What if?

#blogjune day 13

What do I want to do if I’m not a librarian? What can I do if I don’t have a job tomorrow? I consider myself an entrepreneur, been there done that and learned lots from my business venture and I would not hesitate to do it again when the time comes. But what do I want to do?

Do what you love as they say, I love cooking and enjoy good food. Almost every time I buy something off a food truck, I regret it and thought I should start one and steal all their customers (*muahahaha*). For a food truck, you can succeed if you do one thing very, very well. So far I have only seen one that does their thing really really well, that’s Delish Ice.

Perhaps I can start a gourmet catering business, offering high quality, healthy catering option. I think that’s a niche here in Perth at the moment and does sound like the most satisfying and fun job to do.

And why hasn’t anyone started an Asian grocery shop that is modern and cool and comes with an app? Write some useful description for products or ingredients and stick them on the shelves as well as in the app (that’s metadata curation, librarians!). Share my recipes and invite customers to share their recipes with other customers or something to attract them to return to a local shop, which is also a social network – engage them on and offline. Best recipe of the month! Win stuff!

Ahh.. yap… lots of crap in my head. I have ideas unrelated to food too, but that’s for another day.

Recipe: Green Tea Ice Cream

#blogjune Day 1

Since I got an ice cream maker a few months ago, I started experimenting and have been eating too much ice cream 🙂 It’s a lot of fun and I’d like to make ginger ice cream next. I made a batch of green tea ice cream for our house warming party and since then, that is what we’re asked to bring to dinner parties. I guess I must be doing something right and I should share the recipe.

This recipe is derived from the Cuisinart recipe booklet and it contains instructions that require a Thermomix. Of course you can achieve the same result without it, it’s just so much easier to make the perfect ice cream mixture with one.

Ingredients

• 2 cups whole milk
• 1 tub thickened cream (300ml)
• 4 tablespoons green tea powder
• 5 egg yolks
• 3/4 cup castor sugar
• 1 teaspoon cornstarch

1. In a saucepan bring milk, cream, and green tea powder to a low simmer, stir with a whisk to dissolve as much green tea powder as possible.
2. Remove milk mixture from heat, stand for at least 15 minutes.
3. In Thermomix, mix egg yolks, sugar, and cornstarch for 2 minutes speed 6 or until mixture is thick and pale.
4. Scrap down side of bowl, at speed 1, slowly pour warm milk mixture into the the egg mixture.
5. Mix and cook mixture for 4 minutes speed 3 at 70°C until thick
6. Pour into a glass container through a strainer
7. Cover with a sheet of cling wrap directly on top of the mixture
8. Refrigerate at least 6 hours or overnight
9. The mixture is now ready for churning according to your ice cream maker manufacturer’s instructions

This recipe makes just over 1L of ice cream and can be stored in an air tight container in the freezer for 3 days. No it didn’t last that long, I just ate the last bit 😉

Cookbook

I’ve been playing with XML and XSLT in the last couple of days, my brain’s frozen, I couldn’t come up with any more #blogjune ideas. Yeah yeah so many excuses.

I want to do the cookbook memes but they’re in boxes (while we wait for our new house to be built). It doesn’t stop me from buying new ones though, I’m very happy with my latest purchase, Cook with Love: the Pete Evans Collection.

I really like the variety in this book, there are Indian, Asian, Mediterranean, Australian, Korean, Japanese, you name it. He uses everyday ingredients, which is always a bonus. Just had a quick look and the two below are on the must-try list.

Thermomix recipe – Chinese sweet almond soup

Sweet almond soup, or sweet almond tea, is my favourite Chinese dessert. It’s made of sweet and bitter apricot kernels, rice, and rock sugar. It’s very simple but difficult to perfect. Nothing can compare to the version made by my awesome grandma, she’s a great cook. When I was little, I love helping in the kitchen, I know my grandma enjoyed the company of her little helper too, as she’s still telling others how I made my perfect tangyuans :). I still ask her for cooking advice these days, via FaceTime, of course.

I haven’t made sweet almond soup in a long time because it’s very fiddly, and without the right tool, it’s not going to taste as good, and I’d rather not eat it. Since I got my Thermomix late last year, I’ve been trying to convert grandma’s recipe to a Thermie one. I’ve made this 6 times, I’m still not 100% happy with the recipe, but it’s very close.

And here’s the recipe…

Ingredients:

• 100g sweet apricot kernels (the best quality kernels I could get were from the Chinese herbs place, Hong Ninh, in Northbridge. They’re massive and full of flavour!)
• 10g bitter apricot kernels
• 15-20g white rice
• 70g rock sugar
• 700g warm water

Method:

• Soak rice and kernels for at least 4 hours
• Place drained sweet and bitter apricot kernels, rice, and 300g water into TM bowl and blend for 2 minute on speed 8. Scrap down side of bowl and blend for another 1 minute on speed 8.
• Add remaining water and sugar and cook for 12 minutes at 90°c on speed 2.
• Boil for a further 2 minutes at 100°c on speed 2. You have to watch the TMX at this stage as it might start to boil.
• Strain and serve warm or cold (some people prefer their soup strained, some don’t, personal preference)

Edit: We don’t use almonds in this recipe. We refer to apricot seeds as almonds, it would sound very strange if I don’t call it almond soup 🙂

Hot Pot

 

We had hot pot for dinner tonight, just the two of us. In my home town, Hong Kong, there are restaurants specialise in hot pot, so it’s not just for winter nowadays. These restaurants have people queue up for a table at 9pm, it sure is very popular over there.

I love having hot pot in winter, especially with a group of friends, or even better, with my family when I go back to Hong Kong. The beauty of hot pot is that the host doesn’t need to cook anything, and we all have a good variety of food, all cook on the table. You would imagine it’s a popular choice for impromptu gatherings.

Every family does this differently, people tend to have different combination of food, and their own way of preparing their broth and sauces. We love seafood, so we usually have clams, oysters, crabs, prawns, sliced beef, tofu, dumplings, siitake and enoki mushrooms, and some seasonal veggies (we’d get Tong Ho if we’re lucky. Tong Ho is a very strong flavoured Asian vegetable that is absolutely delicious when cooked in a hot pot). And I make my broth with radish, chicken stock, and coriander. I like plain stock because at the end of the feast, the stock will become so full of flavour, there’s no need for a strong stock to start with.

See also sukiyaki and shabu-shabu.

Happy Friday

 

I know it won’t be too long til I start writing about food. I love food, I can talk about food all day, many of my colleagues know that already 😉

Most Friday nights – except when my husband works late, we go out for dinner. If we can’t meet on Friday nights, we would go out for breakfast and/or lunch on Saturday, something I look forward to every week.

Tonight we thought we’d try our luck and went down to Jamie’s Italian, I really miss their wild mushroom ravioli! Well we’re informed that there’d be a 2 hours wait, we knew it, didn’t we?

We then went to Took Bae Kee, a Korean restaurant on Barrack Street, I love Korean soups in winter. Tonight I ordered my favourite, ginseng chicken soup, I think it goes very well with my Corona. LOL.

Have a good weekend, everyone.