Publishing

There's something wrong either with my house wifi or my phone blogger app. Just realised my previous post on nachos wasn't published! Now it's taking a long time to publish my Ricotta cheese post... Weird...

Nachos

I had nachos at home the other day because I really love nachos but it's really expensive to have it outside! So I decided to make it at home. Well, by make I don't mean I literally made the nacho chips from scratch. The pictures will show you everything! So look:

Cost only £3 or £4 I think. Yummy! 

Homemade Ricotta cheese

Two weeks ago, I made cheese! It was the lab assignment from the free science of cooking online course by Harvard. So now, I will share with you how simple it is to make Ricotta cheese!

Ingredients:

1 litre milk

2 tbsp vinegar

Salt

Materials required:

Cooking thermometer

2 pots (1 for heating milk in and 1 for draining)

1 whisk (just a spoon works as well)

1 big pot of ice and water that can fit the pot used to heat milk

1 sieve

1 cheesecloth (optional) folded twice and put in sieve (so that there are four layers of cheese cloth)

I think that's about it! The most uncommon thing to find in most domestic kitchen is the thermometer. Go get one! It's a great investment if you like cooking as it helps you achieve better quality cooked food!

Method:

Heat milk and 1tsp salt in a pot, while stirring gently, up to 92°C then remove from heat. 

Add in vinegar and mix quickly and gently for no longer than 3 seconds. Any longer you may prevent the milk proteins from cursing. 

Put the whole pot in the big pot of ice to cool the mixture down. Once it reaches 36°C, pour everything through the sieve with a pot below it to collect the whey. (Apparently you can make more cheese out of the whey but I haven't tried that yet!) it's fine if you don't have cheese cloth. As you can see, I don't have it either. Shake the sieve a little to help all the whey to drain. If you have a cheese cloth, bundle the sides up and tighten it such that it squeezes the cheese and pushes whey out. 

Then put everything (sieve and pot below) in the fridge for at least 20mins to cool it down further. 

It's ready to be served after cooling in the fridge! You can add more salt to it to taste and add chives, onions etc to make it tastier as Ricotta is quite blend! Enjoy your homemade cheese. 

Food for the sick

I have hives! Ahhhh! And what feels like coming down with a cold. So anyway, mum says that I should eat plain watery congee for 3 days. In the view of traditional Chinese medicine, the water from congee is very beneficial and healing to the body (I think). So this is what I had for the whole of yesterday. 

I really can't feel full from just eating congee! Especially watery ones. So I bargained a little and today I get to eat anything that's not cold, not slimy, not any kind of meat/fish, and not oily. So I chose to stick with vege - specifically broccoli! Since I did some research and broccoli supposedly contains high levels of vitamin C which helps lower histamine levels or something like that. And I love broccoli! Just boiled it in plain water and add a little salt! Yum. 

That's my little Forrest of brooch before cooking. 

And after boiling! Just put it in boiling water and wait for the water to boil again! Depending on how thick you cut your broccoli stems, it should be ready a minute or two after it boils again. You can always try one to see if you like the crunchiness. If you like it softer, just leave it in longer!

Oh and not forgetting my fruits. 

A funny looking Tesco Gala apple. 

And grapes!

I prefer green grapes much more than the red ones! I find green grapes have a lighter flavour to it. The red ones are much more intense in sweetness if you get what I mean. 

Which do you prefer?

Chickpea, Avocado and Feta Salad

Just realised I forgot to publish this! Had this two weeks ago and it's really yummy!

Got this recipe from two peas & their pod while I was searching for what to do with the chickpeas I have at home. Changed it a little as I added radish (some red would be nice amongst all the green!) and did not add cilantro (or coriander, because Tesco didn't have fresh ones). 

Sorry for the ground coriander in the picture, was thinking of using that as the substitute of fresh coriander but decided not to in the end.

Ingredients:

1 can of chick peas

100g radish (or a handful)

1 large avocado

1 pack of Feta cheese (sorry forgot to look at the weight! You can just add as much or as little as you like)

3 shallots

1 lemon

Method:

Drain and rinse chick peas.

A handful of radish.

Rinse radish.

Cut off the ends of the radishes.

Slice radish into thin slices.

Cut the avocado in half.

Use a spoon to remove the seed (or pip or pit, whatever you call it). Alternatively, you can use the blade of your knife to whack the seed so that the seed is attached to the blade and then turn and the seed would come off. I didn't dare to hit the seed hard with my knife so I used a spoon!

Remove the skin using a spoon and dice the avocado. Alternatively (I think this is a better way) slice the avocado with it's skin on, then spoon it out. This way, your avocado would receive minimal damage to it! Avocados are really fragile so remember to be gentle with it. Here's a video on how to deal with avocados. There are so many more videos on youtube on anything you want to learn, so if you want to find other videos on cutting avocados, just search there!

Cut the feta cheese into cubes around the same size as your avocado or smaller. 

Dice the shallots and mix everything together in a large bowl. Squeeze in the lemon juice! 

Serve immediately would be best, but you can also clingwrap it and chill it in the fridge until you serve it!

Doesn't look real nice here since the avocado is kind of coming apart but it is definitely yummy!

edX + HarvardX

My friend introduced to me a fabulous free online course on Thursday when I met with him. It is by edX - a non-profit online initiative founded by Harvard and MIT. EdX provides online courses (I believe all are free) from the world's best universities such as MITx, HarvardX, BerkeleyX and UTx. Anyone can enroll into any course that they want. The courses that I have browsed through so far do not have any prerequisites at all, and they all have a certificate option by completing the course. You can either just register and look at the course materials as and when you want to, join in online discussions with students from around the world, complete homework and get graded, and if you complete all the components of the course, you can get a certificate on completion of the course. You can also sign up for any course any time you want, as long as the course is not over yet.

So this course that my friend introduced is called Science & Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science. I registered immediately when he told me about it since my ambition was something like what edX is providing - to provide free education to whoever wants to learn. Anyway, I registered just in time as the first homework was due next Tuesday. Even though the course started on 8th October (that means I am about 6 weeks behind!) I was still allowed to join, plus the first homework is not due till next week. If I am not wrong, this is a 10 week course with homework (HW) and lab activities (which you perform at home) each week. These HW and lab are then due 6 weeks later. There is no lab for the last 2 weeks, instead it is a final project which has to be submitted by March 15, 2014, when the course closes. Everything regarding the course could be found in the "courseware" tab once you register. For the schedule of this course, click here.

I am really excited to complete this course and get a certificate! I already have my eye on another course - Unlocking the Immunity to Change: A New Approach to Personal Improvement. It starts on 20th January 2014 so I think I will have enough time to complete the course I am currently in first! I have enough time to do 2 courses or more at once anyway!

Do check out edX! I think it's a brilliant idea. Now I can learn anything I want, anywhere, at anytime (as long as I have access to internet)!

Yellow glutinous rice

This is the recipe I got off Raymond's kitchen as mentioned in the previous post. I was actually intending to cook the Burmese kind of yellow rice but couldn't find the recipe so tried this instead. This is the Malaysian style and it's usually eaten with curry (or so I heard). After the boyfriend came home and tried it did I realise (and remember) that the Burmese style wasn't made with glutinous rice at all! Nonetheless, this is yummy with most kinds of gravy I think! We had it with a tomato and garlic paste made by the man's aunty, and topped it with more garlic oil! We are garlic loving people as you can see!

Ingredients: 

2 cups of glutinous rice (Chinese cups which we call "mug" in Cantonese, or u can prepare however much u want. 1 Chinese cup is a little less than half an English cup, which I'm assuming is 250ml a cup)

Half tablespoon of turmeric powder

Water - enough to cover rice twice

Method:

Wash your glutinuous rice first. I usually just wash it in the pot that I'm going to cook it with. 

Then add enough to soak the rice. Add in the turmeric powder and stir so that it mixes evenly with the rice and water. 

Let your rice soak for 4 hours (Raymond's kitchen said at least 6 or overnight would be better. I couldn't wait and soaked only 4 hours. It turned out alright!)

This is what the rice and turmeric water mixture looks like at first:

After two hours, the rice is already stained yellow!

And this is what the rice looks like after 4 hours:

It's more yellowish now. 

Wash the rice to rinse away most of the turmeric water. Then fill it with just enough water to cover the rice a little, so that all the rice is submerged in water but not a lot. If there are makings on your rice cooker like mine, just follow it. 

It would look something like this:

Set your rice cooker to cook. 

And tah dah! The end result!

We ate it like that, with a hard-boiled egg:

Food blog

I found Raymond's Kitchen while I was Googling for a yellow glutinous rice recipe! I think his blog is really awesome since it has loads of Asian food and most of the recipes he posted are simple to follow. He last post was last Christmas though, hope he continues posting new recipes!

Anyway, I am in the process of making yellow glutinous rice, soaking them in water with tumeric powder now. Although the recipe says to soak for at least 6 hours, I think I'm going to soak them for only 4 (because it's getting late and I feel like eating it tonight and not tomorrow!).

If this works out, I'll try tumeric fried chicken tomorrow to go with the sticky rice! Can't do the fried chicken tonight as there's no chicken at home (I'm too lazy to go down to buy!) and it has to be marinated for at least 2 hours! Or maybe I will change my mind and do it. If I go down and buy the drumsticks now and start marinating, I can probably eat it at 10.30pm...... hmmm....

Strawberry Wholemeal Bread Pudding

First off, I apologise for the bad photograph placements to come, I really don't know how to do them properly with the Blogger post composer! SOS! I think I will take a look at and edit with the html next time, when I feel like it.....

I had half a loaf of bread that was going to expire on the day that I made this (last week) and I didn't want to throw it away because it would be such a waste. I didn't want to keep it any longer either as experience tells me that it would become mouldy in a matter of days. So I decided to find simple recipes that made use of bread, and this was the simplest one that I found! The original recipe (click here for that recipe) was a blueberry bread pudding but the blueberries were so expensive at the Tesco Express downstairs (£2.50 for a little box of 250g!) that I bought strawberries instead (£2 for 300g).

Right, ingredients:

400g wholemeal bread (about half a large loaf; white bread is usually used but we eat wholemeal!)
300ml single cream (I used the cream cup/container as my measuring tool)
600ml milk (2 cups measured using the cream cup)
½ cup sugar (again, using the cup the cream came in, ½ of that cup)
5 eggs
2 tsp vanilla
¼ tsp cinnamon powder
300g strawberries
1 tbsp raw/brown sugar
1 tbsp butter (for coating of dish)
(there was supposed to be 1 tsp salt as well but I forgot about that so you can leave it in or out as you wish - it tasted perfectly fine without!)

For the topping:

4 tbsp raw/brown sugar
½ teaspoon cinnamon powder

Gently heat the cream, milk, and sugar in a large pot (or whatever pot that can hold all these ingredients) until it almost boils. Remove from heat.

While it's heating, prepare the eggs and strawberries (don't have to prepare if you are using blueberries).
Whisk the eggs, vanilla, and cinnamon together (the cinnamon wouldn't actually dissolve).
Slowly pour the hot creamy milk mixture into the eggs mixture, little by little at first while constantly stirring so as to avoid raising the temperature of the eggs to abruptly and scrambling them.

Tear the bread into small pieces (or you can cut them into cubes so that it will absorb the moisture better) and add them to the egg and milk mixture.

Remove the greens from the strawberries and slice them then place them in a bowl. Add 1 tbsp of raw sugar to the strawberries, mix them together, and mash half of it, so that there's a mixture of mashed and whole slices of strawberries. Let it sit for a few minutes so that the strawberry juices will collect.

Add the strawberries into the pudding mixture and mix well.
Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius.
Butter a large baking dish.

Pour the pudding mixture in.

Sprinkle the topping ingredients over the top - 4 tbsp of raw sugar and ½ tsp of cinnamon powder.

Cover it with aluminium foil and bake for 45 minutes. Have another tray under it to catch any leakage as the bread pudding will expand quite a bit (I think it expanded at least 2cm).

 


Remove the foil and bake for another 20 minutes.

At the end, put the pudding near the heating coil and turn on the top heating of the oven and let it heat the top for another minute or 2 to crisp up the top, be sure not to burn your pudding!

Let it sit for at least half an hour before serving!!

The pudding will actually deflate!
Serve with vanilla ice cream!