Por el amor di pan!!

There are some things that make living alone and with a small fridge a bit inconvenient. Most herbs come in a huge bunches. With short fridge life, it is a guarantee that a good portion of them is going to be wasted.

I bought a bunch of spring onions/scallions because I wanted to make soup that called for 2 stalks of spring onions... but what to do with the rest of it? I thought of 蔥油餅 (Taiwanese spring onion pancake). Ivy's mother taught me how to make them a few years ago. She kept her own vegetable and herb garden and said that when there was an overflow of spring onion harvest, she'd make the pancakes. They were so wholesome and so simple to make.

Seen here is capicola wheels. I made a bread version of Mrs Hao's spring onion pancake, but on an impromptu round, I added coppa/capicola and parmesan.

Falling asleep (in the middle of baking)

After such a successful batch of bread yesterday, I decided to make another batch. Little known to me, my mother was also making bread at home in Indonesia. Papa joked about how she didn't ask him if he wanted any. After 30 something years of marriage you'd think that he'd just hack them away like usual the way he so kindly did in my early stage of baking when all my bread turned out so craptastic.

I swapped tips with Mama while I waiting for the 3 hour fermentation to be up and after a long conversation that hopped from recipes to travel plan and a various other completely unrelated topics, she told me to go to bed. I hung up the phone and if I had listened to her maybe this disaster wouldn't have taken place. A word of advice for all of you who are reading this: Listen to your parents and this applies and will apply regardless of how many jars of anti-wrikle cream you have stashed away in your bathroom and fridges.
I went on to shape the sweet-sweet beautiful pillow-like dough into beautiful knotted bread rolls and waited for a good hour by which time it was already 2 AM. I preheated my oven for 10 minutes, put the bread into the oven and FELL ASLEEP!!! I was woken by my nose, stimulated by the smell of something sweet, something buttery burning inside my oven. Realizing the catasthrope that was taking place, I took the bread out, turned my oven off and went straight to bed. I admit that I couldn't care less at that moment. Analysis of the damage would just have to wait until the morning came. The whole batch was black despite the lovely texture inside, the evenly distributed air pockets. How my heart aches.

Saturday Kitchen

The weather in Sydney has been really terrible for the last 2 weeks. It was alternating between rain and grey skies, slipped with misleading blue skies. Considering that December is fast approaching, the climate is nothing like the typical Australian summer. Grey skies make me want to cook and what better opportunity to experiment with a willing volunteer of an old friend from Brisbane.

Kormala and I met in first year Chemistry courses back in our undergraduate days in UQ . It was the first practical class where the task was to extract caffeine from instant coffee and the bond that we formed while sneezing on pure (to an extent) anhydrous caffeine lasted to now; she has since been a close confindant. It's so fantastic to have her close again in Sydney. She always complained that I never cooked for her and so I thought our Saturday afternoon meet up would be the perfect opportunity for her to sample and criticize my culinary obsession.
I made simple dinner rolls (and some other breads) and taking on the advice published in Dan Lepard's baking tips, in particular that from #16 from Eric Kayser, I let my dough ferment for a bit longer that I usually did. It worked so much wonder and I'm so pleased (as was dinner my guest).
I made a very simple and a never fail recipe of prosciutto wrapped asparagus spears, drizzled with extra virgin olive oil and decorated with cracked sea salt, pepper and dried chilli. You only need to grill it for a good 10-15 minutes and voila, it's a simple crowd pleaser. You could substitute the prosciutto for beef products if pork product is against your dietary requirement.
As for the mains, I have made a very-very simple spaghetti dish with porcini mushroom that I got from the farmers market in my area. The porcini came in dried form and all you need to do is to soak them in boiling water until the mushroom is plump. I heated some olive oil in the pan with some chilli and organic purple garlic (also from the farmer's market) and in went the mushroom. Toss in the spaghetti (cooked in boiling salted water) and add some cracked sea salt and a generous sprinkle of pepper. This turned out really well too and I'm so pleased with it.
Last but not least is the repertoire-concluding dish of potato gratin with my new experimental sauce. Admitedly, it wasn't only the sauce that I experimented with. I added some left over carrot that threatened expiring within the next few days, finely sliced, following the tips published in Dan Lepard's site: "En cuisine on ne jette rien," which happens to be my mother's life philosophy (actually she never throws anything out whether in and out of the kitchen, she's a pathological recycler :P).

After tasting, I was rewarded by a pleasant "Oui!"
Patience is indeed a virtue. :)

A glimpse into life in the lab

I believe that there are two driving forces behind scientific research. One is humanity, the wish to improve medical science and to better the quality of lives of those who are not so fortunately blessed with optimally functioning bodies. The other is curiosity, almost the same curiosity that pushes an explorer to travel to corners of the world ungrazed by travel catalogues.

Call me a geek, but little things like this assay haven't ceased to be less beautiful in my eyes no matter how many times I see it. Just imagine, there are infinite more other beautiful sights to observe that I am yet to encounter. This is one of the reasons why I get out of my bed in the morning (despite grudgingly). The anticipation of translating the intensities of colors into analytical digits often invades my sleep. Fingers crossed they will fall into places like hoped. Fingers crossed. How unscientific, but old habbits, especially harmless ones like this, die hard. Hehehe.

Beautiful dough

I think throughout the entire stage of the making, bread is the most beautiful as they are dough at proofing stage. That's not to say that they're not beautiful as final product.

The itch to bake really hit today. I don't know what triggered it but I'm glad to be actively baking again. My apartment smells so much better when I bake compared to when I cook fish or do some true South-East Asian stir fry.

Shown here are vegetarian sausage bread, a typical Asian bread. I try to make the dough a bit sweeter to complement the sausage but as it turns out the sausage itself is sort of sweet anyway. I'm happy with the outcome. :)

Attempt x to eat healthy

I think this is a pretty balanced meal. In the bottom box is rice, hot smoked trout salad, carrot and tomato and on the top box are blue berries, mandarin, grapes and dried cranberries. I can't decide if I should have this for lunch or dinner.

forgotten photo

blame it on the weather

retail therapy would have to wait for another day seeing as my motivation to shop was at a low and anyway, it's not like i deprived myself all these times. i bought a pink summer dress last night at the market at the rocks and a pair of mesmerizing earrings.

today i ended up just going to the market for a browse, picked up a bottle of vin rouge that had a lot of award stickers on it, the weekend paper that came with a "real (food) handbook" and a pineapple.

making cookies is definitely not the same without my mother's magic mix. to cream the butter and the sugar by hand/manually, first you have to get the butter soft enough by leaving it at room temperature. then before you use the whisk, you have to use a strong spoon to initiate the process of creaming until the mixture is light enough not to stick inside the wires of the whisk. tricks like this were re-discovered and re-learnt, further cementing the importance of continuous practice. of course like riding a bicycle, once you get it you'll always be able to do it, but it is a question of quality which has no equivalent in bike riding.

i can't wait until i go home to brisbane to feed my family again. :)