Thai fennel

The one on the right is from Belgium, costs almost twice the Thai fennel on the left and looks less fresh.

Tomato soup and a meatless dinner

Today I prepared a big load of tomato soup - most of it to be frozen for weekday lunches. Here are the  ingredients.

22 tomatoes 6 bell peppers 4 carrots, one big fennel, 2 onions, coriander, bay leaves, thyme.not pictured salt, pepper, a bit of chicken stock, and some sugar (to offset some sourness). The fennel, onions, and carrots are for the mirepoix. The peppers to be roasted. 

Word of warning: do not add a lot of fluid as the veg will cook down and produce fluid. I used about 500ml on this lot.

Here's the result (2 hours in oven at 120C, then purée the lot).

Here's the full dinner

Btw, my left over baked sweet potatoes from before taste great with the Pinot noir.

High heat not always good.

Do. Not. Evar. bake something with sugar in it at too high a temp (250C) for too long. I did some sweet potatoes mixed with olive oil, sugar, balsamic vinegar, cinnamon, nutmeg.

When I did it before (180-200 for 25 mins 1in cubes), it was great, texture just nice. Tonight (too much in a hurry coz of guests, so i turned up the heat), the high heat caramelized the sugar, turned it black and chewy/hard. Still edible, but much better on Thursday.

Supper in 90 mins

I made a resolution to try to cook once a week. Only had time this weekend for a crab cake supper.

Much of the time was waiting for the baking or waiting for crab mixture to set.

The crab cake was baked in a mold with a cheese layer on top. Besides crab, it's got spring onions, paprika, turmeric, crushed saltine crackers, beaten egg, salt, pepper and djion mustard ( seems to be my favorite flavoring agent at this time ). The sweet potatoes were baked with cinnamon, olive oil, salt pepper and a spoonful of honey.

First attempt at teochew style fish cake

Well .. sort of.

Saito fish - check

Lots of punching aka throwing the fish against the bowl - check

Red chili finely chopped - check

But I used finely chopped fennel in the mix, chicken stock instead of water. Also added a tablespoon of (sacre bleu!!) Dijon mustard. Also I shaped everything into a tray and "steamed" it in Bain Marie style.

Results. I think it tastes fine albeit not as bouncy as it should be. Should have punched more. Good enough for me to give away to Mw's dad and my mum.

More feedback. MW thinks its too salty. MW's dad thinks also its not bouncy enough and warns I should stand the fish paste for a while. My mum says use boiling water to cook the cakes, not steam them.

Mushroom soup

Made mushroom soup today. Took the tea plant dried mushrooms and simmered it in the stock. I also put in 2 parsnips (sliced) into the (2 ingredient) mirepoix.

The result is a thick mushroom soup with an undertaste from the dried Chinese mushrooms similar to that from the mushrooms in a double boiled soup. The parsnips don't show up to my tongue though. It's slightly over salted because I forgot the stock had salt already and I made the elementary mistake of not tasting on the way. But it's not too bad, probably when eaten with bread.

Here's the result of about 600g of mushrooms. Good for one working day lunch for 2 (with bread and salad). With one bottle leftover (for starters in some other meal perhaps). Quite a lot of shrooms for seemingly small amount of soup.

Grilled octopus - el pulpo

At Sabio by the Sea. 

The grill is good but I suspect it needs a really hot oven. What's revealing is the black mashed potato below - my guess plenty of pepper, squid ink, olive oil and salt.

This was the only decent dish btw

My maiden attempt at Lu rou

There appear to be as many recipes for braised pork belly as there are people posting them. Check 10 recipes and you get 10 variations, usually on the theme of "it was my grandmothers recipe which she trotted out for family gatherings". Both Mw's dad and my mum were no help either. Being very vague about quantities and such.

So as usual I went my own way and I must say its not bad. Not tip top but palatable enough for guests especially the eggs. The meat was very tender and the eggs were very flavorful. The sauce was however a bit disappointing to my mind.

I had the star anise and the cinnamon stick. Since 5 spice powder has fennel, I took some fennel seeds and ground them in a mortar with peppercorns. I took a guess at the proportion of dark soya sauce to water as 1 tbsp per cup of water. I also browned the meat - seemed logical - I do it for my western stews. Lastly after the initial boiling I simmered the braise very slowly at about 90 to 100 degrees c in my oven for 3.5 hours.