Hopefully this works. Cos this app will let me read friends lists as well. So I can catch up and post on the go.
Awsome. Works.
Anyways been busy with work and life lately. And I've been thinking of something that's been bugging me. So will be doing some locked posts to get things off my mind. I need to sort stuff out away from real lifers. Stay tuned.
Here's something new. Was at the grocery store today and found some Korean drink. Milkis. Milk soda. Yeah. One way to make milk unhealthy. Tasted pretty good.
Testing this using the LJ app. Wonder if it works.
This year, I decided on a new challenge for myself. To roast a turkey. Problems number 1: Living in Hong Kong means you have a small kitchen with only a small oven to work with. It was REALLY hard to find a 5kg turkey. Problem number 2: What if it's raw after I roasted it for hours??? Problem number 3: What if it was so dry, no one wanted to eat it? So, I did research and finally decided on Gordon Ramsay's recipe. I did everything except for the stuffing. I wasn't too fond of the orange cranberry stuffing he included since I was making my own cranberry sauce and the double cranberry seemed like too much. But I did make the gravy using the giblets like he suggested and it was extremely tasty and rich. And how did it turn out??? It was the first time I ever had non-dry turkey. And I'm not exaggerating. My friends noted this too. We were all surprised. There is a reason Gordon Ramsay has 3 Michelin Stars. And I noted that every time I tried one of his recipes, they have been not only manageable but delicious. I love this man.
The stuffing I ended up making was pork, sage and chestnut which was amazingly wow. Though yeah ... next time screw grating the onions. Just dice them.
Anyways, since my willing friends who are always there to be my guinea pigs came over, I made mashed potatoes, cheese sticks and random vegetable side dishes. Oh yeah. And a pesto pasta salad where I found the CUTEST Christmas pasta that I found.
Christmas is never complete without gingerbread men. Which I hate but after a lot of looking around, I found a soft and chewy version that was just the right amount of spice. After baking them, my whole place smelled like Christmas.
One successful first Christmas dinner I've ever hosted. Yay me.
Wishing you all a lovely holiday season and a new year ahead. :D
Pumpkin Cupcakes with Maple Syrup Frosting and Marzipan Pumpkins
November 3, 2011 @ 12:28pm
I had the weekend off and not much to do so decided to get a little Martha Stewart and create Halloween cupcakes to give away. Decided to create pumpkin cupcakes but wasn't sure which recipe to use. I thought to go with Martha Stewart because hey ... she has some pretty solid stuff. But then I came upon a recipe from Smitten Kitchen that looked really good and quite easy. And since I had some left over maple syrup, I thought this would be the perfect frosting to go with it. I did adjust the sugar content of the frosting to 1 cup instead of 2 since maple syrup is sweet enough on it's own. This made the frosting not as stiff so I decided to spread it and make little spiderwebs on top using a black sparkle gel frosting pen from Wilton's. Making the spiderwebs were easy. All you did was spread the white frosting on top, then make four circles of black. Then take a toothpick and drag it from the center of the cupcake to the edge. Or look at the here. The marzipan pumpkins were made with pre-made marzipan and followed this video here. Though for the stems, I used tiny little chocolates I found that fit perfectly. I then drew little faces on them with the gel pen and ta-dah! Cute pumpkin cupcakes. :D
a new camera ... new food photography ... new focus
August 10, 2011 @ 1:37pm
It's raining on my day off and I finally decided to do a new focus on my journal here. Since my scanner died, I lost a bit of focus and decided to let other people scope the Law and I kind of enjoyed looking at him from a different point of view. So, I decided to refocus and jot down all my cooking adventures. So, here is a new leaf in my ever expanding journal that I've kept for gawd ... forever. It's funny how I look back at my entries and how they changed from vampires porn to pic porn to now food porn. Oddly the only thing that links them all is that they have each made me passionate about something. So, here goes nothing. Here I teach myself to cook. Just like I taught myself to design a website, do photoshop art, I am now focusing on teaching myself to cook. Learning techniques and just trying things that are new. And teaching myself to do photography all over again.
So, I bought myself a new camera. An Olympus PEN EP-3. And I decided to celebrate my making a cake using wonderful fresh nectarines and blueberries I got at the wet market the other day. Recipe I got was from here. And it's really good. Moist and small. Perfect for my tiny kitchen.
What else is new with me? Well ... went to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers concert in Hong Kong last night. OMG. WAS SO KICK ASS IT WAS UNREAL! Best concert I have been to in a long long time. My mind is still blown. BLOWN I TELL YOU!! BLOWN! They sang 3 songs from their new album and sang a bunch of old ones. MIND BLOWING. OMG. MINDBLOWNTOSMITHERIANS!!!
Also, my coworkers have sucked me into playing Japan Life. It's a game you can get for iPhone and Android. And it's slightly addictive. Clicking away for no apparent reason. If you play .. add me. g3c3. Sad I know.
So, I spent my glorious day off on Thursday making the mango cupcakes. I finally opted on following this recipe but changed it a bit. I didn't have mango extract (they didn't sell it here and I wasn't going to go out and buy it). I left out mango juice because they didn't sell it here except for this strange huge ass bottle of mango drink and it looked sugary and gross. I used this recipe, but changed it a bit. I did Martha Stewart's mango puree instead. And I chopped little bits of mango inside. Since it was a birthday present, I decorated it with mango cream cheese frosting (adapted from Martha ) and lightly drizzled with a mango coulis and a slice of mango and very cute star candy that I found while picking up a box of low fat cream cheese.
Did I mention I bought a Bamix hand blender lately? Yeah. Making purees are sexiliciously awesome now.
By the end of this cooking adventure, I would like to say that my kitchen and my hands smelled of mango. I ate mango, cupcake, frosting and syrup all day long. I was so mango'd out by the end of the day! But what did it taste like? Well ... the mango cupcakes did lose the mango flavor. But they still tasted great. Lovely buttery goodness. The mango coulis was delicious. But the frosting. OMG! Is it horrible you want to squirt it straight from the piping bag? This cupcake was a lot of work and well ... I think I did a pretty good job. I could probably sell this in a store.
I did not forget .. happy (belated) birthday oohasparklie! I know it's late but I've been suckered into playing facebook games and Words With Friends on my phone. It's sad. I know. And happy birthday to wickedcherub! *smuches*
Hey ... been a bit swamped lately with stuff. Life has been hectic and I've been going to bed early. Plus, I'm seeing someone lately. It's a bit .. different than the last boy. We'll see how it goes. So, here I post again. The other day there was a sale on blueberries so I bought a lot and ended up making blueberry muffins. Saw this recipe on TV and it looked seriously good and healthy. Verdict? Incredibly moist and not too sweet. I loved it. AND! Easy to make. Bonus! And everyone that I gave them to loved them also. Will make again.
Now, here's a question. Anyone ever had a mango muffin? Someone asked me to make them as a gift for someone and I've never had one. Search on the net came up with several recipes. Some with ginger. Some with lime. Some with pulp and some without. What would work? Do you have a clue??? Here's a list of potential recipes. What do you think for the more experienced cooks??? Most say the mango flavor just disappeared after baking. That was no good. ARGH!
I'm glad my friends and their family in Japan are all right. Readers from Japan. I hope you are ok, too. Stay safe.
Speaking of Japan, a friend came over to my place to plot out our trip. Where to go. What to do. That sort of thing. And I made dinner. A French dinner that looked like a lot of work but seriously ... it wasn't. At all. My main purpose for the all out French was that I had A LOT of onions. And I mean ... A LOT OF ONIONS. For some odd reason, friends who keep coming to my place give me onions. I tend to like to use shallots and pearl onions. So, I needed to use them up. And what better way to do so but a French onion soup. I also wanted to try the method of cooking fish en papillote. Which is just French for in paper. I then threw together a very healthy dessert. Les photos, s'il vous plait!
French onion soup was from here but I adjusted by adding a bayleaf and had no sherry so substituted with white wine. This was seriously simple. Like seriously. And good.
For the fish, I followed the one and only Gordon Ramsay. Watch him doing the en papillote method. I didn't have red mullet like he did, so I used red snapper instead. Any white fish will do. It was awesome and healthy. And easy. though the folding of the parchment paper part wasn't as easy at it looked in the video. Though second fish I wrapped, turned out better than the first. Will try again.
And dessert was so easy, I had to laugh. And good for you. Like, healthy good for you. Also, a Gordon Ramsay recipe from his cookbook, Best Restaurants. I flipped through it at the bookstore. I may actually buy it. It had a lot of easy recipes that I'd like to try all of them. I did adjust since I didn't own any brandy, peach schnapps or peach liquor like he stated, so I used white wine and peach nectar instead.
I've been watching a lot of Gordon Ramsay lately. They are showing his show "Cookalong Live" on BBC and it's .... amazing. So after work one night, after obsessively watching this video of Gordon making crispy salmon with crushed new potatoes with crab meat, I made this in seriously ... half an hour! This was a gloriously good after work meal. It was scrumptious! And people wonder why I love this man so much.
And the crazier thing? I decided to make bread for the first time. EVER. Since I had a lot of fresh rosemary, I decided to make rosemary focaccia. Especially since I read some where that focaccia is the bread to chose for someone who's never made bread. It was delicious. Better than the stuff I always end up buying at the Italian bakery. Better than the stuff I have at Italian restaurants here. I think it's because I used fresh rosemary and lots of it. And lots of extra virgin olive oil. Since I live alone, I took the rest to work and my coworkers devoured it. Incredible. This is definitely something to make again.
Have an entire weekend off today. Friday was spent watching 127 Hours with a friend followed by a SUPER awesome Japanese dessert restaurant. Hit Shenzhen on Saturday and met up with leahthegreat. Which was awesome to see someone in 3-D after knowing them in 2-D for so long. Body in pain from the massages there. And tonight? King's Speech with another friend. And then back to work. :(
Heading to Tokyo at the end of the month. Looking forward to that. Counting down already.
The Sunday before Valentine's Day, I invited 3 guys over for an elegant dinner. One guy was a friend of the boy and we have been hanging out a lot. The other guy is someone I met during a pizza making class post-break up. The third guy was a friend of the pizza making class guy and we had a wine and French dinner evening at a private kitchen that was simply superb. I invited them over because I wanted to challenge myself after 3 years of teaching myself to cook, if I could do something fancy. Plus, I have always wanted to do dinner gatherings at my place but it was always the same thing. People either didn't come, or like the boy who just sat around not really wanting to be there. But in my mind, I always wanted a group of friends, chatting, eating and drinking in a pseudo sit-com like How I Met Your Mother kind of way. But it just never happened and no matter how hard I tried, it just didn't go well and it always upset me to think what did I do wrong? But now I know what went wrong. I had invited the wrong people. I had invited people I thought were friends but they really weren't. I had invited a boyfriend who didn't want to be there. But since the break up, all those so-called friends left and the ones who still remained were different. These people weren't snotty, who didn't spend their days mocking the world around them. Who were not self-centered and who honestly did care. So, I tried again and I made some spectacular food in hopes it will continue on.
The evening went well. The four of us chatted and ate. They loved everything I made. One of the guys made steamed mussels in white wine. The other guy made a pear crumble for dessert. And the third guy? Gave me roses. Something no guy had ever given me including the boy. And they were beautiful.
And what did I make? I had a theme. I wanted to try out recipes by Gordon Ramsay. So it was my ode to the love of this man and his cooking.
I made prawn, chorizo and tomato kebabs as an appetizer. A simple Gordon Ramsay recipe that was delicious as you get the crunch from the prawn, the spice of the chorizo and the freshness for the basil and tomato all in one bite.
This was followed by an elegant salad of mulled pears with roquefort dressing. The pears wasn't overpowered by the wine and the dressing was a nice balance.
It was great. Everyone had a great time. And then on the 14th, I went with a couple of other girlfriends to a Janet Jackson concert where she sang her hits, she danced her moves and we had munched down on pizza late into the night afterwards. And now I will plan my next dinner party. :D
