Apple Crumble

I think of this as a 3 step process.

ONE.  Cook the Apple filling in a pot (Or skip the cooking. Just combine, cover with crumble, and bake for firmer apple filling)

Green Apples, 3-4, skinned & cubed
Cinnamon, slightly less than 1/2 tsp
Salt, a pinch
Plain flour, 3/4 tbsp
Raisins, 1/2 cup, and you could soak them in water a little beforehand
Brown sugar, 1/8 cup

TWO.  Combine the crumble in a bowl. I like this part.

Brown sugar, 1/2 cup
Plain flour, 1 cup
Butter, firm, 1/2 block, chopped into cubes
Digestive biscuits (I usually use McVities), about 1 cup or 6-7 biscuits.  Put in a clean plastic bag and reduce the biscuits to crumbs.
Combine in a bowl using the rubbing method i.e. use your finger tips to mix the butter with the dry items and try not to melt the butter in the process. You'll want a crumbly mixture at the end of it.

THREE.  Assemble & Bake.

I used these little ramekins, and a glass dish.
Ladle the filling from step 1 into the ramekins/dish (actually I did this right after cooking it)
Distribute the crumble from step 2 in each ramekin/dish, covering the filling below.
Bake in a pre-heated oven at 150 degrees for about 15-20 min.


VOILA.  Serve with vanilla ice-cream. Bon Apetite.

Old Neighbourhoods: Tiong Bahru

This year (and indefinitely), travel plans are on hold.

Which isn't a bad thing, as it's pretty relaxing staying put.

And there are quite a lot of things to do in Singapore if you put some effort into doing more than the usual eat/shop/chill combo.

Like sight-seeing around Tiong Bahru and taking photos of old buildings. Admittedly, food features quite strongly in this sort of adventure too.

Tiong Bahru Market, home to delicious local food (and cheap too).

Old buildings.

Round the corner from Seng Poh Lane, there is Por Kee Restaurant (good zhi char food - yummy!) 

I love sights like this. Low-rise buildings, roads, bright yellow lines on dark grey roads, set against a clear tropical sky.

A Saturday in February

Saturday! Woohoo. My favorite day of the week.

Breakfast...and an early morning cycle. Joggers, Walkers, Cyclists, possibly Minister-spotting (well even Ministers need time out), birds chirping, kites a-fluttering amidst tree branches, the sun playing hide-and-seek, and oh the wind was lovely this morning.

This being CNY season (the remaining days of it), we have one last round of yu-sheng with the family, and a jolly excuse to get together and chill out.

Although I don't do any of the cooking, I'm pressed into service when needed. This morning's schedule includes wringing water from the shredded vegetables for the yu-sheng. My marvel of a mother makes her own yu-sheng. Or at least, she prepares the vegetable, pomelo, raw fish, preserved octopus etc and we buy the sauces & crispy bits.

Artistically arranged by mum. Green radish, white radish & carrot.

The shredded vegetables are wrung and kept in the fridge to dry out until dinner time.

A look back at the year of the Rabbit (Did you see the Wabbit?)

Chrysanthemum tea

ChrysantheMUM tea. Ok this punning thing is one of my nerdy skills.

But seriously folks, home-made c.tea rocks.  Just boil a put of water, add the dried chrysanthemum, add sugar...and drink.

Love the old-school packaging, and love the look & feel of a bundle of dried flowers. I can almost imagine all their summery goodness condensed into a palm's worth of leaves.

Chee Cheong Fun

I am pretty pleased with this photo and the simple but elegant styling!
And on a food-styling-related note, here's a pretty posting of a 4th of July-inspired photo shoot. Katy has many pretty ideas but this one was particularly nice.

Bei-ing Wanton Noodles, Roxy Square

Still going strong after all these years...good value for money. And
the uncle entertainingly yells your queue number when it's your turn
to collect your noodles.

[R-eposting this, I think it got lost in the blogger outage...]

Long Weekend: Satay Party by the Beach

This nice evening that I had with my family harks back to the old days when we would spend whole afternoons at the beach. Those were blissful, carefree days for me.

I'm conscious that these days that we still have together won't always be here; people move away, grow up, get busy. While we still can, I'm happy to have a quiet evening of family and food, under the stars and away from the everyday fast-paced world we live in.


Much to my mum's delight, we found time to use the portable grill that we own. We had satay and grilled mushrooms - yums!

Capturing the fading sunlight. This looks like a scene from another country. In the distance, solitary fishermen.

The warm glow of light.

Tim Sum Saturdays

A tim sum lunch is about leisurely nibbling small bites of yummy goodness. Of sipping delicate chinese tea and reading the papers. I love it.

Tim Sum here was lugged back from my family's recent KK trip. Yes, KK.... Foo Phing Restaurant in KK, to be precise. Google it and you'll find foodies passionately giving their take on the dim sum and/or better/cheaper alternatives.

Delightful Sunday + Scones

Amongst many other things, I caught up on rest this weekend.
It felt so good.
A thunderstorm on a Sunday afternoon plus rest plus mum's homemade scones (and butter! and jam!) = bliss.

Bak Chor Mee

Lunch time!
Comfort food on a Saturday.

Bang-Kwang Photo

As promised, a photo of the bang-kwang. Eat with lettuce, popiah style. Accompany with home-made chili. Potent stuff.

Saturday Breakfast

My love for the everyday enjoyment of moments & things is pretty obvious, I think.

After the morning marketing, we stopped for some makan. Chwee-kueh. Kopi. DEEP FRIED carrot cake. F&N Cherryade.

I love how a saturday morning at the kopi-tiam feels. It's a chaotic, messy, come-as-you-are affair. Slightly dirty but in a D-rating-means-good-food kind of way. I enjoy seeing the hustle and bustle of aunties and uncles ekking out a decent living. The sight of families eating their morning wanton mee and prata kosong. Aunties having their morning kopi-o-siu-tai, with cookies brought from home (none of that no-outside-food business here).

So the marketing is on the table. We eat, relax, chat. This is communal eating (eat your heart out).

Stir-fried pork for dinner

On the menu tonight.

I can add one more recipe to my repertoire, but boy did the cooking go by in a whirl.

1) Prep: We used rib-eye, sliced into strips. Add dark soya sauce liberally to season. In a bowl, dissolve some corn starch in water, as seen here.


















2) Cooking begins. Into the pan goes oil, chopped garlic. Then the black bean paste (tau chio), maybe a generously heaped spoonful. And some of my mother's nasi lemak chilli (oil, garlic, onions, chili, blended & fried), but she says sliced red chillies can be used too. It's got a bit of a szechuan taste, she says. Stir vigorously. Ingredients used are shown below (no need for salt for this dish because of the bean paste used):


















3) Add the pork to the aforementioned pan. Expect lots of sizzle!! An exciting dish, this.

4) Pour in the corn starch mixture when the pork has been suitably pushed around and shown who's boss. Ok I just said that to amuse myself.

5) Turn down the heat, leave the mixture to simmer. This simmering (plus the corn starch effect) makes the pork softer & smoother.

6) Wait patiently for dinner time.

Sunday teatime: sweet & savoury

At the Wet Market

Today we take a walk through the wet market!

The aunty in a dried-goods store is busy, busy, busy. Next to her is a fresh coconut grater, you don't see too many of these nowadays. I love the wide array of goods on display.


















Luscious veggies. Er I think this is spinach.














I know what these are. Yummy. Water chestnuts are great boiled and eaten as they are. Or made into a cooling drink. Or chopped into tiny bits, mixed with minced pork, and wrapped into crunchy wantons. And of course lotus root is great for delicious soups.


















My brother doesn't like this spiky-looking vegetable. But I do! Grate the skin off, slice into chunks, and stir-fry with egg...voila.















At the fishmonger's! Love the weighing scales hanging from the ceiling. I like the batang fish - the one that's got the grey skin and costs $5 apiece, seen here. When fried, the fish splits into neat quadrants.



































We bought mangoes. They're sweet, said the vendor. Eat them tomorrow, he said. All the shops I passed by looked suspiciously like their owners had undergone training on how to better display their wares (lifelong learning, indeed).














We queued up to buy Char Siew and Sio-Bah. It felt rather satisfying to be lugging home food to put on the table and food to be cooked tomorrow, to boot!


















I do so look forward to my Saturday mornings... till next week!

Making Bang-Kwang

Bang-Kwang: The filling one finds in popiah.

So today I have a potluck lunch at a colleague's place. I'm bringing home-made bang-kwang.
It took my mum & I about 45 min to make, including the times that I got in the way with my photo-taking and amateur skills. We started at 7am, and mum is now reading the papers, feet propped up on the table, ahh what a life.

We start with the basic ingredients: turnip and carrot. My mum is quite cute as she obligingly moves aside to accommodate my camera getting in the way.














We bring out the Benriner Japanese Blade.
But first, a warning:














Memo to self:
Use the medium blade next time. The fine blade made the turnip too thin, like mee sua.
The knobs to tighten the blade are underneath.
And there's a 3rd knob to adjust the height of the (errr what do you call it) platform on which the veggies are cut.















Ok let's cook!

The large pot gets oil and diced garlic. Once slightly yellow-brown, put in the carrots, followed soon after by the turnip, followed soon after by salt (to taste. I used 2 tiny heaped spoons) and dark soya sauce (aggaration, as always. Basically to get the bang-kwang to a slightly more pleasing brown colour.). Stir, leave to simmer.

The smaller pot is for boiling prawns. Once boiled, the water gets strained into the bang-kwang, and the prawns are peeled and sliced separately. These are the prawns that my mum bought from Chinatown before CNY, and we'd already de-veined and de-whiskered (Do prawns have whiskers? Well those whisker-like tendrils on prawns. Do prawns have tendrils?).



















Stay tuned for the end result!

[8:30am. NTUC is open, says mum, should we get another turnip to re-do it properly...?]

Lunar New Year (Year of the Rabbit)

Tis the year of the rabbit!











Ang Pow from my parents






Gong Xi Fa Cai! Ang Pow Na Lai! (Never gets old, that one)






Cute, square ang pows.







I quite like having another new year. It gives me fresh inspiration to do de-cluttering. Maybe we should have a new year every month. But my waistline couldn't take it.

The festivities roll by in a sweet almost-repeat of previous years, with familiar sights, sounds and smells: reunion dinner, making and tossing the yu-sheng, the gentle clash of mahjong tiles, snacking, snacking and more snacking.

Oh the familiar food favourites: steamboat, steamboat ingredients cooked teppenyaki style, chap chye, her-pio soup, bakuluat chicken (I'm pretty sure the spelling's not right...oh well, I'll explain it some day).




Steamboat (how blessed I feel to have this laden table). Chicken, Pork, Fish, Prawns, Mushrooms, Toufu, Veggies, Meatballs, Crabsticks. Chicken stock. Sambal Belachan and Sliced Red Chillies. Steamed White Rice. Oh we forgot the squid this year.










I half worry that when the time comes for someone else to take care of the cooking (i.e. me and the cousins), we won't know what to do. That's why I think of this blog as a kind of record of things. Things to eat. Things to cook. Things that happened.

But between me and my brother and cousins, we should be able to do a decent job. Case in point: kris and I did a haphazard arrangement of yu-sheng the first night. I was mortified that after all these years of eating it, I hadn't quite remembered how to arrange it. "Oh no! What will we do when it's our turn?", I go. "I'll remember from now on," says Kris comfortingly.



Memo: The brother knows how to arrange the yu-sheng.










The other thing I like about Chinese New Year is that it's the time of the year when I put on lots more gold jewellery, like this favourite bracelet that kris, gwen and I each have (shout-out to gwen, if you're reading this!). Our grandma gave it to us years ago, and although I thought it was supremely PIANG when I first received it, it's grown to be one of my most nostalgic & treasured items.



















~ The End ~

Baking with my grandma

Today's unexpected adventure:
I made pineapple tarts with my grandma.
It's like art and craft, just that this is edible :)

The Red Kitchen Aid

On my previous Bali trip, I made birthday cupcakes. Boy, it was fun keeping it a surprise and whipping up a storm at 1120pm, i.e. shortly before midnight. The villa staff were so helpful and helped to gather the essentials like oil and butter, as well as this kitchen aid mixer!























So I mentioned this to my family when I got back home.

To cut a long story short, some time later, my brother suggested that we get our mother a KA for Christmas. Mostly out of practicality, we don't often get our immediate family presents unless there's something they particularly want or need. This year would be different, though.

We embarked on an investigation of market prices and debating which colour machine to get. Oh, it was tough. I even tried to engage my mother in a hypothetical which-colour-machine-would-you-like conversation (without much luck).

To speed up the story even more:
We ended up getting a red KA because there was a major sale happening online in the States and it was on sale. Even with shipping - and with the need to use a transformer because of the voltage difference - it was still worth our while to buy it online.

Then we hit a snag - shipping delays! We waited and pretended like we didn't have a present for my parents, which wasn't too hard to do.

The Christmas gift came a few days after Christmas, and my mum was thrilled. Thrilled enough to call my aunt (who was already in on the secret) and relate the news...so thrilled that she couldn't go to sleep...so thrilled that we did some cleaning and moving that very night and settled the KA into its permanent spot in the kitchen...

The mixer purrs like the Ferrari of mixers and it's beautiful to watch. Just a mixer, you might say...but a gift that we'll likely be talking about for many years to come :)

Special thanks to the BFF for helping to chase the fedex guys... oh and my old mixer was adopted by my aunt. The End.

Mushroom, Long Beans & Dried Shrimp Porridge

"...porridge with a delectable combination of mushrooms, minced meat, dried shrimps and diced long beans cooked stir-fried together and mixed into the porridge pot. Ooh, it's the best." - Manda, "My official Saturday food" (6 Sep 2008)

What? You mean I haven't shown you photos yet?

Oops. It's been languishing in a folder on my desktop.

Just a small sidetrack: I love the smell of these mushrooms. They look ugly but taste so good. But I say 'ugly' with affection because they're actually fascinating when you look really close, beautifully textured (and they smell yummy, at least to me).

















This is my kind of comfort food. The kind of food that my aunt would feed to a few of us cousins from the same bowl/spoon while we watched tv or ran around the house.

It's quite easy-peasy, this porridge. Boil porridge in a big pot. Slice & soak mushrooms & dried shrimps (hei-bee). The minced pork shown here is in a frozen block, but anyway when it thaws, season with salt, pepper, light soya sauce, a little dash of black soya sauce if you like it dark like I do, and corn starch. All quantities based on aggaration... Also slice long beans (not shown here). Then stir-fry the minced pork, mushrooms, shrimps, long beans. Chuck this stir-fried mixture into the pot with the cooked porridge and stir it in. Leave to sit.























Add garnishing - sliced spring onions & chilli padi, fried shallots, and voila.