Breakfast of champions

Interesting color combination. Dragon fruit and homemade yam cake.

Steak dinner

steak was from chuck, the toughest but most flavourful meat. The toughness was taken care of by cooking it at 58C for 24 hours with a bit of butter, salt, oregano and rosemary.

Steak sauce was bacon and finely chopped onions sauted. Then add chicken stock and wine. Finally add butter to mount. Salt and pepper to taste.

Fairly nice.

For the salad, stewed dried prunes in sweet wine, then chopped the prunes. The leftover sweet wine is augmented by lemon juice, then mixed with olive oil. The veg is spinach and chopped bell pepper. Add hard boiled egg with soft center and foie gras (bought in France 2 years ago in a can). Turns out it is easier to blow torch the foie gras than to sear it in a pan. When I tried the first sear, a lot of smoke and a thin black skin formed. Luckily I could remove the black skin and restart, which I did with a blow torch.

The foie gras, sweet prunes and the sweet wine vinegrette was very good and went well with the wine, a Barolo we bought 10 years ago in Italy. The Barolo also went well with the meat.

Had to decant the Barolo in the morning to let it breathe in the fridge.

Green bean soup with tumeric

We had this green bean soup with ginger fairly recently in Bintan. It was quite nice, only a minor variation of our version, and I thought I'd recreate it but with fresh tumeric.

It actually isn't too bad, but the amount of fresh tumeric I used was a bit too little. Fresh tumeric only has a slight gingerish taste. Need to add more next time.

For a 1/2 cup of green beans, I used 1-1.5 cup of water and an amount of tumeric about half an index finger. Next time I'll try one full thumb worth. Sugar used was cane sugar (gula melaka is probably better). Only a bit of coconut cream was used - just enough to give a hint of the coconut.