Tidbits
Sleepover at Ikea - Maybe this is the only way to get to the $1 early enough…
A ramen bath - Japanese spa with special baths resembling instant noodles. I wanna play!
Old age homes for dogs - 1) Old dogs don’t like to be abandoned at strange places. 2) Playing with young puppies will probably cause the older dogs to die faster due to exhaustion.
A remote-controlled pigeon - Oh the poor thing…
An article on a brilliant method of teaching grade schoolers about bats and rabies. I smell a lawsuit.
Will trade beer for Crumpler bags. Tempted by the beanbag and messenger bags…
Photos
Attempts at Chinese Cooking: Chicken
January 19, 2007, 3:38 am
Chicken Curry
I make Japanese-style curry all the time, it’s easy using those curry bars you get at T&T. But such a dish lack greens. And all that’s fresh in the fridge is a head of romaine lettuce. I wanted to steam it so it will go “better” but Mike was lazy and served it raw. After munching on a leaf by itself and feeling like a rabbit, inspiration hit and we started wrapping it around balls of curry rice.
This is actually not that an uncommon thing to do. Chinese restaurants serve lettuce wraps with Peking Duck. I’ve been to a Korean BBQ place that also gives you raw lettuce leaves to roll up your meat and stuff. And it’s quite good, and much better than munch on leaves by itself.
Chicken and Mushroom Clay Pot Rice
So in the dark period of time when our rice cooker died, I was desperate for alternative ways to cook rice. This was inspired from this recipe:
I didn’t like it that much, as it was lacking the right sauce. Or maybe it’s because the chicken broth was a bit off, about sitting opened in the fridge for weeks, if not months. Wasn’t sour though, like the last box, so I decided to use it.
Steam Chicken
There is this series of Chinese cookbook I like, called the ”Cookery Class For Indonesia / Filipino Helper”. Mike actually got two of them sort of as a joke, as he likes to tease and call me ”Bun Bun”. But they turned out to be quite good, which we judge by how much our version look like the pictures… We have a couple of other cookbooks from the discount bin that never works out, even if we follow the recipes to the T. Scratch that, I mean Mike, not “we”. I never follow recipes that accurately. Mike does, being an engineer and all. And the food he makes from the Filipino Helper books are quite good, unlike, say, that disastrous Flamb incident involving chicken, watermellon vodka, and wet matches.
But anyways, the dish above was all Michael. It was from the weekend I was holed up in front of my computer hashing out the EE version of this blog. Left to his own devices, he drew inspirations from the only Chinese food in the area: Sunshine, the little Chinese eatery on the Mel’s side of University Plaza. (For reference, it’s like another Mr Panino.) He stuck some frozen chicken thighs into a big pot, covered them with water, and set it to boil. Then chopped up some green onion, ginger, mixed with oil to top on the chicken, with soy sauce. Fried an egg. Added some rice. And voila. It was actually pretty good.
The soup is the corn and egg drop soup you find so often at Canadian-Chinese restaurants. He made it from one of the Filipino Helper recipes. It looked and tasted almost exactly like it should… Only he decided to be creative and add onions…
So here you go, our recent attempts at “Chinese” cooking. I think I prefer this style over Western cooking, in that everything is done so quickly, and you only need a handful of spices and seasoning: salt, pepper, sugar, cornstarch, soy sauce, and sesame oil.
Tagged: Food
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