Poutine, french fries topped with cheese and gravy

Posted by vivien | Recipe | Wednesday 12 November 2008 8:32 am
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12,945 Total Views

No food post, but food rambling today, have you heard of a food called Poutine? It originates from Quebec Canada(a province where most speak french), it is situated towards the eastern side of Canada, also east of Toronto (Toronto is not capital of Canada, but the lesser known city Ottawa is)
Poutine consist of shoestring fries, sprinkled with shredded mozarella cheese(those use for pizza), then pour on gravy(those you get in KFC mash potatoes), and behold, a delicious snack, Poutine, I had it during my study time in Canada whereby i work in the school canteen, and they serve poutine on certain days of the week, and at time i made them, just as described above, And lo and behold, they are snatched up quickly.
So far, i have not seen any restaurant in Malaysia offering poutine, i think some restaurant do offer chili fries, which is fries top with chili, Wendy’s does served something similar, which is baked potatoes topped with chillis, but chili(pic below) is not my thing.

For more info on poutine, you can view this site, perhaps a MIT students, usually poutine recipe will specify cheese curd, don’t think they sell cheese curds in Malaysia, shredded mozarella will do just fine.
There is something quite comforting in eating fries, and poutine is like a step up, imagine picking a piece of fries up with stringy cheese, sorta like pulling a piece of pizza out of the pan, and soft stringy cheese, ummm… unfortunately, they is no where for me to satisfy my poutine craving in KL :\

 

Six Minutes Chocolate Cake

Posted by vivien | Recipe | Thursday 23 October 2008 9:50 am
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8,737 Total Views

Am for a sucker for such recipe, quirky names or unique ways of cooking/baking… So what this so called “Six Minutes Chocolate Cake”? I got it from Chow Times, said to be prepared in six minutes, not inclusive of baking time of course.
Ingredients used: Fine Grain sugar(must be fine grain, else you won’t be able to sieve it thru), vanilla, soda bicarbonate(although recipe specified baking soda, i have none specified as such, only have baking powder and soda bicarbonate, chose to use soda bicarbonate…)Van Houten cocoa powder and white vinegar
There is just this lazy sunday where i am browsing online, wanting to make something, something simple, and end up choosing this, wavering on whether to go ahead making it cos i don’t have sugar and white vinegar, turn up mum store the sugar in freezer, and white vinegar is actually used for chinese cooking sometimes.
Sieving all the dried ingredients: flour, sugar, soda bicarbonate… siever too small, i give up.
Don’t have a weighing scale, so this is what i used to measure all the ingredients, one big spoon (1TBSP is 15ml, about 15g), actually 1 TBSP of flour(dried ingredient) and 1 TBSP of oil(liquid) has not the same weight… anyway, i baked this recipe without rigid measurement. As i am going to make cup cake and not cake, thus halving the amount for each ingredients except cocoa powder, this is going to be super chocolatey… 😉
The liquid: oil, vanilla…
Put it into oven, still looking flat
Done, doesn’t it look so pretty.
Take it out for cooling, look so pretty aint it? But it doesn’t taste awesome. Mixed reviews: some say ok, some say sweet (though i already put less sugar than specified in recipe), some say dry(though i think it is moist, just that it is sticky, kinda stick to your teeth kind of cup cake, maybe cos i didn’t halve the cocoa powder)
If you interested, can go Chow Time for recipe, it takes only 10 minutes baking time for the kind of cup cake size which i making this time.
I got this cupcake mould few months back in Tesco for about RM15-20, finally put it to use. This is a shallow cup cake mould, not deep dish type.

 

No-knead bread by Mark Bittman (Jim Lahey of Sullivan Street Bakery)

Posted by vivien | Recipe | Saturday 27 September 2008 10:05 am
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25,351 Total Views

This recipe i tried is from Mark Bittman (a celebrity chef of TV show “How to cook everything”, and food blogger of “NY Times”…). He got this recipe from Jim Lachey of Sullivan Street Bakery, located in New York City. Check out his blog at http://bitten.blogs.nytimes.com/

Note: I don’t recommend you try this recipe, as this bread is rusticly chewy and slight sourish, anyway recipe taken from http://wednesdaychef.typepad.com/the_wednesday_chef/2006/11/jim_laheys_nokn.html

What so interesting bout this bread is that you don’t need to do the dirty works, namely kneading the bread, thus called No-knead bread.

Mix all the ingredients, all 4 of them
1. flour, here i use 2 cup all purpose flour and 1 cup wholemeal flour.
2. instant yeast
3. salt
4. water!
That’s so simple, mix it all up with a chopstick here.

all mixed up

sealed it up with saran wrap

all poof up after ~ 18 hours in room temperature(no direct sunlight). Recipe recommend 12-18 hours in room temperature.

during this time, take out the dough, shape it into a ball, coat the dough with adequate flour to prevent it from sticking to your hand, put into a container layered with cotton towel, top it off with another cotton towel, and let it rise till double in size. (~ 1 hour)

Heat the pyrex for about 30 minutes in very high heat 230 celcius. Making sure the pyrex is throughly heated will prevent the bread dough from sticking to the container while baking.

here with the bread dough inside, with pyrex covering it. Here, the bread will be “steamed”.(~ 30 minutes) and remove cover and bake for another 15 minutes making sure it is beautiful brown. ;p


Finished product. As you can see, i dust on too much flour, flour tapped off on the side.

cross section.

Well, this is a fun recipe to try. you don’t need to get dirty and it is actually quite easy, just make sure you have time to wait round(waiting it to rise, heating pyrex, “steaming”, baking…)

After baking, you can eat one piece and throw the rest away if it is not nice… jk, or throw it a someone if you are angry, haha, homemake bread is full of substance, it is not light for sure… haha

 

Japanese Cheesecake with pepperidge cookie base

Posted by vivien | Recipe | Saturday 20 September 2008 9:33 am
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21,915 Total Views
Since i have pepperidge cookie which sits in the freezer(it doesn’t taste good, no matter what they say on packaging: warming up the cookie in oven, it still taste sweet and nothing spectacular), i decided to make a cheesecake, since i have a food blog, why not?

meringue, almost dripping to the  table, i tink i don’t beat it enough, only till soft peak stage.
nah, here are the cookie, being lazy and experimental, decided to just lay the cookie like that.
cheesecake batter
finished product.
finished product, see the cookie layer… haha
recipe taken from
Japanese cheesecake, http://ivyaiwei.blogspot.com/2007/11/japanese-cottony-cheese-cake.html
Colleague and friends commented. Some say a bit sweet because of the cookie layer, i think so too, while others say it taste nice. Mum say it doesn’t rise much, yeah think it is due to the egg white not beaten long enough.

 

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