It didn’t really dawn on me until after breakfast that today is Saturday, the day where I usually sit down, browse through my recipe collection, make up a one-week menu and its shopping list, and then go groceries shopping. Only when my hubby mentioned some things I needed to put in my shopping list did I realize this crucial fact.
So I sat down and browsed through my recipes again. I have decided to give some old recipes a go, combined with something new for variation. As for today, I actually already had something in mind: I was going to try and make some chocolate cake for tea time, and then Chinese beef and asparagus with oyster sauce.
I took the recipe for chocolate cake from epicurious.com again, because I was looking for a very simple and basic chocolate cake – which in the end was not simple to make at all! As many of the reviews of the recipe said, the cake turned out a little bit too dry and crumbly, so I serve it with generous heaps of chocolate frosting – which also resulted in twice as much as needed. I still have some leftover of the frosting, and am trying to find out what I could use it for.
While the cake was baking and the frosting was cooling down in the fridge, I prepared dinner. The recipe was taken from Periplus Mini Cookbooks series, titled Simple Stir-fries. And it is as simple as it claims it is. As per recipe, I marinated 500 gr of lean beef fillet in soy sauce, sesame oil and rice wine, for at least 15 minutes. According to the recipe, I was supposed to stir-fry the asparagus and beef separately but I didn’t want to complicate my life. So what I did was, after stir-frying 3 crushed garlic until fragrant, I added the beef (all of it in a big wok) and stir-fried it until the beef changes colour, and then added the asparagus and cooked them covered. After a few minutes, I added the stock, oyster sauce and remaining rice wine and boiled it until the sauce was reduced. It was basically ready in the same time that the rice was ready (about 15 minutes). And that’s the kind of cooking I like. 
