Roast Chicken & Asparagus Salad

New house, new cookware...GOT to put it all to test!

My first "real" cooking session in my new house~ should sheepishly admit tho that the chicken was purchased pre-marinaded (I'm a working girl after all!)

So...is it really cheaper to cook at home? Let's put it to the test:

6 chicken thighs $7.50

1 bunch asparagus $1

1/2 bag of baby rocket $1

2 Roma tomatoes $1

Total: $10.50 (fed 2 with leftover chicken for next day consumption ;p)

As for the process...easy as!

1) Throw chicken in foil, all covered, and heat for 30mins at about 180 degrees.

2) After 30mins, take chicken out, unwrap the cover foil, throw in the tomatoes (and any other vegetable) and put back in for another 20mins to 30mins

3) While waiting, spread baby rocket on plate, chuck asparagus in water & boil for a couple minutes

4) Once asparagus is nice & soft & cooked, drain into a bowl and season with salt, pepper & some Parmesan cheese. 

5) Take the chicken out of oven, and plate everything decoratively (helps make the meal look yummier, seriously!).

And voila! Dinner is served!

Creme Brulee

Who knew that making creme brulee could be one of the easiest desserts in the world? I think most people just avoid because they're missing that essential blow torch, required to caramelise the topping.

Amazingly enough, only a few ingredients are needed:
600ml thickened creme
6 egg yolks
1 teaspoon of vanilla essence
1/4 cup of caster sugar
1/4 cup of normal or brown sugar (for the topping)

mix/beat all but the last ingredient together in a large bowl, split it into ramekins (I bought 6 super cute Marie Claire ones in baby blue, green & pink) and put it in the oven for about 40mins.

To make it all nice and soft and puffy, you can put the ramekins in cake tin trays that are filled with 1-2cm of water...something about steam and softening...don't get it! But it works!

And once the ramekins are out and relatively cooled...spread the sugar on top, BURNNNNN with the blow torch until it's golden brown (or look caramelised), and serve!

This can be served hot or cold but I found it sooo yummy when it's just lukewarm ^_^

The simple no frills beef noodle soup (pho)

So many times my sis & I go to get a pho and we get the death stare for trying to customize the simple dish. But hey...we're customizing it to make it even SIMPLER! >_<

"Can I please have a pho...with no shallots....and no onions...in fact no garnish at all please...and cooked sprouts...not that much beef...and oh...1/4 of the noodles and more soup please!"

That's why I decided to attempt my own no frills version of the pho.

Ingredients:
1kg beef bones
Star anise (a few)
Salt & MSG
1 packet of flat rice noodles
300 grams of beef (thinly sliced)
4 small red chillis
Mint, onions, shallots, sprouts etc as required (they're optional extras which are supposed to spice up the noodle soup, but to me, they just steal the taste away...)

The steps then become way easy!
1) Cook the 1kg beef bones & star anise in a large pot of water for 1-2 hours
2) Add salt & msg as required
3) Filter out the bones & star anise to leave a pot of nice & clean beef stock soup
4) Add noodles & sliced beef
5) Add additional garnish (the chillis, mint, onions, sprouts, whatever you felt like) as required

And voila! It might seem like a too simple/too plain version, but I'll just end the post by saying that all family members I fed cleaned their bowls and there wasn't enough for seconds :)

To think I once thought cooking a pho was the most difficult thing in the world :p

Pork & prawn wontons

It's been awhile since the last post, and yes, I'm going to admit that I probably haven been in the kitchen since >_<

Decided to make some pork & prawn wontons since parents are o/s and I've been vegetating at home so much lately.

The stuffing was quite easy, mix together everything below in a large bowl:
1kg Pork mince (lean kind)
100g Peeled prawns (diced)
250g Greens (any kind you like really)
2 eggs beaten
Salt + soy sauce + cooking wine + sesame oil

Then you wrap them in the wonton skins. Growing up in the city of Shanghai, I learnt how to wrap my wontons the 'pretty' way (like a golden nugget).

Here are the results.

Mango Soft Serve

Still on a quest to perfect my ice-cream recipe (and more or less because there's excess mangos in the house, I decided to alter my watermelon ice-cream recipe from yesterday to make mango soft serve.

Learning from yesterday, the recipe included more cream, less milk, more ice, less sugar. Instead of squeezing out the mango juice though, I threw the decided to throw the actual mango pieces into the blender for a bit more of a mango-y taste.

The result? Perfect mango soft serve! And it tasted so much like fresh mango mum was even more impressed than she was with the watermelon flavor yesterday. This isn't so hard after all!

Pouring the blend into the ice-cream maker

 

My CuisineArt getting the job done :)

 

Yummy Mango ice-cream soft serve!

Watermelon Ice-Cream + Creme Brulee Ice-Cream

So I decided to start my blogging with a dessert rampage. And since receiving a lovely CuisineArt ice-cream maker from my besties for my birthday this year

Creme Brulee ice-cream - I only decided to do this because there was leftover egg yolk from make the macarons! The recipe is kind of inspired by Donna Hay.

1 cup of milk
2 cups of thickened cream
1 teaspoon of Vanilla extract
5 egg yolks
150g caster sugar

This was quite easy, you put the milk, cream and vanilla extract in a pot to boil, at the same time whisking the yolks and sugar together. Chuck it all together to boil for a few minutes or until the mixture is thickened. Once the thing is cold again pour it into the ice-cream maker and voila!
I also make the toffee bits by simmering some caster sugar in a saucepan until it's golden brown, poured it over some foil and attacked it with a mullet once it's cooled down to make it into small bits. Was supposed to add it to the ice-cream mix but decided against it. There's too much sugar already! So here's what I ended up with. Although tasters have told me that the mixture might have been a little too rich.

 

 

And then it was time for Watermelon ice-cream, flavouring inspired by a) the lovely ice-cream gelato I had in a cafe opposite Harrods in London and b) the cheapness of watermelons during the Summer months.

 

I followed a few different recipes from the likes of Taste.com.au and used ingredients like honey and rosemary (both too strong for the watermelon).

 

Eventually, I decided to throw the recipes down the pipes and did my own thing. Here's what went down.

 

1 cup of watermelon juice (left tiny pieces of watermelon in the mixture too)

1 cup of cream

1/2 cup of milk

40g water

1/2 cup of caster sugar

Bit of ice (not really needed!)

Bit of food colour (also not really needed!)

 

Boiled the water with caster sugar and food colouring, then chucked that with my juice, cream, milk and 3 cubes of ice in the blender for a whirl (like 3 seconds). I only added the ice to cool down the boiled sugar (usually you can just shove it in the fridge to cool instead, but I was being impatient).

 

Once down I threw the whole thing into the ice-cream maker and...VOILA! Perfect watermelon flavoured natural soft serve! Even my super judgemental mother was impressed, and allowed me to leave the ice-cream maker on HER kitchen counter 'for a few extra days'. Hahaha...

 



The intro (aka the rant)

I always hear people say, it's sooo hard being a housewife...all the kids, the cooking, the cleaning...

Can't really judge, since I'm yet to experience life as one. But I've got parents approaching 60 and acting like teenagers (yes, my father discovered social media last year, and decided that human interaction is no longer necessary and my mother thinks she brought me to this world to be her taxi driver), siblings who act like (and, to be fair, still are) children and a boyfriend who's like a baby (hands up who's got one of those too). On top of that, I'm juggling all the usual household chores AND a full-time job. Add to this year 2 besties' weddings for which I am maid-of-honour, a trip to Melbourne in March, holiday to Bali in May, Whitsundays for a wedding and my birthday in August, then a month-long escape in Europe in September, and I would have to say that I would give any housewife a run for their money in organisational skills. Surely a couple of kids can't be as bad as dealing with the French police in Paris ("English? No we wouldn't speak that language if it KILLS us!")

But according to my mother, a fundamental skill I lack (and therefore would not understand the art of being a housewife) is cooking. What is this? The way to a man's heart is through his stomach??? Haven't these women heard of menulog.com.au? deliveryhero.com? All of the world's authentic cuisine only a click away! Lol~

Ok, so I am here to prove my mother wrong. Cooking? Can't be as hard as Accounting 101 (which I failed, and had to transfer to Economics in first year uni)! But instead of blogging about all the successes and the great stuff that I make like all the other 100000000000 blogs I managed to find while collecting recipes...mine's going to be realistically me. If I make a cake that looks like it came out of the wrong end of my dog...that's what I would be blogging (but definitely not eating)!

So here goes...hopefully I can keep this up for a while and the photos will get prettier over time...but only time will tell!