whine & dine

I have a friend who hates prawns, lobster, crabs, and everything with an exoskeleton. She says they’ve got an “exoskeleton taste”, all the while wrinkling her nose. I think she’s mad – I love that flavour to bits. Prawns, in particular – not just for the taste but also for the ease with which their protective covering will release its tender, succulent flesh into my hands (and onward to my mouth). And the relatively inexpensive price at which it comes (compared to lobsters, crayfish, and crabs – which both generally have a higher /100g unit price, but also have much heavier shells and a higher shell to meat ratio).

Of all the pasta dishes that I love (both to cook and eat), this might just be the winner. Noodles, oil, garlic and chilli – on its own, it’s already such a perfect picture of simplicity, but adding prawns doesn’t mess anything up. In fact, it’s possibly the only way one could have improved on the dish. Aglio Olio with Prawns – mildly spicy, bursting with the sweet flavour of the sea, headily perfumed with garlic and annointed with the most fragrant of oils. Keep reading →

As someone who has lived all her life in “the tropics” – particularly, Singapore – I’ve never had the chance to experience living in a climate where you feel the weather slowly growing warmer, cooler, wetter, drier, or anything of the sort. Sure, I’ve been to temperate regions before, and played in the snow, but that’s all very different from observing first-hand the subtle changes in weather and to appreciating the shorter days, produce in season, or even having the Zara window displays to make any sense to me in the last quarter of the year. Keep reading →

Whenever bunny and I are in Pacific Place and have some time to kill, we inadvertently end up wandering around great. This time, I found a whole stash of interesting looking honeys in one of the aisles, and decided to buy a tub of heather honey to try it. Now, I’m not a huge fan of honey, served neat. I don’t like it spread on toast, and I don’t really like it as much as I like maple syrup (I know, I’m a heathen..), but I do enjoy its flavour in other stuff, like honey baked into banana bread, or that all time sore-throat soother, honey stirred into hot water with lemon.

I’ve also been having a little bit of a scratchy throat, so I figured if I made some ice cream (which is fine for sore throats, just not coughs – before I get scolded by anyone), I could flavour and sweeten it with honey and that should work just as well as drinking honey water! So I whipped up a very simple Philadelphia-stype ice cream base, but used honey in place of the usual sugar. I decided against using a custard base because I didn’t want anything to overpower the delicate flavour of the honey, excepting a touch of vanilla to marry the flavours together.

Anyway, it’s super easy to make, and pretty darned tasty – it tasted like Honey Stars! I’m quite pleased with my recent successes in the ice cream frontier. Hopefully I’ll have time for a couple of batches yet before the weather turns too cold for me to churn anymore batches.

Honey Ice Cream

400ml whipping cream
200ml full cream milk
1/3 cup aromatic honey, such as heather honey
1 vanilla bean, split and scraped
pinch of salt

Combine all the ingredients in a heavy-based saucepan over medium-low heat. Cook gently, stirring often to dissolve the honey, until just below boiling point. Remove from the heat, and set aside, covered, to steep for 1 hour at room temperature.

Strain the cream into another container, discarding the vanilla pod. Chill, covered, at least 8 hours or overnight, then churn in your ice cream machine according to manufacturer’s instructions.

In my previous post, I mentioned that I’m not a fan of tomato based sauces. That’s not entirely accurate. While I don’t really like them as the sauces for my tagliatelle or linguine, I’m quite a big fan of baked dishes that have a nice red or meat sauce in them. Shepherds and cottage pie (though those technically aren’t red sauces either), lasagne, and tomato-based ragùs are all welcome on my plate, as long as they don’t go with noodles, for some strange reason.

I’ve been craving lasagne for a couple of weeks now. And I valiantly tried to assuage this craving with a picnic lunch one weekday, having ordered lasagne from the city super deli counter. It didn’t really work. Then as I was walking through the aisles of sogo’s supermarket section in Causeway Bay, I saw a packet of rigatoni and had an idea. Keep reading →

Whenever bunny and I have guests over for a fussy-ish dinner, more often that not, she gets asked if she eats “like this” (read: if I cook fancy, fussy, multi-course dinners with LOADS of washing up after….) every day. Obviously, she doesn’t. In fact, most of the time when we eat in, I cook really simple stuff – aglio olio, fried noodles with egg, minced pork and XO sauce, steamed rice or rice porridge with one or two Chinese stir-fry dishes. Rice porridge is bunny’s favourite, but pasta is mine. Keep reading →