My 2 Day Food Diary

Day 1

Breakfast:
- Fried meehoon with black pepper chicken
- Nescafe

Lunch (Japanese):
- Fuku-fuku set lunch - rice, miso soup, beef teriyaki and double portions of unagi
- Green Tea

Dinner (Shook @ Starhill)
- Starters - baked blue crab cake, fritto misto (battered shrimp and squid with garlic aoili)
- Stir fried scallops with XO sauce with asparagus
- A couple of wonderfully greasy, tender bites of medium well beef tenderloin stolen from AK's order
- Bread and butter pudding

Day II

Breakfast (Buffet @ Westin - my all time fave breakfast buffet)
- Post-dinner guilt breakfast of All-Bran with lowfat milk, dragonfruit and strawberries
- Almond croissant (oops)

Morning tea
- Mee siam
- Smoked chicken sausage

Lunch (Buffet @ Crowne Plaza)
- Chilean garlic prawns
- Lamb satay
- Steamed fish (attempt to stay healthy)
- Assortment of retro desserts - walnut tart, black forest gateau, creme caramel, sweetcorn ice cream

Afternoon Tea
- Fish fingers
- Mini walnut tart

Dinner (Eden @ KLIA)
- Claypot King Prawn Tanghoon
- Stirfried mushrooms
- A few bites of aneamic-looking wa tan hor from AK's order

Supper
- Almond-flavoured bovine supplement for knees+soy milk
- kaya bun

Announcing...........

The arrival of my new babies from Amazon.com!!!

1) Dim Sum by Ellen Leong Blonder - had a peek through and I love it already. Watercolour paintings on how to pleat a dumpling, who couldn't love that???



2) Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan - the must-have on the foodie blogosphere. Never mind that I don't have a real oven....but one can always dream for USD12.99, no?

Wistful sigh.............can't wait to take them home :)

Next on the never ending wishlist - Falling Cloudberries.

On Cooking for Others, and Beggar's Chicken for Lazy Ppl

Lately I've been slack with food writing lately. I'm as obsessed with it as ever, feverishly draining my hard earned cash impulse-clicking on Amazon and MPH.com.

My cookbook repertoire now includes Nigella Lawson, Jean Georges Vongerichten, and soon, Dorie Greenspan. I have books on how to make Yorkshire pudding ("all puffed up and glorious, sinful with whipped cream and golden syrup"), Vietnamese Pho, Paneer, Thai Green Curry, Beggar's chicken, Penang Nasi Kandar.

Cooking interests me, but the serving, the offering of a piece of my work to others is what gives me the real rush, I realize.

Food photography, to be honest, bores me. I just don't have the patience to adjust camera angles and lighting. Maybe it's because my photos never come out the way I want it....but the real rush comes from when people taste it. My heart breaks and I brood for days when my food isn't finished. Why why why Too much salt. Too little salt. Pan was too hot. Shouldn't have added water why why why why

I have a friend, who - bless her - seems to really enjoy to cook for - us. But when we sit down to her cooking, and start reminiscing about how we miss our long lost Char Koay Teow and Chee Cheong Fun and Briyani Rice from home, I start to feel sorry for her. Because you see, we're doing what I normally do when I sit down to bowl of Maggie Mee, or worse, when I'm on a diet, All-Bran or microwaved egg whites, my cookbook/magazine in front of me and the TV on the food channel - we're imagining we're eating those foods we miss/dream about while chewing on substandard stuff. This, to me, is rather saddening. One cannot, of course, put the blame on anyone. But let's face it, it is NOT the kind of feedback I want for all my banging and clanging in a blistering kitchen.

So that's why, despite my interest in Indian cookery and the promise of 5 ingredients, 50 dishes, I yet to cook an Indian dish. But I have made Lor Mai Kai (3 times), risked a shortcut Beggar's Chicken and tried about 10 different mushroom dishes, because I know AK will like them.

So says Nigella, it is about giving pleasure to others, and it does not necessarily need to make us suffer in the process.

Shortcut Beggar's Chicken (serves 2) , a One-Baking-Tray-Meal

Enough chicken pieces for 2 persons
2-3 small carrots or 1 1/2 large ones, peeled and sliced into 1.5 cm-ish thick coins
About 8 shitake mushrooms, soaked in hot water for 10 minutes and quartered, keep the soaking water
Goji berries, half a handful
1/2 a honey date, broken up into small pieces or 5 red dates
A few keichi (chinese herb)
About 1 cup chicken stock, or water will do in a pinch

1 tbsp light soy sauce
t tbsp ShaoXing wine
1 tsp sesame oil
White pepper

Extra soy sauce, wine, oil and pepper to taste'

1 baking tray, aluminium foil

Preheat the oven to 190 degC.
Marinate the chicken pieces in the seasonings overnight in a plastic bag.
In a baking tray, strew the chicken pieces, carrot coins, soaked mushrooms, keichi and dates/berries. It's good if your pan can fit all of them, but if not, layer them - herbs and dates/berries at the bottom, chicken pieces and fit the mushrooms and carrots in between the chicken pieces.
Pour over the chicken stock and mushroom water.
Cover the tray with foil, poke some holes in the foil with a fork to let out the steam and roast for about 1 hour.

(enough time to spend 30 minutes on the elliptical trainer and do some cooldown stretches)

In the last 15 minutes, remove the foil and let the chicken brown. Taste the gravy and season as necessary.

Serve with white rice and sliced red chillies in soy sauce.

The chicken will be tender and juicy, with nicely browned skin. Carrots will be baked up sweet, and the gravy will be all herbal frangrance and concentrated with a bitterish (from the herbs), sweet (from the dates and berries), good-for-you kind of flavour. And the mushrooms - one bite and all that flavoursome juiciness rushes out and fills your mouth. We ate this, devoured this, on a Monday evening. Many repeats to come.

Forgive the kitsch and the over-description. But this is what Nigella-ism is about - maximum pleasure for minimum effort. .

Choices Today....what happens tommorrow?

I've been working in kind of a pretend-to-be-busy stupor for a couple of months now. Funny thing is, when expectations are low it is so much easier to assert oneself.

When expectations are plonked so directly in front of you, then one starts to think waaaay too much.

Couple this with jadedness, fear of what other people think, reluctance to "ask" out of (again) fear of looking incompetent.

It's time to start from Zero again, time to humble oneself.