nutty butters

Practically everything that is store bought will have added sugar in it.  It frustrates me.  Yoghurts, drinks, spreads, sauces, practically everything.  Check the ingredients for a yoghurt with fruit in it.  Sugar will be the second or third ingredient.  Before the fruit.  I understand why food producers do it, but all the same, it just makes it very difficult for me to buy things, especially for Lily.

I used to be able to find a 100% peanut only peanut butter in the supermarkets here, but I can't seem to find it anywhere now.  So I thought about making my own nut butters.  They're not just good on toasts as spreads, but useful for dressings as well - see my very first post here.

Anyway, I settled on making a walnut butter after reading various blogs - this one has honey and cinnamon in it whilst this only has cinnamon in it.  This one only has walnuts and salt in it, which the one I decided to go for.  I think the oils that the other two recipes called for would bind the walnuts and would make it into more of a paste.  I wanted my walnut butter to be as unadulterated as possible, so I decided against adding any oils, honey or spices.  I did add a pinch of salt, which enhanced the taste.

This is what I ended up with:

 What you would have noticed from the photos of the butters from the different recipes I referred to is that my walnut butter looks very different from the other homemade walnut butters.  Which is interesting, and makes it all the more appealing in my opinion, but I can understand why the lack of uniformity would not work for a mass food producer.

Anyway - this is probably the easiest thing to make, and there's no real reason why you would ever want to buy nut butters from a shop again - apart from the cost of course.  500gms of walnuts cost me $35 ($7/100gms).  That made enough butter to fill a jar that once had about 450gms of peanut butter.  500gms of Planters peanut butter costs about $5 at the moment.  I don't know what walnut butters cost in the shop, but I suspect a lot less than $35.  You can see why making your own nut butters is not an attractive financial choice.   However, the way I see it, I don't eat a jar of peanut butter a day.  That jar of walnut butter will last us months.  And if I don't have to have the nasty added refined sugar in my food, then I'll pay extra for it.

Anyway:

Ingredients:
500g raw walnuts
A pinch of salt - to taste

Tools:

A food processor

How:

I soaked the walnuts for about half an hour.

Drained them, put them on a tray and into an oven at 180 degrees for about 20 minutes.

Let the walnuts cool, while you go out and get a food processor ;-)

Stick walnuts in food processor.

Process until it becomes a paste.  It really takes very little time (3 minutes maybe?) before it becomes this:

And another 1 min before it becomes this:

Add salt to taste.

This is what I got:

I think it's delicious.  Ben doesn't.  It needs sugar, he says.  Sigh...

Let me know how yours turned out.

xAJ

Update:  I used the walnut butter to make a salad dressing.  The ingredients I used for it were: walnut butter, soy sauce, sesame oil and honey.  (Note: I used a little bit too much sesame oil that it overpowered the taste of the walnut butter, so use very little).  I then made a salad like so:

Tossed it with the dressing, and served the salad with some half boiled eggs, like so:

Verdict:  Ben liked it.  Said I can make it again. :-) xAJ

crab cakes!

It's been a while since I visited this blog. Various things have happened in my life, but that's the subject of another neglected blog. Today is Vesak Day, which is a public holiday in Singapore and Malaysia.  We've spent the weekend in KL, and drove back down to Singapore this morning.  The roads were clear, and having left at 6.45am, and with B driving, it meant that we were back home in Singapore at 10am.  Which also means a whole day for me to do lots of studying, which obviously means a whole day for me to do anything else but... (hence this blog!)

I foraged the fridge and found this can of lovely pasteurised crab meat.  I came across it in the fish section at the Market Place a few months ago and bought one.  B made a lovely dressed crab salad with it.  It was so good, I bought another tin.  It's just one of those things that's great to have in the fridge.

 Today I decided to use the crab meat to make crab cakes/patties/burgers of some sort, but more of the Indian style crab cutlet.  I scoured the world wide web for a recipe and decided on this crab cutlet recipe as a base, and to tweak it according to what I had in the kitchen.

Ingredients:

a) 2 tbsp olive oil
b) 1 onion - chopped
c) 3 cloves garlic - chopped
d) 1 inch ginger - julienned
e) 1 tsp cumin
f) 1 tsp fennel
g) 1 tbsp chilli powder

h) About 400gms crab meat
i) About 2 cups cooled boiled rice (we had leftovers in the fridge)
j) 4 tbsp breadcrumbs (we had it in the freezer - this is great to make with stale bread and frozen for when you need it)
k) 1 egg - beaten
l) Salt & pepper to taste

m) Butter or ghee to fry.

How:
Heat the olive oil in the pan.  Add ingredients (b) to (f).  Fry on a medium heat until the onions are soft and the cumin and fennel give off their fragrant smell.  Add chilli powder.  Add a pinch of salt. Fry for a few minutes.  Take off the heat.

Add onion mixture to ingredients (h) to (k).  Mix well.

Shape into patties.  Like so:

Heat butter or ghee in frying pan.  Fry on a medium heat.  About 3 or 4 minutes on each side, I imagine.  Until they look this: 

 Serve with lime wedges.  Squeeze the lime juice on the cutlets - it enhances the taste. 

We had it with a salad, which made for a lovely, satisfying and healthy supper.

Enjoy! If you do make it, let me know how it turned out.

xAJ

the hungry chef

So as I alluded to in my last post, B is not eating.  Literally.  Not I-am-not-eating-carbs or I-am-not-eating-after-9pm but literally not eating.  For 42 days.  He's half-way there.  Well, almost - he's on day 21 tomorrow.  It's been tough, and I am constantly amazed at his resolve and spirit. I won't go into detail because he does it much better, but suffice to say that I think he's just cleared a major hurdle recently.  The obsession about what his next meal will be (even though it's three weeks away) seems to have gone.

He obviously still thinks of food - I don't see how you can't when your entire existence at the moment revolves around the fact that you are not eating,  especially when you couple that with the reason why you're not eating (to lose weight as opposed to it being a spiritual fast for instance) - but instead of obsessing about the fact that he wants to eat these foods and when he can eat again, he has started channeling that energy into doing something constructive - and that is to MAKE those foods for US to eat!!!

I think it has helped that J is here visiting from HK - it's always nicer to cook for 2 or 3 people than just one person (i.e. me).  So yesterday we had a lovely beef stew that he apparently stewed for 9 hours.  He used up most of the stuff in the fridge that was slowly rotting away (I've not bothered cooking much lately either - like I said, it's just not as satisfying to cook for one person) and the results were rather delicious.

Today he's made us a couple of quiches - one with prawn, scallops and capsicum and the other one with salmon, stilton and onion.  Here's a picture of the prawn and scallop quiche -  (the salmon and stilton one is still in the oven).

And just to compare it to A's efforts, this is what the kitchen looked like after:

 Do you hear me complaining?  Absolutely not!!!

this is why you're fat

B has started blogging about his crazy weight loss efforts, and in doing so, has insinuated that one of the contributing factors of his fat-ness is me.  See his reasons for blogging.  According to B, I compound the problem.

So, just to corroborate that statement - here is what I made him - from the leftover meringue that A made for his a bag of food challenge.

The ingredients are:

1. meringue
2. cream
3. icing sugar
4. frozen raspberries

I  had intended to make him a pavlova, but I didn't have whipping cream.  Nor did I have an electric whisk.  So I whisked (by hand) the cream with the frozen raspberries and icing sugar (because, again, that was all i had) and the results were a sort of lovely raspberry ripple ice-cream.  Served with the meringue, it was, according to B - "delicious, and please may I have some more."

So - yup - that's really the reason why you're fat.  Because I feed you.

And if ever we needed more reasons about why we're fat - The Daily Telegraph has a delicious article about it.

a bag of food

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery they say.  It was a slow weekend.  We had no plans, and we didn't want to make plans either.  On the Saturday afternoon, in between watching Sherlock and the battle of the shriekers, I came across Henrik's and Hazel's latest adventure on Facebook.  Excited, I showed it to B, who promptly got off the sofa and drove to the supermarket to get A the following bag of food:

In the bag, we had:

1. tortillas
2. passion fruit
3. beef
4. asparagus
5. strange looking mushroom
6. corn
7. cream cheese
8. sunflower sprouts
9. cream

We also asked him to use the egg whites I had accumulated when I made the hollandaise sauce.

To be fair, A had no idea this was coming.  And he performed spectacularly.  Oh, did I say B gave him an hour and 45 mins to cook a supper of three courses?

Anyway, this is what he produced:

a tortilla bake filled with beef, peppers, rice in a cream sauce

a passion fruit meringue cheesecake

we had a lovely meal, and with lovely washing up to follow.  it took some effort, but this was what the kitchen looked like after:

I think after that we'll leave the bag of food to the the experts...

jimmy's little tuscan enclave

our friend jimmy has invested in a restaurant that is opening next week.  we were invited (well, we invited ourselves, but that's mere detail) for dinner there last night, so that the staff and chefs could "practice" and we could see what it was all about.

the restaurant is called "Bistecca - A Tuscan Steakhouse", and it is located in a charming shophouse on 25 Mohammad Sultan Road, Singapore.

it is essentially that - a steakhouse alla fiorentina.  big, fat fiorentina bisteccas.

A bistecca alla fiorentina is essentially a T-bone or porterhouse steak, grilled over a wood or charcoal fire, and seasoned with salt and, sometimes, black pepper, and olive oil.  They are thickly cut and very large.  The portions served last night were between 1 to 1.2kgs.  They are meant to be shared, although B and AVP did contemplate having one each! Greedy, much?

We were a (hungry) party of 6 (i was taking the photo).

To start we were served some italian cold cuts, bruschetta with burata and chicken liver pate.

for the pasta course, we had a chef's special risotto and a homemade fusili with fresh tomato sauce.  as you can probably tell from the photos below, they were rather good.

the steaks were next, served with these sauces:

 apart from the two enormous fiorentina bisteccas, we also had a fillet steak, which was very fine.  it was full of flavour and had fine texture. it was firm and yet melted in your mouth.  it was also grilled perfectly (the picture doesn't actually do it justice).

did i say we were hungry? 2 types of potatoes (duck fat chips and sambuca laced mash) and a creamed spinach seasoned with nutmeg (no photo) as sides.

and then pudding to finish:

all in all a very pleasant evening, with a great host:

great company:

a great chef:

It opens officially in February 2012.  Go! Not just because Jimmy is a friend, but because it is a great steakhouse.  25 Muhammad Sultan Road - the red door will lead the way!

And enjoy!

 

hollandaise sauce

thank god for the internet.

the local supermarket was selling whole Norwegian salmons at a reasonable price, and because B loves poached salmon, i bought one. a rather large one in fact, and poaching that big fish is a different story.  anyway, after i had won my battle against the big fish and the small oven, B then said, oh-so-matter-of-factly, that we must have hollandaise sauce. "oh, but you can't have poached salmon without hollandaise sauce. you know that.  you'll have to make it."

Make hollandaise sauce?! I don't even know what goes in a hollandaise sauce.  I know what it's supposed to taste like, but no idea what goes in it. egg yolks? what else?

and what do you mean you can't have poached salmon without hollandaise sauce? you've managed so far...

so thank god for the internet.  and google! what did i do before google?  i found a Reluctant Gourmet who gave the clearest instructions on what ingredients i needed and what i needed to do with those ingredients.

you need:

7oz salted butter
2 egg yolks
2 tablespoons lemon juice
½ teaspoon fine grated lemon zest
2 tablespoons white wine vinegar.

the Reluctant Gourmet explains the process clearly, and I won't try and reinvent the wheel.   I followed his instructions and the results were, according to B - "fantastic. as it should be."  B the gourmet has spoken y'all...

Here are the results:

and here's what it went with: