two pastas

linguine with garlic oil and bacon. this is very nice, and simple; the long pasta really emphasises the oil.
spaghetti al aglio olio. i scraped out the seeds because i was scared that it would be too spicy, but in the end there was no chilli flavour.

i think, no matter what i feel, there are always cookies to be made.

pierce

looks like i won't get to watch 容祖儿 afterall. but i'm watching the vcd of the esplanade concert in 2004, albeit a truncated one.

one nurse, one housewife

is it lalang? yes i think it's lalang, all the wheaty-looking plants that have suddenly grown out. there was yet another suddent storm in the evening, a deluge to flood the stairways and bring down the mangoes prematurely. and the setting sun made the corridor diamond again. (as if 'diamond' were a colour.)

maybe the rain tamed the sun's evening glow, but then didn't the sun bring about the rain? the air is definitely cool, but you can still feel the warmth of the sun rays. 暖光.

haha, i had a good evening in the ops room with weiyang. for once, we weren't running and, instead, getting fat. drinking tea, hot chocolate, eating cookies. and the fried food. god, the fried food. but i have a 29 inch waist.

i think this week i have - for the last time - cleared out the platoon 6 bunk, and along with it all traces of everyone. it's easy to think about them when i think about the arrangements of their beds, but now even the beds have been moved. i picked up the slip of paper i wrote to label my cupboard.

i have again failed SOC too, which was followed immediately by another evening storm. and then the bus stops on the road in the rain. it's at moments like these that you start pondering your past - past choices, past mistakes - and willing the rain to wash away even the most indelible stains. and then the bus moves on, and so do we.

i'm actually tired.

curly wurly hurdy gurdy

this is my second time trying reinhart's recipe for the transitional cinnamon buns. the idea this time was to make more buns from the same amount of dough, since the last time the buns were so huge. i wanted smaller buns, and more buns.
so instead of rolling up the dough from the short side, i rolled from the long side, and cut it into 16 pieces.
they weren't as nice, because the dough was not evenly thick when i rolled it out initially, so some of the buns were larger. and when the proofed some of them got pushed out of shape.
nevertheless, all that bulging and sticking together gave it a warm homey look, like the norwegian cinnamon buns.
and tear away at the buns.

who said it?

有些东西要某些人去做才会有意义。

tickles

once in a while i make a swing with the two long ropes outside the centre foyer (and pronounce fo-yay) and sit on it for a while, until my hips hurt from the ropes.

once in a few months the mango trees bear fruit, and now is the season. they are all sprouting with small bobs of mangoes. i don't know if those will actually swell up and ripen for us to pluck and eat.

everyday, a blazing sunset would throw a thick orange glow into the corridor. some days it's just different - maybe it’s the particles in the air, maybe it’s the sun; some days the setting sun shines into the corridor and makes it shimmer like a diamond.

sometimes our timing is just bad; our paths just miss each others' by a few seconds, a phone call, a lunch. but a heavy rain can coop everyone together, and a mug of hot chocolate warm the heart.

i have almost - just almost - forgotten how much i love the feel of buffed nails on the lips.

reparo

sunday was supposed to be a lazy day. but the rain, the cold, cold, air made me stop doing a puzzle, take out some butter and flour, and made pie dough. what was there to make with pie dough, curd, and egg whites left over from making the curds?

and so i created.
pie dough. i used up the last little bit of butter left in the refrigerator to make it, taking advantage of the cold weather. and i was calm.
i baked eight little mini pie shells, though these should really be made into tarts. but i didn't have the ingredients for tart dough. i hesitated between using the lemon or lime curd, and decided to use the lime. i think the lemon curd was too nice, too precious.
piled the tops with meringue, which was a little too soft. but they held their peaks well.
the meringues cracked, and they weren't clinging onto the pie shells well enough. but i liked the taste. the lime curd was qutie sour, but i think the meringue was just sweet enough to make up for it.

i find myself humming the 再见艳阳天 song, the sweeter one. sometimes it just goes on in my head. watched a 3-D movie for the first time ever, and i saw 赖怡玲 at jurong point today, where i just had a big feast with weiyang and yishi.

many things in the kitchen

i've done many things in the kitchen today, but mostly i find a little stove-side pottering the most satisfying.

as it is, i have two jars of curd in my refrigerator now. one is a lime curd and the recipe comes from flora woods. i also made a lemon curd (recipe from the culinary institute of america), which used five egg yolks, leaving behind five egg whites, which i've frozen. never mind that, i think i could make a meringue pie using the curds and the egg whites, or try my hand at small meringue tarts.
(look at my new electronic balance!) this is my first time using such big limes; i think those small ones that come with hokkien mee are not the right ones to use... there is just no way of getting that much juice from them. anyway, the lime curd was just made by whisking butter, eggs, sugar, lime zest and juice over a low fire until thickened. the recipe didn't call for an ice bath, so i just kept whisking once in a while until the curd cooled down. then i stored it in a oven-dried jar.
the lemon curd was more complicated. as i said, it's a recipe from the culinary institute of america, so i think it's expected that only the yolks were used, and five yolks at that! the exclusion of egg whites means that the curd cooks out to be very silky, very smooth. and of course tempering would be involved, and then an ice bath. classic culinary institute stuff. the only thing disappointing was that my jar was too big, so after i poured everything in, the volume looked unimpressive compared to the lime curd.
hmm, there really is a sense of homespun achievement when you produce jars of stuff like that by yourself. normally, these would go into a larder, which practically no modern home has anymore, but curds have to be kept in the refrigerator. so, there. the lime curd was refreshingly sharp and slightly bitter, and the lemon curd was very brightly/deeply yellow and sweet.

because one of the egg yolks broke when i was separating the eggs for the lemon curd, i reserved that egg for cooking. i took out the star mold that beejuan bought for me and tried to fry the egg. problem was, the mold did not lie flat on the pan, and so a lot of egg seeped out =/

and the project that stretched across the whole day was reinhart's transitional cinnamon raisin bread. the dough is essentially the same as the cinnamon buns one, but the addition of the raisins seemed to make the dough a little less cooperative during the final shaping stage. the dough kept tearing and appeared to be refusing to rise.
i made the biga and soaker in the morning. this time, the soaker contains raisins. and then in the evening i made the final dough. chopping up the soaker, i realised that the raisins were chopped open too. i guess that can't be avoided, but i think whole raisins would look better.
mixing the dough, kneading it, and once in a while sending raisins flying out. after the first rise, you can see that it split down the middle, showing that throughout the rise it didn't form one piece nicely. i think the raisins may be distorting the hydration. the dough was perfect without raisins when i made the cinnamon buns.
anyhow, the split down the middle of the dough helped me divide it quite equally in two. i rolled them into rough rectangles, and this time they didn't stretch as easily. sprinkled the cinnamon sugar over, and then rolled the rectangles up into loaves for panning.
the loaves did not rise spectacularly, but the bread still came out tasty, though i think i love the cinnamon buns more. the raisins were still juicy, but the cinnamon sugar swirled in the bread made parts of it wet and feel rather gummy if you concentrated too much on the feeling.

ruminate

in a late morning storm last monday, i found the encore piece i was looking for. it's a chopin mazurka. my dizzy spell comes on and off nowadays, but i still made some good runs with weiyang. (i think we'll lose tummy!)

just yesterday we went to the airport for a send-off. i splurged on yet more organic flour, and then i borrowed jia en's books on torts. now i don't know what to fill in on my application form for NUS.

解铃还须系铃人

omg look at this thesis paper by rose levy beranbaum.

add more some more

i made oatmeal-raisin cookies, from the american book, again. this time, i managed to use some real rolled oats, and not instant oats.
the last time i made them, my refrigerator died. this time, i managed to get the logs of dough to harden enough for good slicing.
cookies done, on some very parched parchment paper. these came out quite crispy; i hope they soften in the next few days. i like oatmeal-raisin cookies to be chwey. and i can't smell the cinnamon in these =(

and then i made the devil's fudge cake. i can't help but always veer back to a chocolate cake nowadays. somehow, the recent cakes i made all managed to use up cocoa powder without melted chocolate, and i like that, because there is a lot of unused cocoa lying around in the kitchen.
my hand brushed against the side of the oven when i was trying to get the cakes out, so i got quite a burn. and then i realised that the cake had broken - literally - into a devilish smile. quite apt.
i have said before that i am terrible at icing cakes. today i sliced the cake so nicely, set up my table very well for icing the cake, but the problem appeared in the icing.
it became way too fluid, and to right it again i had to mix in a hell lot of icing sugar, by which time i can't really smell the vanilla, nor tell if what i was tasting was indeed chocolate, or brown sugar syrup.
anyhow, i got on with the icing. it was very sticky, adhered to the cake well. at least it didn't flow everywhere like a glaze, though after a while it lost its shine.

self-service

i made the rosemary loaf cake, which is very similar to the madeira cake. the rosemary does add a very unique dimension to the flavour in the cake. as nigella says, there is something about the 'musky fragrance' in the eggy vanilla cake.

it was raining early in the morning again. oh i went for an sso concert today, and the tchaikovsky symphony was perfect; i think it's the best i've ever heard. popped over to over easy and saw sunshine walking around inside.

oh no i'm on a retro night. i suddenly found all the old, very old, videos of shows i used to watch. more importantly it's the songs; i think the songs link you to the memory of the show even after a long time. there's 不老传说, 再见艳阳天 with both the theme songs, 奔奔, 豆腐街...

love, love, love, what can i say~~~

this is not my sandwich

i attempted peter reinhart's transitional whole-wheat sandwich loaf today, and it was quite a semi-success.
the pre-doughs. i love reinhart's epoxy method for his whole-grain baking book. i think what appeals is the way he has broken up the baking process so that you can fir the baking to your schedule, not the other way round, as is the case with other straight doughs.
the dough came together nicely. but i was having a dilemma: the recipe called for a loaf tin which i didn't have. the ones i had were smaller, so i thought maybe i should divide the dough in two, but i didn't know if they would rise to fill the two tins fully enough.
in the end, i decided to divide the dough. i preshaped them and then shaped them after more resting.
i was trying to bake them pullman-style. that is, covering the top of the loaf so that the expansion is limited and the loaf gets a flat top, resulting in an almost square shape, just the kind that comes from gardenia.
but alas, they failed me by collapsing during the baking. oh well, i think they overproofed in the loaf tin, because they were more than double the original size when i sent them into the oven. still, the collapse didn't come with a dense or gummy interior. the bread was still soft and fluffy, entirely eatable.