Relationship Goal

It was my wedding anniversary! Again! Just like last year…

It wasn’t how I imagined, or wanted it to be though. The food didn’t come out right. I was not feeling well… And, hubby was incredibly grumpy because of work related issues.

Not that I wanted a lavish celebration or something like that. We are not used to celebrating things anyway. But I was thinking of making something for us yesterday. DIdn’t happen. Oh well…

But at least one thing came out okay:

Mickey and Minnie gingerbread biscuit…

PS. Do you know that Mickey and Minnie have been together since 1930’s? Well that’s your new relationship goal, isn’t it?

x ❤ x

Pancake Day!

Alright. I have been in the UK for over 2 years now, but yesterday was my first ever pancake day.

I always missed it in the past, but yesterday… I did it!

Pancake in the UK is different from American pancake. This pancake is thin, and the batter is quite runny, like crepes. It is very easy to make, with very simple ingredients… yet incredibly tasty.

Especially when you eat it the traditional way (my husband taught me how to do it “properly”): squeeze the lemon, and sprinkle some sugar on it. YUM!

However yesterday evening my husband had his overtime, so he went home a little bit later than usual. That’s why I had time to make even more pancakes… so I made mille crepe.

I made one few years ago before we had this current oven hob. In fact, it was my first ever cake made for my husband’s birthday (I didn’t know how to bake back then). But the cake was too rich for him at that time, so I made less layer, and used different filling for it too…

Ah anyway…

I still have some of them left… Guess what I am having for lunch?

x ❤ x

This Little Piggy and Her New Toy

Yes, I bought a candy thermometer from Amazon. It is definitely made in China kind of product, and since it is shipped from there as well, it took ages to finally arrived to our mailbox. It is cheap though… very cheap. You can obviously find a better looking, and ones with faster delivery there, but… I wasn’t in a rush, it’s just a minor inconvenience having to wait for few weeks for that thing.

the thing…

What for?

Well… i wasn’t sure when I bought the thermometer. It was… you know… an impulsive purchase, because it popped up in my “you might like” section, and it was really cheap. Have I mentioned that it was incredibly cheap? I mean… less than £2, it’s obviously a bargain…

Anyway, it arrived, and it’s working. So, I better make use of it.

And… I’ve decided to make my own homemade yogurt.

First step is to pasteurise it. Some source said that if I use milk from an unopened bottle I don’t need to do this, but I found out that this is actually a very important step to guarantee a thicker, creamier yogurt…

Now I don’t have a fancy yogurt maker. I don’t fancy buying it too. Yogurt is something that people has made in the past for many many years successfully without yogurt maker, so it is a clear evidence that we don’t need yogurt maker to make yogurt.

All I needed was a pan, and a rice cooker. Yes rice cooker, the one that looks like a small slow cooker. You can use slow cooker too. We have one of those, but it was stored way back in the larder, and wasn’t going to make a big batch… so.. Rice cooker would do. But no, Sir, I’ve made my point, and am not going to be tricked to buy a yogurt maker.

After adding the starter, the milk mixture is wrapped, and let snuggle comfortable in the pre-warmed rice cooker. See the thermometer? Yep!

Especially because you don’t need so much effort to make a good homemade yogurt too. Seriously. With bread, I can see the appeal of having a bread maker. The idea of not having to break my back kneading the dough, and the minimum mess it’s making can be quite appealing. But yogurt is much easier, you just stand and stir, and if you have an oven you can sit, and occasionally check how’s your bacteria doing…

It is really easy. Especially if you have a thermometer… like me 😀

A quick google search and I was in the kitchen making yogurt.

Okay… I lied. I tried to make yogurt BEFORE i had the thermometer. So, making yogurt without thermometer is definitely possible. You would have to rely on your sense of touch, and visual clue. My yogurt turned out okay, albeit slightly slimy and runny. And this is why i believe thermometer would make a difference.

it is very thick… you can see how it makes lumps when it is moved to a jar. If you want greek yogurt though… you can strain it and remove the whey. I use the whey to make bread 😀 Waste not!

My second attempt of yogurt, I got everything… i mean everything measured. The timing, the temperature… And the result? Creamy, tasty, healthy, and cheaper yogurt (I am tight, I know)… Definitely won’t need any more yogurt from the store.

x ❤ x

P.S. I did some calorie calculation for the plain home made yogurt vs plain low-fat store bought yogurt. The homemade yogurt, made from semi skimmed milk (that’s 2% by the way) is significantly lower calorie while having a thicker and creamier texture. I suspect it is because in store bought yogurt, it was either runny and then strained (so gram per gram it is more calorific), it used cornflour as a thickening agent, or added sugar.

I Am Officially An Auntie :D

Well… I was an auntie before this, because my DH has a nephew, but you know what I mean…

My sister just gave birth to a beautiful little daughter — the first in my family. Both the mother and the baby are healthy, and in an excellent condition. My parents are over the moon for their first grandchild.

I am so overjoyed, but at the same time feel a bit sad that I am not the only one who are not there with my sister to give support. Seems like I am the only one missing the celebration in Indonesia 😦 Not happy about it 😦

Anyway…

So, I decided to just celebrate it myself here with my husband, by baking a cake 🙂 Obviously we don’t need any reason to bake a cake, but it feels slightly more special when you attach story behind a bake…

And here you go…

Whoopsie… Forgot to take photo before sliced it :p

Cocopandan Cake with Gula Melaka topping.

Yes it sounds foreign, I know. But I feel like I want to make this one because it reminds me so much of home. Cocopandan is basically coconut and pandan (fragrant leaves, very popular in Indonesian desserts and beverages), and gula melaka or gula merah is how we call palm sugar in that part of the world.

It tastes wonderful. A wonderful cake for a wonderful day 🙂

From Farm To Fork…

Well.. in my case it is actually from Garden to Gut, but that doesn’t sound pretty, does it? I harvested the young leaves of my Bok Choy, or Pak Choi — I am of Chinese descent but I still am not sure how to pronounce this Asian themed vegetable.

Some of the leaves were munched by something, and I am not sure what has munched my leaves. Some said that slightly munched vegetable leaves means it is free from pesticides. But… still I am not happy about my something eating my veggies without my permission. That’s thievery…

After washing them out, I am left with beautiful fresh looking baby Pak Choi leaves. Not a lot to start with, but I wish it will change in the future (next harvest). I decided to make something out of it.

Tada…

Stir fry is one of the most common way to cook things in our culture. My grandmother basically stir fry everything. I think she believes that stir frying things is the best way to keep the nutrients in the food, because the meat — in this case I had chicken, will be cooked first, and the vegetables would be flash cooked (so quick, it didn’t even realise that it’s actually being cooked).

Sooo excited. Especially because of my courgette is start flowering too. Really can’t wait to harvest this one too. Eek!!

x ❤ x

Courghetti or Zoodle?

Yes, courgetti is probably the British version of American zoodle. Since in the UK we call this particular vegetable as courgette, and as far as I know it is called zucchini (is it the correct spelling, though? My spell check refused to acknowledge the word, unfortunately) in the US.

I have heard about it and have noticed the trend of people making courgetti to substitute pasta in their pasta recipe. An interesting idea… especially for someone who would like to reduce the calories intake like myself. But of course, I don’t have the spiraliser — the almighty tool that allegedly could turn everything to noodle-like shape.

I said “allegedly” because I haven’t got them myself. And I am so overly jealous with people who have it. Please don’t flaunt your magical kitchen tool in front of me — I am offended. (Why not? People could get offended by the silliest thing in the world, couldn’t they?)

So, after postponing the courgetti for months, I decided to go on anyway. Google “how to make courgetti without spiraliser”, and youtube is your friend again. A bit of a chore really, especially I don’t have the knife skill of the kitchen goddess I thought I was. And was it worth all the trouble?

Well…

Uh…

Not really.

I have never had problem eating vegetables. I don’t need to hide or disguise the vegetables into a pasta to enjoy it. It might be a good idea if you have a child who is a picky eater. But for someone who could enjoy vegetable as it is… well, it is a bit of a chore really.

Would it be a good replacement for pasta? Definitely. But I don’t need to eat pasta anyway. Spaghetti shaped courgette tastes the same with cube shaped courgette — delicious, by the way. If I chop it and cook it as I would do pasta… I mean, what’s stopping me?

Maybe one day, when I have bought my awesome spiraliser (or mandolin, even), I might make these thing again… just for the sake of variation. But until then, I would be having cube shaped courgette.

Anyway… have you tried this?

x ❤ x

Happy Homemade Pizza

My husband likes pizza. But I mean, who doesn’t? Well… I don’t. At least not the kind of pizza we usually have. Bake from frozen pizza is okay for convenience, when I don’t have either time or when I couldn’t be bothered to start making things from scratch.

In Aldi, you can get 3 pieces of 8 inches magheritta pizza for just under £3, means just under £1 each. Sounds like a good deal? True. But man, when I look at the pizza base recipe in HERE, I thought… I’ve been robbed. And that frozen pizza isn’t even “that” nice.

So… I decided to try to make my own pizza. From scratch. Mind you this is not the pizza base as you know it. It does not need proofing — the only reason why I was willing to try this recipe :p

Half of the recipe could make an 11 inches pizza. And that’s what I made. Not tomato and cheese standard pizza, I have sausage meat, mushroom, and extra mozzarella. Yum!

Not only that, I could not only add and substitute ingredients as I like it, and making it more wholesome, I could also calculate the calories I am actually eating. If you are counting calories, making your own food is much better than buying a ready made things.

And it tastes MUCH better. Fresher, definitely. And much more satisfying. I can only eat two slices. That’s all.

x ❤ x

This Little Piggy and Pastry Madness

I love food. I love eating it, and I love making it. I found my passion for cooking in early 2012 and baking in the beginning of 2015, and most of the time I could eat whatever I made. Of course I screwed some of the recipes, some worked really well with tweaks.

But pastry…

Pastry seems like coming from different realm. Especially when you’re talking about these: sweet pastry, flaky pastry, rough puff pastry and puff pastry. To be honest, I don’t want to go anywhere near puff pastry for now, as I just started learning pastry since few months ago.

It started with pie crusts with flaky pastry. You might remember my humble quiche and pies? That’s kind of easy because I didn’t roll my pastry. All I did was pressing the flaky pastry dough to the tin. Somehow I had this reluctance to use rolling pin.

You can see as the result it looked slightly “rustic”. My father in law would hate it because of the lack of professionalism in it.

Flaky pastry is probably the easiest. I found that once you have mastered the rubbing technique, it is just a piece of pie 😀 What I consider as one of the most revolutionary inventions in the pastry business is… pastry blender. That thing looks savage and scary, but having that in your kitchen would make rubbing much much easier.

Sweet pastry, like the one in that strawberry bakewell tart is not too difficult either. From the recipe that I had, I think sweet pastry is like flake pastry, but it uses eggs to bind the dough, and sugar. Texture wise, sweet pastry is not as crumbly as flaky pastry. Of course, that if I have been doing it right all these time lol.

One problem with pastries is that the time spent to use to prepare and make it, plus the cooking time and washing up time is always more than the time spent to eat the whole lot 😦

x ❤ x

This Little Piggy Is Learning British Food

Few years ago I had a job as a content manager for one of a culinary websites in Indonesia. The start up website did not take off, but I discovered a whole new world of food and cooking. And I love it.

Food has been a part of our culture in Indonesia. Simple thing is, if you greet someone for a meeting the first thing you said after a hello is: have you eaten anything? How weird is that?

When I moved to the UK, I thought British food is just chips and full english (fry up!!). Full English Breakfast is good. I love it. My husband loves it. We even had it for last bank holiday weekend. It’s just… you can’t have it everyday (Or can you….?)

My husband likes to have two of everything. The plate is not big enough for two spoonful of baked beans. Mine? I’d like to have half what he has… *shudder*

But after meeting my father in law and his wife, I realised that British food is more than fry ups. They also have Sunday roast and pies. I also learned that there’s a reason why The Great British Bake Off is such a biggie… because British desserts are just so heavenly. So I thought, of course the best way to learn how to BE British, is to EAT like a Brits.

I started to cook and bake… My husband never complained, obviously.

Pie and Mash was such a success

Some food like meat pie, mash potato or apple crumble are quite obviously British. But I am not sure where quiche is from (it sounds French but it’s basically egg pie, isn’t it?)