Perth Royal Show 07

Went to Perth Royal Show 3o Sep 07(yesterday). We were a little put off in the morning as it was cloudy and drizzle with rain. We took the chance and went and it turned out to be a lovely cloudy day, not intensely hot and it was not raining. It made the trip the more fun!

There were soOO many people on the day. This once a year thing is really an excitement for kids of all age (including many adults too LOL).

My newphew Alan first time in the show and had a good fun day. These chair lifts gives me a wobbly knees, not too comfy with heights like this.

Among many rides, my kid Nicole and Alan prepared to get tortured by all these rides. I am just a by standing chicken.. I rathter be the kids's porter(pile with all the bags and stuffs) than go on these rides. I only enjoy watching lah!

Nicoles and Alan had a good time checking the place out. Dogs, animals, rides, horse show games, rides, etc etc, we spent hours in the show ground and went home late at night with all the show bags. Good fun!

Mini Mooncakes/piggy Mooncakes

Today, I thought I will give mooncake another try again. I followed a recipe from the web, it turned out really nice. Although, again I find the color of the mooncake is a little paler than shop's type. Regardless, I am much more satisfied with the result compare the my first trial.

I did not make any red bean paste for this patch of mooncakes. I found this in one of the local oriental supermarket. The paste is much more softer than my homemade red bean paste. I put the paste in the fridge just to harden up abit so I can roll into balls. A bit too sweet for my liking too.

In the same shop I bought these Jelly moulds. I use them for my mini mooncakes as I cannot find any mooncake mould in Perth. The definition of the mooncake is not so fine but eh, I am not complaining, chinese say, "no fish, prawns also can lah"

Custard Swirl Bun

My family is mad about these buns, Sell like hotcakes as it is!

The Custard filling which I made the night before, I find it easier to work with when I make fillings the day before and allow it to sit in the fridge overnight.

The custard filling is thinly rolled and spread across the dough.

Dough is then roll into a swiss roll

Custard Swirl Buns

Ingredients
300 g Bread Flour
70 g Cake Flour
12 g (sachet) Instant Yeast
Pinch of Salt
60 g Caster Sugar
50 ml Butter Milk
75 ml Fresh Milk
125 ml water
30 g Cheddar Cheese
1 tsp Bread Improver
50 gm Melted Butter

Custard Filling
10g Custard Powder
50g Wheat Starch
100g Castor Sugar
100ml Fresh Milk
50g Melted Butter
1 lightly beaten egg

In a sauce pan, mix custard powder, wheat starch and castor sugar and milk over low heat. Stir constantly until well mix and add butter. Stir and mix well until butter blended in. Turn off heat and mix in egg. Do take note while stirring the filling, if it turns out a little dry/lumpy, small quantity of water (1-2 table spoons at a time) can be added to smoothen the lumps. The filling should look smooth and glossy. Set aside for use.


Put all the dough ingredients into the bread machine and set it on dough mode. Let the machine works its full cycle. Remove the dough from the machine and roll out on a floured board to 2-3 mm thick with a rolling pin. Try to roll it into a square(ish) shape.

In between two pieces of (approx 50 cm) non stick or greased baking sheets, place fist size custard filling and roll it out as thin as you can. Remove top sheet and slap it onto the square roll out dough with the sheet facing up. Keep rolling out the filling until most of the dough surface is covered with fillings. Roll the dough Swiss roll style follows by cutting the roll into 1 inch thick sections. Place the cut out rolls onto greased tins and let to prove for around 50 minutes or until twice in size. Glaze the rolls with egg and milk wash and bake in a preheated 180c oven for 10 minutes. Remove from heat and allow cooling before serving.

Mooncake

My first time making mooncake. It is much harder than I thought. I remembered mum used to work for a mooncake factory donkey years ago. Vaguely I remembered she said how precise and important all the ingredients were, now I realized it too. As two mooncake in Perth will cost around 18 dollars for one york mooncake, I thought I will give it a go.

I search high and low for alkaline water and the cake mould. Well, tough luck as it is sooO near to the festival already. In the end, I decided to use the US chinese recipe which can skip using the alkaline water. Well, all turn out fine except I do notice the texture of the mooncake is not as soft and dense like mooncakes which I bought from the shop. I use an empty square container for my moulding and write out a stencil of "fook" just to increase the feeling of mooncake. As you can see my mooncake mould is abit blunt.The red bean paste, I had to make them the day before so it would be easier to shape into ball.

I have to admit my family is not much of a fan of mooncake but they still sampled a portion of it. That is good enough for me as a first timer! Better next time..

Enterprising Fish Or What?

I want to share these old pictures of mine to show everyone, not only human knows how to advertise their business, fish can too!! It kind of read WELF CO. With unclear alphebats below the "CO" and somekind of alphabets on top of the welf co which I couldnt figure out. Wierd a?

In was back in year of 1994. I was holidaying on Tioman Island with a couple of friends. This paricular day in time, we were strolling on the jetty to wait and watch the beautiful sun set. As most people been on Tioman Island in West Malaysia, it is a unspoiled beautiful island with plenty of fishes. On the jetty, youngsters was dropping their lines hoping to catch a good fish. This young boy we came across had a bucket next to him and it seemed he was quite a lucky boy too. He had few fishes in the buckets and I was curious to see what he has got. When I looked into the bucket, I was quite shocked to see this fish lying on its side, still alive, with somewhat seemed like alphapets on its scales. With permission, I took the fish out of the bucket and showed it to my friends. I was absolutely amaized at what nature can create. And so I took a few pictures to remember this unusual finds. It was really a special highlight of our trip!

Peanut Caramel Brownies

My sis Jessie came over for a short holiday. She bought for me two lovely baking books. One is all about fudge and brownies and the other is all about steam buddings. Couldn't wait too long and already starting to gather ingredients the same day.

As I have quite abit of left over roasted peanuts, I opted to bake this brownies. In the book itself has not such recipe so I picked the caramel brownies which request to use walnuts and I changed it to peanuts instead. It actually turned out very well too.

Peanut Caramel Brownies

Ingredients

60g Self Raising Flour

40g Plain Flour

150g Butter(room temperature)

230g Brown sugar

2 Eggs

1tbsp Mil

1 tsp Vanilla Essense

75 g Roasted Peanuts (blended roughly)

Combine the self raising flour and plain flour and sift into a big bowl. In another bowl, whisk butter and sugar until light and soft. Add one eg and a time and whisk well. Add in milk and vanilla essense. Fold in the sifted flour gently and also the peanuts. Keep a little peanuts to dust the top of the mix after it has been poured into a greased tin. Bake in a preheated 180c oven for 35-40 minutes. Remove from oven and allow to cool completely before cutting and store in air tight tins.

Pizza Pockets

Made another patch of pizza pockets for school lunch. Kids love these pockets as it is soo yummy!

Yorkshire Puddings

Yorkshire Puddings are one of the traditional English pudding which is usually eaten with roast beef, veges, mash, turnips and gravy on sundays. I make alot of such meal with this pudding as it is well demanding in the household. It has very simple ingredient; much similar to a pancake mix but to get it puffy, crispy on the outside and soft on the inside is another story. Too ashame to mention how many times axactly it turned out flat and compact for me.. Or even all puffed up!

I clearly remembered the first time I made the pudding. I was in Malaysia then. As there were no muffin tin available at that moment in time so the batter was baked in a big round baking tin. When it came out of the oven, waw! it was so puffy and round. Not kidding, it is so round that it looked like a half round football! big! Eagerly I porked a fork into the pudding longing to taste the success, what a laugh to see the inside. It was nothing but a big balloon! absolutely nothing inside, honestly, it was so funny!

Well according to my soo many trials, it would turned out much much better if you can make the mix many many hours before hand.

Ingredients

1 cup plain flour

1 cup fresh milk

2 eggs

1tsp lard

pinch of salt

Put flour, milk, egg, lard and salt in the bowl and use a cake mixer to beat until smooth. Leave it sit for few hours and beat now and then with the mixer until bubbles formed. Preheat oven to 220 or max. Grease the muffin tins with 1 tsp cooking oil in each muffin mould, as this is vital for the rising of the pudding. Bake the tin in the oven until oil is really hot. Give the pudding batter one last mix with cake mixer until pubbles formed. Remove tin from oven and pour the batter immediately into each mould. Fill only one third or one quarter full to each mould only. Bake in the oven for 14 minutes. Remove and serve hot.

Tips: Years ago, I would put the batter mix in a closed container such as a pop bottle. Shut the lid tight and shake it vigorously now and then over few hours. Do not put batter back into the fridge during this period as it requires warmth to help in its rising too.

Vindaloo Prawns

In cold winter night, nothing beats a hot and spicy vindaloo prawns for dinner. It goes very well with coconut rice or simply tortilla wraps.

Mini Dounuts

Mini Dounuts maker in the stores are inexpensive. Its a good idea to encourage kids to make dounuts at home when they said" Mum. I am bored!". It works a magic to keep their little minds occupied for a while and it is also very creative for them too.

When the dounuts just came out of the maker, it looks like this. It havent have those deep fried dounut look and tastes much less greasier too.

At this stage, I normally dig in my baking ingredients and sourcing out all the bits and bobs which I can provide for them to decorate the dounuts. I will also make up some butter cream for them to spread on the dounuts before decorating.

This is done by Nicole and Noni, my newphew's girlfriend. They had a fun time putting all the colorful coated chocolate drops and hundreds and thousands on. A bit of a mess but it is so worth the trouble.

Ingredients

75 g Plain flour

50 g Sugar

2 tsp Baking Powder

1/4 tsp Salt

75 ml Fresh milk

1 large egg

2 tbsp melted butter

Preheat the dounut maker. Mix all ingredients together in a big bowl. When maker is ready, fill the dounut mould half way to the top. Close the lid and allow to bake for 5 minutes or until desired color formed. Remove and set aside until cool before spreading any butter cream for decoration. For dusting, put dounuts in a bowl of caster sugar immediately after removing from maker. Dust them well and removed to cool. serve.

Note: If children are involved, do take care when dealing with dounut maker, as it can get rather hot

Mini Spring Rolls

My daughter Nicole had a food tasting day in her school. She opted to make some mini spring rolls for her school mates. As the preparation has to be done the night before, so I helped out. It was quick and relatively fast when two of us do the job. We had to wake up early the next morning to fry and ready for school. That afternoon she came home and said her spring rolls was one of the favourites and seconds was requested!

Pretty Cake

My daughter's friend came to play yesterday. They suddenly decided to make a cake on their own. So Stephenie and Nicole made this Fairy sponge cake dotted with chocolate rocks. very pretty to look at. They were so proud of it. Stephenie took half home for her family to sample too. They even made some home made lemonade to go with the yummy cake!

Curry Puffs

Curry Puffs are relatively easy to make. Especially when I can purchase different kinds of pastry sheets from the supermarket. Now and then I will take the affort to make home made puff pastry sheets. Of course the satisfactory on the result will be greater. Nevertheless, ready made is just as good.

Ingredient

1 packet of defrosted large puff pastry sheets(about 6 sheets). Cut into four square on each sheet(hence you will have 24 little squares)

1 large potoato cut to cubes

1 cup mince beef or pork

1 curry sauce (ready in tins)

1 large onion

2 cloves of garlic finely chopped

dash of pepper

egg wash for brushing pastry

olive oil for frying

In a wok, fry onion and garlic till fragrant. Add in mince beef or pork and stir fry until redness is gone. Add in potatoes, curry sauce and dash of pepper. Allow the potatoes to cook and the curry sauce is reduced to a thick and almost dried sauce. Remove from wok and allow to cool.

Take one square sheet of pastry, put one table spoon of curry mince diagonally to the square and envelope it into a triangle. Press on the sides to seal the pocket. Fold the side of the triangle up and inwards to form edgings. Use a fork, pork few holes on top of the curry puffs, egg wash and bake in a 220 c oven for 16 minutes. Remove and allow to cool before serving.

Note: Curry Puffs are great for freezing. When completely cooled, pack in air tight container and freeze. Good for storing up to a week.

Pak Chang

Making Pak Chang is a pass down traditional home recipe my super cook mum taught us when we were still young. She didn’t allow me to use her precious rice and meat so she gave me few pieces of bamboo leaves which she boiled and asked me to wrap up some wet sand. I did just that and eventually sort of cracked the technique. I have never forgotten what she has taught me. This is one of many things my mum teach me in life. She is also the one that teach me how to sew initially. Love her to bits…


Home made Pak Chang


Ingredients
1 kilo chicken tight meat de-boned and cut into cubes
8 medium size mushrooms soaked overnight and boiled to tenderized before hand
3 cups sticky rice soaked over night with water
1 Chinese Lap Cheong (sausage) slice thinly
3 Salted eggs boiled and quartered before hand
4 clove garlic roughly chopped
1 large red onion chopped
25 pieces of dried bamboo leave soaked overnight with hot water
Nylon strings
Note: I replaced chestnuts with egg as my family is not keen in the nuts. If use chestnuts, it has to be pre-boiled and set aside.

Seasonings
2 tbsp Oyster Sauce
2 tbsp Dark Soya sauce
2 tsp Chicken Essence
2 tsp Sesame Seed oil
2 tbsp Chinese rice wine
2 cups water
Olive oil for frying

In a wok, heat olive oil to fry onions and garlic. When fragrant, put in chicken meat and fry till semi cooked. Add Chinese rice wine and let to reduce a little. Add Sesame oil follow by chicken essence, oyster sauce and dark Soya sauce and water. Let it simmer until liquid is very minimal and thick. Remove from wok and let to cool. Assemble all other stuff for wrapping Chang. Wrapping as follows:-

Pak Chang

Pak Chang Cont'...

Tied up Pak Chang should look something like the above. Use a large pot and put all the wrapped chang into the pot and fill water till slightly submerge the chang. Add some salt into the water. Boil with high heat for an hour. Keep adding boiling water if water in the pot run low. Remove chang from liquids when cooked and serve

I use pressure cooker to boil the chang which will only need 30 minutes.

Ingredients prepared for the wrapping of Pak Chang.

Take two piece of bamboo leave with the leave end(not the stock end) facing you. Overlap the leave half way.

Make a cone shape as in the photo.

After placing all the stuff into the cone, (i.e. One spoonful of rice; 11/2 spoonful of chicken; one lapcheong and one quarter egg; lastly 2 spoonfuls of rice on top) Use right hand to press down the leaves towards you and hold in place by the left hand. Use right hand pinch the leave pointing towards you and bend it towards your left thumb according to the shape of the underlying cone. Hold it in with the left thumb. When in place, use a nylon rope to tie around the portion that is facing you.

Cauliflowers with Mince Pork

Ingredients
4 cups Cauliflowers
1/2 cups Pork Mince
2 Clove Garlic finely chopped





Seasonings
1 tsp Sesame seed oil
1 tsp Chicken essence powder
1 tbsp Oyster sauce
1 tsp Light soya sauce
1/2 cupWater
1tbsp Olive oil for frying

Heat a little olive oil in a non stick wok on medium heat. Add garlic and fry till frangrant. Add mince pork and fry till redness is gone and add in sesame seed oil, chicken essence, oyster sauce, light soya sauce and water. Allow to mix well then add the cauliflower. Cook till vegetable is cooked but not soggy. Remove from heat and serve immediately.

Sizzling Beef

When it comes to dinner, I cook everyday. Problem is, I keep forgetting to take some pictures and post them in my blog. Making use of my new sizzling hotplate has reminded me to do so tonight. There you go, we have sizzling beef, home made Ham Tan, and cauliflowers with mince pork. I was stufffed like a fat lady's socks.

Sizzling Beef
500 g fresh beef thinly sliced
1 large red Onion sliced
Few slices fresh ginger
1 clove garlic crushed

Seasonings
Dark soya sauce
3 tbsp chinese rice wine
Oyster Sauce
Chilli powder
Pepper
Corn starch
Sesame oil
olive oil for frying

In a wok, heat olive oil till medium hot. Add in ginger, red onion and garlic. Stir fry until fragrant. Put in beef and fry until redness is gone. Add chinese rice wine and simmer to reduce. Add dark soya sauce, oyster sauce, chilli powder, pepper and a dash of sesame oil. Mix well and add one cup of water and let to reduced to half. Add in corn starch mixed with little amount of water to thicken the sauce. When gravy appears thickened, remove from heat and place aside.

Before serving, heat hotplate on stove. Place hotplate on the wooden base and pour the beef gently onto the plate. Take extra careful not to stand too near to the plate as it really sizzlers.

Lime Mmmm

As spring is on its way, my lovely lime tree in the back garden yielded plenty of ripe juicy lime. Like the previous year, I tend to cook more dishes with lime than the rest of th year for making use of home grown stuff. I still remembered the first year it started to bear fruits, it was only a handful of it. Now, it is producing more and more. As a result, I will harvest them at the lastest date possible but also remember to leave few here and there on the tree so as the tree will not look too "botak" or bare.

What I have harvested, I rinse them clean, halves them and squeeeezee them. Goodness me, it was a long and squeezing task! My poor hands are all wrinkly by the end. Worth it! I got two one litre bottle of fresh lime which I freeze them for future cooking.

Salami Pineapple Pizza

Salami Pineapple Pizza makes a appetizing after school snacks. My kid is in the crazy growing age and she is constantly crying hungry. This pizza is just ideal to keep her tum tum satisfied until dinner time. As salami is generally high in fat but we love them the most, I fry them in the nonstick frying pan until the fat melted away. I then pad the salami with towels to remove access fat. As a result, it dont only taste yummy, it is also a tiny bit healthier too.

This is the journey of my tofu con't

Gypsum Tofu Take Two! And Success!
This is the Second round making gypsum tofu. The result is really remarkable! I am pleased with the outcome of the experiment. To my opinion, I have cracked it! (To my preference lah! Hee) Same ingredient quantity but I used one table spoon of gypsum this time.

Top Secret Experiment. OpsomTofu. Take One!

This is the Opsom method. The tofu has small pockets of holezies in between. Texture wise is much much more firmer/denser than the other two. Press time is somehow the least compared to the other two. Thickness is slightly less than gypsum tofu.

Top Secret Experiment. NigariTofu. Take One!

This is the Nigari method. The tofu is soft and silky but somehow it is much much thinner than the other two. I uses the liquid Nigari which is the only type I came across so far. I started with adding one tbsp of nigari but the milk was still very milky so I added another and then another. 3 tbsp I have used.





Experiments Result
I don’t know if my creations are correct but I will certainly have a go again with all the three coagulants until I came up with the best way I can make with each of the stuff.
When it comes to the taste of the three tofus, they tasted and smelled pretty delicious!

Gypsum tofu: Tasted very silky and soft. Need to toughen up a little bit more.
Opsom tofu: Tough guy, tasting firm and good. Need to soften up much more to perfect it.
Nigari tofu: Tasted soft and silky but don’t know why abit on the skinny side. Maybe I need to make more quantity to yield a decent size?!

The Journey of my Tofu making con't

This is the curd which Epsom and Nigari yield. Unlike gypsum curd, which most of us call tofu fa, is more a giant silky piece.

This is the curd/tofu fa using gypsum powder. Initially it is in one piece jelly mass. It has been scoped into the pressing mould.


All three types of tofu use this same press to remove access water.


Same weight was also used for the three types of tofu.

Top Secret Experiment. GypsumToFu.Take One!

For gypsum, because the coagulant is premix in a big bowl and follow by pouring down the Soya bean milk like waterfall at a go, the result of the curd or tofu fa is in one big mass. Hence the quantity of the curd is much larger than the other two. Pressing also takes longer but the result is really pleasing. The tofu is thicker and silkier