After almost two weeks, my snacking cravings still isn’t curbed. I don’t know why, but my teeth just keeps on wanting to munch on something. Constantly. And gum doesn’t help at all.

So I wanted to find a more healthy snack to snack on… and ended up making apple chips!

someone else's apple chips...

Picture is stolen from another website, since I’m at uni right now and I can’t upload my picture. But it looks pretty much the same, except without the cinammon sprinkled over it. I don’t like cinammon much.

Verdict? They were surprisingly good! And VERY easy.

Just slice up your apples thinly (i used my pyramid looking food slicer. I wish I had a proper mandoline). Then line them up on a baking sheet without overlapping, and stick them in the oven at about 110C for an hour (While you go and do something productive). I actually had my oven on 140C-ish for the first 15mins which was too hot, then turned down to 100C for the remaining 45mins.

Problems…?
I scraped some skin off my finger while slicing the apples… :S  hence the need for a real mandoline. And also, one hour of the oven left on just for a handful of chips isn’t very cost effective or satisfying. If possible, use two trays or more if you have. Unfortunately, I only had half an apple and one tray to use… It was also just an experiment. Didn’t want to make too many, nor did I expect them to shrink so much~

By the way, I used golden delicious apples. I guess any apple would work…

If electric bills aren’t a big concern for you, and you like apples as much as I do, then I suggest you give it a go

Some things I made in the past few months that I didn’t manage to post pictures on…

Jam drops (mini-verson for Chinese New Year!)

Step 1: Make little rounded balls. Step 2: squish with little finger. Step 3: Fill with favourite jam

Somehow I really like this picture (above).

This was the last batch to bake, so it wasn’t arranged nicely at all. But I thought they looked really cute so here’s a picture of them baking…

And for the first time ever, there’s a VIDEO of stuff baking. Seriously you got to watch this. It’s so cute!

Mini jam drops done!

Banana muffins (with muesli)

I think I mentioned these a while back. These were the muffins that my brother ate without complaining! So I’d consider it an achievement. woot!

Vanilla slices

OK. Disclaimer: This is a cheat recipe. All i made was the custard and even then I used custard powder. Not from scratch

Instructions: Buy a pack of Arnott’s Lattice biscuits. Follow the given instructions on the packaging. Can’t go wrong.

I’m posting this mainly for photography reasons… but they kinda suck. Lighting at home sucks, and my camera also quite lousy (whaddyou expect from a freebie?). Oh, and if you didn’t notice, attempt to make white background in picture above also failed…

and the dirty plate! ah! what~!

=The End=

OK. The title was lame, I get it. But I was inspired! Vi gave me a Dove chocolate with a wrapper that said ‘when life throws you lemons… make lemonade’. Very common phrase, although I’m not sure what it means. Make the most of what you have? I guess….

Anyway, today’s food entry is more in ‘my genre’- DESSERT!! Yes. I love dessert. So. What are we making?

…

Upside-down Pineapple cake!

Interesting, no? I was flipping through The Book (Yes, capitalized AND italicized. It’s my fav commonsense cookbook) and I came across this recipe a while back… When my brother asked me to go and buy pineapples in a can because he got excited about making Hawaiian Pizza at home. Don’t ask why.

So I went out and bought 2 cans of pineapples. Main reason being it was on a special price: buy 2 for some price which will save you money. Ha. Neat trick.

Enough rambling for now.

Ingredients:

definitely more butter was used than that... that's just the 20g.

20g+90g butter
1cup self raising flour
1 can 440g sliced pineapples in natural juice (use 1/3 cup of juice)
2 tbsp soft brown sugar
1/2 cup castor sugar
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 tsp vanilla essence

Oven heat 180C.

Melt 20g butter (i used less…), pour in pan and swirl to coat the base. Sprinkle the brown sugar over the butter, then arrange pineapple slices over the top. (i had 1 extra slice from the can… i put it in my sandwich for lunch :))

Beat the butter and sugar until light and creamy with electric beaters

This is where I got overexcited about what I’m doing and forgot to take pictures… (Lots of things happened then. I was on the phone, then I did something stupid like eject the beaters while only holding on to one of them, so I ended up with messy beater guns… Then I to turn on my oven. So you can see why picture taking was suddenly forgotten.) Anyway, continue…

Add the egg slowly, beating well after each addition. Beat in the vanilla essence. Then in alternating turns, fold in the flour and pineapple juice. (currently don’t have the book with me. too lazy to get it, so directions and ingredients summarized from memory :P)

Spread mixture evenly over the pineapple.

Bake for 35-40 minutes or until skewer comes out clean.

yes it CRACKED. But! It doesn't matter... that's the bottom of the cake anyway! ^^

Leave to cool in pan for 10 mins.

Then turn it over a wire rack to cool…

and…

TA DAA!!!

Beautiful upside-down pineapple cake!

OK i lied. That picture is from the book. (for those ppl who are a little slow and haven’t figured out that a cake from a square pan cannot suddenly become round)

So here’s what mine really looks like…

What? Not the same as the one in the book?

The only difference between mine and the book is the flower…

.

.

.

.

There! Mine’s got a flower too!

It’s been a while since I posted anything about Food. I’m a horrible cook, but I like the idea of blogging what I tried so here goes.

So, today while I had my little 2 hour break between lecture and counselling practice, I decided to make lunch/dinner.

I had to drop by the bank before going home and I got distracted at Target for a little while so by the time I got home it was 12:45pm and I had to be back at uni at 2pm.

Anyway, time to start.

I didn’t think about blogging until about halfway through so we’re missing some early pictures.

Here’s 500g of minced beef, less than half a chopped onion, an egg, about 3 tsp corn flour, about less than a cup of breadcrumbs, seasoned with salt and pepper. OK i didn’t actually measure anything, i kinda dumped them all in and MIX!

Here’s parmesan cheese cut up in blocks…

Take some beef, make a little hole in it, put a block of cheese in it…

Then cover it up. Squish it as you roll it into nice little meatballs so it doesn’t fall apart when cooking and the cheese doesn’t ooze out.

And arrange them nicely on a plate. Because nicely arranged things look pretty

And when they don’t fit try some other arrangements… ><

Heat up a pan to about moderate heat while you clear up some stuff… then dump in the meatballs. I didn’t use any oil… i figured it won’t stick… but it did a little bit. I’d suggest you use a nonstick pan if you have one… (meanwhile you might want to put some water on to boil to cook your pasta…)

Let the meatballs brown nicely all around. They need turning… I found chopsticks to be useful to turn (since they’re kinda sticking and i couldn’t just shake them around~) Yes, I know, I’m so authentically Italian right?

After they’re cooked all round, pour in your favourite (or any yummy) instant pasta sauce (yep, instant pasta sauce is my saviour)

cover and let boil for about 5 mins or whatever it says on your bottle of sauce.

Sometime within that your water for your pasta should have boiled so time to cook your pasta. With a pinch of salt.

By the way, I had to take my meatballs off the heat a few times because they were starting to burn and I’m using a stupid hotplate which I can’t control… very un-pro… I know.

Anyway, your pasta is cooked when you take a bite and it’s ‘al dente’ or directly translated= To the tooth. Ie. not too hard not too soft. (redundant statement. I know most of you would know when your pasta is cooked…)

Arrange it prettily in a bowl, top off with meatballs and some sauce…

and… CONSUME.

Here’s the inside…

Honestly, it wasn’t the best. I mean, the meat was nice and all But I forgot to add some herbs to it which might make it nicer. I think using mozarella inside would have been a better idea too cuz it goes all gooey and the flavour isn’t as strong as parmesan. Parmesan can be used to sprinkle over the top. Also I think I needed a side of vegetables. I feel so unhealthy. And finally, I could have cooked a smaller portion of pasta. I was stuffed after that.

Anyway, was there a song about spaghetti and meatballs? Or was it a children’s folktale? I swear there was something about meatballs (and I’m not talking about the new pixar movie)… if you remember let me know!

Side note and more pictures:

I had dukbokki for lunch yesterday!

Bought the dukbokki mix from a korean grocery in Chinatown, bought some extra fish cakes, and added some veges and egg to it. At least managed to trick my brother into eating *some* veges. But I washed up his pot and bowl and found left over veges in it! Seriously. if he doesn’t want to eat the veges, at least wash up his mess after eating and get rid of the evidence. ugh. lazy pig.

Then for dinner I had Dosai.

And no (if you haven’t figured it out yet), I did not cook this. 

Multicultural diet! Yay!

———————————-
Edit: 16th March 2010

You know how I said I should have used mozzarella cheese instead of parmesan for the inside of the meatballs?

Well, I take back what I said. Turns out parmesan melts pretty well when heated properly. And the flavour is good too. In the end of the day, I don’t think it really matters what cheese you put in it… I think I’ve made it with Cheddar once too. As long as there’s cheese, it’s good.

zucchini pancakes- the front and back

OK I’m really excited about this. Seriously. It’s yummier than it sounds… or looks.

I’m still in the process of finishing off raw materials mum bought from the market… Of the stuff I have in the fridge, is a bag of zucchinis… it’s been a while. It was gonna go bad! I’m not a big zucchini fan (Eat it, but i dont LOVE it). In fact in my 2.5 years here I’ve NEVER bought zucchini because I have this voice in my head telling me I won’t like it. But surprisingly, was really yummy when cooked this way. I’ve never actually tried it, but I remember mummy telling me sometime ago about ‘zucchini pancake’ she was having for dinner… Never found out exactly how to make them, but here’s my rendition of it.

1 zucchini, grated
2 eggs
a splash of milk (about 1/4 cup)
some self-raising flour… a bit less than 1/4 cup
some salt

mix all together… and cook as you’d cook pancakes. (adjust amount of milk and flour to your preferance… if you like fat pancakes then maybe you can add more flour~)

Trust me, you should give it a go! Even my bro didn’t complain about it. Haha.

I’m gonna be a little more hardworking next time and maybe add in more ingredients… its a little plain.

(and now I’m going to sleep… and study MCBT tomorrow morning. ><)

I needed some sort of therapy on Wednesday…

I happened to be flipping channels on TV and came across this guy who was showing us how to cook this… thing. I kinda missed the beginning, so I don’t know what it was called. I swear I heard him call it ‘tart’ once but I dont see how it’s a tart… Since it looks like a quiche to me, that’s what I’ll call it. Mushroom and chicken quiche!

Mum bought fresh basil when she came, and we had about half a packet left in the fridge, so when I saw the chef using the fresh basil, I figured, what better way to use up my basil right?? Plus i had almost all of the other ingredients~ Plus cooking is pretty therapeutic! (on top of that I get to go shopping for some ingredients and shopping is therapeutic too!)

So i started with this:

Ingredients: flour, butter, eggs, mushrooms, chicken, fresh basil, shallots(?? spring onions? the label said shallots but i thought shallots were those little red onions~) and parmesan cheese.

The chef on tv used frozen pastry sheets, but Woolies didn’t seem to have shortcrust pastry… So I pulled out my recipe book and randomly used one of their recipes for the crust for quiches~ (strangely enough there’s a number of diff ones but i dont know what the difference is)

And I ended up with this!

chicken and mushroom quiche

But um… I think I didn’t have enough pastry. So the bottom was quite thin… and I guess that made it a little soggy (juices from the chicken and mushroom and stuff) and it STUCK TO THE BOTTOM OF THE PAN!

Which resulted in this…

crumbly crust... broke when I tried transferring it :(

 Oh well. Overall, I’m quite happy with it

After a disasterous test on Friday I had to do something to take my mind off things.

What better way than to bake something new, easy and hopefully yummy.

So I tried Lemon Meringue Tarts. I saw the recipe in this month’s Woolworth’s free monthly magazine. Looked easy enough. And definitely looked good. But they suggested using ‘Woolworth’s shortcrust pastry tartlet cases’ which were ready prepared…  Well, I had all the ingredients, so i wasn’t going to go out to buy tarlet cases… I have a recipe book! Which is totally awesome and has recipes for all the basic stuff such as shortcrust pastry. So I followed that recipe instead and made my own tartlet cases.

So here are the ready made tartlet cases. OK so they’re kind of ugly… but whatever. I didnt actually follow instructions to put baking paper over the top with rice on it (so the center doesn’t bulge up which i figured out AFTER i baked them cuz before that i was like what..!?? what for!? so ya… it was too much work anyway. And since these were so small, it wasn’t really necessary~ ok enuff rambling back to the main story.) I cant figure out how to make it all nice and smooth though. Maybe using a rolling pin would help

Here’s the lemon tart filling

And here’s the meringue!

And here’s the finished combined product ready to be baked.

You can probably see a couple of really weird looking meringue on the tarts, but i thought i should try make it spiky since well… it browns better? But then i thought they didnt look so nice so i stuck with little blobs.

Looks so cute right??? (ok sorry. Enough SSing…)

Baking…

And the final product.

Was a little runny when this was taken. It was still warm and I was too excited to wait for it to cool. But the next day the inside was a bit more solid. I don’t know if that’s a good thing… I’ve never had lemon meringue tarts before…

Overall I thought it was a bit sour. My lemon was one heck of a juicy lemon. I considered cutting down the amount of water I had to add to the lemon custard. And I thought maybe I should add a bit more sugar, but it was my first time making it I didn’t want to mess around with the recipe too much :S But then again ‘one lemon’ in the recipe is quite ambiguous.

Ayway, I had some left over meringue so I just baked them… low temperature, long time… I remembered this from the time we tried making pavlova at home with mum.

I could have made a little pavlova i guess but then I ndded cream and a bunch of other stuff to put together and i really couldn’t be bothered. My brother seemed to like these little meringues by itself anyway so i just baked them and they got eaten up!

On a completely non-related topic, here’s some other food I indulged in this weekend…

I went out for a movie later that evening then Marina picked Conie and I up and we headed to Brace Girdle. WHeee! finally made it there.

Here’s my strawberry indulgence… I really have no idea what its called but that sounds acceptable The chocolate was SO GOOD i took a spoon and scraped out every single bit from the tub even after my strawberries had finished. ><

Here are the darlings…

Then last night I went to the Casino to try the $5 roast of the day that I’ve heard so many people talk about for such a long time but never been there!

Here it is.

$5. Pretty worth it?

It was GOOD. The roast of the day was Veal. The meat was very tender. There was apple sauce and/or gravy, and it was served with beans, carrots (which were surprisingly sweet and Yummy. If you know me well you’ll know I DONT LIKE CARROTS but i ate every single one of them on my plate) And roast potatoes which were very tasty too although the outside skin was a wee bit tough.

I wont tell you what TIME i had this meal because if I did you’ll be shocked and tell me that’s why I’m gaining weight.

So I’ll just leave it at that

Anyway, thanks to all who made my weekend off so far one of my bestest. And no alcohol or dancing involved! hahaha.

Dinner tonight at Hog’s Breath with YinLu- HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!

Since the pumpkin soup I had during the Flinders Ranges trip, I’ve been wanting to make my own. The pumpkin soup Tom made for us at the farmhouse was SO GOOD.(Me being really greedy, ‘helped’ people finish off their soup… cuz lots of ppl didnt like it ><) Anyway, I asked him what was in it, and it turns out he put in sweet potato as well! (so that’s what made it so good!) SO. I took my pumpkin soup recipe (from my trusty cookbook) and added sweet potatoes to it

Product: Yummy stuff. haha. But a lot less sweet compared to the one Tom made. I guess in a way it’s good since it’s for dinner and dinners shouldn’t be too sweet. I think it’s also cuz the vegetable stock I used was a lot saltier. I actually thought it was a bit too salty… so i added a sprinkle of sugar to my soup…

So here’s how it went…

Ingredients!

pumpkin and sweet potato (adds up to about 1kg), 1L vegetable stock, 1 onion, some butter.

First add some butter to olive oil in a pan (I learnt on tv just that day, to put some oil in the pan, then add butter. The oil helps to prevent the butter from burning. and you get the butter taste anyway :P) then soften the onions. then dump the pumpkin and sweet potatoes inside, and add the 1L of stock.

Let it simmer until soft (around 20 mins)

then…

Blend.

LOoks really gross here…

but then after blending it doesnt look to bad anymore (i think…)

Add about 3/4 cup of cream.

splatter!

mix mix mix…

and serve.  WIth some bread (i bought the bread from the market that day. stone oven bread. yummy stuff.

I tried to use the cream to make it look pretty but um… a bit of a failure. ><

and that’s it. eat.

enjoy.

For someone who used to not like pumpkin, to actually Love this soup now is a miracle… (it’s like me suddenly saying Ii love celery! But we all know that’s never going to happen… haha)

Last week I managed to get hold of ramekins! I’ve been looking all over for them. I actually saw some at Haris Scarfe… but there were only 2 or 3… and they cost at least $2 each. Actually that was already a bargain. I was going to buy. BUT luckily I hesitated.

The following day I managed to get hold of a set of 4 ramekins. For $5!! guess where I bought it from?

*drum roll*

A Pharmacy!

Yah. Seriously.

So what do I do now that I have ramekins?

Well I’ve been wanting to try to make a couple of things. One of them is Crème brulee. The other is Souffle. But I figured I shouldn’t be so adventurous and try the easier of the two… which I assumed was crème brulee.

So I went online and re-found all those really yummy looking recipes I’ve seen before, and came home and looked up in my trusty cookbook and found another recipe but I decided on one I found online cuz it was the smallest recipe available.

Product?

Hm.

I’ll just show you.

So here’s my final product. From round 1.

Looked ok I guess. But if you look properly its not set! It’s all runny… :S

Oh and the sugar layer on top is Waaay too thick. But I can’t do much about that. I don’t have the fancy flamer thing, (we’re supposed to sprinkle sugar over the top, then flame it so it melts and goes slightly brown so we have a ‘thin layer’ on top which goes *crack* nicely when we break into it.) so I had to melt the sugar and then pour on top and it solidifies so quickly its impossible to control how much to pour. So my sugar went *CRAAKK*.  Anyway, that’s the least of my worries.

First of all, when I was actually baking it I couldn’t decide on when the ‘end point’ was. Too wobbly- not cooked. Slightly wobbly- perfect. Not wobbly- overcooked.

But what defines ‘wobbly’?? I couldn’t decide… Well so by the way it looked in the end I thought it wasn’t cooked. So I defied all rules of baking and re-baked them. At a higher temperature. Which resulted in….

That. It went all brown and bubbly. It’s not supposed to. It’s supposed to be like… that Japanese egg thing you know~ like tofu. Smooth. Flat. Not browned!

But whatever. So I made the sugar top thing again.. and even attempted to make it pro with random deco…

But I couldn’t scrape enough out to make a nicer shape, and I couldn’t stick it in the middle cuz the sugar was too thick… =.=” Fail.

So  you’d think after that extra over baking, it would be cooked through right?

Look. It was!

Ok I lied. Only the sides were…

Look at the failure!! Ah!! (and the super thick sugar Again…)

I know I’m not that bad a baker… I mean, I’ve had quite a number of success stories. Right? >< So I concluded… there wasn’t enough egg in it. See… not enough egg, no matter how much you cook it, no way it’s going to solidify. Its just cream, milk, egg and sugar. The only thing that would make it solidify is Egg! So. I blame the eggs on being too small. Yes. Blame it on the eggs.

I’m going to try this again another day and I WILL MAKE IT WORK.

On the plus side, it actually tasted ok.