Brain Broth

The actual name of the recipe is 'Brain-Boosting Broth', and I wouldn't have chanced upon it if I did not end up with much more fennel than two people could consume (courtesy of my mum who got an incredible deal at Pasar Bella).

Wanting to find a way to use up more fennel (there was only so much fennel salad we could eat in a week), I went to my usual trusty source - Epicurious. The recipe looked simple enough, so I used the largest cast iron pot I had and set to work. It smelt and tasted delicious - the sweetness from the vegetables, warmth from the fennel and earthiness from all the herbs came together very well. I used it as a base for a risotto on one night and froze the leftover. 

When Ed was feeling peckish this weekend, I made a pasta soup out of it and added some diced green peppers and fresh dill. Good for the body, good for the brain. Also good for the wallet. 

Brain-Boosting Broth

Ingredients

8 quarts water

3 carrots, coarsely chopped

2 white onions, coarsely chopped

2 celery stalks, coarsely chopped

2 bulbs fennel, coarsely chopped

1 parsnip, coarsely chopped

12 cloves garlic, chopped

1/4 cup fresh ginger, peeled and chopped

Stems from 1/2 bunch fresh flat-leaf parsley

1 bunch green onions, green and white parts

1 stalk fresh lemongrass, cut in half lengthwise

1 tablespoon salt

1 teaspoon black peppercorns

2 cloves

1 teaspoon dried oregano

1 teaspoon dried rosemary

1 bay leaf

1 teaspoon ground turmeric

Method

Combine all of the ingredients in a large stockpot and bring to a boil over high heat. Turn down the heat to maintain a gentle simmer and cook, uncovered, for 2 hours.

Strain the broth through a fine-mesh sieve. Use immediately, refrigerate for up to 5 days, or freeze for up to 1 month.

Goong Xi Fa Cai!

I've got so much to blog about - a (not so) recent trip to Beirut and Istanbul where my companions and I ate particularly well and tried a dish we know we will never eat again, a Coq au Vin Blanc recipe I tried which was tres easy and delicious, and my favourite salad place just around the corner from where I live.

Instead, I thought I would blog about a trusty Tom Yam Goong recipe that has come in handy the past 3 years when helping my mum prepare the reunion dinner of Steamboat/Hot Pot. I used to think that there was nothing that could beat the convenience of pre-packaged Tom Yam Goong paste that only required a bit of hot water to turn into a fiery and satisfying red soup. When I received the cookbook 'Inside the Southeast Asian Kitchen' as a gift, and read how easy it was to make Tom Yam Goong from scratch, I was pleasantly surprised and strangely compelled to try it for myself. The most time consuming part is probably making a trip down your local supermarket to find the ingredients - the most elusive of which is probably the galangal. Once you've gotten your hands on the 8 main ingredients, you literally need only 10 minutes to peel/slice/crush before everything bubbles away in a pot. I've never looked back since.

Tom Yam Goong for Steamboat

Adapted from 'Inside the Southeast Asian Kitchen'

Serves 4

Ingredients

Shells and heads of 400 gms of prawns (raw prawns can be served for guests to cook in the hot pot)

5 bird's-eye chillies, crushed

2 stalks lemongrass, thinly sliced

2 cm piece of galangal (blue ginger), thinly sliced

4 kaffir lime leaves, torn

6 coriander roots, crushed

Fish sauce

Lime juice (I like mine from the bottle for the kick that is sometimes difficult to pin down with fresh limes. These bottles of lime juice can be found at Thai-specialty stores such as those in Golden Mile Centre.)

Method

Place prawn heads and shells in a large pot, and cover it with 1 liter of water

Bring to boil then add lemongrass, galangal, kaffir lime leaves and coriander root.

Simmer for at least 30 minutes.

Skim off scum as you go.

Add lime juice and fish sauce by the tablespoons to taste

Just before serving, add chillies. (To increase the heat, add more chillies or simmer the stock a while longer before serving)

Pho Bo

Pho (pronounced 'Fer') is a dish almost synonymous with Vietnamese cuisine over here in Singapore. The closest rival would be those crunchy and delicious rice paper rolls, which cannot do without the piquant dipping sauce of fish sauce, lime juice, sugar, garlic and a touch of chilli padi.

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During Chinese New Year, my mum wanted to do something different and less fussy than the usual Chinese reunion dinner dishes. Since she had just been to Hanoi and brought back many packets of rice paper, she was naturally inclined towards incorporating the rolls into our reunion dinner. This was a perfect opportunity for me to try making some Pho Bo, even though the thought of trying my hand at a dish that Ed eats frequently was terribly stressful.

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By the time I realised the high expectations my family had of this Pho Bo I was preparing, it was too late. I had already filled up two big pots with stock made from beef bones and marrow, fish sauce, star anise, cloves and rock sugar. There was nothing else in the fridge that could stand in as a main dish for the meal. It sure smelt heavenly, but I was plagued with fear that it would taste nowhere as good as the aromas seemed to promise.

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Alas, my worst fears were realised with the first spoonful of stock I tasted. It tasted nothing like the flavourful soup usually associated with Pho Bo - meaty, slightly tangy, with a hint of spice. I took another spoonful and this time tried to figure out what was lacking. Usually, it just needs a bit of salt, so I added more salt. And more. But there was something else missing - perhaps it was fish sauce. So tablespoon by tablespoon I added more fish sauce in desperation to salvage the 2 big pots of nothingness, and them into 'something edible'.

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Slowly but surely, the soup became more and more palatable. Wait, perhaps it is even delicious! I threw in a few stalks of holy basil for good measure, spooned the soup into waiting bowls of noodle and thin slices of beef, then hoped for the best. As I brought the last bowl out into the dining room, I could only hear slurping of noodles.

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I was on tenterhooks waiting for the verdict and was taking my first bite when finally someone spoke. Great news, the Pho Bo was a hit! I watched with satisfaction as my family finished their very generous helpings of Pho Bo, 'garnished' with artery-clogging beef marrow, and then went back for seconds. Ed even paid me the highest compliment ever - that it was the best bowl of Pho Bo he had ever tried. And I believe him, not just because I want to, but also because I know he would never lie. Not especially when it comes to something so close to his heart - Pho Bo.

Pho Bo - Vietnamese Rice Noodles Soup with Beef
(Adapted from Epicurious)
Serves 6

Ingredients
2kg beef bones
1.5kg beef marrow
2 (3 inch) pieces of giner, cut in half lengthwise, lightly bruised with the flat side of a knife, and lightly charred (see note below)
2 yellow onions, peeled and charred (see note below)
1/4 fish sauce, and then some to taste
3 tablespoons sugar or equivalent of rock sugar
10 whole star anise, lightly toasted in a dry pan
6 whole cloves, lightly toasted in a dry pan
1 tablespoon sea salt, and then some to taste

500g dried 1/16 inch wide rice sticks, soaked, cooked and drained
200g sukiyaki beef i.e. beef sirloin, thinly sliced across the grain

1/3 cup chopped coriander
400g beansprouts
10 sprigs of holy basil/thai basil
6 chilli padi, cut into thin rings
3 limes, halved


Method

In a large stockpot, bring 6 quarts water to a boil.
Place the bones and marrow in a second pot and add water to cover.
Bring to a boil and boil vigorously for 5 minutes. Using tongs, carefully transfer the bones and marrow to the first pot of boiling water. Discard the water in which the meat cooked. (This cleans the bones and reduces the impurities that can cloud the broth.)
When the water returns to a boil, reduce the heat to a simmer.
Skim the surface often to remove any foam and fat.
Add the charred ginger and onions, fish sauce and sugar.

When the broth has been simmering for about 1 1/2 hours total, wrap the star anise and cloves in a tea bag/cheesecloth and add to the broth.
Let infuse until the broth is fragrant, about 30 minutes.
Remove and discard both the spice bag and onions.
Add the salt and continue to simmer, skimming as necessary, until you're ready to assemble the dish.
The broth needs to cook for at least 2 hours.

To serve, place the cooked noodles in preheated bowls. (If the noodles are not hot, reheat them in a microwave or dip them briefly in boiling water to prevent them from cooling down the soup.)
Place a few slices of the raw beef on the noodles.
Bring the broth to a rolling boil; ladle about 2 to 3 cups into each bowl.
The broth will cook the raw beef instantly.
Garnish with coriander.
Serve immediately, inviting guests to garnish the bowls with bean sprouts, basil, chilies and lime juice.

Note on charring ginger/onions:
To char ginger, hold the piece with tongs directly over an open flame or place it directly on a medium-hot electric burner.
While turning, char until the edges are slightly blackened and the ginger is fragrant, about 3 to 4 minutes.
Char the onions in the same way.
Peel and discard the blackened skins of the ginger and onions, then rinse and add to the broth.

My Monthly Fix

Every month, I religiously head to Kino for my dose of food related magazines. For a very disturbing digression, on one of those trips I spotted a guy in his late thirties or early forties sitting on the floor, with a soft porn magazine open on his lap. Sure, I'm all for free speech and human rights, and whatever men like to do in their own little private space. Lets not even go there.

Bring it out into the open, er... SURE. But to sit there, with a camera phone in hand, snapping photos of the bikini clad, busty model with barbie-type big hair featured in the magazine, now that's just plain disturbing.



Anyway! Fortunately or unfortunately, I head to Kino pretty often to grab a couple of magazines. I'm a terrible sucker for handsome steaks or sexy pies. Throw in some adorable mini scoops of caramel ice cream and I'm sold. A couple of magazines have entrapped my mind and heart. Donna Hay is one of them. The gorgeous photos, reader-friendly layout and useful tips on cooking make the magazine a mainstay in my repertoire of magazines to grab regularly.

Sadly though, their recipes and tips have been grossly used and consulted. And with that realisation, I stacked up my D.H. mags and trawled through, considering a possible menu to provide for some friends. As I was catching a matinee, I only had a couple of hours to prepare the meal and had to (again) look for something uncomplicated.

There were way too many choices, and after much mulling over, I chose to start the meal off with caramelised mushrooms to top off a thinly sliced baguette, smeared generously with cheese (I chose my childhood fav, Laughing Cow Cheese) and scattered with wild rocket leaves. This was such a convenient dish to prepare way before hand, to get out of the way and out of the mind while preparing the other courses. I just had to simmer it for a while, allowing it to cool naturally until it is ready to serve. Although the original recipe asked for goat's cheese, my uncontrollable aversion to goat's cheese led to my substitution, which I thoroughly enjoyed anyway.

Following that, we had salmon gently poached in tomato broth, frugally garnished with dill. Convenient point number 2: the broth is prepared before hand and the salmon poached for just 8-9 minutes for the middle to remain that slightly darker shade of pink. Of course, that means that the salmon should be sliced into individual portions first before poaching.

With some careful timing and prep work, some stew and risotto was served after that. The lamb was stewed with an entire bottle of red wine and the aromatic rosemary, while the risotto was plain and spiked with just a mere hint of thyme.

One thing I've learnt however, after so many attempts to recreate dishes featured in magazines or in cookbooks, is that they almost always never turn out the way it looks like in the photos. My fish broth looked far too red, making me alarmed by the disparity of colour. I re-read the recipe over and over again to make sure I wasn't adding the tomato puree to the broth erroneously. Was it 1 tsp, and not 1 tbspn? Was my tomato puree unusually red?

So yes, I've learnt (the hard way) to accept that I might never be able to make such perfect looking steaks or pies. But when you have friends like mine who mostly don't notice if the carrot sticks were not julienned properly or if the frosting on the cake is slightly uneven, it is easier to let go. Just walk away from the cake Daffy, just walk away from the cake.

Lentil Soup

I have had a stock of lobster oil sitting pretty in my fridge for a while now. It was something I bought on a whim when I was browsing around Arcangel's in Great World City. At the time I bought it, I had no idea what I was going to do with it, but I knew I had to get it. I was sure I would find a great nesting place for it, in a risotto or a soup.

Today, I decided it had enough rest in my increasingly overcrowded fridge, and took it out for some fun. As I browsed through some of my cookbooks, a particular Chickpea and Langoustine soup tempted me, while another's Sweet Garlic, Bread and Almond Soup looked amazing garnished with some chopped spring onions and drizzled with a few drops of oil. Anyone who knows me well, knows that it's not enough for me to make something that tastes good, it has to look good too. But one thing I would never do, is to compromise the quality of the dish to take a great photo.

In the end, I chose to make a Lentil Soup with small amounts of roasted sweet garlic and caramelised onions. Lobster oil and lumpfish caviar then finished off the bowl of soup. To make the soup, I used some seafood stock I had made many moons ago and kept in my freezer for a special day. I did everything within my means to make the soup as flavourful as it could be, without coming up with something that would be too strong to handle the lobster oil. Towards the end, I thought the salt would finally bring all the flavours together, as it usually does. But when it didn't, I was dumbfounded.

What else could I possibly have missed out? Good seafood stock - check. Yummy sweet, oozy roasted garlic - check. Freshly made onion relish - check. Salt and pepper - check. A splash of wine, a dash of vinegar - check, check. But no matter how much of the soup I tasted, something was missing. I couldn't believe I could fail in making something as simple as Lentil Soup.

Then I thought of what my grandmother would do. As a Cantonese, her dishes are rather extreme in tastes. Subtlety is not an existing word in her vocabulary. The flavours leap right at you rather than dance around on your tongue with every mouthful. To achieve that, she never stinges on salt, and sugar. So that's exactly what I did, I added sugar.

It's not uncommon for sugar to be added in savoury dishes. I've seen plenty of recipes, especially those featuring tomatoes, with a touch of sugar to tame tartness and enhance the sweetness of the tomatoes. I have no idea what forces combined in the lentil soup I was making, but the sugar did it. Just half a tablespoon of precious white crystals brought all the flavours together, giving me an extremely joyous feeling.

I did a little victory dance around the kitchen (it was very little, considering how little standing space there was available) then scooped out a little bowl for myself. It was velvety and hearty, yet sophisticated with a few drops of bright red lobster oil and the almost luminiscent pearls of caviar.

The only tool one would need to make a soup as simple as this, is a sturdy heavy duty blender, preferably made with glass that can take the high heat. I used to have a plastic one and would constantly fret that the plastic would crack or worse, that it would impart some incredibly off-putting plastic taste to the soup. So now that I have my glass one, there's no way I'm looking back!

Lentil Soup

Serves 6-8 as a starter

Ingredients

half a bulb of garlic

2 cups red lentils

5 cups homemade vegetable/seafood stock

1 tbspn olive oil

1 big white onion, sliced

2 tbspns good white wine

1 tbspn white wine vinegar

salt, pepper and sugar to taste

Lobster oil, caviar, or dried sakura ebi (optional)

Method

Preheat oven to 180 degrees celcius.

Place garlic in oven and roast for half an hour or until flesh is soft.

Boil lentils in stock until soft.

Meanwhile, heat olive oil in pan at medium heat and add onions then turn down heat to low.

When onions turn translucent, add white wine and vinegar.

Continue cooking and stirring until onions are caramelised and brown

Remove flesh from garlic skin, and add to boiling lentil soup with the onions.

Puree in a blender until smooth, then strain if preferred (I chose not to) back into pot.

Add salt, pepper and sugar to taste.

Spoon into bowls and drizzle lobster oil and garnish with caviar or dried sakura ebi if available.

Going Mediterranean

'What is Mediterranean food?' my friend asked. When I think Mediterranean, plenty of beans and healthy food comes to mind. Egyptian, Syrian, Greek, Moroccan, Turkish... all fall under that category among others (which is just a convenient way of saying that I am not entirely sure myself).

Many recipes I looked through required a wide variety of spices. Some also involved Harisa, a Tunisian chilli paste that one can make from scratch at home but using ingredients that are difficult to find here in Singapore. Thankfully, I managed to find a Paula Wolfert recipe from 'The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen: Recipes for the Passionate Cook (that's me!)', that involved only a reasonable amount of work and easily accessible spices - Lamb Smothered in Onions. The lamb, braised slowly in the oven for 3 whole hours then roasted for another half an hour, was fork tender and an explosion of flavours from the caramelised onions, ground cinnamon, ginger, saffron and tomatoes. I combined some pasta, spinach and red lentils, tossed in oil and seasoned with salt and pepper, as the lamb's sidekick - there to support and complement, but never to steal the show.

In addition, I found a greater treasure trove of Mediterranean recipes in Claudia Roden's 'Arabesque'. Sorted into the various parts of the Mediterranean region then split into the starters, mains and desserts, her book was easy to navigate and had better food porn. Also, the recipes featured seemed a little less fiddly than the previous cookbook. I attempted a Cream of Dried Broad Bean Soup that awoke the tastebuds with garlic, cumin, cayenne pepper and caraway. And to finish off the meal, I chose Sweet Cous Cous with walnuts, sultanas and pomegranate. It was the simplest dessert I have ever put together and thankfully it did not lack in taste.

The only un-Mediterranean part of the meal was the Korova Sables (Pierre Herme's prized recipe) that I had baked earlier in the day and served with a scoop of S's delicious and smooth (it's as smooth as it gets!) eggless milk ice cream. GreedyGoose had written about these delectable chocolate chip cookies before and it's worth every turn of the KitchenAid, every chip off the Valrhona chocolate block and every calorie consumed.

Cream of Dried Broad Bean Soup

Adapted from Arabesque

Serves 3

Ingredients

125g dried broad beans, soaked overnight

3/4 litres water

2 whole garlic cloves

1 chicken stock cube

1/2 tsp ground cumin

1/2 tsp ground caraway

1/2 tsp cayenne pepper

salt to taste

Strips of fried bacon (optional)

Method

Simmer beans, water and garlic cloves for an hour.

Crumble stock cube into soup and simmer for another 30 minutes or until beans are tender.

Mash the beans in the pot, add spices and salt to taste.

Simmer longer if soup is not thick enough, if not, serve immediately with strips of fried bacon (optional).

Sweet Cous Cous

From Arabesque

Serves 6-8

Ingredients

500g fine ground cous cous

600 ml warm water

1/2-1 tsp salt

2 tbspn sunflower/veg. oil

100g or more unsalted butter

2 tbspn caster sugar

Chopped and toasted walnuts, raisins and pomegranate seeds

Icing sugar, ground cinnamon (to decorate)

Method

Mix warm water with salt and add to cous cous.

Leave for 10 minutes for cous cous to swell.

Add oil and fluff with a fork.

Work in butter and sugar until butter has all melted.

Add in walnuts and raisins then shape on a plate using high ring molds.

Sift icing sugar and ground cinnamon over cous cous and serve with more walnuts and raisins, and the pomegranate seeds.