French Doughnuts at Aunty Yochana’s Blog

Aunty Yochana made some fantastic French Doughnuts that melts my heart the first time I saw it. The yummy picture is at here.

MIL Homemade Chinese Buns

It has been a while MIL’s buns sitting inside my fridge. So ’sayang’ to gobble them up. MIL bun wrapping skills has improved. It used to be quite gross looking. I finally made up my mind to steam all and eat with my 3 boyfriends. Taste damn good with Aik Cheong’s ‘kopi O kosong’ on a quiet Sunday afternoon.

Assorted Potato Salad

For mental note, today I bought 2 medium purple potatoes, 1 large pink potato, 3 new potatoes and 1 local sweet potato. Cleaned and steamed all potatoes together till soft but not mushy. While they were still hot, peeled off the skin. Break all hot potatoes by hand into bite size. Put all onto a plate. Squeeze some japanese mayonaise and sprinkle generous amount of finely cut spring onion. Mix and enjoy.

Pumpkin & Dried Fig Rice Porridge

Steamed pumpkin flesh mixed with rice porridge that is still cooking with dried fig. Add a dash of soy sauce. Kids favourite. Today’s thick porridge is cooked by my other half with these instructions. So easy and tasty vegetarian porridge. Forgot to snap photos. Next time…

Second Baking Attempt: Bake with Yen Ready Mixed Poppy Seed & Orange Mini Muffins

I love the result but hates sweet taste and overwhelming orange flavour. I baked about 200 mini muffins in the smallest cupcake casing for my faithful baking fan.

Close up of orange poppy seed mini muffins.

 

My little fan

First Baking Attempt: Betty Crocker Blueberry Muffins

I did not have enough ingredients to make souffle but there are some for this ready mixed muffin. Yucks… this is how my muffins looks like and they are all sticky. I’ll do some muffin research to find out why muffins are sticky. The blueberries are fantastic!!!

Steamed fish & fish meal

I have gone mad recently, over fishes. Both of my sons enjoy any style of cooked fish. My younger son Chris went even madder over them – dead or alive.

 

I bought all the fishes I had on this post from Jusco. I could not resist my temptation, ended up buying 2 kinds of fishes for dinner. On cod fish, I decided not to use any sauce – not even soya sauce, I used wolfberry or gei chee (regretted not putting more) as it is good at drawing the freshness of cod fish. Each bite of cod fish with wolfberry tastes sweet and melt on your tongue sensation.

 

This second fish dish (forgot the fish name), as you can see, I had slices of ginger on top to steam and later added crispy pickled radishes as topping after steaming. The taste turned out to be so-so.

Ginger Sauce with Wood Ear

I tried to recreate cold young wood ear fungus in ginger and green onion sauce that I had in Hong Kong. I found some wood ear fungus stock in my stock cupboard from my confinement period. These wood ear fungus kept well in dark and dry condition. The type which I had were quite mature.

Unfortunately I had frozen spring onion and garlic as emergency stock. Luckily the young ginger is fresh. I blended everything till the texture that I like. Smooth texture does not provide me the excitement of biting into the ingredients.

The mixture is slowly cooked in peanut oil til fragrant as I find sunflower oil is not as flavourful. I forgot to snap picture of the finished product as I was too engrossed in eating it. Anyway, I boiled the soaked woodear and mix with the ginger mixture. Sort of like chinese salad. I wished I had fresh ingredients for the sauce and better wood ear fungus. The original dish that I had in Hong Kong was superb in terms of flavour (for both sauce and wood ear), texture, chewy-ness and after taste. The sauce may sound oily but you may appreciate its role in making the rest of the ingredients mely in your mouth.

Panasonic SR-MM18N

This is my new rice cooker. My old rice cooker and slow cooker (both Panasonic ) can retired into the darkest corner in my kitchen. It has become an essential equipment for me to prepare meals for my husband, 4-year old and 2-year old. When I reach home I can expect food hot, ready to be serve at anytime. I tried slow cooking red kidney bean (without having to soften beans in water beforehand) soup after the kids went to bed at 9pm and next morning it’s ready to be serve, soft and fluffy bean and sweet soup.

I must admit the instruction manual is disappointing. There are no recipes. I am a part time cook therefore instructions and recipes are very important to educate a user like me.