Butterhead Lettuce Salad with Chick Peas and Balsamic Vinaigrette

It turns out that living healthy in Singapore is not cheap, folks. It seems like anything green and related to 'ang moh' eg. lettuces and the gang are priced like a gold in here. With a 5SGD bill, guess what you get, just 2 cute bouquet of red and green crispy lettuces, or a very, very slim romaine lettuce. I have to carefully reading all the descriptions on the price tags hanging above those lettuces. And I don't even bothered to go beyond lettuce. If the main salad ingredients are priced like this, it'll be more horrifying to see what's the price for the topping. This makes me miss US, where lettuce are abundant and very much bigger and cheaper.

So with this in mind, I have to be smarter and more creative in what I should throw to my salad bowl, or I'll spend equally like if I buy any salad from a bistro.

After mix and match, here is a new recipe that at least still fits in my budget.

1 pack of butter head lettuce (consists of 2 cute bouquet, just nice for 4 portion), cut to bite size

2 red bell pepper, diced thinly

1 can chick peas, washed and strained

4 eggs, hard boiled, sliced

Vinaigrette: 100ml balsamic vinegar, 50ml olive oil, lemon pepper to your taste, marjoram to your taste, mixed

Assemble:

1. On the bottom place lettuce, then bell pepper, top it with the chick pea and eggs

2. Drizzle the Vinaigrette for finish, 3 tbsp is enough

Storage tips:

1. All ingredients MUST be dry before go into the fridge. With that said, it means that everything must be strained to the last drop of water. Lettuce is the most particular. You'll get a rotten lettuce if you store it wet inside a Tupperware. One way to avoid this is to put 1 layer of strainer inside your Tupperware. This way, at least the water stick to your lettuce will be slowly go down.

2. Separate all the leavies and greenies separate. Mixing them up will cause them to rotten faster. It's the same principle when you see pre-packed salad bowl in supermarkets. They separate your dressings, croutons and greenies, so that it lasts long.

3. Greenies should not be stored more than 3 days, unless you like to have your greenies with dry and red colored ends. I'm very particular about this and that's why I'm so fussy about storage.

4. Eggs should be stored in whole, not cut. Only cut when you want to eat it.

Savoury Muffin ~ Ham, Cheese and Red Peppers

I've been wanting to make this savoury muffins. Basically what you did is change the fillings with savoury items, such as sausages, cheese, tomatoes and so on. This time I use ham, cheese and colourful baby peppers (I choose yellow, red and orange peppers). For the cheese, I want to experiment with the Provene cheese. It tastes nice, with the texture of cheddar but not too salty, more similar to Danish Mozerella. Just nice as I don't like salty cheese. The ham? I use honey chicken ham (the supermarket under my office currently doesn't have the honey-baked ham, so chicken it is). Initially I want to use tomatoes, but I find it too troublesome, must take out the seeds and water as they're not good for the batter.

As you see in the pic, it looks... heavenly... imagine it hot and fluffy just come out from the oven... yumm....

Chocolate Cranberry Muffin

Just made it. Smells heavenly with the chocolate scent and taste delightful with the tanginess of cranberries.

What you need to do is change 20gr of flour from your fave muffin recipe with choco powder and add dried cranberries. Another combination for you to explore :).

Cream Puff

I've always thought that making cream puffs or eclair is hazardous to your kitchen because of their different method used. So I gathered some courage and manage to make tons of it yesterday. It's still hazardous in terms of how many times you have to wash your beaters, pans and pots, but the result is rewarding :)

333 gr milk
168 gr butter
4 gr salt
250 gr bread flour
8 eggs

• Bring milk, butter, and salt to boil. When it boils, quickly put all the flour on the pan and using mixer, beat it with low speed on moderate heat until the dough forms a ball and pulls away from the side of the pan


• Then take it aside and beat with low speed the eggs, one by one until smoothly incorporated


• With whipping pipe, pipe about 4cm straight for eclair or round circle for cream puff.


• Bake in 200C for 20-25 minutes until golden brown and crisp
  

240 gr milk
130 gr sugar
1 egg yolk
75 gr cornstarch
rum, to your taste

• Separate about small bowl of milk to mix in with cornstarch and set aside


• On the sauce pan, put milk, sugar and egg yolk. Stir in the egg yolk until it's fully incorporated with the milk before turning on the fire. Bring to boil and stir in the cornstarch. Keep stirring until it boils again and set aside.


• Quickly stir on to cool the custard and when it cools down, pour your favourite rum and stir on until it's incorporated.
  

Serving: Cut off bit of the side of the cream puff and spoon or pipe in the custard. Then, sprinkle the top with icing sugar or top it with ganache.

Maccha Cake with Azuki Beans

Been wondering how to incorperate the maccha into standard cake recipes and here is the result. Still in smooth texture but it smells heavenly with green tea aroma. Maccha must be accompanied by its partner, the sweet azuki beans to be called complete. So I splashed some of the canned azuki beans inside my maccha cake :).


170 gr butter
150 gr sugar
3 eggs
130 gr cake flour
20 gr green tea powder
4 gr baking powder
2 gr vanilla essence
1/2 can azuki beans

• Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy in high speed and add in vanilla
• Reduce the speed to low and add the eggs until well incorporated
• Still in low speed, add in all dry ingridients and resume to high speed untill the batter are well blended
• Using 8' round baking tin, pour 1/2 of the batter and spread it evenly, with spoon, spread the azuki beans, and tope it off with the rest of the batter
• Bake it for 30-45 min in 180C
• Serving option: sprinkle the top with icing sugar

Cold Tofu

This is a very simple Japanese dish and it taste so soothing and comforting. Very suitable for a hot day or after a long day at work. And the catch is, you don't even need to cook it.

1 box good quality Japanese tofu (silken tofu preffered)
6 tbsp shoyu (you'll most likely find this at the Japanese food aisle in any supermarket nowadays. You also can use this to eat with soba/somen)
2 tbsp sake (to make it sweeter) - optional
bonito flakes - to your taste (I like lots of it) - optional, you also can substitute this with furikake, but mindful that furikake is much more saltist, so you have to reduce the amount of shoyu that you pour
decorative toppings: sliced green onion, minced ginger, grated white daikon - optional

How to:

• Wash tofu to get rid of the preservative liquid from the box, pat dry with paper towel and place it the bowl
• Pour the shoyu around it and top is with bonito flakes and the rest of the toppings
• Optional: to make it even luxurious, you can place ice cubes underneath the tofu, the purpose it to keep the tofu chilled, but in the next few minutes, you'll sacrifice the shoyu's thickness

Marble Cake

I admit it, I'm not so creative this week. I want to make some full-proof and not a time consuming cake, so that's why it's marble cake this week. The whole process from preparing to washing the kitchen take a total of 1.5 hour, so it's quite fast. The cake itself is quite versatile. So long as you cream the butter and sugar correctly, your cake will not get deflated or dry or burn or whatever disaster that you can imagine. It also will not dry if you forget about it in the oven for 5 more minutes from the supposedly baking time, but off course longer than that it's a blackhole (with a burnt smell).

100 gr sugar
1 tsp Vanilla extract
200 gr butter
4 eggs
13 gr milk powder
4 gr baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
210 gr cake flour
10 gr choco paste

1. Cream sugar, vanilla and butter in high speed until light and fluffy.
2. Lower the speed then spoon in the eggs one by one, until each of them is incorporated.
3. Still in low speed, mix in all dry ingredients and turn back to high speed for 10 seconds, and set aside the batter.
4. Take about 4 scoops of the batter and mix it with the choco paste.
5. On an 8-inch round pan, already lined with the parchment paper, pour in half of the white better, the pour about 4 scoops of chocolate batter then top again with the remainding of the white batter. With toothpick, swirl around the batter until the top looks like a marble.
6. Bake it for 40 minutes at 180C.
7. After baking set it off to cool.