*1247 - roasted chicken

Being someone who loves cooking so much, it was pretty odd that I had never roasted a whole chicken by myself (I recall stuffing one for maybe Christmas when I was at home years ago).  Chanced upon whole chickens in Whole Foods one day and decided to give it a shot.  Me being me, I researched the art of baking chicken thoroughly before beginning.

Let it sit out of the fridge sitting up and pat with a paper towel so the skin dries out as much as possible.  We stuffed with lemon, garlic, and rosemary.  Lots of salt and pepper and olive oil/butter.  Get it under the skin and on the skin and in the cavity.  No need to truss.  Cook it breast down at 425F for about 2/3 of the time so that the fat from the dark meat on top drips into the white meat and moistens it.  At the end, sit it breast down for at least 15 minutes covered with foil again to let the moisture redistribute.  Best gravy ever made from the drippings, together with a bit of chicken stock.

 

Poka and EV watching the chicken cook together!

So beautiful!  It was delicious and the entire house smelled delicious too.  I also have a weakness for cooked lemon.

*1246 - friends

To those of you who
Have your friends a subway ride away, or
A taxi ride away, or a trot down the street, or
Work with a group of colleagues who at some point became your friends without you even realising it, or
Can pick up the phone and chat to friends in the same timezone, or
Can pick up the phone and whatsapp someone "casuarina prata tonight ok?", or
Bump into friends ever so often randomly on the streets of a little country, or
Have regular girls' night outs or weekend brunch buddies, or ...

Don't take all that for granted.

*1245 - subway

But of course the one week I am in NYC, the subway happens to shut down (or at least the line headed downtown).  Now I know what the streets of NYC look like minus trains: chaos.  Going to be remarkably late for work but at least I miraculously managed to squish myself onto bus.  Pretty harrowing.  At some point I seriously considered walking 60 blocks in heels, so I'm glad it didn't come to that.

I wonder how I used to survive without smartphones and google maps on the go to tell me what to do in an unfamiliar place!

*1244 - sous vide diary: eggs and steak

Back in culinary class in Cornell some 3, 4 years ago (oh my), we learnt about the chi chi method of cooking in gourmet restaurants: sous vide.  Literally meaning "vacuum" in French, it involves vacuum sealing your food (especially proteins), immersing in a circulating temperature-controlled water bath, at a fairly low temperature, for a fairly long time.  This results in very precise temperatures and very even cooking and no chance of overcooking.  When you grill a steak for example, you put it on a really hot grill and it cooks quickly from outside to in and you guess at when to pull it off the grill and hope for the best = very unforgiving.  For sous vide cooking, all you need to do is to find the temperature for that protein to cook the the precise doneness you want it to be at, no guessing involved.  It also results in perfect textures and is packed with moisture, and because you're vacuum sealing your food tightly with its seasonings sans air to get in the way, you don't have to marinate as long for an equal intensity of flavour.

The one thing that doesn't happen when things are sous vide cooked is that Maillard browning doesn't occur as there's no hot, dry, heat (this is culinary class theory that has stayed with me, woohoo), so at the end, you have to do the quickest, hottest sear possible to get that nice tasty crust without cooking it more as far as possible.

Anyhoo, my progressive (in the kitchen) brother decided to buy a professional sous vide machine for himself to replace his amateur home-cook version of the equipment, which now has fallen into my very willing and thankful lap!  It is essentially a temperature control probe that measures and regulates the temperature of a non-digital piece of cooking equipment, in this case, a large rice cooker.

Yes, my siblings and I are kitchen/food dorks.

My first experiment was the simplest way to embark on a sous vide journey--soft-boiled eggs.  I'm typically an egg snob so having perfectly cooked eggs is like heaven to me.  Every tenth of a degree results in a differently cooked egg, so I'm still trying to find my favorite temperature; at this point it's probably somewhere around 62.8 degrees C for one hour.  (Pictured above was my first attempt at 62.2 degrees C eggs--a teensy bit too runny for my liking; adjusting to 62.8 worked much better.)  Sous vide eggs are unbelievable in texture, it's like drinking egg in cream form.

Second experiment: steak.  56 degrees C for about 2 hours, length of time depends on fattiness of steak.  The steak was perfectly, evenly, juicily pink almost all the way through except for the very thin browned rim outside.  Unbelievable!

I'm a convert and cooking steak any other way would be unthinkable at this point.  I've never been very good at cooking steak the conventional way anyway so this works perfectly for me.

*1243 - homemade (healthier) potato chips

Amazing discovery.  One can make homemade potato chips in under ten minutes.

 

The amazing part is, these are not deep-fried but have a very similar texture.  Reduced mess, reduced calories, reduced reliance on excessive packaging and processed ickiness.  Equal yumminess, added customization, the only problem is that these go FAST.

Behold.  Microwaved potato chips.

Yes, microwaved.  I'm not a master of the microwave and would tend to choose oven/toaster over microwave whenever possible.  But I found this "recipe" and thought I would give it a shot.  It's not really a recipe, more of a set of instructions.

1. Grab a clean potato and slice it as thin as you possibly can.

2. Season with a drizzle of olive oil.  I also added fresh ground salt and pepper here.

3. Put a single layer on a plate.  Put in microwave on high for 2-3 min, turn over, and blast for 2-3 min more until just slightly browned (really depends on the microwave so just keep watching it).

4. Remove and let cool before eating because it continues to crisp up after it comes out of the microwave.

And that's really all there is to it.  Magical.

*1242 - swirls

D gave me the best Christmas present ever, it's going to be a tough one to beat.

My very own Kitchenaid :) :) :)

I've been baking an obnoxious amount of breads and sweets as a result but to D it's probably a win-win because he gets to enjoy the finished product too.

Themed baking last weekend: the swirl.

Cinnamon currant swirl wheat bread.

And blueberry/cranberry/lemon swirl cookies.




The trick to baking cookies for two is to freeze half of the raw cookie dough so you can have homemade, fresh baked cookies whenever you want.  Much better than baking a ton, having them go stale, and getting all jelat from trying to finish up so many of the same flavor.  Rationing them out is probably better for you too.

*1241 - poka in backyard

It's been a while since a Poka pic.  Here she is exploring our backyard, sniffing succulents:



Indoor cats tend to have a longer lifespan than outdoor cats so the choice was obvious for us to keep Poka indoors.  But we do like to let her out every once in a while under careful supervision so it stimulates her little brain as she explores a new environment and lets some energy out chasing insects and creepy crawlies.  It also turns out that she likes rolling in gravel and smearing her face in dirt.  For such an otherwise fastidiously clean animal, that seems rather odd.

*1240 - delivered

70+ slide report, from scratch, out the door.  Appendix soon to follow.  It is always hard to say but I might be alive again soon, fingers crossed.  And thank goodness I'm a data-loving dork because this would probably not have been worth it otherwise.

*1239 - caprese

This used to be one of my guilty late night pleasure in college--the classic caprese: fresh mozzarella, tomatoes, fresh chopped basil, olive oil, coarse salt, black pepper.

Fancy snack food, eh?

*1238 - nemo

Nemo is one of the reasons why I'm now in San Francisco.  Not to add to the misery that is on the other coast but I'm just not a winter type of girl.  (Exception: give me a snowboard and I might not complain as much.)

It's Chinese New Year and it's just as well that it has traditionally been nothing much more than an extended holiday for me and my family, given that we've got virtually no relatives with us in Singapore.  I haven't been home for CNY in five years anyway (holy moly that is a fifth of my lifetime).  And I must say that I have never been a fan of blaring shopping centre CNY music.

But still, occasions like this make me pause and consider how far away from my roots I have been drifting, on this side of the world worrying about the weirdass concepts of snow storms and filing taxes and nurturing Californian succulents and having no easy access to asian veggies besides baby bok choy and making friends in a city that isn't mine, a country that didn't grow up in the same way that I did.

It's really strange when I think about it.  It's been five years away from home.

*1237 - anime nerds

In approximately 4 days, D and I finished watching Steins;Gate.  Yes, there's a semicolon in the title; we think it indicates a pregnant pause between the two words when you say it out loud.

*1236 - mendocino roadtrip

We've driven up the coast North-ward a couple of times and the Pacific Ocean never fails to amaze.  Final destination: Mendocino, but any of our stop points could have been destinations.  We frolicked upon beach after beach, walked out treacherously to cliff after cliff.  

We're roadtrippin'!

View from Highway 1.

Possibly the largest, most awe-inspiring waves I've seen.  That's saying a lot for a tropical girl who's been to many a beautiful beach.

 

 

 

 

We stayed in Mendocino, in a little B&B.  There was a cosy little upscale-ish restaurant, Cafe Beaujolais, just down the road that we walked over to.  For some reason, they brought us to a separate part of the restaurant which was practically empty, just us and a few other couples.  It was romantic and cute, service was personal and attentive, and the food was quite good--we had the duck and the sturgeon.

 

The next day, we stepped out of our B&B and walked toward the coast and discovered this:

 

 

What in the world are these weird tubular seaweed things?  They were so strange and sat around the beach in gross giant wormy piles. 

 

 

 

D can never resist a flat skipping stone.

 

(Look at the tubes behind us again!)

 

Whenever you drive along Highway 1, there are always parts of the road where you can just veer off to the side and walk out to a vista point of your choice.  Walk along this little path and reach the end and realise that the path drops off to a frighteningly sharp cliff.  Straight down to the water and rocks down below.  See that section of the path that D is contemplating?  It's a foot wide with a sheer drop on either side.  Eeee.  Wobbly knees.  But so gorgeous.

 

 

 

Spot the D:

 

And we're in Northern California.  Which means wineries galore!  Being all posh and snotty about wine is not always our favorite activity but Toulouse winery was just lovely.  Had a relaxing tasting in a sunny spot on their newly opened patio that looked out to rolling mountains.

 

:) What a lovely getaway.  And it's a resolution of ours to go on even more while we're here on this coast.

*1235 - waffles

A spur of the moment buy: a waffle machine.

This means ... homemade "fried" (actually baked) chicken and waffles!

And a whole host of other fun waffle flavors.  Most recently: rosemary cornmeal waffles, because I happen to have an abundance of fresh rosemary that I'm struggling to use up.

They're about equally as effortful as making pancakes and take about the same amount of time unless you have a griddle upon which to make gazillions of pancakes at the same time.  They also come from pretty much the same recipe so pancakes and waffles are essentially different incarnations of the same thing.  Just a matter of whether you feel like having something fluffy or something crisp.

*1234 - vertical garden

In a bid to beautify the corridor outside our new place, I invested in a hanging garden of great alien-like succulents.  Succulents are all the rage now in San Francisco; take a walk around our neighborhood and you will see hundreds of different species of succulents sprouting all over the place.  Very, very hip garden feature.

And thankfully, very idiot-proof (or so we hope)!  Water only when the soil dries out i.e. once a week or every two weeks-ish.  And if they so happen to catch a glimpse of the sun, they flower!  Delightful.

This is a glamour shot of the succulents--they are more sparse than that and we are patiently waiting for them to grow and fill out and become gloriously lush.

First time actual gardening experience (I'm not counting tending to Mum's ferns or growing tau-gey as a child)!

*1233 - parsleyed fish gratin

Recipe from Nigella Lawson.  It makes a beautiful gratin with buried parcels of fish and shrimp and a delicate green parsley taste, even if you don't like parsley.  In fact, I first made this dish years ago when I wasn't quite a fan of parsley due to its extremely perfumeyness, and this was the dish that made me appreciate it more.


My problem is that whenever I try to follow a recipe, I make substitutions because I can't believe the amount of calories I'm intentionally adding to an otherwise innocuous or already calorie-laden dish.  And add to the fact that when I'm cooking (vs. baking), I never actually measure anything out precisely and adjust unhealthiness down almost subconsciously.  And given this is a Nigella Lawson recipe, you can only imagine how decadent it is.  I usually skimp on the finishing touch--the brushing of seemingly way too much garlic oil--but tried it out this once and what a delightful difference it made to the crispness of the top layer!

*1232 - MacRitchie treetop walk

Hiked up to the MacRitchie treetop suspension bridge with the parents and D.  Monkeys galore running about our ankles, practically!  Had loads of National Geographic moments with monkeys right by me peering into the camera.

After quite a hike (I mean, imagine HIKING in SINGAPORE; Dad had to wring out his t-shirt after), the reward of the suspension bridge was all too short-lived!  It was pretty though and unsurprisingly clean and orderly and well-kept, some good old nature within a bustling city, an invigorating, healthy activity to help punctuate the constant eating that we did while in Singapore.

   

*1231 - lands end

Whenever anyone visits San Francisco, there are just some places a tourist must strike off the list.  The Golden Gate Bridge, Fisherman's Wharf, Ferry Building, Lombard Street, Alcatraz, Union Square, cable cars, ...

And if you have time, Coit Tower, Twin Peaks, Castro, Golden Gate Park's gardens, oldest/largest Chinatown in the US, ... etc. etc. etc.

But why did noone ever mention Lands End to us??  

Now that is really a gem.  A beautiful trail with intense views and peppered with little bits of history: ruins of baths, shipwrecks, old rail tracks.  Quaint little trails that branched off the main path, some with rudimentarily cut out steps winding into a secret-garden-esque landscape, some leading to treacherous-looking spurs overlooking the bay, some leading to quiet little beaches.  Windswept and misty and lush and fairytale-like. 

Even if you're not a hiker, this is worth a visit, no question about it.