What we've been up to + Pear and chocolate Cake

The spread of desserts here partly explain the absence from blogging. I've been cooking, eating, then more cooking and eating. Above picture courtesy of M, whom we had the pleasure of attending the party celebrating his engagement with LC.

Our contributions include the peachy Charlotte, the tangy Lemon Tart, and Camille's Fondant au Chocolat.

And here's a useful tip, for those who wants to make heart shaped cake like me, but couldn't find a heart shaped tin after visiting some 6 stores in the city.



Besides Camille's fondant, Rémi has also started the first experiment to find the right way to make a volcanic like French melted chocolate cake. Meaning when you use your dessertspoon to break the little warm cake, the chocolate just oozes out like hot lava.

The idea is to bake the chocolate cake for a short time in a hot oven, so that the inside doesn't cook completely and hence it's still moist. We hope to try a few variations of recipes Rémi found on French websites. By the way, the white patches on the cake is my lame attempt at dusting icing sugar on the cake, they are not the results of a mouldy cake.



And finally, the ugliest looking cake of this whole lot, because me and Rémi are too busy with savouring it while it's still piping hot from the oven and only bother to take photo after the second day.

The recipe comes from Christelle Le Ru. First time we made it for the Chinese New Year reunion dinner, it was sooooo good that despite having a 101% full stomach, I went on for a second and possibly third slice. Second time, we couldn't repeat the success but not too bad still. Third time, yum yum. So I've decided to post the recipe, for my bro who have tried the first yummy attempt. The precious highly recommended recipe book was from them afterall.

Pear and Chocolate Cake
Serves 5? I've halved the proportion and the cake last us 3 desserts for 2.

2 eggs
100g sugar
a few drops of vanilla essence
85g melted butter
135g flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
3 sweet pears
100g dark chocolate
sliced almonds

Preheat oven to 160 degrees Celsius. Grease a loaf tin.

Beat eggs, sugar and vanilla essenee together. Add the melted butter and mix until everything is well combined. Fold the flour and baking powder into the cake mixture.

Peel and cut the pears into slices or cubes. Break the chocolate into small pieces. Stir the pears and chocolate pieces into the cake mixture. Do not worry if you find that there seems to be more pear than cake. The juiciness of the pears gives a moist sweet texture to the cake.

Pour into the tin and scattered sliced almonds over the top. Bake for 40 to 45 minutes. The cake is especially nice when it's warm, with the chocolate partially melted inside.

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.

Orange Duck and Orange Cake

At 18 degrees Celsius, I was told that my rented apartment's internal temperature before switching on heater is warm. It is afterall the standard temperature recommended by the World Health Organisation. The average indoor temperature of a Kiwi home in winter is 16 degrees Celsius. And according to my classmate in French class, she can even blow fog out of her breath in her lounge, if the curtains over the huge floor-to-ceiling windows are not drawn in time.

Despite being a developed country, it is universally acknowledged that Kiwi homes' insulation and heating are third world standards. I read that the country has the worst winter mortality rates in the developed world, and high pneumonia, asthma or whatever rates due to damp cold houses.

If you think that these cold hard truths will make them wake up and improve their home insulation, you're wrong. The standard Kiwi response is to ask complaining foreigners to "toughen up" or otherwise "go home". They sure are a tough species, when I see children wearing shorts and walking barefooted outside, while I am huddled up with scarf, gloves, 3-4 layers of warm clothes and a thick jacket.

Being of tropical breed, I definitely desire to have warmer house. Especially after staying one week in my brother's warm apartment in Sweden when it's minus five outside. So warm that you can walk around barefooted, wear tees and shorts indoor. Well, in my Kiwi home, I wear a jumper even in summer.

So cooking stews and baking will become a favourite winter pastime of mine to warm the house further. Just don't show me the electricity bill.

And yes, I finally found duck meat being sold in a gourmet supermarket. So I was determined to make a French duck dish. My original plan was to cook duck confit, but after discovering the horrendous amount of fats used (basically, you need enough fat to cover your meat), I opted to cook the more modestly oiled "Carnard à l'orange". Dessert came in the form of "Gateau à l'orange", an orange caked soaked in orange juice.

The duck recipe was adjusted from Camille's French classic cookbook. Cake recipe was recited by Rémi's mother from her memory.

Duck of Orange (Canard à l'orange)
Serves 6 (Serves 2)
Note: Original recipe used one whole duck, whereas I used only 2 drumsticks, enough for 2 persons. Quantity quoted in brackets are my very rough guestimations.

1 big duck about 2.5kg (2 duck drumsticks)
20g butter (1 spoonful, you decide how less sinful you want your dish to be)
1 carrot (1 small, more veg is always healthy)
1 onion (1 too, since onions has so many health benefits)
200ml white wine (about 80ml, I just poured randomly actually)
3 oranges (1 orange)
1 glass of chicken stock (less than half a glass)
salt and pepper

Slice onion and carrot thinly. In a casserole or pan, heat butter, add onion and carrot. Brown the duck on all sides. Add salt and pepper.

When the duck is well coloured on all sides, moisten with white wine. Cook for about 10 minutes and pour over the chicken stock. Cover and simmer for 1 hour.

Remove the zest of one orange (or half) coarsely. Blanch for 1 minute in boiling water (a step that I skipped conveniently). Squeeze the juice off the orange (or half) and cut the other 2 oranges (or the other half) into thin slices.

After one hour of simmering, pour orange juice, zest and slices into the casserole. Stir gently. Remove cover and turn up the heat to reduce the juice, caramelise the orange and duck skin.

My resulting duck drumstick was fat and juicy, and the orange slices so soft it's almost like marmalade.

Serve with rosemary roasted potato cubes, or salad.

Orange Cake (Gateau à l'orange)

The recipe was given from memory, so not very precise. I will try making it again another way for improvements.

4 eggs, yolks and whites separated
120g plain flour + 1 teaspoon baking powder
120g sugar
60g butter, melted
4 oranges, extract zest from 2 oranges, and juice from all 4

Preheat oven at 180 degrees Celsius. Prepare a cake tin, lined with greaseproof paper (I was too lazy to do that, and almost couldn't unmould my cake)

Beat egg yolks and sugar together. Add flour and melted butter and zests.

Beat egg whites until it becomes stiff and firm (make sure the eggs are at room temperature before beating). I find that after adding the flour, the mixture becomes rather dry. So a tip from Nigella, the celebrity chef who likes to fling her hair is to take a big spoon of the egg white meringue mixture, stir strongly into the flour batter to smoothen the texture. Then fold the rest of the stiff egg whites gently.

Pour the cake mixture into the prepared cake tin and bake for 25 minutes, or until golden brown and a skewer poked into the centre comes out clean.

Pour orange juice onto the cake, let it soak through. You may like to unmould the cake first.

Serve cold.

Crumble of Lemon Curd

The first dish that Rémi tried to impress me with was homemade lemon curd. Or rather, a 2-week old lemon curd on bread. Errr...well, I can say that I wasn't too impressed. Moreover, it was a tad too sour for me.

Well, if he had known or seen this Lemon Curd Crumble recipe, he would have scored more points then.

The recipe came from the Crumble cookbook by Martine Lizambard, published by Solar Editions. I had decided to made it as I had some leftover crumbles from making an apple crumble.

Sometimes, one dish lead to another. From the first apple crumble late last week, we went on to have a second one, and now the lemon curd crumble. But because of a mistake I made when mixing cream and eggs together, I was left with an extra portion of cream and eggs mixture. So I made a quiche out of that earlier today. This will leave me with extra tart dough, so the apple crumble misjudgment is going to end with a pear tart tonight.

Lemon Curd Crumble (Crumble de Citron)
Serves 4 (I've divided the quantity, wanting to make just 2 cups, but still having enough lemon curd for 4 small ramekins)

100ml lemon juice (from about 2 lemons)
70g sugar
2 teaspoon cornflour
2 eggs
100ml liquid cream
1 branch of lemon verbena (it's something new to me, I tried replacing this with mint leaves)
Butter for greasing the ramekins

Crumble
60g flour
35g butter
40g sugar

According to the recipe, you may replace cream with whole milk yoghurt or white cheese. But I stuck to the cream.

Beat the cold cream with a hand beater until it becomes creamy (do not overbeat until it becomes chantilly cream). Mix the eggs in.

Boil the lemon juice with sugar for 2-3 minutes until sugar dissolves. Remove from heat and add the verbena leaves. Cover and let the leaves infuse for a while. I had used 6 small mint leaves, but probably didn't use enough to make much of an impression. Anyway, discard the leaves and let the lemon syrup cool down.

Mix the lemon syrup with cornflour. Add the cream and egg mixture to it. Cook the mixture over low heat (or bain marie), stirring non-stop until it thickens. It took quite a while for the mixture to thicken (until it almost become like lemon curd), but do not be tempted to increase the heat, as you will end up with scramble eggs.

Preheat the oven to 160 degrees Celsius. Grease 4 ramekins and pour the lemon curd mixture into it.

Prepare the crumble. Using your fingertips, rub the cold butter into the flour until it resembles crumbles. Add sugar and mix well.

Bake the lemon mixture for 15 minutes, or more, until you see the surface browning and solidifying. Sprinkle the crumbles very gently on the surface and return to over for another 15-20 minutes, until the crumbles are golden brown.

Serve cold or just warm.

Walnut Tart and thoughts about getting dessert proportion right

I'm thought of being a wee bit philosophical today and get back to the roots of dessert.

A quick check on google shows many dictionaries defining dessert as the last course of a meal, normally a sweet dish.

Cuisine Net further explains that it came from the French word "desservir", meaning "to clear the table": "At a Medieval banquet, a table was laid with fantastic dishes, all of which were removed before the arrival of the last course. Dessert was originally quite light, and it was intended to clear the palate -- and the state of mind."

And so the French in Rémi says, we must always have dessert after every meal. Even if it's just a little cup of yoghurt.

What about the Chinese desserts? They are not just served at the end of meals, but also as snacks or with tea during the day.

Wikipedia's entry on Chinese desserts quite aptly classify them into biscuits, candies, rice-based snacks, jellies and soups. So some Chinese desserts are more suited for consumption as tea time snacks than as the last course of a meal.

But French or Chinese desserts, the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility still applies. A light dessert gives a pleasurable conclusion to a hearty meal. Too much of it spoils the state of mind and stomach.

Take the picture of an apple tart on the right by Rémi. He had it on a trip to California a year ago and swore that it tasted horrible. Not a surprise, he didn't finish the overly humongous pastry. And you don't order an apple tart to eat mostly pastry crust.

Just like the Chinese mooncake, to those who complain that it taste horribly sweet, they must have tried to eat the whole biscuit when the right way to eating it is at most a quarter slice with a cup of Chinese tea.

And if you see a fruit tart with super thick crust or too much custard filling, beware. More likely, the chef is trying to get away with having less fruits with more crust.

The Walnut Tart below comes from Camille's classic French cookbook. I had wanted to make walnut tart for a long time since trying it at the Bordeaux Bakery in Wellington. I have adjusted the quantity slightly to make the tart more nutty. And as the tart is quite hearty, a small slice per serving gives a more satisfactory conclusion to a meal.

Walnut and Honey Tart (Tarte au Miel et aux Noix)


about 200g walnuts (more if necessary)
150ml liquid cream
50g butter
50g brown sugar
100g honey (try to use a strongly flavoured honey, such as bush honey, mountain honey or Corsican honey)

Sweet pastry dough (pâte sucrée or pâte sablée)
50g white sugar
1 egg
125g melted unsalted butter
270g flour

To make the dough, mix sugar, egg, butter together. Stir hard with a spoon and add flour. As the egg mixture thickens to a dough, use your hands to knead into a smooth dough. Chill for 15 minutes.

Preheat oven to 200C.

Press the pastry with your fingers over the base and sides of the greased tin. Poke all over with a fork.

Mix the butter with the sugar. It may be easier to allow the butter to soften sufficiently before you blend them together. Add the walnuts pieces. Follow by the honey and cream. Mix well. You may like to add more walnuts if you find filling too creamy. The idea is to cover the whole tart base with the nuts.

Spread walnut and honey filling on the tart. Recipe says bake for 40 minutes, but my nuts were burning after 20 minutes. So do watch out.

Serve when the tart has cooled.

The tart keeps well for a few days.

Almost given up on croissant

No, I won't attempt to learn how to make croissant, it's something that even professionals in Wellington fail to make it right. Rémi has almost given up on buying croissants here after many disappointments from supermarket shelves and French cafes.

Pictured above is a Pear and Almond Tart I attempted from my favourite Christelle Le Ru's dessert cookbook. It doesn't quite look like tart because I have kept the shape squarish. It's made using ready made frozen puff pastry bought from the supermarket, so the only work needed is to cut the pears, cook it (though my pears were so deliciously ripe that I should have skipped this step on hindsight). The other work is to make the almond cream, which I will share here, because it is so wickedly good, that we used sandwiched the remainder in croissants. The cream managed to transform the dry plain croissants, making a wonderful warm breakfast on a cold autumn morning.

Almond Cream
To go with croissants, or use in pear tart or both

60g yoghurt
70g sugar
70g ground almond
1 egg
70g melted unsalted butter
a few drops of vanilla essence
rind of half a lemon

Mix yoghurt, sugar and ground almonds in a bowl. Add egg, butter, vanilla essence and lemon zest and mix well.

One can reduce amount of butter and sugar accordingly to suit his/her dietary preference. It's quite a lot of butter here especially.

To use with croissant, sandwiched the croissant with cream, top with some almond flakes and bake for about 15 minutes over low heat (160C perhaps).

Steamed Buns and my guide to finding affordable cookbooks on Chinese cooking

Rémi the breadmaker has hijacked my bao project. He loves to eat Chinese steamed buns so much. So he couldn't resist not making them when he heard about my intention to do so.

I have two steamed bun recipes, but eventually chose the one from "Chinese Desserts 100" written by Winnie jie (I trust the Cantonese to be good dim sum makers). I bought it a bookstore in Hong Kong's airport while on transit. Rémi's Mandarin is certainly still as good as my Malay, so he will not be able to read the Chinese instructions. But fret not, like many of my Chinese cookbooks, the recipes are presented in both English and Chinese.

It's a paradox, but bilingual cookbooks that require the extra effort of translating recipes are actually cheaper than English ones. Even the Chinese version of cookbooks by celebrity chefs are much cheaper than the original English versions found in the same bookstore.

Anyway, I am not too interested in cookbooks by celebrity chefs nowadays but prefer more affordable ones by seemingly anonymous homecooks. To cater to the growing English market, more and more Chinese and Malaysian cookbooks are bilingual. It doesn't matter if you don't understand a single Chinese word. Just let yourself be guided by the accompanying deliciously shot food photos and be tolerant of the less than perfect English on the recipes. The recipes work!

So for $10-$20, you have a wider range of cookbooks on all kinds of Chinese, Malay/Indonesian and Peranakan cuisines to choose from than if you stick to purely English cookbooks.


Steamed bun (包)
Makes about 16 small or 10 medium buns

Basic bun dough:
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon yeast
2 teaspoon sugar
1 tablespoon lard or vegetable oil
5/8 cup fresh milk (warm)
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon oil for greasing

Filling:
we're less imaginative this time, being our first bun-making experiment, so we use ready-made red bean paste bought from the Asian grocery store. But Rémi is already dreaming of making nutella buns...I prefer traditional fillings, like lotus paste, minced pork, chicken, vegetables...will hope to try egg custard fillings on the recipe someday too.


To make the dough, put flour, yeast, sugar and lard into a bowl. Add warm milk and mix well. Pour onto a countertop and knead for about 5 minutes into a soft dough. If the dough is too dry, add more warm milk or water.

Grease a deep bowl, Put in dough and cover with a damp cloth and set aside to let it prove for about one and half hours, until it has doubled in size.

Beat the dough forcefully with the palm once to squeeze out the air, put it on the countertop and roll flat into a cross shape. Sprinkle baking powder on top and knead for a while. Set aside to ferment for about 30 minutes.

Divide the dough into 16 portions. Do so by rolling it into a sausage and cutting it into equal parts. Roll each portion into a ball, flatten and wrap in the filling. Line each bun with a small square of paper.

Steam for 10 minutes. To prevent water from dripping onto the buns and affecting its look, cover the buns loosely with baking paper. Serve hot.

Sweet Potato Balls

Being not a big fan of sweet potatoes (aka kumara), it took me quite a while before I am again seduced by its abundance at the Sunday market.

I bought two yellow fleshed and one orange fleshed sweet potatoes, having a vague idea of what I am going to do with them.

Although I am not a big fan of sweet potatoes, they deserve credit for being a poor man's marzipan. I used to hear stories from our grandparent generation about how the tubers were their staple during the turbulent second world war years when food was scarcity.

Three simple ways of cooking sweet potatoes are: 1) steamed on its own. having piping hot steam sweet potatoes is perfect on a cold day; 2) cooked with plain rice porridge; 3) boiled in ginger + sugar syrup to make a clear sweet soupy dessert.

So with two of the sweet potatoes I've bought, I've tried (2) and (3). For (3), it is very straightforward. Using two different types of sweet potatoes, diced them into cubes. Boil them together with 2 slices of ginger and enough sugar until soft. Adding a pandan leaf tied into a knot enhances the taste significantly.

My third experiment with sweet potatoes is to make a sweet snack, that I had tried years ago at Maxwell market. The steps for sweet potato balls are like making onde onde, except that the dough is deep fried with a variety of different fillings.

Being lazy to experiment, I had ready-made red bean paste bought from the Asian grocery store, that we had intended to make steamed buns (paos).


Sweet Potato Balls 番薯担

1 sweet potato (both the orange or yellow fleshed variety can be used. In fact, I had mixed both together)
approx. 1 cup glutinous rice flour
white sesame seeds

Filling suggestion:
red bean paste, or roasted crushed peanuts tossed with sugar, or lotus paste or yam paste or black sesame paste etc.


Boil the sweet potato in boiling water until it's soft. Peel and mash the flesh.

When it's cool enough, start to knead the sweet potato into a dough by adding the flour. Add the flour slowly, until you get the consistency you fancy. It may be possible to not use flour at all, if you prefer a full sweet potato texture.

I've seen some recipes adding sugar to the dough, but I find sweet potato sweet enough. Furthermore, the filling is also sweet. So sugar is quite redundant, I feel.

Flour your hands so that the dough doesn't stick to them. Pinch some dough and roll into roughly a ping pong ball size. Flatten and put fillings inside. Roll back into a ball. Repeat until you've finished the dough.

Roll the balls with sesame seeds.

Heat oil for deep frying. Fry them until golden brown. They are very nice when eaten warm, freshly fried. But you can also snack on them when they're cooled.

Tips:
If you're like me and don't like deep frying, make smaller balls. Instead of filling a pan full of oil, use a wok, add about 3mm depth of oil for frying the sweet potato balls, just have to turn them on all sides manually until all sides are cooked and golden brown. Soak up excess oil on kitchen paper.

Fresh Oysters with Vinaigrette of tomatoes and shallots

Yes, we have a lot of fresh food over the weekend.

Besides the duck liver (which is still sitting in the fridge and no longer fresh by now) and freshly grated coconut, I finally satisfied my craving for fresh oysters without the exorbitant price tag that comes with eating them at restaurants.

For people like Rémi who are less tolerant of the taste of raw oysters with just lemon juice (strange, since raw oysters feature very much in the French traditional Christmas feast, much to my delight), I made a vinaigrette to kind of mask the rawness of the oyster taste. At least, there's something to crunch on besides the jelly soft oyster meat.

The vinaigrette draws inspiration from what we recently had at a restaurant (it cost $4 per oyster, so we had only 1 each), as well as a quick browse of some google results.

Fresh Oysters with Vinaigrette
1 dozen fresh oysters

2-3 cherry tomatoes, chopped
1 shallot, chopped
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
pinch of salt and pepper
1 tablespoon fresh parsley, chopped
juice of half a lemon

Mixed ingredients for vinaigrette altogether. Serve with the fresh oysters.

Fresh Coconut Indulgence

Despite the absence of new entries for over a week, I am still cooking diligently to fill our stomachs, albeit with less fresh inspirations.

The week has been punctuated by a mix of successes and failures. The highlight being Rémi's attempt at making foie gras paté after chancing upon fresh duck liver at the supermarket over the weekend.

I'm not a big fan of anything to do with liver (except pig's liver mee sua soup without the liver itself). But goose liver became an exception for me after tasting the Fontan's famously delicious foie gras. French are particular about how they eat their prized foie gras and you're not supposed to spread the pâté thinly on the bread, but rather, eat as a whole chunky slice on it. Yet, the freshly made foie gras is so smooth (read fat) you instantly forget you're eating liver.

But the conclusion of our expensive (having bought 1kg of duck liver and 1 bottle of brandy) foie gras adventure in New Zealand: leave the ducks alone here. The key to good foie gras is as much about birds' oversized French diet as it is about how it is cooked.

On the same weekend, we also tediously attempted to make Malay kuehs. Tedious because we used FRESH coconut. As in, bought a whole coconut, used a hammer to hack it open, and painstakingly grated the flesh inside (to Rémi's credit, he did all of these). Unlike in Singapore, where we can easily buy freshly grated coconut off supermarket shelves or at the wet market, we find only whole coconuts (presumably from the nearby Pacific Islands).

I can say for certain on behalf of Rémi, we're not going to grate coconut ourselves too often, so with this precious lot of grated coconut, we cooked them with gula melaka (palm sugar) to make sweet coconut fillings for kueh dadar (pancakes with sweet coconut ), pulut inti (glutinous rice with sweet coconut) and kueh koci (sweet coconut in glutinous rice flour dough). Whatever remains of the sweet coconut, we sandwiched them in sesame burger bun for breakfast today.

My kueh dadar recipe comes from "Authentic recipes from Indonesia". In Singapore and Malaysia, green colouring is commonly added to the pancake, but not in this cookbook. Anyway, I didn't quite fancy artificial colouring, and although I had also painstakingly pounded some pandan leaves to squeeze out some green juice out of it, it wasn't intense enough dye the batter.

Similarly, the rice in Pulut Inti is traditionally blue but I had left it as white. Also lacking in banana leaves to wrap the rice and coconut, I made them sushi style. The recipe comes from my Food & Nutrition textbook that I had for my O levels.

Kueh Dadar
makes about 6-8 pancakes

75g flour
1 egg
250ml thick coconut milk
pinch of salt
1 tablespoon oil

Coconut filling
50g gula melaka (palm sugar)
30ml water
50g freshly grated coconut
pinch of salt
1 pandan leaf, tied into a knot

Make coconut filling by bringing the sugar and water to boil in a saucepan. Over low heat, simmer uncovered for about 10 minutes until the sugar is dissolved. Add all other ingredients and stir continuously until the mixture is well mixed and dries up. Discard the pandan leaves.

To make the pancakes, combine flour, egg, coconut milk and salt in a mixing bowl. Whisk into a smooth batter.

Grease a frying pan and heat over low heat. When the pan is heated, scoop 1 ladle of the batter onto the pan and quickly turn to obtain a thin round layer. Cook until the pancake sets and begins to brown, then flip over the cook the other side for a few seconds. Remove and continue doing the same until the batter is finished.

To serve, place pancake on flat surface, top with coconut fillings and roll up tightly into a cylinder shape.

Pulut Inti

1 cup glutinous rice (wash and soak in water for at least half an hour)
125ml coconut milk (meaning for 250ml cup of rice, you halve the amount of coconut milk)
pinch of salt
blue colouring, optional

Coconut filling, same as for kueh dadar


Drain the soaked rice and pour into a greased shallow cake tin. Mix in the salt, coconut milk and blue colouring.

Steam until the rice is cooked (about half an hour).

Make the coconut fillings, like you do for the kueh dadar.

To assemble, put 2 tablespoons of the cooked glutinous rice onto a greased banana leaf and a spoonful of coconut filling on top. Wrap up nicely for serving. Or do it sushi style, roll the rice into a ball and top with coconut filling.

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.