OUR ATRINA JOURNEY

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Recent cooks

A new year to challenge myself with more cooking :)

1 of the lunches I made for K using whatever we had at home.



Tuna filling inside the foccacia. Gardenia's version is very very nice. Love it!
*Note the side salad I gave him. He refused to eat the cucumber (also ate the tomatoes grudgingly), claiming that he only eats JAPANESE cucumber. I had to explain to him this IS the Jap one. He is so pampered thinking that Jap one must be cut in long thin strips.*



Complete the meal with canned soup. Um... not very nice this flavour or maybe cuz I added the Daisy milk which is too sweet?



That's my own lunch. With sliced chicken breast from the chicken leftover from NY day dinner.



A bit addicted to salad recently. Tried a few variety of lettuce and this curly one is the best. I love my salad with Japanese sesame dressing :)



That's romaine lettuce. Shredded chicken meat was a bonus cuz I steamed a whole chicken leg for XY's dinner and I usually give her half of it for 1 meal so I finished the other half.



Back to Korean inspired again. 炒年糕 - a dish I like very much. It's quite convenient to get the fresh 年糕 from Korean supermarket these days :) This is also a result of watching too much Korean drama.



K's version has more gravy (I fried his portion only when he's back home). He is a "everything-hater". Only likes yellow Hokkien noodles but too bad he has to eat anything that I cook. As a consolation, he said the gravy is nice so I'm going to do a gravy over rice version 1 of these days. Easy to cook and he confirm likes it. XY can eat that with us too.



The latest craze at home these few days - Korean pancake. Thanks to the convenience of Korean pre-packed pancake flour, we can easily make this dish at home without having to Q outside and pay exhorbiant prices. If I'm not wrong, pancake is a typical "cheap" dish eaten in Korea but in our local restaurants they charge almost a premium for it.

As you can see from this pic, a very funny sight - prawns fried separately and laid on top. Not very well done...



Close-up



After 3 pcs on my second try, I finally got it done right! Thickness is about 3mm. The previous pcs were actually too thick and when it is too thick, the middle tends to be not well-cooked while the exterior is very brown. The trick is to mix all the ingredients together with the batter and pour a small amount of the mixture into a frying pan and use a spatula to spread and flatten the mixture so that the pancake can be very thin and crispy. The surimi sticks (imitation crab meat), spring onions and prawns all contained inside the pancake. I used surimi sticks from Cold Storage which is much much better than the typical reddish ones. K likes it so much he just sat there and finished the pce I fried for XY. Can't believe right? The "everything-hater" leh. And from this dish onwards, I can quite safely say XY is cleared of seafood (at least for prawn). She ate this twice as a side dish for her porridge and she didn't show any signs of allergy reactions.



A Japanese inspired dinner for 1. Had planned to prepare this for dinner the day before but K informed me in the afternoon that he was not able to make it back in time for dinner so I cooked a personal portion instead. I showed him this pic and what he was missing out. His reaction was "Need to do till so nice meh?". Pls lor, my principle is: Want to do, do a nice one. Not happy to do don't cook!

A very simple meal with simple ingredients but it made me very happy :)
The pathetic 2 pcs of lettuce on the right is for wrapping the chicken to eat with.



Rolled egg omelette. Looks quite pathetic. 1st time trying out my rectangular pan. Not too difficult but I think I should try pouring in half an egg next time so that it won't be so thick.



This needs no further introduction. Teriyaki inspired chicken thigh with enoki mushrooms. Honestly after getting the taste right, I won't buy bottled teriyaki sauce anymore.



A knock-off version of Hiyayakko - Japanese cold tofu. Got the recipe from a random website and it's so easy and nice too. No cooking required. Just mix the seasoning and pour on top of the tofu and garnish with bonito flakes. I used the tofu which is meant for eating cold. It's really good. I read in noobcook's blog that she uses the kind of premium Japanese tofu which costs like 4-6 times the price of normal tofu. I used the cheaper version and it worked too :)

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