubor chacha, as well as savoury dishes such as claypot yam rice.
Now, Yam Cake is not a sweet cake, but a savoury kueh you find in dim sum restaurants. It is also eaten at breakfast by Chinese in Singapore. Taro or yam, its Chinese name 芋头糕 remains the same.

And while I was lamenting about the absence of Sweet Potatoes in Wellington, I was to discover that they are actually everywhere all year round. By a different name that is - Kumara. While Kiwis eat kumara fries here, Singaporeans like Sweet Potato Fritters, Sweet Potato and Ginger Soup (it's a sweet dessert), Sweet Potato Porridge, and yes, Sweet Potato balls in the form of Onde Onde. It's a Malay or Indonesian sweets, with palm sugar wrapped in a dough made from sweet potato and flour.

Yesterday, I finally satisfied my yam and sweet potato cravings at one go by making yam cake and onde onde. Kept me busy but the result was rewarding.

I did the Yam Cake by combining 2 recipes from my high school textbooks. Not chemistry but home economics, and food and nutrition (which I did for my O levels). So, it's simple enough for a 14 year old to make, which I did when I was 14.

Yam (or Taro) Cake 芋头糕
Serves 4-6

About 200g Taro, peeled and diced
125g rice flour
1 tablespoon corn flour
2 cups stock
half cup dried prawns, pound
4 shallots, sliced
Vegetable oil

Seasonings:
1 tablespoon light soya sauce
salt and pepper
1 teaspoon sugar

Classic garnish:
Chopped spring onions or coriander leaves
Fresh red chillies, chopped
Fried shallots

Heat oil in a frying pan. Fry the shallots until light brown. Add the pounded dried prawns and fry until fragrant. Add the yam and seasoning. Fry for a minute and remove from heat.

Put rice flour and corn flour in a saucepan. Gradually add in the stock, stirring well until the mixture thickens slightly. I'm assuming it's done over low or medium heat here. Stir until there's no lumps.

Add in the fried ingredients and mix well.

Grease a cake tin. Pour in the mixture and steam for 45 minutes to 1 hour, until it is firm. Try using a skewer to poke through the middle. If it comes out clean, should be good.

Slice, garnish (with whatever you have) and serve with chili sauce.

To reheat for eating, say the next day, you could either steam again, or pan-fried the sliced pieces. Pan-frying gives it a delightful crispy outer layer.

Onde Onde

My sister has a pretty good recipe here.

Like her, I'm not a big fan of adding food colourings, so the colour of my sweet potato balls reflected the pale yellow variety of kumara I used. The traditional colour of Onde Onde is green. Natural way is to extract the green juice out of pandan leaves.

I also did a few tweaks to her recipe. Replaced glutinous rice flour with a combination of plain flour and tapioca flour (2 tablespoon plain and 1 tablespoon tapioca flour). Add the flour gradually, so that I ended up using only two-thirds of the flour mixture, and the dough was elastic enough to be rolled into balls.

For grated coconut, in New Zealand, it is possible to buy a whole coconut imported from Fiji, find a big chopper or hammer to smash it open without spilling out the juice, and then grate the white flesh inside painstakingly. Well, that's just one possibility.

The less fresh but easier option that I experimented with pretty good results is to use dessicated coconut. Pour a little boiling water, teaspoon by teaspoon until it puffs up and looks almost fresh!

Octopus Stew in Red Wine

I would think our 'portion control' exercise has been quite successful. We definitely have comparatively smaller appetites than the usual Kiwis. We struggle to finish our main course in restaurants (well, the servings at restaurants are huge here), get full by sharing between two of us, a main course and a starter dish.

Back at home, we hardly eat outside mealtimes. We seldom have space for the traditional French course of cheese (that is served before dessert).

For dinner, we have moderate servings. Like sharing a tuna steak or a lamb shank (it's also so that we can enjoy a bigger proportion of vegetable to meat). Last night, dinner was octopus stew. To be more precise, we shared a tentacle of an octopus. Hmmm...this is making us look like Scrooge. Well, a smaller main course serving allows us to have a hearty salad for starter, and space for a sinful dessert.

The stew was done entirely by Rémi, who wanted to reminisce the octopus stew he used to have during his Corsican summer holiday. Recipe comes from our Ultimate Fish cookbook. Original cooking time was supposed to be more than two hours, but we halved it and the meat was just as tender as we could have wished for.

Octopus Stew in Red Wine
Serves two

Prepared octopus (up to you to choose how many tentacles is enough to feed you)
2 onions, sliced
1 bay leaf
2 ripe tomatoes (or use canned whole peeled tomatoes)
olive oil
2-3 garlic cloves
sprinkle of castor sugar
sprinkle of rosemary or oregano
1 tablespoon fresh parsley
70ml red wine
1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
chopped fresh herbs, eg basil for garnish

Begin by tenderising the octopus meat, after cleaning and skinning it. Place the meat in a plastic bag, and beat well with the back of a knife or rolling pin.

Put the octopus in a large pan of gently simmering water with one quarter of the sliced onions and bay leaves. Cook gently for 1 hour (we halved the cooking time here).

Peel skin off tomatoes by first putting them into boiling water for 30 seconds and running under cold water. Chopped up the fresh.

Drain the octopus and cut into bitesize pieces.

Heat oil in pan, and fry the octopus, remaining onions, crushed garlic and cook over low heat. Stir occasionally for 3 minutes.

Add tomatoes, sugar, rosemary or oregano, parsley, red wine and vinegar. Stir continuously for about 5 minutes until the mixture is thickened.

Cover and cook over low heat for about 1.5 hours (we did it for about half an hour only), until the sauce is thickened and the octopus is tender.

Garnish with fresh herbs and serve with couscous or rice or warm bread.

St Remy Tuna

After whining for close to two weeks about being sick, I'm finally well enough to do some bit of research and development in the kitchen. Before that, meals are almost about Chinese stirfrys and soup with rice. Very straightforward. And a lot of fish too, cooked mainly by steaming.

The fish department in Wellington supermarkets generally has quite limited variety. So when we saw tuna steaks for sale the night before, we couldn't resist trying something different. I do not like canned tuna, but love tuna sashimi. But we also make it a point not to eat tuna too often, as this is one fish that has suffered from overfishing.

Found this "St Remy Tuna" recipe from my ultimate fish cookbook. It's surprisingly fast and easy to cook. It was the side dishes of fried kumara (sweet potato) sticks and boiled french beans that took us longer to cook. St Rémy is a village in Provence, France, which has nothing to do with Rémi.

And dessert was Apple Yoghurt Cake. No doubt my appetite has come back.

St Rémy Tuna
Serves two

2 tuna steaks
about 1 tablespoon olive oil
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
2 tablespoons white wine
1-2 ripe plum tomatoes, peeled, deseeded and chopped
dried herbs de provence, or Italian mixed herbs. Or just simply a mixture of thyme, rosemary, oregano etc.
salt and ground black pepper

Season the tuna steaks with salt and pepper.

Start cooking just before you are ready to serve, like get your side dishes ready first, as the tuna steak and sauce takes only about 10 minutes to cook.

Set a frying pan over high heat until very hot, add the oil and coat more or less evenly around the pan. Add the tuna steaks and press down gently. Reduce heat to medium and cook for about 6-8 minutes or less. Turn only once, until the centre is just slightly pink. Do not overcook.

Transfer tuna to a warm serving plate and cover to keep warm.

Then quickly add garlic to the pan and cook for a few seconds. Pour in the wine, bring to boil until it is reduced by half.

Add the chopped tomatoes and dried herbs. Cook for 2-3 minutes, season with pepper and pour over the fish steaks.

Serve with potatoes and french beans.

Savoury Crumble of Tomatoes, Provencal style

One of our 拿手好菜 (specialty) is apple crumble. When we saw this cookbook offering over 30 both sweet and savoury crumble recipes in Grenoble, we can't resist not buying. Not even the fact that all recipes are in French (better for me, let Rémi do all the cooking). And it's affordable at 7 euros, unlike those expensive celebrity chef cookbooks (I will blog about how to find good cheap cookbooks another time).

Published by Solar Editions, the book on Crumbles is part of a series of yummy looking small cookbooks. There are also books all about French charlottes, crêpes, gratin, souffles, crèmes brûlées, pâtes, to name a few. I almost wish to buy half the collection.

So on Sunday, we made a whooping three different types of crumbles at one go: tomatoes, courgettes and mixed berries. I conveniently helped with small little tasks, since I can't read the instructions.

Introducing the tomatoes crumble, which we liked most among the three. Not that the other two are bad.

Tomatoes Crumble, Provencal style
8 tomatoes
2 garlic
fresh parsley
olive oil
salt

Crumble:
200g breadcrumbs
3 tablespoons olive oil
pepper

Cut the tomatoes in half. Scoop out the flesh and drain away seeds and mince the remaining flesh.

Set aside olive oil for crumble in freezer until it thickens.

Preheat oven at 180 degree Celsius.

Chopped garlic and parsley. Mix all together with minced tomato flesh. Season with salt and olive. Spoon into the tomato halves.

To make the crumble, mix breadcrumbs with the semi-frozen olive oil. If you're making crumbs from fresh bread, toast first before tearing the bread into small pieces.

Sprinkle the crumbs over the tomatoes and bake for about 20 minutes.

Mountain food, Swedish food, holiday food

Finally back from my long break. The holiday is mainly about spending time with family. But we also get to eat lots of good food, reminisce lost tastes and discover new delights.

In Singapore, it's more about gorging ourselves with as much local delicacies as possible without suffering from indigestion. Managed laksa, nasi lemak, dou hua (sweet beancurd), steamboat at home, xiaolongbao, bak chor mee, to name a few. Also grabbed 2 new cookbooks about local desserts and claypot dishes.

Over in France, Rémi's mom cooked a lot of mountain food in Meribel, an alpine ski village where we spent one week. Like the Tartiflette, a specialty of the Savoie region. To make it, boil potatoes, peel and slice, top with crispy bacon and generous blocks of the Reblochon cheese and bake. It was yummy. Other hearty meals include cassoulet, a casserole containing meat (eg pork sausages, duck and mutton) and white haricot beans, wild boar stew and more.

In Sweden, the Semla (above) is a must-have at Swedish cafes. A wheat bun stuffed with almond paste and whipped cream, it is traditionally eaten before fasting in Lent starts. They are available in bakeries and shops between Christmas and Easter.

Then, there's the lingonberry, that is eaten with almost everything, from toast, syrup to meatballs. I managed to try this Swedish bak-zhang (meat dumpling), like a potato meatball accompanied with lingonberry. Not bad.

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.

Confiture d'abricots

Our jam making experiment continues...

Being penny-wise when it comes to jam-making, Rémi calculated that the cost of making 4 bottles of jam is cheaper than what we paid for 1 bottle.

Making your own jam can be extremely mind blowing. May even be revolting to the health conscious, when right in front of your eyes, you see the jam-maker pouring one whole pack of sugar into the pan, which were to later concentrate into four tiny bottles. So it's more than being penny-wise to spread your jam as thinly as possible.

While Rémi may disagree with me, as he still considers his strawberry jam experiment a success, I firmly believe that his apricot jam was much much better than the strawberry one. In fact, it's as good, or even better than what you can find on supermarket shelves. So if you're going to make jam for the first time, I reckon making apricot jam is a safer guarantee of success, than strawberry. We don't know about other fruits until we try them.

The recipe comes from Rémi's maman.

Apricot Jam (Confiture d'abricots)
Makes approx. four 300ml bottles

1 kg apricots
750g sugar
125ml water

Remove the pits from the apricots. Cut into quarter slices.

Dissolve sugar in water and simmer for 10 minutes over medium heat.

Add the apricot slices and continue to simmer for about 30 minutes or until the syrup has thickened and mixture has set. To check, spoon some jam onto a cold plate, if it moves very little, it is done.

Pour immediately into clean, sterilised bottles. Seal immediately and invert the jar to cool down. Check if seal is airtight by pressing the centre. If it flexes, refrigerate and use like any opened jam you buy.

Peaches Poached in Red Wine

If you have leftover red wine that's too good to throw away, but too bad to drink, the rule is to keep it.

You can always trust the French to find a happy solution to their excess, undrinkable wine. They come up with this home device called a vinaigrier, a big clay pot where they pour their unwanted wine from the top and drains good wine vinegar through a tap at the bottom. I would imagine it takes more than the blink of an eye to ferment wine into vinegar, but the idea is there.

Anyway, I do not possess a vinaigrier, but I do always keep a bottle of red and a bottle of white for cooking. Cheap one that is.

And yesterday, being the first day of Chinese New Year, I was determined to have a nice dinner, after sorely missing the festive tradition of feasting the night before. To digress more than a bit, we had wanted to fish for abalone and sea urchin on Sunday but luck wasn't with us. Ended up buying a pack of fresh sea urchins at the supermarket. It tasted wonderful with just bread and butter, but come on, it's New Year's eve which called for a better feast beyond bread and butter. So we followed a random recipe found on internet, cooked pasta with white wine sauce and sea urchins. It totally ruined the strong, delectable taste of the sea urchin and left me extremely unsatisfied.

So I was determined to have a good dinner last night. Nothing fancy, just some French style 'garlicy' roast lamb from Camille and Jamie's rosemary crispy baked potatoes, which made me happy to want to try again and post the recipe next time. And there must be a nice conclusion to the dinner.

Camille came to the rescue once again. Strangely, this cookbook in French was a present for Rémi, but I seem to be using it more than ever. Frequent enough to understand enough of the ingredients list before I tediously type the steps of suitable recipes on google translate.

This recipe is a must try, because it's easy and amazingly wonderful. A scoop of vanilla ice-cream may bring you to the moon, but as we didn't have any last night, we're still on earth today.

Peaches Poached in Red Wine (Soupe de Péches au Vin Rouge)
Serves two

2 ripe peaches (Idea is 1 big peach per person, so it's straight forward to adjust the quantity)
2 tablespoons sugar (you may like to reduce your sugarly sins here)

120ml red wine
Another 4 teaspoons of sugar (or 4 sugar cubes)
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon powder or 1/4 cinnamon stick

Peel the skin off the peaches and remove the pits. Cut into halves or quarters. Coat the peaches with the big spoons of sugar. Leave in a cool place for an hour.

After an hour or so, you would see a sweet syrup forming around the peach slices. This peachy syrup is crucial in enhancing the taste of the red wine syrup, so make sure you don't skip the first step.

Then, boil the red wine and the 4 teaspoons of sugar and cinnamon for 10 minutes over low heat. Add the peach slices and the sweet peachy syrup into the wine syrup. Continue poaching for about 15 minutes. The wine syrup should have reduced by about half.

When it's done, leave to cool in fridge before serving. Wonderful.

It should be possible to replace peach with pear.

Baba au Rum without Rum

Contrary to its name, this cake is not an Arabic cake invented by Ali Baba. Neither is it a Peranakan cake (early Chinese settlers in the Malay peninsular who intermarried with locals and their male offsprings are known as Babas).

As history goes, the Baba Rum cake is linked to this deposed Polish king in France. In exile in Lorraine, he found the Kugelhopf (a cake roughly similar to the baba and common in Alsace-Lorraine) too dry for his liking and soaked it in rum. Delighted with the resulting taste, he named it after Ali Baba. Or at least, this is one version of the origins of the cake.

Traditionally, the cake is made using yeast as the rising agent, but this recipe that I had from Rémi's mom can be substituted using baking powder, which makes it more manageable. In order for children to enjoy the cake without breaking the alcohol age limit, I simply omitted rum in the sugar syrup, and had in place a sweet plum cum coffee syrup from my coffee encyclopedia cookbook.

Baba au Rum without rum
serves six

125g flour
60g sugar
4 eggs, whites separated, brought to room temperature
1 tablespoon milk
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 hazelnut size of butter (as translated from the French recipe)

Syrup
4 plums, stoned and thickly sliced
100g sugar
120ml water
120ml coffee

Beat egg yolks and sugar together until the mixture becomes pale yellow in colour. Add milk, flour and baking powder.

Preheat oven at 160 degrees Celsius.

Beat egg whites until firm and stiff. If the eggs come from the fridge, make sure to bring them to room temperature before making the meringue.

Fold the egg white mixture into the sugar and yolk mixture. I found this part tricky and used the electric beater, but instead causing the resulting cake texture to be denser than desired. As the sugar and yolk mixture is very thick, while the egg white mixture is very delicate, a more proper way is to scoop 1 or 2 spoons of meringue and stir strongly into the yolk mixture, so that the texture becomes smoother. After that, fold the rest of the meringue gently into the yolk mixture.

Butter the ring cake mould generously.

Pour cake mixture into the cake mould and bake for about 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, prepare the syrup. Melt 25g sugar in water. Add the plums and cook over low heat until the plums are almost tender. Remove plums and add the remaining sugar and coffee to the pan. Heat until sugar are dissolved but do not boil.

When the baba cake is cooked, leave to cool for 5 minutes. Then dunk the cake in the warm syrup until well soaked. Let it drip dry on a wire rack or whatever.

To serve, fill the middle with fruits, like the plums and topped with cherries. Spoon extra syrup over the cake and serve with Chantilly cream or plain yoghurt.

As seen from the picture on left (cake done by Rémi's mom), after soaking the cake with sweet syrup, you could also pour Chantilly cream over the whole cake and fill the inside with strawberries and raspberries. This is the expert version.

Tips:
It is also possible to use canned peach or apricot for this cake, and use the syrup straight from the can.

Down-to-earth, traditional Macarons de Nancy

My second Macaron attempt has been more successful. This time round, I ditched fanciness and opted to make more ordinarily-looking macarons, which is realistically more achievable for an amateur cook like me.

Macarons de Nancy is a specialty of Nancy (a city in France), said to be baked by nuns seeking refuge in the region during the tumultuous French Revolution. It's also made up of egg whites and ground almonds but less fanciful than the colourful sandwiched macarons common in Parisian patisseries.

I got my recipe from Camille's French classic cookbook, but did not follow through her exact proportion. Learned also that in French, when they said "sucre en poudre", literally translated as powdered sugar, they don't mean icing sugar, but just fine castor sugar. Well, my icing sugared macarons still tasted yummy, and added some Chinese New Year festive spirit to my kitchen routine.

Macarons de Nancy
makes about 30 cookies

150g ground almond
150g fine castor sugar
2 egg whites
2 tablespoons clear honey
a few drops of almond essence

Mix ground almond and sugar together. Add the rest of the ingredients, mixing well with a wooden spoon. Original recipe asks for 200g of ground almond and sugar, but as I was using normal size eggs, and also not having enough ground almond, I find 150g sufficient. But be prepared to adjust quantity up if your dough is too liquid.

Refrigerate for 3 hours.

Preheat oven to 120 degrees Celsius.

Line a cookie tray with baking paper. Take a pinch of the dough and roll into a small ball. Flatten on the tray. Space each cookie about one inch apart to allow room for expansion.

Bake for 20 to 30 minutes, until golden brown. Leave to cool for 5 minutes before transferring them to air tight container. The inside should be a bit soft and chewy.

It is possible to substitute ground almonds with dessicated coconuts.

Experimenting with Chocolate Macarons

I haven't been keen on trying out macarons for a long long time, despite requests to do so. Yes, they are very French. And they look so daintily pretty and dainty looking desserts are not something I am good at. I do not also like to use food colouring. I am averse to eating food that looks too artificially coloured, and sometimes go to the extreme of pinching away that little red dot that marks a char siew bun.

Finally, my deeply frozen egg whites were calling out to me to use them, and I bravely decided to attempt making macarons all on my own. I faithfully stuck to the recipe and instructions by David Lebovitz, an American pastry chef in Paris, whose blog I've enjoyed reading since discovering it.

It was tedious and messy to pipe out the paste without a proper pastry bag and tip, especially without my chief food licker to help clean up the remaining batter stuck to bowls and spoons. As seen from the photo, my attempt wasn't too successful either. All of them cracked when they should not be, and they didn't have the 'foot'. As each oven has its own quirks and temperament, I may have overbaked one minute too long or 10 degrees too hot. So my macarons weren't crispy outside and soft inside, as I think it should have been (but I can't really remember how it should be, this is going to be on my list of things to eat for my upcoming trip to France). For the filling, I used this delicious honey and hazelnut spread bought during our South Island trip.

I also discovered that the most original macarons come from Nancy region, made by nuns. Camille's cookbook has a recipe, and I'm still contemplating whether to make it today with my remaining 2 egg whites.

Cheesy way of using up leftover rice

I've just found a cheesy way of using up my leftover fried rice, and pleasantly pleased with the result. Now I do not have to always cook Chinese fried rice to use up my leftover grains.

I found this recipe "Peppers with Rice, Feta and Pine Nut Stuffing" in my The World Encyclopedia of Cheese, which I'm going to add to my list of frequently used cookbook. Long neglected, it actually consists of a treasure trove of useful, easy to cook recipes.

I had quite liberally adjusted the recipe to my needs, which worked very well. Other than capsicums (bell peppers), it is possible to use tomatoes, portobello mushrooms or zucchini to stuff the rice in. And for those without an oven, you could possibly forgo the baking stage. The rice tasted good even before baking.

Peppers stuffed with Rice, Feta and Pine Nuts
Serves two

2-3 large bell peppers (mixture of colours would be good)
half to one cup leftover rice (or whatever you have)
1 carrot, grated
1 onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1 tomato, chopped
2 large button mushrooms, chopped
sprinkle of pine nuts
sprinkle of raisins
feta cheese, crumbled (quantity depending on how cheesy you want your rice to be)
1 tablespoon fresh parsley, chopped
sprinkle of freshly grated Parmesan cheese
salt and ground black pepper

Preheat oven to 190 degrees Celsius.

Cut the peppers in half lengthways and remove the cores and seeds. Bring a large saucepan of water to boil. Add the peppers and boil for 5 minutes. Remove and leave to drain upside down. If you're unsure of how many peppers you need to hold your rice stuffing (like me), you could hang on and blanch whatever number of peppers you need only after frying the rice.

Heat olive oil and sauté the onions and garlic until onions are softened. Stir in the mushrooms, carrot and tomatoes. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Cook for about 5 minutes, then mix in the rice, feta, pine nuts, raisins and parsley.

Spoon the mixture into the blanched peppers, sprinkle over the Parmesan and bake for 20 minutes.

If using tomatoes to stuff the rice, spoon out the flesh of tomatoes. Keep the flesh for frying with the carrots and rice.