Tag Archives: food

Places I Miss

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And probably don’t exist anymore…

A real Kopi Tiam, with lau ah pek’s talking about horse racing at the top of their voices.

A true Hawker Centre, with ka-chuak crunching underfoot, where the food is served on colourful melamine plates that you throw in a big wash basin after you’re finished. Plastic chopsticks in a big ceramic pot on every round table with rigid, backless plastic stools cemented into the ground. And a lot of aunties tut-tutting waiting for your table. Oh sorry, THEIR table cos you shouldn’t take so long, you know… Typified by Newton Circus (probably razed to the ground now) and Lau Pa Sat (before gentrification).

A full-on seafood place on East Coast Parkway. Chilli crabs! I’d have gotten married in Singapore if they would have let me have it at a chilli crab craphouse. Yeah, fat luck.

You can keep your gourmet Michelin-starred gastropubs, fancy French bistros, and your air-conditioned “food courts”. I want the old-school open-air, fan-overhead, noisy, busy, rude, chaotic makan places of my nostalgia.

Time to switch on the Singlish, shock the husband, slap on the sunblock, and swan back into the country that threw me out1 a decade and a half ago.

1 They didn’t technically throw me out, but there was no future for me there.

I am craving

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aka How akatsukira would spend her last day on earth.

Breakfast:

  • Roti prata
  • Tau huey (sweetened bean curd)
  • Soya bean milk (see above) with you tiao (chinese churros)
  • Nasi Lemak
  • Teh Tarik (or even just ginger tea)
  • Teochew porridge
  • Taiwanese porridge
  • Dan tart
  • Soon Kueh
  • Chwee Kueh
  • Kaya on white plastic bread
  • Bak Kut Teh (in Johor)

Lunch:

  • Hokkien Mee
  • Laksa
  • Mee Goreng
  • Mee Siam
  • Mee Rubus
  • Dempsey Rd Banana Leaf Curry
  • Pohpiah
  • Char Kway Teow
  • Kueh Chap

Afternoon snack:

  • Tanjong Rhu Char Siew Bao
  • “Carrot cake” (the savory turnip variety)
  • Tau Sah Beng
  • Chendol
  • Ice Kacang
  • Otah
  • Coconut Water
  • More Dim Sum
  • Goreng Pisang
  • Ah Boling
  • Muah Chee
  • Peranakan Kueh

Dinner:

  • Chilli Crab
  • Steamboat
  • Hainanese Chicken Rice
  • Laksa again; this time Penang-style
  • More Hokkien Mee, with extra prawns and lime

Supper:

  • Satay
  • Lontong
  • Anything from Lau Pa Sat
  • Is Newton Circus still open? Anything from there too.
  • Yong Tau Fu
  • Ahh… Grilled stingray!

Makan1! Then die happy…

1 Guess where I’m headed after a 12 year absence…

Mini pancakes with turkey bacon

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ickle pancakes

You never know what kind of pancakes you’re going to get in this household. It all depends on the mood of the pancake maker. Some days, we get beautiful fluffy specimens, and other days… Well; let’s not talk about those too much.

Today’s reward for getting out of my snuggle-buggle duvet-land was pretty good. When quizzed on what the chef had done differently, this was the reply:

An egg and some baking soda.

Yeah, that’s as precise as he ever gets. I sometimes wonder about his bench work.

Kimchi noodles revisited

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Kimchi noodles

These kimchi noodles were so good and so tasty, they prompted a blog post after a month of absence. This is round two, with udon instead of somen. The different noodles create completely different eating experiences. We had both cold, like noodle salads. Even so, the udon version was very more-ish. Chewy and mouth-filling, it’s the option for a hungry day. I can just about picture the somen version going to the Hollywood Bowl or Greek Theatre for a summer day’s picnic. That said, I can picture both versions in my tummy any day of the week.

Oh, and I added sesame seeds for some prettiness this time. That added another 5 seconds to the total prep time.

Ginger biccies

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Ginger biccies

Made some ginger biscuits, recipe courtesy of BBC’s h2g2 pages. Three substitutions: used butter instead of margarine, raw crunchy brown turbinado sugar of forgotten name instead of demerara sugar, and maple syrup instead of golden syrup. Just because those were staple pantry items.

It worked pretty well. I plopped two different sizes of dough on the floured baking sheet since the original recipe called for “walnut”-sized pieces, and I wasn’t sure if they meant the two halves of the walnut interior or the entire walnut in shell. Both worked fine, but I’d improve it next time by squishing all with the back of a spoon. The centres of some of the biscuits weren’t biscuity and resembled soft cookie instead. The edges, however, were perfect ginger snap crispiness, just a minute short of being burnt. Another thing I might do is use molasses instead of maple syrup. And I definitely want to try it without the egg yolk to decrease the moisture content (which may have been increased by my use of turbinado sugar).

I’ll reproduce the recipe here with my modifications later. I just wanted to post something before it became too onerous a task to get it all down. Catch ya later, alligators. And here we go…

Ginger Biscuits
modified from h2g2 recipe

  • 125g butter, softened on “defrost” in microwave for 10 seconds
  • 125g turbinado sugar (sugar in the processing stages)
  • 1 tbsp (15ml) maple syrup
  • 1 egg yolk from a US large egg
  • 180g self-raising flour¹
  • 1 heaped tsp ground ginger

Method

(I pretty much followed the h2g2 protocol, but this is what I actually did)

  1. Pre-heated oven to 350°F / 180°C.
  2. Sprinkled some flour onto 2 baking sheets and smeared them around with my mucky paws. I shook the excess into the bin. Wasteful, no? Incidentally, I like this a whole lot more than greasing the sheets then flouring them. It actually worked this time.
  3. Prepared all the ingredients, taking care to WATCH the butter to prevent accidents like this happening again:

    melted butter 1

  4. Creamed the butter and sugar using my trusty hand-held beater. I have no idea what I did before inheriting this hand-held beater. I have wonderful memories of my mother’s Kenwood Chef/Professional standing mixers, then a almost blank period of painful recollections of hours spent whipping cream and mascarpone for tiramisu as a semi-impoverished, aspirational under- and post-graduate and postdoctorate in Edinburgh. I’m still semi-impoverished, but at least I inherited a hand-held beater from a friend who left the lab.
  5. Added the egg yolk and maple syrup, beating it in well. Saved the egg white for cocktails later because my impressionable mind had read in some fancy foody website that egg white-containing cocktails were da bomb these days. Is it still alright to say “da bomb”? OK, forget I said it.
  6. Mixed the flour and teaspoonful of ginger well, then sifted it into the creamed mix in batches (about 4). After each sifting, folded the flour/ginger mix into the creamed mix. Final product was considerably softer than shortbread, a little softer than American cookie dough, but still firm enough to form tight balls in my mucky paws.
  7. Formed tight balls in my mucky paws. h2g2 recipe suggests walnut-sized balls that will later double in spread. I agree. I tried walnut nut-sized balls, which made cute little biscuits you could serve for a teddy bear picnic, and walnut-with-shell-on-sized balls, which were far more satisfying in my grabby paws with a cuppa tea.
  8. Baked in oven for the suggested initial 12 minutes, after which I added 3 min for the smaller biscuits (total 15 min). The bigger biscuits were left in for 18 min, mainly because I kind of forgot to set the timer again. Their bottoms were a bit on the dark side, but still edible. 2 baking sheets would have been enough, but I split the dough into three because of the following troubleshooting help on the h2g2 page:

I don’t have biscuits! I have one biscuit, and it’s huge…
* You probably underestimated the space that you need to observe between each of the biscuits on the tray.

As he stuck this paws into the biscuit tin, P’s first question was: “Are they crunchy?”

I didn’t hear a word he said for the rest of the night…

¹ I make my own self-raising/rising flour to the tune of: 4 US cups flour, 2 tsp salt, 2 tbsp baking powder (not soda). I sift each ingredient into a plastic container and shake shake shake it all about. Makes life a little bit easier when making mini pancakes.

Food and politics – Salad or Stew? Butter or Marge?

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Here’s a bit of silliness that combines my two casual interests: food and politics (via Serious Eats). Suffice to say, it’s demographics gone mad. Or maybe not. Consider the food preference of the “likely” McCain supporter: high-fibre cereal, protein bars, energy drinks are all foods I would previously have associated with a certain demographic of caucasian, middle-aged, fairly affluent gym-going males. But in California, I’ve met younger males and females who are die-hard Obama supporters who have similar shopping cart contents. Let’s take a look at the food profile of potential Hillary Clinton supporters: also high-fibre cereal, energy bars and energy drinks, but all of “trendier” brands that are associated with shoppers at the more expensive supermarkets (typified by Whole Foods). Hmm, I’m beginning to see a trend here… OK, final look at the third major-party candidate: Barack Obama. Oooh, he bucks the trend with granola and sparkling juice, but retains energy bars.

I think I’ll make one parabolic observation from this NY Times article: Americans like their high-fibre/healthy cereal, buy power/energy/protein bars and energy drinks, and have shopping carts that look nothing like mine¹.

[/tongue-in-cheek]

¹ I concede that the intention of the micro-targeting is to categorise the brand choices of the electorate; there is a certain trendiness to the list made for Barack Obama, which makes me suspect the writer of the sidebar of this NY Times article favours him over the other candidates, who have been made out to draw in an older crowd of supporters. The main article, on the other hand, makes a few good points about candidates and the different aspirations of their potential voters.

My usual disclaimer here: I’m not American, I can’t vote in the US elections, and I wasn’t sure who I’d vote for anyway even if I could, but hmm McCain supporters are more likely to go fishing? Sign me up..

Super-speedy Sesame-sprinkled Somen with Kimchi

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Sashiburi de, interwebs.

I return to report on what will become a staple super-fast dinner in my household: kimchi noodles¹. It’s not often that I have all the ingredients in the pantry for Serious Eats’ Dinner Tonight column, but in our recent East Asian phase, we have stocked up on kimchi and a variety of dried noodles, like udon and somen. Furthermore, there are almost always green onions in the fridge, and sesame oil, rice vinegar and sugar in the cupboards. So, ingredients: check!

Let’s see now, it took all of 30 seconds to decant half a jar of kimchi on the chopping board and a further 30 seconds to julienne the squares of napa cabbage/leaf. A further 30 second period was invested in thinly slicing a stalk of spring onions (aka scallions). It took about a minute² to extricate the large mixing bowl from its tall stack of precariously balanced dishes and mix in the kimchi, scallions, 1 tsp of rice vinegar and 1 tsp of sugar. All this time, the water for the noodles was boiling in the kettle, so I spent a further minute or two preparing the pot, colander, bowls and chopsticks. Choosing somen, from boiling water to finished product (2 min), rinsed under the tap till cool, was another time-saving choice. All the chopping, slicing, boiling, cooling and tossing of the noods in kimchi and a sploosh of sesame ooil took under 10 min. There was even time to prepare some kinugoshi (silken) tofu by topping half a block with a yuzu miso paste and more finely sliced green onions. So, speed: check!

Taste: check, check, check! It passes the D and P taste test. Depending on the kimchi you start with, of course. It’s taken me a while to find a mild kimchi that doesn’t disagree with the super-fussy stomach in P’s pathetic peritoneum, but still stimulates our tastebuds: K.J’s MSG-free Napa Kimchee. Made in Carson, California, so it passes the locavore test too. We definitely like the fish paste in our kimchi but not too sweet and no MSG, so recommendations welcomed.

No doubt, these kimchi noodles fail any Korean authenticity test, but so does pesto pasta another alliterative speedy carb-based mid-week meal. My two online sources of Korean foodology are pretty keen on what must be the original that inspired this super-fast take. Zenkimchi describes his search for the perfect summer dish: naengmyeon and thedelicious mentions cucumbers and pears in her bibim naeng myun, which is something to try next time.

Something else on the list of things to try is a Korean restaurant that does not specialise in soondubu or galbi… Again, recommendations will be appreciated.

Until my next sporadic spouting, mata ne.

¹Nae photos again. The trusty little Nikon 775 is with the boss. What he’s doing with it, I don’t want to know…

² It only took so long because the cupboards are filled to the gills and need to be emptied whenever I want something stashed at the back. Oh how I long for revolving Ikea shelves…

Better Butter

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Recent correspondence with tsogb sparked by Susan’s meal at Manresa started me thinking about a new type of party I have yet to explore. I’ve recently hosted a few wine tasting parties, which have all degenerated into drinking binges despite best efforts to create tasting flights. Quite often, many are on the Syrah before I’ve even finished pouring the Roussanne. And since most of these parties are on Fridays to accommodate everyone else’s busy weekend schedules, we usually go the cheese and bread option to line the stomach. In LA, this is also not the financially-wise menu, with the average small piece of cheese costing anywhere from $6 to $20. Oh for a Tesco selection of cheap and cheerfuls. While we don’t begrudge sharing our favourite luxuries with our labs, populated by equally financially-challenged grad students and post-docs, the last round really wiped us out (physically too). Add to that the whisky “tasting” and cocktail nights, and I’m all tuckered out carting heavy bottles of alky around town. The next big party has to be a little lighter on all fronts. Bring forth: the butter tasting party.

My favourite butter of the moment is from Isigny Ste Mère, also home to one of my favourite hard snacking cheeses – the Mimolette. It has a crisp quality with a hint of salt that doesn’t overwhelm. And my first taste of it following an impulse purchase¹ a decade ago was a revelation. Wow, butter can be more than just fat in baking. And it doesn’t have to be the semi-melted parcel found in most restaurant bread baskets to be eaten as is. My butter tastes have not developed much since then, but perhaps the time has come to enlighten my fatty tastebuds and try some other butters out

Courtesy of Santos: the ultimate butter page. I can see I have a long way to go. Of the butters listed, I’ve only knowingly had a few: Lurpak (my mother’s baking butter), Kerrygold (my baking butter in the UK), Anchor (the butter of my childhood ‘cos it was slightly cheaper than Lurpak – the preserve of baking), the Devonshire, Isigny, and Échiré². Of American butters, I have to confess to only using pasturised, unsalted butter from Horizon, the Whole Foods and Trader Joes own brands, mainly for baking. There is a whole unexplored world of butter out there, beckoning us with globules of pristine saturated fat.

My next party just has to be butter-themed. But how many will accept the invitation?

¹ When I first realised that shopping in Sainsbury’s was not necessarily going to kill my bank account. Oh boy was I wrong!² I think it was the Beurre Échiré we had at the Ludo Bites evening, but I may be wrong.

Granola thumbprints

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It’s been a wasted weekend. Work and sleeping off the effects of a cold have fettered my precious free time. That and 285 posts on the RSS reader. Must streamline. First to go will be the Scotsman feed; too much repetition. I’d already thrown out the right-of-centre blogs a few months ago, but was sucked into reading their recent froths about the COE’s archbishop’s radio interview. Bad idea; even worse, I read some of the comments.

And to top it all, we are out of biscuits/cookies in the house. This is never a good state at the weekend. What exactly am I supposed to have with my tea if not a biscuit? And I was craving jammy dodgers. So it made sense to bake thumbprint cookies, which are just cookies in which you stick your thumb and fill the resulting indentation with jam. No recipe this time; it just wasn’t good enough. Note to self: putting granola in baking only makes it all taste like health food1.

Jammy Thumbprints

Oh, they weren’t awful per se. Just chunky when what I wanted were slightly crisper biscuits, not chewy cookies.

1 Might as well eat one of these.

Brill Breakfast Burrito

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Nae baking the last two weekends. Hair cuts, new guitar and work have eaten up all my free time. But I’d like to take a moment to sing the praises of my favourite LaLaLand breakfast food: the breakfast burrito. Viewers of my photoblog on Flickr may remember the first burrito I had in LA, ship-sinker that it was. I have not exactly been enamoured of huge floppy burritos that can feed an entire football team since. But one particular burrito has warmed the cockles of my cold anti-burrito soul: the Ketchy’s II breakfast burrito.

Our favourite breakfast burrito

It is a fried breakfast lover’s dream come true: a perfectly fried omelette, rolled up with fresh lettuce, tomatoes, and streaky bacon in an easy-to-hold wheat tortilla origami creation. Breakfast-to-go. Or, in our case, linger after our bi-monthly haircut1.

Ketchy’s II2
Sawtelle3
11270 La Grange Ave (just behind the shabu shabu restau Mizu)
Los Angeles CA 90025
+1 310 481 0799

1 Tip for those who wish to sit and eat: the tables outside don’t usually get much sun. But if you’re there sometime between 11am and noon, there are two little tables under the trees that get nice and warm. There. It’s taken me 2 1/2 years, but I’ve finally picked up a few insider tips and tricks. And share them with you.

2 There’s a bit of history behind the Ketchy name. I think it used to be a taco stand, which was unfortunately smashed by a truck. At any rate, it’s now a hole-in-the-wall, and the fry-cook (ala Spongebob) is a super omelette fryer. I live for my haircuts now…

3 Not only do we not leave the Westside much, we don’t even venture much further east than just west of the 405. Sad.