I’ve been making my own jam for a couple of years now. I don’t do this on a regular basis (though I really should!), and I definitely don’t make jam nearly as often as I would like to. But every now and then I’ll come across a glut of beautiful fruit that I won’t be able to avoid buying by the crate, then there’s nothing to do but cook it down into jam and bottle it up.

Making jam is much easier than many people realise – whenever I make a new batch and hand out samples to my friends, I am invariably met with shock – What?! You made your own jam?! – or confusion – How on earth does one make jam? Doesn’t it take forever?! – and while that’s all well and good for my ego, it really isn’t that difficult. One friend recently told me that she’s always wanted to try making jam, only she was worried by how complicated it seemed to be to sterilize jars and canning equipment. Thing is – you don’t need to bottle it for it to be jam. Sterilizing your containers and canning the jam just allows you to keep it longer and prevents you from losing precious fridge space, but you could always just keep the jam in a container in your fridge.

The easiest way about it is to start out with fruit that naturally contains a high amount of pectin (the stuff that gels your jam together and gives it that jelly-like consistency), like apples, quince, gooseberries, or citrus fruits like oranges. All it takes then is peeling (or zesting) the fruit, cutting it up into little pieces or blitzing it into a puree, and cooking it down with sugar (with fruit that’s high in pectin you won’t even need to bother looking for jam sugar!) and some water until it reaches the setting point. To test for the setting point, stick a saucer or small plate into the freezer for 5-10 minutes, and plop a teaspoonful of your jam onto the cold saucer. Run your finger through it, and if it holds its trough, it’s ready. To sterilize your equipment, all you do is wash it thoroughly with hot, soapy water, then place the rinsed jars, open-side up, in a deep pan. Cover with boiling water and boil rapidly for 10 minutes. Lift them out with tongs and leave to drain, upside down, on a thick, clean, dish towel, and keep them warm in a low oven while you’re preparing your jam.

Below, I’ve provided one of my favourite jam recipes – this one’s a beautiful mandarin jam from Melissa of The Traveler’s Lunchbox. Your usual bitter marmalades have nothing on this obnoxiously vivid jam, and it’s one of the easiest I’ve ever made. And there’s really nothing like having a lazy Sunday brunch in your balcony, with crusty toast (or home-baked bread!) smeared with freshly churned butter, and topped with jam you made all on your own.

The only thing to note is that this jam is so delicious, you’re gonna run out of it in no time. So do yourself a favour, stock up on some fresh lids, wash those bottles out, and double (or even triple) this recipe. Trust me – you won’t be the only one sneaking spoonfuls of it when you think no one else is looking.

Mandarin Jam
1kg mandarins (about 8-10, depending on size)
400-600g caster sugar
juice of 2-3 lemons

Wash and finely zest half your mandarins, reserving the zest. Peel all the fruit, removing as much of the white pith as possible. Cut each mandarin across the equator and dig out the pips, working over a bowl to catch the juices. Wrap all the pips up in a square of cheesecloth, tying the ends together firmly. (Using the seeds will give you the maximum amount of pectin in your jam.)

Place the halves along with any juice you’ve collected into a food processor, and blitz until you’ve got a puree, 1-2 minutes. Taste the puree, and add an appropriate amount of sugar based on the sweetness of your fruit. If in doubt, start with a smaller amount – you can always increase the sugar content towards the end. Tip the puree, along with the reserved mandarin zest, lemon juice and sugar into a deep, heavy saucepan, stir well to combine, then add in the bag of pips, tying one end to the handle of your pot.

Bring it to a boil over medium-high heat, then reduce the heat to medium-low, and simmer, stirring occasionally, and skimming off any scum from the surface. Allow to cook until it sets, about 30-40 minutes. Taste for sweetness and acidity at this point – if it needs more sugar or lemon juice, add some at this point, and cook for a couple of extra minutes.

Pour into hot sterilized jars, firmly attach lids (screw top and rubber gasket lids all work just as well), and place in a deep pot of boiling water. The jars should be submerged by at least an inch. Boil rapidly for 10 minutes, then remove from the heat, dry off the bottles and allow to cool to room temperature in a cool, draught-free place. With their seals intact, bottles of jam will keep in a cool, dark place for about a year.

If you don’t wish to go through the hassle of sterilizing and sealing, simply transfer your jam into clean containers that can be tightly covered, and keep refrigerated for up to a month.

I have a strange obsession with making things from scratch. And this obsession doesn’t stop at dishes – I’m often trying to find ways to make what most people would consider ingredients on my own. It’s so bad that whenever I start banging on about a new project I’m embarking on, one of my friends starts asking if I’m going to grow a tree and whittle my spoons out of the branches, using a knife made from a flat, sharp piece of rock. (I’m rolling my eyes right backatcha, S.) And as much as I’ve talked about making many things from scratch (bacon, ketchup, mustard, cheese etc), I haven’t actually gotten round to most of it.

A couple of months ago, Michael Ruhlman wrote a post about a book called Unfinished Business. In the post, he challenged the readers to comment and commit to our unfinished business (in the kitchen, in particular). I didn’t comment, mostly ‘cos I was worried I wouldn’t see it through, but mine was to finally make two things: butter, and bacon.

I’ve yet to do the bacon (and I’ve been talking about doing that for over 2 years now, so I really should get down to it), but at least I’ve finally done the butter! One Friday, I woke up grouchy – it was the sort of mood that only submerging myself in cooking is ever able to really fix, so I got into my car and hightailed it down to the supermarket. I bought a tub of crème fraïche, trawled the shelves for the cream with the highest fat content (I have no idea where to find raw cream, and figured I could save the nitty gritty details for a subsequent attempt), and got to it. And while every blog post that’s dealt with making your own butter has reiterated how easy it is to do, for some reason I was still taken aback by the idiot-proof-ness of it all. Clean a container, mix your cream and culture together – let that stand for 12-24 hours at 20-26ºC. Bring it to 15ºC, and blitz/process/blend/whip/whisk/paddle/churn until it separates. Drain out the buttermilk (reserving it for another use), rinse, knead and salt if desired. Butter. This was made with fairly run-of-the-mill organic cream (not some superfat, from-Jersey-cows, reared on grass not grain, raw, unpasteurized stuff), but boy was it delicious! Now I’ve gotta find me some of that superfat, from-Jersey-cows, reared on grass not grain, raw, unpasteurized stuff and I’m positive my mind’s simply waiting to be blown.

Or maybe I could convince bunny to get me a cow.

Cultured Butter
(from The Traveler’s Lunchbox)

1 litre full-fat cream (preferably organic, non-UHT cream, with the highest fat content possible)
80-200ml crème fraïche/yoghurt (without gums/stabilizers)
ice and water
salt, optional (preferably flaky maldon sea salt)

Clean an appropriately sized container (preferably glass or ceramic) and a silicone spatula – I used a deep glass mixing bowl and washed it with boiling water. Tip in your cream and the crème fraïche, mix together thoroughly, then cover loosely and set aside for 12-24 hours. You want to leave this in a place that is around 23ºC (within 20-26ºC will do), so I stashed my bowl in the study with the air conditioner on (room temperature is something like 35ºC these days!), safe away from the cats.

Check and taste it every now and then, it should thicken and become pleasantly tangy. If it’s bubbling and gassy, this means that some bad bacteria has gotten in and you’ll have to chuck it out and start again. Once you’re happy with it, you can either proceed to the next step, or transfer the container to the fridge and hold it for another 24 hours.

Once you’re ready to churn the butter, allow it to come to approximately 15ºC (let it sit at room temperature if taken from the fridge or sit the container in an ice bath if it’s already at room temperature). Prepare a jug of iced water, and then transfer it to your chosen churning contraption: if you are so lucky to be in possession of one (and in which case you probably wouldn’t need to read this post), you can use a butter churn, otherwise whack the cultured cream into a food processor, a stand mixer fitted with the whisk or paddle attachment, or even into a large bowl if you’d like to do it by hand. Whisk at medium-high speed as though you’re making whipped cream, and once it gets to stiff peaks, reduce the speed to low. Continue whisking, the cream will take on a grainy appearance and finally split into a watery-milk looking liquid (your buttermilk is, after all, essentially cultured skim milk) and yellowish globules of butter. Shut off the motor when it splits (if using a stand mixer you might want to clingfilm the bowl to avoid looking like a dairy truck exploded all over your kitchen!), and drain the buttermilk out through a sieve. The buttermilk can be reserved and used in baking, cooking, or making smoothies etc.

Add a cup or two of iced water into the bowl and paddle/knead the butter gently – this is to rinse any remaining buttermilk out. Removing the buttermilk prevents the butter from going rancid as quickly. The water will turn chalky – drain off this liquid, and repeat until the washing water remains completely clear. The butter globules will also start to stiffen and stick together into a big ball of butter. Drain well, then knead on a clean surface or in a cloth-lined colander to remove as much water as possible. At this point, you can also knead in salt if desired, to taste (for flavour, as well as to prolong the butter’s shelf life), then store your butter in ramekins, in rolls, or any way you like.

It will keep for a week in the fridge, or for a few months in the freezer. Either way, ensure that you keep it tightly wrapped, as butter tends to soak up odours (unless you’ve got some truffle in your fridge, in which case you should chuck that into a ziploc bag with your butter).

I’m not sure about you, but I’ve always been more of a beer drinker than any other sort of alcohol. Sure, I enjoy the odd glass of wine (mostly when I’m inhaling a gooey wedge of brie – only since discovering my lactose-intolerance that’s happened with far less frequency), and once in a while I’m in the mood for sharing a bottle of sake, but beer is my go-to drink. However, when I’m in the mood for cocktails, the only one I ever really want is a mojito.

Acidic, sweet, refreshing, minty, bubbly – what’s not to like about this perfect summery drink? Sure, I’ve had a number of terribly made mojitos – bottled lime juice/cordial (and far too much of it), sugar syrup instead of granulated sugar, lazy muddling which fails to properly bruise the mint leaves and bring their full flavour out, and – worst of all – I once had a ‘mojito’ which was nothing more than a glass of Sprite with an extra squeeze of lime, topped with a sprig of mint.

Enter C – to whom I was introduced by one of my best friends in January this year – who regaled me with stories on how he once spent 5 hours straight making mojitos at a friend’s party. Sure, he’s not Cuban (he’s Spanish), and they may not be 100% authentic, but his version of mojitos sounded so good that I invited him over the next day to have a little mojito-making session in my balcony. His version uses both white and brown sugar (white masks the harshness of the rum, and brown gives you that caramel-y molasses layer to the sweetness), as well as white and dark rum. One should note, though, that the effect the white sugar has is that you don’t actually realise how strong the drinks are (one of these and I was giggling like a school girl) while drinking them, which had another friend muttering, “Jeezus – who needs Rohypnol when you’ve got these mojitos?!” Unfortunately, C must have explained the logic behind using both white and dark rum later in the night ‘cos while I know dark rum is used for its distinctive flavour, I have no clue why you don’t just substitute all the white rum with dark.

What I’ve laid out below is more a method than a recipe, the proportions really depend on the size of your glass, but I’ve given rough starting amounts and you should taste and work from there. However, when you’re planning a mojito night, factor in enough ingredients for multiple mojitos per person – these are so damn tasty you’ll never be able to stop at one. Unless you run out of ice.

Mojito

white sugar
soft light brown sugar
thai limes, quartered, seeds removed
mint, leaves picked
white + dark rum
sparkling mineral water (alternatively, substitute with soda water)
crushed ice

Add about 2 teaspoons of each type of sugar to the bottom of the glass. Squeeze about 3 wedges of lime over the sugar, then throw in the spent quarters. Fill the glass to the brim with very loosely packed mint. Muddle for 1-2 minutes until a sludgey paste is formed.

Top the glass all the way up with crushed ice, pour in equal amounts of light and dark rum until there’s about 1-2cm left to the top of the glass (in my glasses this takes slightly over a shot of each), then top up the glass with sparkling water (roughly a shot’s worth). Garnish with a slice or wedge of lime, stick a straw in, and serve.

Stir, and taste: the mojito should be refreshingly perfumed with mint, and have a hint of acidity from the lime (not so much that it makes you pucker, but you should be just about able to taste and identify it). The alcohol shouldn’t burn as you sip it – but both the dark rum and brown sugar should lend that caramel sweetness to your drink. If the balance isn’t right (these proportions are really for my glass specifically), add more of each ingredient as needed.

To refill, don’t empty your cup – just squeeze in another two wedges of lime, add another teaspoon each of white and brown sugar, top the glass up with more ice, and slosh a little more rum into your glass. Dribble in more soda water, and stir. The drunker you get, the less you’ll notice, but these mojitos get better as you build each refill over your used glass.

Yield: Serves one (at a time)

It all started when I was last in London, and I had a scoop of the most perfect Pistachio ice cream at the Fortnum & Mason cafe. Wanting desperately to replicate it, I trawled through the internet looking for pistachio ice cream/gelato recipes, but each and every single one of them called for this elusive ingredient – pistachio cream/paste. (All the online stores selling it only either shipped it in industrial-sized tubs, or wouldn’t ship to Asia due to customs regulations.) After a couple of weeks, I started looking to try and make this darned paste on my own, only to be shot down again – you need some specialized heated rollers to extract the oils out of pistachios and mash them into such a smooth paste. And as much as I love pistachios, I wasn’t about to go that far, so I all but gave up the hope of ever getting my hands on any, especially when I couldn’t even find it last December in New York.

Fast forward to last month, where you’ll find the bunny and I trundling around Tokyo on a quick weekend trip. We were staying at the Ritz, which is conveniently located just off Roppongi, above Tokyo Midtown, aka home to patisserie Sadaharu Aoki (where you’ll find the best eclairs in Tokyo), and a Dean & Deluca store. While nosing around D&D one morning, I happened across an entire shelf of these petite clear bottles, each containing 5oz of a pale green paste. I swept as many bottles off the shelf and into my basket as the bunny would allow, and – grinning to everyone I skipped past – exultantly made my way to the cashier.

Once I got back to HK, I started digging around my bookmarks for all the recipes I’d found, and came across a rather recent addition – just one month prior, a recipe for Pistachio Eclairs had been posted over on Cafe Fernando. The bunny not being a fan of chocolate, I made a few tweaks, subbing a salted caramel sauce for the chocolate glaze, and reducing the sugar slightly in the pastry cream.

All I can say is, I regret not buying more pistachio paste. But all’s well – a bunch of friends are headed to Tokyo in July, and a few thoughtfully proffered eclairs have ensured that they’ll be saving some space in their luggage for my next stash of pistachio cream. :)

Pistachio Eclairs

Pistachio Pastry Cream (adapted from cafe fernando):

280ml whole milk
3 large egg yolks
2.5 tbsp cornflour, sifted
30g caster sugar (2 heaped tbsp)
140g (5oz) pistachio cream

Prepare an ice bath in a baking dish about 2-4 inches deep. In a heavy-based saucepan, scald the milk, then set aside. While the milk is boiling, whisk together the egg yolks, cornflour, and sugar until pale.

Whisking constantly, slowly pour the hot milk into the egg yolk mixture to temper it. Once all the milk has been added, transfer the mixture back into the saucepan and cook over medium heat, whisking vigorously, and bring it to the boil. Boil for 1-2 minutes, still whisking, then remove from the heat, and whisk in the pistachio cream. Place the entire saucepan into the prepared ice bath, and – stirring frequently – cool the mixture to 60C.

Scrape all the mixture out into a piping bag, clipping the mouth and tip as close to the pastry cream as possible, creating an airtight seal, and refrigerate until cold. The pastry cream will keep for 2 days, refrigerated.

Yield: About 2 cups

Salted Caramel Butter Sauce (from David Lebovitz’s The Perfect Scoop):

40g unsalted butter
75g caster sugar
125ml heavy cream
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 tbsp coarse sea salt (fleur de sel)

Melt the butter in a heavy-based saucepan over medium heat. Once the butter has liquefied, add all the sugar and cook, stirring, until the sugar turns a deep golden brown and just starts to smoke.

Remove the pan from the heat and whisk in half the cream (be careful – it will splatter!) until smooth. Whisk in the rest of the cream, then add the vanilla extract and salt. If there are any lumps, whisk the sauce over a very low heat until it has all dissolved. The sauce keeps for 2 weeks in the refrigerator, and can be rewarmed over a low heat on the stove, or in the microwave.

Yield: Makes about 3/4 cup, which is much more than you’ll need, but it’s excellent drizzled on pancakes, ice cream, and pretty much anything else you can think of.

Pâte à Choux (from Sherry Yard’s The Secrets of Baking):

1/2 cup bread flour
1/2 tsp sugar
1/8 tsp salt
1/4 cup water
1/4 cup whole milk
3 tbsp unsalted butter
2-3 large eggs

Preheat your oven to 220C with the rack in the centre of the oven and place a heatproof baking dish or pan on the floor of the oven. Prepare a baking sheet by lining it with parchment paper (you can glue each corner of the parchment to the sheet with a dab of choux paste to keep the paper in place). Sift together the flour, sugar, and salt in a medium bowl. Set aside.

Bring the water, milk and butter to a boil in a medium-sized saucepan over medium heat. At the boil, remove the pan from the heat and add the flour mixture all at once. Using a wooden spoon, beat vigorously to combine.

Return the mixture to medium heat and stir constantly in figure eights. Cook for about 4 minutes, or until the mixture has a smooth, mashed-potato-like appearance. This helps to break down starch and develop gluten. Remove it from the heat, and continue to beat for 2-5 minutes, to cool the mixture down to about 80C. Add 2 of the eggs, one at a time, mixing until thoroughly incorporated before adding the next. Pinch off 1 teaspoon of the dough between your thumb and index finger, then pull your fingers apart – the dough should stretch rather than break. If it breaks, add the last egg. (I didn’t need to add the last egg.)

Fit a large plain tip into a large piping bag and fill the bag halfway with pâte à choux dough, pushing the contents towards the tip. Pipe 2″ strips, leaving 1″ of space between each strip. If desired, before baking, score each eclair with the tines of a fork or a sharp knife to aid the expansion.

Place the puffs in the oven and pour a cup of hot water into the pan on the oven floor. Quickly close the door to keep all the steam in the oven. Bake for 10 minutes, or until the puffs begin to rise, then turn the oven down to 175C and rotate the baking sheet. Prop the oven door open slightly with a wooden spoon and bake for an additional 10-12 minutes, or until the puffs turn nutty brown.

Remove from the oven and cool completely on a rack, about 15-20 minutes, before filling and serving.

To fill: either cut the eclair shells open horizontally, or use a piping nozzle with a long tip to pierce the side and fill with the pistachio pastry cream. Spoon or brush a little salted caramel sauce onto the tops, allowing it to drip down the sidest.

Yield: about 25 mini eclairs.

Over the Easter holiday, I met up with a couple of friends down under for a gloriously indulgent weekend in Western Australia. Kick starting the weekend off with plenty of mojitos (both the night before and the night after a 4-hour long drive into the Margaret River wine area), we then spent the next three days in a wine, cheese and chocolate-induced food coma.

Although Australia rarely is my first choice for holiday destination, one thing that always makes me kick myself for not returning sooner is the weather. The whole time we were there, the temperature hovered in the mid twenties, with oodles of blue skies (as you can see in the pictures), and a comfortable level of humidity. And with the general casual attitude of the friendly locals, I was blissfully happy wandering around vineyards, soaking up the sun in a teeshirt and sunnies.

Obviously, with our only goal of the weekend being to inhale as much delicious food and wine as possible, we hopped around to a number of wineries, and managed to sample a whole bunch! Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m no expert when it comes to wine (honestly, I’m much more of a beer-drinker), so I really appreciated the chance to try a good variety. Especially since the last time I was in a vineyard doing tastings, I was 20 and in the US, which meant I had to inconspicuously sneak sips from my parents’ glasses when the staff weren’t looking.

I really enjoyed this delightful getaway, where I managed to spend time with a dear friend and get to know one of her closest friends. I tried fortified wines for the first time, and finally met a Rosé that I enjoyed. After all, with such great company, beautiful blue skies, and nights spent crowding round bottles of wine and platters of cheese, gossiping and watching movies on my laptop, confiscating iPhones from compulsive movie-ending-googlers, and even an afternoon by the beach, it would have taken me a fair bit of effort to come up with anything bad to say :)

Some wines I enjoyed:
Sauvignon Blanc Semillon & non-alcoholic sparkling grape juice from Voyager Estate
Chenin Blanc from Cape Grace
Late Harvest Riesling & Cabernet, Rosé from Gralyn Estate
Classic Dry White, Cabernet Sauvignon from Vasse Felix

Wineries with beautiful grounds:
Voyager Estate‘s whitewashed walls and rose gardens
Watershed Premium Wines‘s floor-to-ceiling windows and high ceilings with exposed beams
Vasse Felix with modern sculptures scattered around perfectly trimmed lawns
Laurance Wines‘s flower gardens, beautiful lake and cobbled driveway

Food and non-wine:

Steak Sandwich and Cheese Tray at Laurance Wines
Pizzas, Fish and Incredibly Crispy Chips at Sea Garden Cafe
Oysters at Must
Black Gold coffee at Yahava KoffeeWorks
Romano, Triple Cream Brie and Smoked Cheddar at The Margaret River Dairy Company
Hot Chocolate & Long Macchiato at The Margaret River Chocolate Company

Note: All pictures were taken with S’s Canon S90 – I was too lazy to bring my own camera, and anyway the other two were more than happy to designate me photographer so I could snap plenty of pictures of the two of them :)

So most of my friends know what a huge fan I am of Michael Ruhlman – it was, in a way, his - of a Chef series that kind of encouraged me to give working in a restaurant kitchen a go. (Far from hyping up/glamourising the job, he told it pretty much like how it was which made me feel a little more prepared for what was in store.) And it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my life, as I think I learnt a lot about myself and – hey! it was great fun :)

Ruhlman’s also the author of Ratio (also available as a pretty spiffy iPhone App), which I think is one of the most important books ever written for people trying to learn how to cook. I’ve written briefly about it before, but essentially he strips recipes back to their core: ratios (mostly by weight), and I love A) any recipe that will allow me to measure by weight instead of volume, and B) a recipe that allows you to adapt it with different flavour combinations and seasonings. The concept of Ratio teaches you to cook exactly like that: giving you basic building blocks and letting you free to pretty much create whatever you’d like in the kitchen.

A couple of days ago, he also posted a recipe for buttermilk dinner rolls on his blog, and I’ve been looking for a soft roll recipe for a while now. (The bread ratio – 5 parts flour : 3 parts water – is great for most sturdy loaves but I wasn’t confident enough about knowing what to substitute for the liquid etc in order to get a soft fluffy dinner roll.)

Being the fan girl that I am, I decided to give those rolls a try, sprinkling the middle buns with sesame seeds and the rest with flaky salt. Unfortunately, I didn’t really let it proof enough during the second rise so the rolls were a little dense (and baked into a slightly non-roll-like shape), but the flavour and – density aside – texture were great. I’m intending to try them again very soon (perhaps with a slightly smaller amount of flour: maybe 700g?), this time starting out a little earlier so I don’t end up rushing the process.

Ruhlman recommends eating these with soft butter, but they were also fantastic, torn into chunks and smeared with a little homemade mayonnaise (egg yolk, dijon, mild-flavoured olive oil) or whole-grain mustard, and topped with a rare slice of steak (fried in some canola oil scented with two cloves of garlic). It was a fantastic dinner, and thanks for inspiring this meal, as well as countless others, Michael! :)

Happy 2010, everyone! Things have been a little busy in the ‘Kong, what with our NYC trip (which I will try to write about soon!), and back-to-back visitors over December. New Year’s Eve was a fairly tame affair in this household, with just four of us (the last houseguest of the decade, J, and S joined us in this year’s feasting), a delicious spread, and a healthy dose of booze.

To bunny’s dismay, J has been the first person around to not just entertain but encourage my crazy kitchen ideas, and while I was showing him one of newest cookbook acquisitions, we decided that NYE’s dinner needed to pay tribute to some of the yummiest food I partook of in the big apple. Having regaled him with tales of the Momofuku Pork Bun, that naturally was on the menu. When we flipped through and found the fried chicken recipe, things just started to fall into place.

And dinner was thoroughly badass. A fittingly epic last meal of the decade, starting with my take on the pork & egg buns, followed by David Chang’s fried chicken (which he brines, then steams, then fries, delivering a shatteringly crisp skin), and ending off with the River Cottage pistachio cake topped with a batch of cereal milk (based on Christina Tosi’s cereal milk panna cotta) frozen custard.

It’s now two days later and I’m still reeling from the deliciousness of the meal – something I couldn’t have carried off at such short notice without my trusty sous chef! (He also took most of the photos here – and you can see the rest of his shots – plenty of which involve the three monsters who have been haranguing him nonstop – on his flickr stream.) I’m also more than relieved that I don’t need to wait till my next visit to Manhattan before I get to sample more of David Chang’s awesome Momofuku creations!

Now, how did everyone else count down?

Pork & Egg Buns
(inspired by and based largely on recipes from David Chang’s Momofuku cookbook)

8 slices pork belly (see below)
4 slow-poached eggs (see below)
4 or 8 frozen chinese buns (the white sweet-ish sort, I substituted man tou ‘cos I couldn’t find the proper ones, but it worked fine)
quick-pickled cucumbers (see below)
4 tsp hoisin sauce
rendered pork fat or oil for deep frying, heated to 190C

Steam the buns according to the instructions on the packet (generally about 5-8 minutes on medium-high heat), and halve them if necessary. While the buns are steaming, deep fry the pork belly slices just so they’re heated through and the edges are golden brown and starting to get crispy. Crack the eggs out of their shells and slide them into the hot oil, deep-frying until golden brown all over and just heated through.

Assemble the buns from bottom-up as follows: bun, pork belly, egg, 1 tsp hoisin, 4-5 slices of the pickled cukes, then the top bun. Serve immediately, with chilli sauce and scallions on the side.

Pork Belly

5-600g slab of pork belly, with the cross section measuring roughly 2×4″
1 tbsp sea salt
1 tbsp caster sugar
50g rendered pork, beef, goose, or duck fat

Mix the salt and sugar together, then rub it all over the pork belly in a ziploc bag, then seal and refrigerate for 4-8 hours. Rinse, discarding any liquid that has collected in the bag, then transfer to a new, clean ziploc bag. Warm the rendered fat until liquid and pour it into the bag over the belly. Seal the bag, pressing out as much air as you can.

Heat a pot of water to between 80-85C. Using a flame-retarder, or any other method you prefer – if you’re a lucky bastard and already own a sous vide supreme, you should clearly use that (heated to 82C, specifically – maintain the temperature of the water in that range and confit the pork belly, en sous vide for 8 hours. Once the cooking is complete, plunge the bag into an ice bath to stop the cooking process, then refrigerate until completely cold (this makes it easier to slice). You can prepare the pork up to a week in advance until this step.

Before serving, run warm tap water over the bag to slightly loosen the fat, then remove the pork belly from the bag, scraping off the excess fat. Cut into slices roughly 0.5cm thick. The slices can then be warmed in a little oil in a skillet, deep fried, or grilled.

Slow-Poached Eggs

This is basically David Chang’s take on the ubiquitous onsen tamago – i.e. eggs that Japanese women used to make by carrying a basket of raw eggs into then onsen or hot spring baths with them while they bathed. In the time it took for a good soak, you’d emerge not just refreshed, but with a basket of creamy eggs, coddled in their shells.

There isn’t so much a recipe for this, it’s just a method. Essentially, the raw eggs – shells intact – need to bathe for about 45 minutes at 62C. Again, unless you have an immersion circulator, it’s a little hard to keep your water at Precisely this temperature, so if you keep it within maybe 60-63C, you should be good to go. Once I got a large-ish pot of water to 62C, I popped the eggs (previously brought to room temperature) in, and just turned the heat back on to medium-low for about 30 seconds every 7-8 minutes. Obviously, if you have a bigger pot of water, it’s going to maintain its temperature better, especially immediately after adding the eggs in.

Once the eggs are cooked, you can use them immediately, or chill them in an ice bath to arrest the cooking, and refrigerate until you reheat for use up to 2 days later. When you crack them open, there will be a little bit of egg white that’s still fairly loose, just crack your egg onto a saucer, and tip the dish over your sink, using your fingers to hold the egg in. It will drain off the loosest, translucent bits, and the rest are fine for eating.

Quick-Pickled Cucumbers

Another non-recipe: slice two to three small cucumbers into 1/8-inch-thick discs, and toss with 1 tsp each coarse salt and caster sugar. Set aside for 5 minutes, then rinse and drain. Taste them: if you like how they are (slightly crunchy, with a little saltiness and a hum of sweetness in the background), you’re good to go. Otherwise, correct the seasoning with extra salt or sugar, and drain again before using. It takes literally 8 minutes to do from start to finish, and the cukes can be held for a couple of hours max, so do this right at the end, just before you start your steaming and deep-frying!

Yield: Serves 4 as a first course, or 1 really hungry person. :)

The first time I’d heard of snickerdoodles was sometime early this year. It was on some food blog or other (sadly I can’t remember where I originally saw this whimsically named cinnamon-sugar encrusted cookie), and I was hooked. I mean, c’mon. They’re called snickerdoodles – how can that be a bad thing?

Long story short: I completely forgot about them, having neglected to pick up a jar of ground cinnamon on any of my supermarket runs. (Bunny isn’t a fan of cinnamon, so I don’t use it all that often.) That is, until Deb of Smitten Kitchen posted about them. This time, the pictures were so gorgeous and so tempting that I pretty much immediately ran out to citysuper to get supplies, and boy were they good.

For one, the entire house smelled heavenly. I mean, it tends to, when you’ve got little bombs of sugar and butter and cinnamon in the oven. And it took so much self-control to not eat them as I pulled each snickerdoodle off the baking tray and onto the cooling rack. They were the perfect mix of crisp-edged and chewy on the inside.

It’s taken me long enough (about 3 more batches have since been baked in between) to post about them, but now that I have, it’s your duty to make some. Your sweet-toothed, cinnamon loving friends and family will love you all the more for it, and, because they keep for about a week when wrapped air-tight, they’d probably make the perfect Christmas gifts. No prizes for guessing what my friends will be receiving this year – which reminds me, I’ve gotta get baking! :)

PS: Merry Christmas everyone!

Snickerdoodles
(From Smitten Kitchen)

2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons cream of tartar
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
8 oz unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 3/4 cups sugar, plus more if needed
2 tablespoons ground cinnamon, plus more if needed
2 large eggs

Preheat the oven to 200°C, with one rack in top third and one rack in bottom third of oven. Line baking sheets with silicone baking mats or parchment paper.

Whisk together flour, cream of tartar, baking soda, and salt to evenly mix and aerate then set aside. In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, cream the butter and 1 1/2 cups sugar on medium speed until light and fluffy, about 4 minutes. Scrape down sides of bowl. Beat in eggs, one by one. Add dry ingredients, and mix on low speed to just combine. Chill the dough for at least one hour (or overnight) in an airtight container to facilitate scooping.

Once the dough has chilled, in a small bowl, combine remaining 1/4 cup sugar and the ground cinnamon. The original recipe says to use a small ice-cream scoop to form small balls of dough, but I found it much easier to weight out 20g pieces of dough and roll them into small balls with my hands. Roll them in the cinnamon sugar, and arrange about two inches apart on the prepared baking sheets. Bake until the cookies are set in center and begin to crack (they will not brown), about 10 minutes, rotating the baking sheets halfway through. Transfer the sheets to a wire rack to cool about five minutes before transferring the cookies to the rack.

Yield: I didn’t count (and, also, many of the finished cookies disappeared into waiting and eager mouths once they came out of the oven…) but I think I made around 4 dozen 2 to 3-inch snickerdoodles.

As I mentioned in my previous post on Bento Basics, one shortcut that I’ve found invaluable is relying on your freezer. I’ve always extolled the virtues of bulk-cooking, especially for people who have small family units. It can be a little tricky to buy and cook for one or two people, and since it takes hardly any longer to make a small amount of ragu as it does to make a giant pot, why not just do a big batch which you can portion and freeze, and that’ll make for another 4 or 5 meals which will only take a few minutes to heat up in the microwave (or on the stove top).

Soboro is likewise a great staple to have in your freezer. Since I use it mostly for my bentos, they’re also in such small portions that I can nuke them while stir-frying some vegetables, and the entire bento gets assembled in under 10 minutes. The best part about it is that it takes under 30 minutes to cook, even in a huge batch (unlike some stews which might need a few hours in a low oven). The only thing I’d really caution you against is buying cheap ground meat from a dodgy source: there’s been quite a lot of attention shone on E.Coli and other types of bacterial food poisoning arising out of contaminated grinder equipment and poor hygiene (especially if all sorts of odd, nasty bits get ground into the meat, complete with the associated germs), so find a reliable butcher you trust, or – as I prefer – grind it on your own. (Granted, most people look at me kinda funny when I say that I grind my own meat. But it’s really quite easy when you have a KitchenAid or a similar stand mixer, which has a meat grinder attachment available. Although, presumably, grinding your own meat means you’ll be in the kitchen for more than the abovementioned half hour.)

The best part about soboro is how versatile it is: you can make a classic sanshoku-don (3-coloured rice bowl) bento if you combine it with some tamagoyaki (Japanese rolled omelette) and steamed veg, mix it with some mashed potatoes, then bread and fry the mixture for soboro croquettes, fold it into an omelette or scrambled eggs, use as your base for a fried noodle dish, or even drain off the sauce and fill onigiri (rice balls) with it (as pictured at the start of the post).

And lest you start to fancy soboro as something that belongs only in your obento, I should probably share one of our current favourite weeknight quick-fixes too: when I was in Tokyo in October, we closed off a meal at a little yakitori joint with an excellent soboro donburi: a bowl of steaming hot rice, a few spoonfuls of juicy soboro, all topped with a quail’s egg yolk. When mixed together, the sauce from the meat and the egg yolk combined, coating the rice with such a delectable rich flavour. I now replicate this at home by mixing up a double portion of the donburi with a hen’s egg yolk. Simple, and – admittedly – not much to look at, but I can assure you: it is thoroughly satisfying.

Ground Meat Soboro

5 tbsp oyster sauce
3 tbsp mirin
2 tbsp light soy sauce
1 tbsp dark soy sauce

3 tbsp sesame oil
1 bulb garlic, peeled and minced (or grated)
3 tbsp grated ginger (about a 2-3 inch knob)
1kg ground beef/veal/pork/chicken (or a mixture – I like using roughly 70:30 beef to pork)
5 tbsp sake
salt & black pepper
a small bunch of spring onions/chives, sliced into 1cm lengths (my bundle weighed about 100g, and had around 20 stalks, but feel free to adjust this amount to taste)

Mix the first 4 ingredients together in a small bowl, set aside.

Heat the sesame oil in a large, high-sided frying pan over medium heat, and add the garlic and ginger. Fry until fragrant, and just starting to brown around the edges; about 3 minutes. Turn the heat up to high, add all the meat in and fry fast to brown all over, breaking up any clumps that form.

When the meat is about 3/4 cooked, add in the sake and a big pinch of salt. Cook, stirring frequently, until the meat is cooked through. Add the sauce mixture along with a level tablespoon of ground black pepper and about 50ml of water, and stir thoroughly to ensure that it is evenly mixed. Turn the heat to low and simmer, about 5 minutes until the liquid is reduced by half. Remove from heat, then stir through your spring onions, cover and let it steam for a minute or two more to wilt the spring onions. Taste, correct the seasoning with salt and/or pepper if necessary.

You can now either serve it immediately, or cool rapidly (use an ice bath), then portion out and store. It will keep for about 2-3 days in the fridge, covered tightly, or for a few months frozen in an airtight container. I generally freeze portions of around 150g for my bentos, which I can then nuke for 2-3 minutes on high to defrost and reheat.

Yield: Makes about 8 servings, depending on the sizes of your portions, but you can also double (or triple!) the amount you make, depending on the size of the pots you have. Likewise, feel free to reduce the amount you make, tasting and adjusting the measurements accordingly.

Those of you who follow me on twitter or flickr probably know by now that I’ve been mad about bento for a while. It all started sometime in the middle of September, when bunny and I were both So Bored of all the food in Central (where she works). I mean, as much as Hong Kong is the Land of Food, there’s only so many days in a row when one can eat wonton noodles or congee with century eggs.

It’s been 2.5 months now, and apart from when we weren’t in town, or when bunny had lunch meetings, she’s gotten a w-packed bento box for every single weekday lunch. The best part is that making one for myself as well means I don’t end up eating instant noodles or ordering pizza for myself either, which used to happen when I was too lazy to get out of the house for lunch (i.e way too often). Now, our bentos aren’t of the macrobiotic, whole-wheat, largely vegetarian variety either, but we’ve been eating nutritious, balanced meals. And since my bento boxes (which I bought from the awesome Bento & Co. to replace my prettier but less sensible lacquerware ones) each have two equal-sized compartments, it’s easy enough to divide: one compartment gets half carb and half protein, the other compartment gets fruits and veg.

After the first week or so, I also got into the swing of things and have now learnt to build up a small but dependable stash of freezer staples for each week. We also get to use up doggy-bagged leftovers from when we eat out, which we always used to just chuck in the fridge and forget about till they had to be thrown out. I think I’ve figured out a few tips for those of us bento-makers who don’t/can’t/won’t wake up early enough to assemble the bentos each morning, and hopefully those of you looking to make your foray into bento-making will benefit from what I’ve learnt. I can’t say I’m anywhere near a pro at this bento stuff, but well, I’m sure there’s always stuff we can learn from each other. Likewise, I’d love to hear what tips and tricks you guys have, if you bento too. :)

Bento Basics

1. Use Your Freezer

Daily bentos would be darn near impossible if I didn’t use my freezer the way I do now. I’m not much of a morning person, which means there’s no way I would ever get up at 6am to prepare a fresh batch of rice, let alone cook all the other components of our obentos. My favourite tip that I learned from Just Bento (my favourite online resource for all things bento), was that rice freezes really well! You just have to make sure that you clingfilm your portions of rice while the rice is still hot and wrap the clingfilmed bricks in a heavy-duty ziploc freezer bag, ‘cos that way you’ll trap the moisture in, and once you nuke it (I microwave a 150g packet for about 4 minutes on high, or two packets for 6 minutes), it’ll be a little parcel of moist, steamy rice, which you can then fluff up and no one will be able to tell that you made it last weekend. I also like making some staples like simmered kabocha (japanese pumpkin) and meat soboro (which I’ll talk about in a later post), and these all freeze great as well. Apart from my giant fortnightly rice-cooking/packing operation, it generally takes me about 10-15 minutes each evening to assemble the next day’s bento, which makes it a much more accessible task.

2. What To Include

There aren’t that many things that can’t find a happy home in your bento – leftovers from last night’s dinner, stewed/steamed/stir-fried veggies, eggs, fruit, and all types of meat. My basic bento is a rice bento: rice, some meat, vegetables (cooked or raw), maybe some egg or tofu as a secondary protein, and some fruit for dessert. Flavour combinations work the same way as any other meal, so if you’d be happy eating some stir fried beef with steamed broccoli and fried tofu on rice for dinner, there’s no reason why that wouldn’t work in your obento. I also like to surprise bunny with her some of her favourite snacks every now and then. For example, she loves mushrooms, but I hate them, but I’ll buy a batch of mushrooms to cook up for her in different ways once every week or fortnight to make sure she’s not missing out just ‘cos I don’t like them.

3. What NOT To Include

I pack my bentos the night before, since – as mentioned – I’m really not a morning person. This means that whatever I pack is going to be sitting in the fridge for at least 8-10 hours, and then on bunny’s desk for another 3-4 hours before she eats it. So as much as you can theoretically include anything you want in your bento, I have to keep in mind not to put in things that wouldn’t work if they had to be microwaved. For example, fish tends to overcook very easily, and if I have thin fillets of fish over densely packed rice, I know that by the time the rice is warmed through in the microwave, the fish is going to be overcooked. Apart from the odd pasta salad, I probably also wouldn’t try to pack in pasta dishes – claggy sauces, overcooked noodles.. ew! You also don’t want to include things that would spoil easily like raw fish on sushi, or eggs that are particularly runny, as they’re just open invitations for bacteria to come out and play. (For the eggs in the picture below, I only cut them open just before I was going to eat them, since they’re runny inside, and kept them properly refrigerated right up till lunch time.)

4. Variety

The main reason bunny and I started on this bento stuff was because we were bored of the lunch choices around her workplace. Keep in mind, as awesome as it may be to be tucking into home-cooked food for lunch while everyone else is chewing on cardboard sandwiches, you’d still get bored. Even if you were eating your favourite food every single day. So mix things up – some days I make pasta salads with leftover bits of ham or bacon (pictured at the top of the post), some days green salads. This week, I made yakisoba and fried up some e-fu noodles with minced pork and shredded chinese lettuce since bunny was getting bored of rice bentos. Over at Just Bento, Maki’s got a great Weekly Meal Planner which is great for meal planning (obviously), but also to help you keep track of what you’ve been eating/packing, so you know if you’re getting boring and need to mix things up a little. (See, I told you! That site is Fantastic.)

5. Equipment

Alright, I’ll admit it: half the reason I got tempted to start on bentos was the evil world of e-commerce. Shopping for bento boxes was such fun! :) But there’s a reason why the ones I started out using wouldn’t cut it. First, the lid didn’t shut firmly, so if I had a stewed dish with lots of sauce, it might spill and leak out while bunny made her way to work. Second, there was only one compartment, which meant that I either everything had to be microwaved at lunchtime, or nothing at all. The boxes I now use each have 2 compartments, each with a 450ml capacity. So if I want to include raw veg, they can sit in one compartment while the rice and meat goes in a different one. That way, when bunny’s in the pantry at work, she doesn’t need to pick out her fruit from her rice to microwave. And, these sets came with an elastic band to keep the two compartments snapped firmly together, even when I pack them a little too full. Also, unless you’re sure that you’re never going to need to microwave your bentos, I’d recommend getting a microwave-safe box instead of a metal one, and ensure that it’s big enough to contain a meal that will satiate your biggest eater. (Keep in mind that most bento boxes are made with kids in mind, so they might be a little on the small side for adults.)

Another thing you might want to consider is getting tumblers for soup or hot drinks – if you, like bunny, love hot soups, you can get an insulated tumbler (which means you’ll have to heat the soup up in the morning before packing it), or get a couple of cheap Lock & Lock type water-tight containers which can then be microwaved to heat up along with the rest of your lunch. But if you’re just including a packet of juice, a neat idea I got from Jamie Oliver is to freeze the tetra-pack, which helps to keep the items in your lunch bag cold, and will also melt into a slushy by the time lunch comes around. In fact, if you have a 2-tiered bento, you could also do away with the top lid and use the elastic band to tie your juice pack to the top so as to keep its contents cool.

There’s no need to go out and spend an arm and a leg on your bento boxes, especially if you’re going into bento to try and save money (which is a great idea, by the way – my bentos cost a mere fraction of how much we used to spend eating out). Just keep in mind that you want something easy to clean (dishwasher safe if you’ve got one), microwave safe, and big enough for your meals. I’d also recommend looking for those that come with elastic bands, but you could always DIY that bit, or use a collection of tightly-lidded plastic containers, of course.

One last thing which I’m sure you’re all already aware of: the internet is rife with resources on all topics under the sun, including bento making. So whether it’s cute charaben or the more ordinary, everyday lunch bentos you’re looking to make, have a sniff around online. I’ve learnt loads from the sites I’ve found (most of all from Just Bento and Just Hungry), as well as a whole bunch of others which are a quick google search away.