Posts tagged cooking

Open-faced burgers

I love a good hamburger and my preferred patty is made from minced pork, minced beef, and chopped bacon. The good things about making your own are:

1. You know exactly what’s in it
2. No messing around with unwanted stuff like chutney or onion marmalade (yes, I know there are some of your who actually like the stuff!)
3. You can make em whatever size you want
4. You can keep an emergency stash somewhere for those “I need meat” moments.

Ingredients:

• 250g minced beef
• 250g minced pork
• 150g bacon, chopped into small bits
• 1 medium sized onion, chopped finely
• A couple of cloves of garlic, pressed or chopped finely
• A handful of Panko breadcrumbs
• Couple of teaspoons of milk
• Salt and pepper

Directions:

Pop everything into a large bowl and mix well to distribute the different meats evenly.

Mix the milk with the breadcrumbs and add to the meat mixture.

Season with salt and pepper

You can also add other yummy things like feta cheese to the meat mixture, chives. 

Shape into patties. Coat lightly with flour to help it hold its shape. When ready, pop them into a frying pan and fry till the meat is browned on the outside and cooked on the inside.

I had my burgers with some baguette from Sun Moulin which I buttered lightly and topped with a hint of Naked Baby mayo, and sides of cherry tomatoes tossed in olive oil and grilled cauliflower (which is really easy - cut into florets, drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with some salt and pepper and grill till tender)

I also remember having these little burgers with rice and an egg on lazy days.

Meat & mushroom tartlets in a herbed crust

About two weeks, a friend pinged me and asked if I’d be interested in be interviewed for a feature in the Sunday Times. Here’s the article from the 4th of December. The theme was Christmas and the journalist was looking for something savoury coz the other people were making sweet things - mulled wine, cake pops and cupcakes. Another friend of mine suggested making mince pies with a twist - the mince being savoury instead of the Christmas minced pies that are traditionally sweet with spices in them.

It just so happened that the book Kitchen Coquette had reached me the day before and as I was pouring through its pages, our jumped a recipe for meat & mushroom tartlets.

[Adapted from Kitchen Coquette for the filling & Tartelette for the pastry]

Ingredients:

(For the pastry)

• 1.5 cups of all purpose flour
• 1/2 tsp dry mustard
• 1/2 tsp thyme
• a pinch of salt
• 3 egg yolks
• 70 g unsalted butter

(For the filling)

• 150g minced pork
• 150g minced chicken
• 100g shitake mushrooms, finely chopped
• Small handful of shitake mushrooms sliced into fingers
• 1 small onion, chopped
• 2 garlic cloves, finely chopped or pressed
• 1/2 tbsp spoon thyme
• Zest of half a lemon, finely grated
• Half a cup of cooking cream
• Salt and pepper
• Handful of parsley, finely chopped

Directions:

In a mixer, whip together the butter, mustard, herbs, and salt on medium speed until light and airy. Add the egg yolks, one at a time and beating well after each addition. Mix until incorporated. Add the flour and mix briefly.

Gather the dough into a smooth ball. Flatten the dough into a disk, wrap it in plastic wrap and refrigerate for an hour.

When the dough is nice and cold, roll it out on a lightly floured board or in between two sheets of plastic to fit your tart tins. If the dough tears while you roll or/and transfer into the pan, just patch it with your fingertips.

Refrigerate 30 minutes before baking.  (You can freeze the dough for up to 3 months and prepare it up to 4 days in advance.)

To make the filling, heat some oil in a frying pan and sauté the onions till translucent. Add the mince and fry till golden brown. Add the chopped mushrooms, garlic, thyme and lemon and cook till fragrant and all the meat has cooked through.

Reduce heat and stir the cream through, together with salt and pepper to taste. Just before taking it off the heat, stir the chopped parsley in.

In a clean frying pan, heat up some butter and fry the sliced mushrooms until golden. Set aside.

Spoon the filling into the prepared tart shells. Top with the butter mushroom slices and bake in an oven preheated to 180ºC until the crusts have cooked through and the meat and mushrooms have taken on a golden brown hue.

~~

There are quite a few steps to it but you can make a larger batch of tart shells and freeze them. These are delightful little savoury bites for tea parties or for a buffet style get together. Enjoy!

Japanese tonkatsu on rice

A couple of months ago (yes, this photo is that old), Sue Ern came over for dinner instead of trying to rub elbows with the Orchard Road human traffic and I decided to make tonkatsu because we both are meat eaters. We had a great time catching up over a quick bit of frying, eating and make up. I thought I’d post my tonkatsu recipe because many people don’t know easy it is to make. It’s Japanese but really, it’s just pork chops. What makes it Japanese is the “naked baby” mayo and the tonkatsu sauce (I like the Bull Dog brand).

Ingredients:

• 4 pork chops (you can use loin too)
• 2 tbsp soy
• 1 tbsp sesame oil
• 1 tbsp Chinese cooking wine (optional)
• White pepper powder
• Flour for dusting/coating
• 1 egg
• Panko breadcrumbs
• Oil for frying

Directions:

Sandwich the pork chops between two pieces of cling wrap and flatten with a mallet until about 1/3” thick.

Make the marinade by mixing the soy, sesame oil, Chinese cooking wine and pepper together. Add the pork chops to the marinade and until the chops are well coated. Leave for a couple of hours to marinade or overnight.

Heat up about half an inch of oil in a fying pan till medium-high.

While the oil is heating up, line up the following in shallow dishes: flour, egg, Panko bread crumbs. Take each piece of pork and dust with flour. Next dip into the egg mixture quickly and coat both sides. Then transfer to the dish with bread crumbs and coat well with the breadcrumbs. You may have to use your fingers to press the crumbs in.

Fry the pork chops in the oil until the outside is golden and the pork chops are cooked through.

Serve on a bed of warm Japanese rice with “naked baby” mayo and tonkatsu sauce. Here, I added some rocket/arugula leaves dressed with mayo to the dish. And there you have it, Japanese tonkatsu.

~~

The best thing about tonkatsu is that you can make a big batch and store it in the freezer, sandwiched between waxed freezer paper or baking parchment. Just pop them into the fridge compartment a couple of hours before cooking to thaw and you’ll have a really simple easy meal that you can whip up in no time.

Megan, this recipe’s for you :)

Featured on Notabilia: quinoa salad with green pepper and grilled cauliflower

I am absolutely thrilled to be featured on Notabilia - thank you Pooja - sharing my failsafe go-to recipe when I’m knackered after a day’s work or when I have vegetarian friends coming to dinner or when it’s so hot outside that all I can stomach is something crisp and clean on the palette.

Click through for the recipe and I hope you like it too.

And here’s a link to some of my other recipes.

Cinnamon French toast & fresh strawberry topped honeyed Greek yoghurt

Whenever there are red, ripe, sweet smelling strawberries (that aren’t Driscoll’s because from my experience Driscoll’s pick them when they haven’t yet ripened enough to give them a longer shelf life and so are tasteless and hard) in the supermarket, I buy some for immediate consumption. So far, the best strawberries I’ve found are from NTUC Fairprice and Carrefour in mini punnets. Strawberries are best eaten slightly thawed and not straight out of the fridge in my opinion.

I decided to have some honeyed Greek yoghurt topped with strawberries and some French toast with it as I had some soft white bread left from a brunch party. After trying with different breads, I’ve come to the conclusion that French toast is best made with white bread (yes, evil!) and nothing grainy because the grainy texture interferes with the texture of the fried egg.

Ingredients for French toast:

• 1 egg (1 egg per 2 slices of white bread)
• Cinnamon - I used about half a teaspoon because I love cinnamon but you can adjust this to suit your tastes
• 1 tbsp milk
• 2 slices of white bread

Directions:

Beat all the ingredients together.

Take a slice of the bread and dip it into the egg mixture, coating both sides evenly.

Send it to the frying pan with a little oil or butter in it and fry till the egg is cooked till golden on both sides. Repeat with the 2nd slice.

Serve with maple syrup and some butter.

I am going to have to learn to make my own yoghurt soon because yoghurt is so expensive in Singapore. Speaking to Pooja from Notabilia a few weeks ago at the bookbinding class, I hadn’t realized how easy it was to make until now. I just found a recipe online so you can bet I’ll be making my own very soon! More on that later! In the meantime, have a lovely day!

Joël Robuchon’s beef bourguignon

I love trying out new (as well as tried and tested) restaurants and eating out when I don’t need to think about cooking but I also love cooking and trying out recipes and making stuff from scratch. There’s something about knowing exactly what went into a dish that I find immensely appealing. I like the hands on experience and I just love doing, whether that’s paper craft, developing a photo from RAW or making stuff to eat. Sewing and knitting is a totally different kettle of fish altogether and I’m not embarrassed to say that when I was 14 and had to sew a pair of shorts for home economics, my mother took the fabric to a seamstress and told her, “please make some mistakes so that it looks like my daughter sewed this.”

My parents were away a couple of weeks ago and I trooped to the supermarket and bought a heap of groceries to tide me through the studying (I think the longest stretch I was holed up without stepping foot outside the main door was 3 days, which is really long for me who has cabin fever daily). Initially I’d wanted to make lamb stew (also from Robuchon) but the two supermarkets near home hadn’t any lamb other than a French cut rack of lamb. So I bought stewing beef and decided to make beef bourguignon.

I’d made beef bourguignon from a Julia Child recipe before so after the huge success with the Robuchon lamb, I decided to go to him for a how to. I was not disappointed. The beef was slow cooked to tender perfection and the bacon added at the end was the finishing touch, breaking up the taste of the beef.

Here’s the recipe. It may seem lengthy but it’s really easy to make. Adapted from The Complete Robuchon.

Ingredients:

• 1 bottle of red Burgundy or pinot noir
• Oil 
• 60g butter
• 900g rump roast, cut into cubes
• 2 medium carrots, peeled and sliced into 0.5cm thick rounds
• 2 medium onions, peeled and sliced into 0.5cm thick rounds
• 2 tbsp flour
• Crushed pepper
• 750ml beef broth
• 1 bouquet garni (1 sprig fresh thyme, 2 celery stalks, 1/2 bay leaf, 3 stems flat leaf parsley, wrapped and tied in a green leek leaf)
• 2 cloves garlic, peeled and degermed
• 16 small white or cippoline onions, peeled
• 1 tsp coarse salt
• 125g lardons (or chopped bacon)
• 150g small or cup mushrooms, cleaned and with stems trimmed
• 1 tbsp finely chopped parsley
• Salt and pepper

Directions:

Put the wine in a saucepan and bring to the boil. Lower heat and simmer for 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, put 1 tbsp of oil into a pan or casserole. Add 45g of butter. When the butter foams, add the meat and brown evenly (about 5 minutes). Remove the browned beef and set aside. You might need to do this in batches.

Put the carrots and onions into the pan in which the meat was browned and cook for 5 minutes, stirring to prevent them from caramelising.

Dust the meat with flour evenly and put it back into the pan. Add 1 tsp of crushed pepper. Turn the heat to medium and cook, stirring constantly for 5 minutes to cook the flour to remove its raw taste.

Pour half the broth into the pan and stir.The pour in the wine and the rest of the broth. The liquid should just cover the meat and vegetables. Add the bouquet garni and garlic. Cover and simmer gently for 2 hours. Every 30 minutes, skim the foam from the surface and stir gently. Add water to the broth if it becomes too thick.

As the meat cooks, put the small onions into a saucepan with 1 litre of water and 1tsp of coarse salt. Bring the liquid to a boil and simmer for 2 minutes. Drain.

Melt 15g butter in a saucepan or small saute pan. Add the onions, season with salt & pepper. Cover and cook over a gentle heat for 20 minutes until tender and golden. Drain on a paper towel and set aside.

Heat 1tbsp of oil in a frying pan and fry the lardons until crisp and cooked. Remove and add to the cooked onions. In the same pan, cook the mushrooms, seasoning to taste. Add the mushrooms to the onion & lardon mixture.

When the beef is tender, remove the meat and place in a serving dish. Add the onion, lardon & mushroom mixture to the meat. Strain the meat sauce into another saucepan and simmer of 5 minutes. Taste for salt and pepper; the dish should be quite peppery. Pour the sauce over the meat and vegetables and sprinkle with parsley.

Chocolate earl grey pots de crème

I’ve had these gorgeous little pots from Studio at 37 for a while (they arrived in the mail and have been sitting on the bookcase in my room for a good month!) and decided that they’d be perfect for desserts, so I made chocolate earl grey pots de creme some time last week.

These little chocolatety desserts are infused with earl grey which go very well with dark chocolate and topped with a dusting of cocoa powder to cut through the sweetness.

I couldn’t eat all of them myself and my parents aren’t a big fan of sweets so I brought some over to my best friend’s one night and shared them with some friends when they were over for brunch last week. I was extremely pleased that everyone liked it and thought that it was good enough to be restaurant fare. Make that absolutely ecstatic.

Ingredients

• 1½ cups double/thickened/heavy cream
• 1 cup milk
• 3 tablespoons loose leaves or 3 teabags of earl grey tea
• ½ cup sugar
• 250g dark chocolate (chopped)
• 6 egg yolks

Directions

Heat cream and milk to just simmering. Add the tea to the mixture and take it off the heat. Allow the tea to steep for 20 minutes.

Preheat oven to 120ºC.

After 20 minutes of steeping, strain the tea from the milk & cream mixture. Bring the liquid to a simmer and add the sugar. Whisk gently till the sugar has dissolved.

Add in the chocolate. If the liquid is too cool for the chocolate to dissolve, gently heat but do not allow to over boil. Whisk till the chocolate has dissolved and the mixture is smooth.

Beat the egg yolks. In a slow, steady stream, pour the chocolate mixture into the beaten yolks, whisking continuously to incorporate until the mixture is smooth.

Divide the mixture into ramekins. Place the ramekins into a bain marie, filled till the water is halfway up the side of the ramekins. Cover the entire tray with aluminium foil and bake for about 55-60 minutes for smaller ramekins, about 75 minutes for larger ramekins. You might have to adjust this based on your oven and ramekin size. The pots de crème are ready when the cream is wobbly when shaken but not liquid.

Allow to cool to room temperature and then place in the fridge to set.

Optional: Dust with cocoa powder and top with a dollop of freshly whipped cream.

Adapted from Chubby Hubby.