Tiramisu for a birthday dinner.

Sibling no.3 turned his first double-digit number yesterday.
As is family tradition, we are allowed to choose three courses for a birthday dinner.
He went for vietnamese spring rolls, followed by rendang, with tiramisu for dessert.
For some reason he didn't choose the crispy spring rolls (why? why would you forgeo something deep-fried?) and instead went for the fresh variety. I must admit, they taste totally amazing thanks to the great filling my mum makes.
I think it involves carrot, pork mince and some form of cabbage, as well as copious amounts of fresh grated ginger, a few cloves of garlic, red chilli, and a splash of nam pla (fish sauce). I made nuoc cham (a dipping sauce of lime juice, nam pla, sugar and red chilli) to go with them. Once constructed, they look gorgeous with the slightly translucent rice paper skin shining whitely against the plate. They were delicious with a few tiny purple basil leaves tucked inside too.


I was going to write about the rendang (a sort of curry dish popular in Malaysia. It's usually made with beef, and it's slowly cooked. Once all the liquid has evaporated, the curry paste is added and fried with the then tender meat). However, I realised it is highly un-photogenic. Like, even worse than stew . You can see what I mean by clicking here .


So we shall instead skip gaily onto dessert.
It's a bit weird to sing happy birthday whilst crowded round a tiramisu and sticking candles in it, but that's just the way we roll. Yeah.
This is the recipe I used.



The whole thing turned into quite a debacle.
I had already started making the sponge when I realised I had only 6 eggs - the recipe calls for something like 9.
Secondly, there was no sugar in the house apart from muscavado.
Thirdly, I managed to scramble my egg/sugar mixture when I left it on the heat and wandered off to do something else..

So I ended up making a few adjustments to the recipe.
I was meant to use 3 eggs + 3 yolks in the sponge, instead used only one extra yolk.
And, since I screwed up the egg mixture for the mascarpone layer, that ended up eggless.
With everyone else at work/school, I had to work out which bottle in the cupboard was rum. I naively thought it would actually say 'rum' on it (that's not too much to ask, is it?), so when I couldn't find any I instead sniffed my way through about 5 different drinks until I found the one that smelt like it would be good in this dessert. I still do not know what I put in there!
Luckily the muscavado worked - the soft dark sugar gave the dish an extra flavour not to be found in caster, and lent the mascarpone and cream a lovely colour.

Anyway, I thought it was pretty cool the way the eggs and sugar turned from this:



into this:


Or maybe that's just me, I'm very easily amused.

Extreme deliciousness and an Indian takeaway.

First off, mother will probably want you to know that we hardly ever get takeaways.
We've given up on Cantonese ones because they aren't executed very well, do not do the cuisine justice and the quality of the chicken makes me want to vomit. The only pizza place near us is Domino's, and at £12 a pizza it's not very cost-effective for 7 people.. so basically, we never get takeaways.
The occasional exception to the rule, however, is an Indian takeaway. Unfortuently curry is one of the worst foods I could be presented with*. However, upon trying a new place, I have decided to give it another go. I generally enjoy sniffing at food (I do this when no-one is looking as it is quite a bad habit), and I must say, this smelt pretty nice.



What we ate:
- raita and chickpea salad
- chicken pakora and vegetable pakora
- lamb samosa
- naan
- potato paratha
- lemon and cashew rice
- chicken curry
- chicken and spinach marsala
- Delhi style lamb
- lamb kofta
- okra curry
- yellow split pea dhal
- gulab jamun
- AND carrot halwa which we got for free because we are awesome!

Even though I really couldn't face properly eating any curry*, I did try a scant amount of each sauce. It was outstanding for takeaway food - everything tasted fresh and vibrant rather than sad and old and greasy.

I had a samosa, some salad, two pakoras and some paratha;


And damn fine it was too, sir. In an average meat samosa most of the content is veg, but this one was stuffed full of lamb mince - in fact, I think I only detected three peas in all, an outstanding result I think you'll agree. The paratha (a type of flaky pastry/flat bread hybrid) was also absolutely delicious.

Okay, I must admit something. This whole meal was in fact a ruse. A cunning one to disguise the fact that all I really wanted was gulab jamun. These babies are the absolute pinnacle of perfection. They are basically balls of dough, deep-fried until dark brown, and then doused in a sugar syrup. They are 100% joy, 100% deliciousness, and a 100% better than doughnuts (!). They are also incredibly sweet, so eat all four at your peril and your dentist's disapproval.

Everyone was overjoyed since the last time we had them was.. actually, I can't even remember. They are quite tricky to get hold of because not many shops stock them, and if they do, they're all the way over in the other side of Glasgow.
So all in all, this was a pretty fantastic dinner.
I shall sign out with another shot of the lovely golden spheres, and a video of a lady named Manjula showing us how to make them - whatever else?





*There was an unfortunate incident about a decade ago in which I was rather violently sick after eating some curry. Only recently have I been able to smell any kind without feeling faintly nauseous, but there's still a fair few years to go before I could face actually ingesting any.

A lonely dinner - chicken macaroni soup.

You know how food from other countries can seem really strange? And then you think to yourself, 'it's obviously not strange for them, because that's whast they've grown up with.. but DAYUMN! That's some weird food.'
Well, this is a dish that may seem slightly weird to some. I mean, it's not outlandish in any way, but I find a lot of people don't really get how delicious this soup is!
I don't think of it as anything exciting since I've been eating it my whole life. Actually, it's one of my top 3 favourite meals ever, but whatever.
Chicken macaroni soup (praise the lord) is from Singapore, where my mum grew up, and it is absolutely divine. I don't know why I like it quite as much as I do, but there you go.
As usual, I don't have any weights or measurements because this is also a meal that heavily depends on personal taste. Go with what you feel you will like, but if you feel you want some weights, give me a shout.

Ingredients:
chicken (breasts, thighs, wings, a whole bird, whatever you've got)
ginger
garlic cloves
spring onions (i.e. scallions, green onions, salad onions)
a red chilli
coriander
soy sauce
sesame oil
sriracha chilli sauce
chicken stock cube or concentrate
macaroni
beansprouts


How to do it:
1. Fill a big pot with water and place over a medium heat. Add the raw chicken. (The base of the soup is a chicken stock so meat on the bone is best, but you can use breast meat and add more stock cubes.)
2. Chop up the rest of the ingredients for the stock.
Slice the ginger into thick coins, and squash the garlic cloves under a knife. Add to the pot.
3. While the stock is bubbling away happily, get on with the garnishes.
Finely slice the spring onions and place in a ramekin or small bowl. Slice the chilli into rounds, as thinly as you can, and put in another ramekin. Chop up the coriander, and, you guessed it - put in a remekin.
4. Once the chicken has cooked and become tender, remove from the pot and shred the meat. Throw away the bones and put the shredded meat into a serving bowl. Taste the stock. It'll probably need some more chicken flavour, so add a cube or concentrate from a bottle. Keep the stock on a low simmer.
5. Cook your beansprouts by blanching them in a big pot of boiling water. You want them to still have some crunch so don't overcook them. Put the cooked beansprouts to the side. In the same water, cook the macaroni according to packet instructions. Once cooked and drained, return to the pot and douse in sesame oil to stop it from sticking and also to give a faint aroma that's crucial to this dish.
6. Pour some soy sauce over the sliced red chilli in the ramekin.
7. To serve: place the ramekins of spring onion, chilli in soy sauce and coriander on the table along with the bowls of beansprouts and chicken and the pots of soup and macaroni. Also have on the table the condiments (soy sauce, sesame oil, chilli sauce). Construct your own bowl of soup and enjoy!


This is the way we have it at home - everyone serves themselves and adds as much or as little of each component as they want.
I have my chicken soup with lots of shredded chicken, beansprouts, sliced chilli, a squirt of sriracha, copious amounts of spring onion and lots of soy sauce.
Your finished bowl, however you wish to garnish it, will be fragrant with ginger, very faintly garlicky, and extremely, extremely delicious.
You could also have some chinese veg in this, such as pak choi, or substitute the macaroni for noodles (but trust me, macaroni is the best here!).


Sorry for the rubbish photo. I'm at the flat so I only have access to a rather old compact digital camera. (But look how sparkling and white my stove is ;D) And unfortuently I don't have those lovely big chinese bowls at the flat, or chinese spoons so I had to have it in a tiny white bowl ):

I love chicken macaroni soup more than life itself.