second cookout

today was battalion anniversary, so i woke up absurdly early in the morning to cook myself french toast for breakfast. and then to lido for an equally absurd movie called tropic thunder.

anyway, the afternoon was supposed to be a baking date with weijie, but it turned into a full-fledged dinner cookout. it's a nigellan feast, because all recipes, save for the fish, were from nigella.

first was my re-make of her pain-au-chocolat pudding, not that i did it her way the first time either. this time, i added some cocoa to the custard mixture, though i think it wasn't quite enough.
now that i've made it the second time, i do think i need to bake it a bit longer than required to get it to set into a firmer pudding.

next was the caesar cleopatra, from forever summer. it's the name she gives for a caesar salad which has chicken in it.
we cooked the chicken first, and then i made the dressing (which contains a raw egg yolk =/). the only problem was that it didn't actually taste like a caesar salad, and there was much much water in the washed lettuce, leading to a liquidy dressing.

the fish was just fish. no recipe, just fried on the pan.
it looked like a muscular stomach, with all the lines etched into the fillet. and full of bones too.

perhaps the crowning glory of the evening was the creamy potato gratin, from nigella bites. this, although a bit too salty, was dream-like; as nigella puts it: margin-blurring softness.
when we were cooking the potatoes in the cream and garlic, there was this constant waft of smell like the creamy pastas from pastamania! i think now we can cook the cream sauce for pasta... it was so exciting to see the cream bubble and boil as the gratin went through the blitz in the oven.

so, the dinner was assembled and served, and ended with dessert. probably have to learn about plating.
happy halloween - the festival of weiyangs! i am looking forward to another cookout that is coming very soon... and then the christmas ones!

半载 banzai!

ok, very random updates about this week:

my waist is thirty inches now. i did some STEP questions that jinquan brought (and they were all damn hard). i passed ACCT. (exactly six months ago i passed ICCT.) seibu just told me that hong kong's krispy kreme outlets are all closing down =(

lyrics time!

愛怪物的你

生性古怪缺點這樣多
長滿尖刺人人離棄我
但你　不管旁人諸多的教唆
亦浪費歲月陪我渡過　錯配的一個
饒恕我出於貪歡遠比戀愛多

越是誠懇對待　越是成為良心障礙
任別人歧視因我累你遇上白眼
你都百般寵愛是種幸福的虐待
長期地拖你越耐越會有害
任我看到最遠看不出有未來
感激得你　伸手擁抱怪獸
感激卻無緣變做愛

一隻妖怪寄居孤獨島
竟會得你來投懷送抱
任你　一生之中於荒島最好
壞事也努力和我辦到
我更加焦燥　難過於命運滑鐵盧

越是誠懇對待　越是成為良心障礙
任別人歧視因我累你遇上白眼
你都百般寵愛是種幸福的虐待
長期地拖你越耐越會有害
自責對你抱歉愛不出愛
擁抱你也帶著感慨　情侶到底未活過來

你縱容我帶有私心分給你這種溫馨折磨
時間不能拖　明白我只不過寂寞便惹禍

不必死心塌地　會有害
分開都不會視作意外　我意內
扮若無其事將你扮做伴侶禮待
但我勉強報答你的慷慨
只有變做感慨　施捨不會變做戀愛
這種戀愛怪獸　應走進無人國自愛

from 27th september to 26th october, i spent $963.05. 做朋友会很辛苦吗?

breakfast and tea

i'm starting to get better with eggs. yesterday it was french toast. today it's poached eggs. maybe i'll do shirred eggs, deviled eggs and eggs benedict soon!
it was difficult to lower the egg into the water and get it to form into a round bob; out of seven i cooked, only one rolled into the water and formed a ball. the rest just spread open their whites, like how precipitates form during double decomposition.
sprinkled with salt and black pepper, to go with toast. nice breakfast! compared to soft-boiled eggs, the poached egg has a much firmer white, but the yolk is just as liquid. i just love the way the egg yolk flows out.

then i made the lemon meringue pie again, to use up the egg whites i had in my freezer.
this time i went back to my old pie dough formula. instead of using flour twice the weight of butter, i followed my american book: 1 cup butter to 2 2/3 cups flour. this, i'm quite sure, deviates a lot from the 1:2 ratio formula. and then i realised why nigella always had less problems with pie dough: the ratio formula uses a lot more flour, and this makes a dough that is easier to handle, though the crust eventually becomes tougher.
cooking the lemon curd. when i baked the pie today, the curd didn't set up properly, which i only discovered after cutting out one slice. so i sent it back into the oven and baked it again.
don't laugh at the shit-like tubes! today i piped the meringue onto the curd filling, and then used a spatula to smoothen it out and make a beautiful dome. at least it looks better than the one i made previously.
lemon meringue pie again. when i cut through the pie and removed the slices, i could see a very interesting pattern of tunnels in the meringue layer - a result of the piping of the meringue onto the top.

like a trisha

last sunday i had dessert with weiyang, just before we were booking in. we were dreaming of our far away ORD; it's like i'm half way down the mrt line, but he's only one-third down.

on one of the nights off i had dinner with guanwei, weijie, guohao, kenneth and jinquan at new york new york. we were talking so much about going out into the world to explore everything...

on wednesday i made some cut-out cookies, from the leftover dough i stashed into the freezer when i made the rainy-day biscuits two weeks ago. i happened to find two very cute cookie cutters, and decided to make those shapes...
these are so tiny, so cute, they should be called petite cuties/cookies.

on friday i did a sentry guard duty with jinquan. omg we were left at some god-forsaken place to rot and be eaten by mosquitoes. they were truly godlike. anyway, we were talking about games that had some form of binary/ternary counting basis.

and yesterday i made my first french toast: nigella's doughnut french toast! i was surprised how just one slice soaks up the whole of one egg.i didn't have real vanilla, just the artificial essence, so although the french toast had a really nice vanillary smell, there was a blackness in the taste because of the essence...
this was real quick, just twenty minutes of soaking, frying, dredging in sugar, and i was done. since i didn't have strawberries, and a blender to blitz the stuff, i used some jam for substitute. still works perfect. (takes only five minutes to finish eating.)

i also finished visiting the biennale exhibits. here are some photos to inspire your wonder.
and two songs from joey's new album:


presto su, mario! mario! su presto andiam! su! su! mario! mario!

bailiwick

i just went to graze today for brunch. thanks to sonya for finding the place! and then it rained in the evening... i want to bake again.

sleeping with the butterflies

joey's new album in motion is nice.

i splurged on the score for elgar's cello concerto today =/ there's a new cross pinned on the wall immediately beside my front door and i hate it.

lemon meringue pie

yesterday i made this pie using a recipe from great british puddings by debbie and mary smith, which was the book i used to make the bread and butter pudding many months ago.
the stars of the pie: lemons, zested and waiting to be juiced. apparently lemons are in short supply now, and cost a bit more than usual.
this is the excess pie dough from making the apple pie some time back - the one that got laminated accidentally; almost like a puff pastry. this one was blind baked completely before filling with the lemon curd.
the sweet and sour elements of the pie: the lemon curd cooked in a double boiler, and the meringue whipped using my mixer.
filled the pie with the curd, then piled the meringue on. actually, i dolloped it onto the curd and found that it was impossible to spread and cover the pie, because it either stuck together, or got pushed deeper into the curd. as a result, the meringue looked ugly. i think i might try this pie again, seeing as how i have an obscene number of egg whites still in the deep freeze. next time, i would try piping the meringue onto the curd filling.
after baking, the meringue top turned a light brown, like chestnut cream. it was also delicately fragile, and it started to absorb moisture and turn soft over the (humid) day.
a slice of the pie. you can see the distinct layers: the crust of the pie under the sunny yellow curd, topped with the white meringue whose surface is baked brown and crisp. the short burst of citrus sourness wakes you up quickly, but the curd was not overly sour. and the meringue was not overly sweet like the one from the american book, and the lemon curd was not overly sour, so the pie actually tasted quite good.

if you watch desperate housewives, you may remember the episode bree kept trying to get the lemon meringue pie recipe out of katherine; katherine said 'the trick is finding the perfect blend of sweet and sour'.

weavers

oh i'm so stealing as much time as i can. only back home for about one hour. interestingly, i met two eugenes this week. one was eugene from RI, and he's training to be a military police. the other was eugene from leopard, and he's a naval regimental police or something. again, i don't familiarise myself with these military stuff.

it couldn't have been more than ten minutes of meeting the two eugenes, but in each ten minutes i regained memories stretching back more than six months.

currently, i love elgar's cello concerto (again). it's so painful to play it though, physically and emotionally.

coulis and cheesecakes

i've finally gotten down to making the cheesecakes that people have been bugging me for. it's the no-bake recipe from nigella; i felt it would be weird to make a strawberry/blueberry cheesecake that was baked.
cooking the strawberries and blueberries to make the coulis. the idea is to swirl the sauce into the cheesecake mixture and flavour it. the leftover pulp of the fruit i used as a 'jam'; just spread onto plain bread and eat.
i decided to make individual-portioned cupcake cheesecakes this time. also, i used a rolling pin to bash the biscuits into sandy rubble, instead of using a blender to blitz them into powder. hopefully this gives more a more crunchy base.
the cheese mixture is made and used to fill the cups. to make the chocolate cheesecake, i portioned out and stirred some cocoa into the cheese mixture. for the strawberry and blueberry ones, i drizzled some coulis in, and swirled it a bit. the strawberry coulis didn't seem to mix in well with the cheese mixture though.
there was (fortunately) quite some excess cheese mixture, so i prepared another big one in a box. this one i drizzled with the blueberry coulis, and moved a blade randomly through to create the swirl effect. this one's for home.