Thank you all for your comments for the burglary post. We have ordered fake surveillance cams. Going forward I will call the police when I see assumed banana thieves. I have installed a timer for one of the living room lamps, it goes on at 3am. Sticks are jammed into the sliding doors, window bars are ordered, although I hate them. Charles, we don’t live in Sai Kung, that would be too convenient :). We live on the seventh island, over the seventh hill. The police wrote a very detailed report, found fingerprints, and I hear helicopters flying over the hills behind our house. Still, I don’t think we will get our stuff back. APJ, women’s intuition is widely underrated. We Are Doomed, we were barely coming to know our neighbors when the burglary happened. They are as freaked as we are, and I hope everyone of us will be bit more careful going forward. Lime, Dubai wasn’t pleasant but it taught me valuable lessons.
Still it is beginning to be a home.
We have a car, but not yet a license to drive it on the seventh island. So, I took the bus to the third village north where they have a “supermarket” (cough… laugh… five short aisles stuffed to the ceiling). You learn to concentrate on the essentials (that’s a good thing), if you have to take the public bus home, still four very heavy bags had to be hauled home.
Once through the door, I cooked Chinese winter melon soup and Jamie Oliver’s beef stew with guinness (yep, I watched TV last night). Both were a first and both are keepers for cold winter days. I love Chinese winter melon. It’s completely tasteless on its own, but in a soup it takes on the flavor of the rest of the ingredients.
I got the second last winter melon slice in the snow-white supermarket. My competitors were seasoned Cantonese grandmas… I had to grab quickly. I cooked it together with pork spareribs, sliced smoked ham, ginger, and wolfberries. The recipe also calls for red dates, but I didn’t want to buy them because of bad Dubai associations… ok, the truth is I wasn’t sure they were needed. Still the soup turned out yummy. I am a big fan of soups, especially if it’s cold and wet. One of the strength of German cuisine is its soups or “eintopf”. Like most of the best dishes around the world it’s poor men’s recipes, but oh so good. I can’t get all of the German ingredients here (does anyone have a cheap and reliable source of celeriac in Hong Kong?), so I am going for local recipes. Winter melon soup was yummy.
Jamie Oliver’s stew had to cook for two hours in the oven. The original recipe puts it into a pie with puff pastry. I am not that English, so I just made the stew and salt potatoes to go with it. It was very rich, smooth, and just what I needed today:
2 large sliced onions fried to gooey, sweet perfection
half a pound of marbled beef
3 cloves of diced garlic
stick of fresh rosemary, hacked to small pieces
1 stick of celery or two
a diced carrot or two
mushrooms ( I took local Chinese ones, not the tasteless, white Holland variety) and half a dozen dried ones (soaked in hot water for an hour)
pepper, salt
1 tablespoon of flour
a can of guinness (even the five-aisle supermarket had it ?!?)
water so that all ingredients are covered with liquid
at 180 degrees Celsius (360 Fahrenheit) for two hours in covered (oven-proof) pot
Jamie, you are the man!
I will also start a new sourdough production. Bread selection in Cinderella’s supermarket is pitiful, stuffed with preservatives, and I won’t buy it. Expect pics of burned sourdough bread in the future.
By popular demand, little man and I made chocolate crinkle cookies last Sunday. Thank you very much for helping us decide :).
For all of you interested in the other recipes, here is a link to the yummy-looking persimmon cake, which one day I will bake as well. Persimmons are quite new to me, but they are offered in every supermarket in Hong Kong at the moment. I am amazed about the different tastes and textures they have. Some remind me of pear, others taste more like pumpkin pie. I think persimmon would go very well with Christmas spices in cakes or cookies. And here is a link to a video showing how to make Tuiles.
We however baked chocolate crinkle cookies, using this recipe, for which you will need:
8 ounces of melted bittersweet chocolate
1 3/4 cups of flour
1/2 cup of unsweetened cocoa powder
2 teaspoons of baking powder
pinch of salt
4 ounces of butter at room temperature
1 1/3 cups of brown sugar
2 large eggs
1/3 cup milk (which we didn’t use)
1 cup caster sugar for rolling
1 cup icing sugar for rolling
Mix the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, and salt in a bowl.
Carefully melt the chocolate in a microwave or double boiler (heat resistant bowl in a pot of simmering water), taking care that the chocolate doesn’t become to hot. Let cool slightly.
In the meantime, mix the butter with the brown sugar until well combined (I used a fork). Then add the eggs and beat mixture until light. Add the melted chocolate.
Slowly, spoon by spoon, add the dry ingredients and milk to the mixture, making sure that everything is well combined before adding the next spoon. I have to admit that I completely forgot to add the milk, but the dough consistency was still fine. It should be thick and heavy.
Wrap the dough in cling wrap and chill in the refrigerator until firm. We cheated and divided the dough into two equal sized portions and popped them into the freezer to speed up the process. When I took the dough out after about 15 minutes, it had the consistency of hard, chilled Muerbeteig.
Preheat the oven to 350 Fahrenheit/180 Celsius.
Prepare one bowl filled with granulated sugar and another one filled with icing sugar. Line a baking tray with baking paper.
And now comes the fun and messy part: take tablespoon sized portions (3/4 ping pong ball-sized) off the dough and roll them to balls between your hands. Then press them slightly. First, roll the cookies in the granulated sugar, then in the icing sugar until they are well coated. Put them on the baking tray about 1.5 inches apart, and bake for 10-15 minutes.
Little man and I had a hard time waiting while they cooled down enough for us to try them. And I have to say that we were a bit disappointed. Maybe we did something wrong? They had a crumbly and dry texture which I didn’t like, and they were tooth-achingly sweet. Even little man, who normally loves all things sugary, had only a few and asked for a big glass of water afterwards. That said, the overdose of sugar and chocolate makes them a perfect wake-me-up snack for a drowsy morning or afternoon. After eating a handful, I felt very alert, a bit like a nervous hamster…lol.
(Sorry, no photos this time. My digital camera died, and my phone camera wasn’t up to the challenge of taking pics in low light.)
Tomorrow is little man’s school Christmas fair, but on Sunday it’s time for the fourth installment of our Christmas cookie marathon. Please help us decide what to bake:
1) Chocolate Crinkle Cookies
Because we love chocolate!!!
or
2) Tuiles
Because they are thin, crunchy goodness!!!
or
3) Persimmon cake with candied ginger and walnuts
I know it’s not a cookie, but persimmons are in season, and that cake does look good, doesn’t it?
The sun was shining, but to be honest I was hoping for rain. Sometimes it is just wonderful to have a lazy morning in PJs without feeling guilty about it.
Little man had a relapse into the terrible twos, and kept his mama on her toes. Why?
Because it was one of those days.
I was toying with the idea to take a break from our Christmas cookies test series, but then I thought that baking may get little man’s mind out of his rebellious state, and give him something fun to do.
Initially it helped, but somehow baking wasn’t enough for a little six-year old with boundless energy this morning. He disappeared after a while to make paper airplanes, and came back after five minutes to ask mama to help him with folding. Busy mama with dirty hands, had to say “no, sorry”. Unfortunately, little boys with a bossy streak do not take no for an answer. So while I was explaining to little man why he has to wait, and he was saying “but I want my paper airplane NOW”, and I was saying … etc etc… I messed up the recipe.
I ended up with a very soft and sticky dough, and wondered why.
Because it was one of those days.
Because in my side-tracked state of mind, I had taken only half of the recommended amount of icing sugar, but the full quantity of egg whites. Something to do with initially planning to half the recipe but then eventually deciding to do the full amount, and somehow forgetting what the final plan was midway through.
Anyway, here is the recipe for Zimtsterne from “Unser Kochbuch Nr. 1″ (Our Cook Book No.1), which my parents, clearly worried that I would starve, gave me when I moved out of their house about 20 years ago. It has 700 recipes with a special how-to section for dummies. You can half the recipe or not, or can, or not, or can, but don’t forget what you settled on:
For 60 Zimtsterne (cinnamon stars) you need:
400g ground almonds, 5 egg whites, 400g icing sugar, 1 teaspoon of lemon juice, 1 tablespoon of ground cinnamon (I used 3 though), additional icing sugar for rolling out the dough
Beat the 5 egg whites until very stiff, add the icing sugar one spoon at a time, and then the lemon juice. The mixture should look like shiny whipped cream. Take 4 tablespoons from the egg white mix and put it in a separate small bowl for later use as icing.
Fold the ground almond and cinnamon into the mixture.
Preheat the oven to 140 degrees Celsius (285 Fahrenheit).
Roll out the dough to about 1cm thickness on icing sugar or corn flour (we did two batches, one 1cm thick the other only half a centimeter, while the thicker cookies stayed chewy in the middle, the thinner ones were crispy, I liked the crispy ones better, little man the chewy ones).
Cut out stars with a cookie cutter, brush the egg white creme on top, and put them on a baking tray lined with baking paper.
Bake the cookies – it is more drying than baking – for 30-40 minutes.
So far the theory, reality didn’t go as smoothly. Even after adding the forgotten half of the icing sugar, the dough was still too sticky. I have done this recipe several times and it always worked out fine, why not this time?
Because it was clearly one of those days.
Or because I didn’t use ready-made ground almonds, which are fairly dry. Instead I used unblanched whole almonds, which I ground myself in an old coffee grinder. They smelled wonderful, but were fairly greasy.
I had to add corn flour to the dough to make it manageable. First, we folded a paper airplane, then we rolled out the dough on icing sugar.
And as you can see, we didn’t have a star shaped cookie cutter. We made a modernized version of Zimtsterne with airplanes, trains, cars, and other merry Christmas folk, and it suddenly hit me why these “Christmas cookie cutters” had been such a bargain.
Then little man brushed on the egg white mix, and we put the cookies into the oven. After only five minutes, the icing turned slightly brown. It is supposed to stay as white as snow.
Say it with me please: Because it was one of those days!
I blame my prehistoric gas oven, for which it is very hard to control the temperature and keep it at a low level.
They don’t look very pretty, but taste delicious nevertheless.
It was one of those days. But with cookies. And so the day had a happy cinnamon star ending.
This is turning into a food blog, and that’s how it should be. What do you really need? Love, of course, and other nourishments. And is there a better way to share and tell that you love, than cooking and eating and savoring food?
This is a Thanksgiving post from a professed atheist, though I know that God loves me nevertheless :).
I was craving for food that I grew up with. I am quite adventurous with new foods. I eat what smells good, and that is 99% of the food I have encountered. The big exception is Durian, but one day I will be brave enough to try it too. It smells of dogsh*t, but people tell me it’s as good as custard. Maybe, one day, I will try it.
I was dreaming of calf’s liver. In Berlin, it is dusted in flour and seared shortly on each side, and served with fried apples and onions on top and mashed potatoes. My mum makes yummy calf’s liver.
Some people get grossed out at animal innards, frankly I don’t get it. If you eat a steak (which necessitates to kill an animal), you should also be able to eat its innards, especially if they are as tasty as liver. Isn’t it more humane to eat as most as possible from an animal, you kill for food?
I know people who eat goose liver (expensive, French, you need to force feed geese to get it) but turn their noses up at liverwurst (cheap, German, you only need to quickly kill the pig). I eat both of them.
Where am I heading? Gosh, I don’t know, but the oxtail stew (the very end of a cow) cooking away on my stove smells lovely. I can’t get calf’s liver in my neighborhood supermarket, but fortunately they have oxtail, and chicken with the heads still on, and other animals that we eat but sometimes don’t want to know we eat.
One thing I admire about Asian Food, and there is lots more that I admire, is that they are still aware where the meat comes from. In western-style supermarkets, more often than not, every reference to the animal is removed. Clean cut steaks, minced beef and pork, cutlets, chicken breasts. We have that here too, but you can also get chicken feet, whole chicken with their heads on, and fish that is taken out of the tank and killed for you. Sounds gross? It’s the reality. If you don’t like it, become vegetarian.
I eat meat as a treat. I use meat to flavor, not to get full. I remember the pigeons, rabbits, chicken, and pig at my grandmother’s neighbor’s house. We ate them, they tasted lovely, they were prepared with care, they were prepared as a rare feast.
Little cookie monster and I are trying out a different recipes every weekend. Only the best will be on our final Christmas cookie list. Last week’s biscottis were my favorite, but little man didn’t like the hardness of them. So this week, we tried a more kids-friendly recipe:
Muerbeteig cookies with lemon icing and a ton of colorful sprinkles
Knead 70g of caster sugar and the mark of one vanilla bean into 140g of unsalted butter. This works best if you cut the butter into little cubes. Add one egg yolk, and 210g of flour. It’s a 3-2-1 Muerbeteig dough (3 parts flour, 2 parts fat, 1 part sugar), which also works great for tart bottoms. You can leave out the egg, but I find for cookies adding one egg yolk works best.
I don’t have a fancy kitchen machine, so we used our hands. There is something very satisfying about grabbing a handful of buttery dough and pressing it through your fingers. Through experience I have learnt to only put one hand into the dough, so that you still have one clean hand to prevent a little cookie monster from eating half of the dough or eating all the sprinkles :).
Wrap the dough into cling wrap and let it rest for at least 15 minutes in the fridge. You can also make the dough one day in advance and leave it in the fridge over night.
Preheat the oven to 160 degrees Celsius (320 Fahrenheit). Roll out the dough to about 5mm thickness on a floured work top, and then use cookie cutters or a small glass to cut out shapes. We got about 65 cookies. Lay them on a baking tray lined with baking paper, and bake for 10-15 minutes. We watched them all the time, you want them to brown only lightly.
Let them cool. For the icing, mix about 120g of icing sugar with a few tablespoons of lemon juice, until it becomes a gooey sauce. Brush the cookies with the icing, and then let little cookie monsters add the final decoration.
It was such fun to see little man enjoy making cookies and eating them. We agreed to only eat the broken cookies today. You know, the reindeers without horns and the Christmas trees without tops. There were surprisingly many of them. I am counting making cookies with little man today. He is such a sweet little cookie monster :).
I had such a craving for something sweet this afternoon and there was plenty of flour and a big bag of almonds in my kitchen cupboard. After a bit of surfing on the internet, I decided to make almond biscotti. I love them, but had never baked them myself before. The ingredients and instructions below are a combination of several recipes I found on the internet. They are surprisingly easy to make.
Almond Biscotti
100g of whole blanched almonds (go here on how to blanch almonds)
125g of plain white flour (but have plenty more at hand)
125g of brown sugar
1 pinch of salt
1 teaspoon of baking powder
mark of 1 vanilla bean
2 large eggs
Preheat the oven to 175 degrees Celsius (350 Fahrenheit). Lightly grease a baking tray or line it with baking paper.
Lightly dry toast the almonds in a frying pan, or on a baking tray in the oven until fragrant. (Side note to self: Do not eat too much of the almonds, even if the smell is intoxicating. You’ll need them.)
Mix the flour, sugar, salt, and baking powder in a bowl. Don’t add the almonds yet.
Scrap out the mark of one vanilla bean. Beat the eggs and vanilla mark in a separate bowl until light.
Combine the eggs with the dry ingredients, but leave out the almonds. Knead the dough until it becomes elastic, adding more flour if it is too sticky.
I ended up adding a lot more flour than in the original recipe, about 100g more. How much flour you need probably depends on the particular size of the eggs and also how the flour that you use absorbs moisture. (Note to self: Keep the flour bag open and close at hand, so that you don’t need to rummage through cupboards with fingers full of sticky dough, leaving traces everywhere.)
Add the almonds and knead them into the dough.
Form long loaves about three fingers wide and one finger high, and put them on the baking tray. I ended up with two loaves about 40cm (16 inches) long.
I baked the loaves for 30 minutes, then switched off the oven, and let them sit in the oven for a further 30 minutes. They should not color much.
When I baked them, the smell of almonds and vanilla permeated the whole apartment. Little bubbles of almond oil oozed out of the biscotti loaves.
Take them out of the oven.
Preheat the oven to 175 degrees Celsius (350 Fahrenheit) again.
Let the loaves cool for a bit, then cut them diagonally into one centimeter (about half an inch) thick slices. I used a serrated bread knife.
Try stopping yourself from eating more than half of the biscotti at this point. Nibbling away the loaf ends is allowed though :).
Spread the slices out on the baking tray, cut side down, and bake for a further 10-15 minutes, turning them over after half the time. It’s better to keep a close eye on them while they bake for the second time. They should be completely dry but not color.
In theory, biscotti should keep for a few weeks in an airtight container. In reality, they will be gone by tomorrow. We are a two person household, so double or quadruple the ingredients if you are baking for more people. The original recipe called for 500g of flour and 500g of sugar.
Mmmm… crack … sweet… crack… full of almond aroma… crack… yummy!
How could I forget Anthony Bourdain’s love declaration to Hong Kong yesterday? It’s the best travel show about Hong Kong I have seen so far. If you do a travel guide for this city you better show it’s obsession, culture, and love… FOOD.
It takes about 45 minutes to watch all 5 parts, but if you have a bit of time now or later, I promise you it’s worth it.
Part 1: The body builder restaurateurs and the angry hawker granny
Part 2: Handmade noodles, a ball-crushing art Part 3: Bliss in a North Point food court “I am so happy here” Part 4: Spicy typhoon shelter crab Part 5: Fighting for Dim Sum
I have a sweet tooth for cooking shows. Is there anything better than arm chair traveling around the world with a little salivating on the side?
APPETIZER
I can’t watch Food Safari without munching something myself. Maeve O’Meara, the presenter, has the best job there is. In every show, she eats herself through one of the “immigrant” cuisines of Australia, and in the process has eaten herself around the world. Thailand, Lebanon, Spain, Malaysia, Pakistan, Hungary…
I also love that she goes shopping and learns about essential ingredients before digging in.
<
MAIN
Food is love, and Rick Stein shows how delicious it is. He travels around Great Britain and Continental Europe in search of simple, good, local food, and because his restaurant is located in a sea side town his show often features seafood. Mmmmmm!
DESSERT
It needs to be sweet, sticky, gooey, and full of chocolate.
“Who wouldn’t want this? Look at this ravishing… pool… of chocolate. It’s quite mesmeric.”
Oh yes, it is. Are there language courses that teach Nigella’s accent?
We were up at seven this morning. I am still trying to teach little man the concept of sleeping in on weekends … lol.
But we made up the early start by spending a few lazy hours afterwards in our PJs. Little man told me in detail last week’s school adventures, we simulated space shuttle lift-offs, and tried to transform his new transformer toy without breaking it. It took a while, was only slightly simpler than solving Rubik’s cube, but finally we managed to change the police car into a robot.
Before little man could say “and now please transform it back into a police car”, I suggested making pancakes. This was happily accepted.
Pancakes are our preferred lazy morning food, and little man has gotten quite good in helping me to prepare them. We make the European variety, thinner than American pancakes with more eggs. In German, they are also called “Eierkuchen” (egg cakes).
It’s funny how everyone has a slightly different recipe for these very simple dishes. Naturally, little man and I think ours is the best in the whole wide world :D.
Mix 200 grams of non-raising flour, 3 tablespoons of brown sugar, and three eggs in a bowl until the mixture is reasonably smooth. Then whisk in milk little by little until you have thin, smooth pancake batter. The amount of milk needed varies, but I would say it’s about half a liter. Let the batter stand for 10-20 minutes, to make it more elastic and avoid excessive flour taste, then whisk one more time.
Little man has become an expert at whisking. He started whisking before he could talk… lol. Attracted by the cool kitchen toy, he demanded a share of the action very early in life. I am glad to say that the spillage is now down to a minimum. This morning, he also cracked an egg… trying to fish the egg shell out of the batter slowed us down a bit.
Then the frying begins, and getting the temperature just right, makes a good pancake in my opinion. I have a gas stove, which lets me adjust the temperature instantly. I start by heating up the skillet at maximum heat for several minutes, only then I add a teaspoon of oil. When the oil is hot and evenly distributed in the pan, I turn down the heat to a minimum and add batter, just enough to cover the bottom of the pan after a little bit of swiveling. Heating up the pan thoroughly avoids the infamous first spoiled pancake.
After all the liquid has evaporated, I turn the pancake. I am a chicken and use a spatula, but one of these days I have to learn the cool throw-it-in-the-air trick to impress little man. The kitchen ceiling needs a new coat of paint anyway.
Little man tops his pancakes with extra sugar or orange jam, but I think they also taste good on their own. The recipe above yields about eight 7-inch pancakes, which we didn’t eat all at once… really.
