Rudy loved Japanese food. He missed sushi the most, as consuming raw/ undercooked foods was not advised when undergoing his treatments. As much as we could we still tried to have our Japanese food fix, and ramen was one of the things we wanted to have more of.
Read MoreI love mi kari. I love them a specific way, where the broth is creamy but not too rich or thick, with a good mix of toppings but not overdone or trying too hard. I also like the broth to be flavorful and savory and bursting with umami, which I imagined should come from some form of stock.
Read MoreI generally cannot refuse dumplings of any variety, be it steamed, fried, boiled, served as dim sum or in soup, just name it. Dumplings are simply the best comfort food for me, especially served in steaming bowls of hot soup on cold rainy days.
Found out about molo, a Filipino dumpling soup dish, from a colleague. Coincidentally Kak’mbang also stumbled upon the recipe for it on YouTube, specifically the one by LittleChef Asia.
My version of the recipe of course uses chicken instead of pork, and I’ve also written it to include making the chicken stock/broth from scratch.
Read MoreIt’s strangely hard for me to find turkey ham of late. Chicken toast is everywhere, but turkey… not so much. I went to the usual places like B.I.G. and Cold Storage near my house and they are always out of stock. So I reached out to Merv, whom I can always count on for bulk supplies of stuff. Merv definitely delivered; a 3-kg loaf of smoked turkey roll. Now I have enough to add to easily 10 different recipes, and then some. Haha!
I also had a block of Velveeta cheese waiting to be used. I originally intended to make enchiladas with it, but that just didn’t happen so here we are. In the end I used the turkey ham and Velveeta for this interesting looking chowder recipe I found on Taste of Home.
Read MoreMade a few more soups for Mummy to try. A few ingredients I recently tried were tomato, which was yummy but too light, and corn which was too heavy. Since Mummy liked the lentil soup I made I figured other types of beans would also make decent soups with the right amount of heartiness, and since I had canned chickpeas in the larder this became my next ingredient of choice.
This Moroccan Chickpea Soup turned out nicely. I loved the spices which gave it a more ‘exotic’ Mediterranean flavor; cinnamon, cumin and paprika. There’s also something about tender beans in rich tomato based broth which feels so comforting. Mummy loved it, so this recipe is now in our soup rotation.
Based on the recipe by Dave Lieberman, with my own modifications.
Next experiment: minestrone, perhaps?
Read MoreMummy has been losing weight of late, and I’ve been trying out various soup recipes for her to have some variety in her diet. I wanted to keep things interesting enough for her to want to eat, while at the same time provide her with all the necessary nutrition to stay healthy.
Since it’s fasting month and she might get even skinnier, I tried out this wonderful oat soup recipe by the Queen of Sheba. It’s a soup which is pretty much a meal on its own, with healthy oats and protein from the meat. At the same time it is really easy to eat, making it the perfect dish for sahur. It is a bit heavy to have as a starter before a main course, so my family and I would dish out only very very small bowls during buka puasa.
Try it out!
Read MoreI bought some lamb cubes some time back and never got around to cooking them. Since it’s Ramadan and the evenings have been so rainy of late, I wanted to make something comforting and soupy. Besides, Mummy is watching her health more carefully and no longer eats any red meat, so even though she’ll avoid this dish, it is just one of the many dishes we served with rice for our buka puasa meal.
I loved the broth, so flavourful yet the spices are not overpowering. I flooded my rice with it, and i imagine this soup would also be excellent with bread.
The original recipe was intended for lamb shanks, but since I wanted to use up the lamb cubes in the freezer I just used that. The meat turned out a bit tough even after simmering for 1 1/2 hours, so I wonder if I’ll give it 30 minutes in the pressure cooker next time. Because it was already time to break fast and the meat wasn’t as tender as I had hoped, I skipped the shredding step. Will make this again, using a couple of good quality shanks I hope. Yums!
Adapted from a recipe on taste.com.au.
Read MoreMummy has her “seasons” of favorite foods. Currently she’s into pumpkins, and every week we’d pick one up from the grocery store. Kak’mbang has tried making all sorts of stuff with it, from sayur labu to pengat to bingka, and most recently delicious pumpkin pudding. Mummy requested sayur labu every day, then got sick of it and moved on to pengat, and got sick of that one too. She loves the bingka and the pudding, but these are desserts and Kak’mbang wanted more savoury options. This was where I came in, and I offered to make pumpkin soup.
I looked through several options on the Internet, and found this one to be most interesting. I’ve tweaked it here and there as always, using readily available ingredients and spices in my pantry. The end result was a hearty, flavorful soup, a comforting dish which would have been excellent served with crusty bread. I might use about 50% more chicken stock cubes next time and adjust the salt quantity accordingly, for even more oomph.
Definitely making this again!
Read MoreI’m really trying hard to clear out stuff from my freezer. It doesn’t help that I keep buying new ingredients, I know, but I still try. I had a few smoked duck breasts sitting at the bottom of my freezer for ages, and I knew I had to make something that would do them justice. I’ve used them in risotto before, and considered using them in aglio olio. But I wanted to use them all up in one go, so I decided on this gumbo recipe I found on Saveur.
I honestly didn’t know what to expect when making this. The ingredients looked simple enough, and given the rather tedious step of making a dark roux, I went on with it hoping it wasn’t for nothing. When I finally tried it, served over steaming hot white rice, I was so pleasantly surprised. The flavor was rich and dark and smoky and went so well with the plain rice. All of us went for seconds.
The original recipe made a lot, so I halved the recipe and used ingredients I had on hand (and actually available in KL/Malaysia). I couldn’t find mesquite seasoning anywhere, and making your own still seems like a pain, so I used barbecue seasoning instead. The goal of this recipe is to create as much of that wonderful smoky flavor as possible, so do not sub that smoked paprika with sweet or hot (all three offer quite different flavors anyway), definitely use smoked duck instead of fresh, and find some good quality smoked sausages. I made the mistake of using cheapo “smoked” sausages (see pic below), and was rather disappointed by the really meh texture, which resembled fishballs instead of meat and gristle. The next time I make this (and I definitely will), I’ll use Victoria Crest’s smoked chicken sausages instead, which is available at the more upmarket grocers like B.I.G. and Village Grocer. I’ll also be making the potato salad as well, which I hear is excellent when paired with this gumbo.
Try it out! Well worth the effort.
Read MoreI shredded the last bits of my leftover GobbleFest turkey meat and stored them in the freezer, along with the turkey carcass. This weekend I just wanted to finish them all off and finally close the 2017 chapter of GobbleFest. What better way to do that than to try a new recipe?
I made a casserole and a salad previously, so why not make soup this time? I found this recipe on The Kitchn’s website, which uses only five ingredients, all of which are things I already have on hand. I was intrigued by this Greek traditional comfort food, which uses eggs instead of dairy like cream or milk to achieve its creaminess.
It is a surprisingly bright, tangy soup, very unlike the creamy chicken/turkey soups I’m used to. Most recipes for this soup uses a lot of lemon juice so I guess the sourness is expected, but I might halve the lemon juice the next time I make this, to see how it turns out. While the original recipe calls for “long grain white rice”, which in my mind points to basmathi and the like, I opted for Japanese rice for a starchier porridge. I suspect Thai fragrant rice (beras wangi Siam) would work just as well.
Another Mummy-approved dish, best enjoyed when hot.
Read More
