cooking. dining. travel

My family have yoghurt for breakfast everyday. My mother makes a new batch every evening before going to sleep - but sometimes it comes out all wrong the next day. So I googled it out - and make a new batch myself. It turned out great this morning. Surprisingly easy too. 

Store bought yoghurt and preserves are not expensive and literally hassle-free, but if you are extremely health conscious - or just plain cheap, like I am, and loads of free time in hand, experimenting with simple and easy recipes are really fun. 

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I have started a new site for Indonesian and Chinese food cooking experience. South East Asian region cooking has been heavily influenced by Chinese cooking technique, however, Indonesian style is profoundly dominated  by its spices and herbs. I’d say it combines the best of two worlds. 

With so much spare time in hand, I have been able to pick up a few tips and tricks from my mother and the group, and cooking has been real fun. Although I must say that most Indonesian recipes require more than 15 different ingredients, in some cases more than 50, it is a real challenge trying to learn and finally, cooking them. I have always figured there must be a reason that there is not that much Indonesian cooking blogs out there! 

Cooking a decent traditional meal with three course dishes would take two hours in preparation, and one hour or less in cooking time. That is with two sets of hands. And, a big pantry of fresh herbs and spices. I guess it is so time consuming that cooking and documenting at the same time is just too much. I had trouble looking up for the English terms for the native spices as well. 

But we have fun. So, please drop by and check out the site. 

Best wishes,

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I have been home for one whole week now. It is unbelievably amazing how good it felt to be home and to sleep in my own bed after six months in a foreign soil. I have been talking a little bit too much too. Conversing in English is great, but my tongue needed to be loosened up by yacking in my mother language.

I had been doing a lot of cooking this past week - my favorite dishes from my mother’s and our cook’s. After taking 400 + photos, I tried to upload them into my brother’s ancient laptop. My whitish MacBook is in iHospital for keyboard problem. Voala … the photos proved to be too much for this old gadget that it crashed as soon as it finished extracting ALL my photos. After rebooting, I couldn’t find any of those.

That was so devastating, that not only I who got upset, but everybody in the house as well since the photos were pretty much group effort. Although they were giving silly suggestions, I tried very much to be as accomodating as possible.

Anyway, a good news is that I am working on a new site - dedicated to my mother - that will document all of her recipes and her favourite food. There will be giveaway too! That would be such an exciting project!

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 It’s finally here. My last weekend in the Philippines. I can’t wait to go home. I have been having anxious attack for the past couple of days. I am not a globe-trotting girl. Whenever I need to make long distance travel - something involving more than a couple of hours flight, I got butterflies in my stomach for a couple of days before leaving. Weird? I think so. I am a homey girl. 

This is the last cooking post that I did. Tonight and tomorrow, we will eat out and cuddle as much as we can before I leave. Yay! 

I have always had mung bean as sweet and cold dessert drink. I had no idea that in some other part of the world, it is used in savoury dishes, like soup and all. 

We always add pandan leaves in our sweet dessert / drinks as it has special fragrant flavor that is so inviting. My mother put a bunch of pandan leaves in a basket / muslin bag to make our cars smell good. People who ride in our cars always compliment how the car smells like dessert. Oh well. 

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Canned food is extremely popular in the Philippines. They love their food with their own coffins - an expression picked up from Jaden. Sardines is the lowest of the coffinated-food item. It is the food of the peasants. It is still strange to me why they all come with tomato sauce. 

I did try to “class” it up a bit - my peasant food. With a bit of bell pepper and fried egg, it was quite presentable. Fatty omega 3 and lycopene in one meal - I think now we know how peasants are always stronger than the rich. How much nutrients you can get from a spoonful of caviar? Not that much, really. 

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I had bad craving for sweets when I was first left alone in Manila. Naturally I headed straight to Chocolate Bar at Greenbelt. Greenbelt is the high-end shopping complex with Louis Vuitton store and the usual gang. It is also packed with great fancy restaurants. However, I am easily satisfied with just great dessert. 

Chocolate Bar by Max Brenner is located right at the entrance, and of the many many times I visited Manila and Greenbelt, I always eyed the people who dined there enviously. That was just like a dream come true.  It was not that perfect, of course, this wasn’t fairy tale. The air conditioner unit was being worked on and it was warm inside. Rather than breathing the nasty polluted air of Makati at the al-fresco area, I chose to sit by myself inside. The freaky doorman kept on staring, maybe not used to having a girl to gobble on chocolate by herself.   

The brownie was huge! It doesn’t look that way in the photo, but it really was. By the time I finished with it, I swore I would have no more chocolate for the rest of the week. It was the most delicious brownie I have ever had. Big with chunky nuts and pieces of chocolate. Top with Hagen-Daaz chocolate ice cream. It was truly divine. That was my guilty pleasure. I am sure glad mine is nothing more sinful than that.

Also, the shot of the brownie is not that flattering. I am suffering from a condition called “shyness” when it comes to taking shots of food in public restaurants. I don’t think I am allowed to call myself a foodie blogger.

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This is rice with little fishes. Anchovies - english, bilis - malay, teri - indonesian, dilis - tagalog. All referring to the small fish with a bit of punky smell to it. Medan - North Sumatra is very famous for the small dried anchovies, they are very tiny, about 0,5 cm long. Anchovies fried rice is a popular dish.

The overly salty fishes complement the bland rice nicely. As all fried rice, the most important ingredient is garlic, eggs and rice. Indonesian style fried rice always calls for shallot. Here is my version of Sumatra style of anchovies. 

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Another snack using mango. It was so refreshing. Mango salsa - taste like summer with every bite. It is the prettiest salsa. Just chop up the ingredients, grab a bunch of nacho chips, sit back and enjoy. Of course, don’t forget to grab the tv remote. It is my ultimate snacks for channel surfing. 

Ingredients : 

1 mango, peeled and cubed

1/2 cucumber, seeded and cubed

1/4 red onion, roughly chopped

1/2 red pepper, roughly chopped

2 green chili / jalapeno pepper, finely minced – optional

1/4 cup chopped cilantro

4 tablespoons kalamansi / lime juice

Mix everything in a serving bowl and serve with nacho chips.

My Note : 

Cucumber is better to be seeded because the seed always gives out liquid, the salsa would be too much watery if not consumed right away - not that is a big problem. I always finish mine in no time. 

The chili really gives it a kick. Sweet, soury and spicy at the same bite. Might be too spicy for some 

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Left over from the Vietnamese beef pho. The rice noodle is almost like something we have in the noodle house in Chinese neighborhood at home. Basically it’s something soupy and hot, with some greens, few pieces of meat, scallion and etc etc. 

The twist is the garlic oil. Otherwise, the soup would be bland and hence, boring. 

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