Avigayil Damm

For a few times now, whenever my hubby and I go to Plaza Senayan for a movie, we have noticed this market restaurant Marché, so this time we decided to try it out. As the name says, this restaurant uses a market concept where you go from one stall to another and pick your own food. They will give you a card at the entrance, which the stall’s staff will stamp with a code corresponding to your order. You will then pay at the exit. I thought it was quite fun!

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Lasagna is one of my favorite dish, and although I have often made it, I just realized that I have never posted about it, so here it is. The recipe is from my mom, so don’t ask me where she got it from. I love my mom’s cooking a lot, so I am going by her recipe for this one.

White (Bechamel) Sauce:

• 50 gr margarine/butter
• 50 gr all purpose flour
• 400 ml evaporated milk
• 1/4 tsp (or to taste) ground pepper
• 1/4 tsp nutmeg powder
• 100 ml beef stock
• 125 gr grated cheddar cheese

Melt the butter and add flour, whisk vigorously until fragrant. Add milk and stock gradually and stir to mix. Add grated cheese, pepper and nutmeg powder. Let simmer, stirring constantly, until it slightly thickens.

Meat Sauce:

• 2 tbsp butter
• 2 cloves garlic, crushed
• 1 large onion, minced
• 500 gr minced meat
• 400 gr tomatoes, peeled and minced or crushed
• 100 gr tomato sauce
• 100 ml beef stock
• 2 tsp dried oregano (or Italian seasoning)
• salt to taste
• sugar to taste if desired (or add one grated carrot)

Melt the butter, cook the onion and garlic until soft and fragrant. Add the minced meat, stir to mix, cook until slightly browned. Add crushed tomatoes, tomato sauce and beef stock. Cook and stir until the sauce has slightly reduced. Add oregano, salt and sugar to taste. If you use grated carrot, add it together with the crushed tomatoes.

The rest is just to stack them up in an oven dish (I used a 20×20 cm dish and had some leftover sauce). If you’re using instant lasagna plates, make sure you put some sauce on the bottom before you add the plates so it doesn’t dry in the oven. Otherwise, cook them as directed. Layer the lasagna plates alternately with the white and the meat sauce, with the meat sauce being the top layer. Add 125 gr of mozzarella (or more, depending on how much you like mozzarella) on top. Cook at 180 degrees (Celsius) for 35-40 minutes. Bon appétit!

For a belated birthday dinner, I took out three friends of mine to Din Tai Fung, a Chinese restaurant famous for its dim sum variety and other dishes as well. We ordered chicken xiao long bao (dim sum filled with chicken – yummy and juicy), fried rice with salty fish (yummy and salty but goooood), mie angsio sapi (noodles with beef – best with additional soy sauce and chilli), kepiting soka abon (crab with floss – no idea how it tasted, I don’t eat crabs), steamed vegetables dumplings (not so impressive but good anyway), and buncis cah sapi (stir-fried haricot beans with minced meat – deliciously crispy).

It has been a long time since I last dined here so I really dug in. We all did. With all the food on the table, at first we thought there was no way we could finish them all, but we were wrong. We even ordered a second double portion of the chicken dumplings because they were so delicious. Of course it goes without saying, that I would definitely come back to this place again soon.

Tonight’s recipe is taken from a recently purchased Periplus Mini Cookbooks ‘Favourite Everyday Dinners’. The obvious reason for purchasing this book was to compile as many recipes as possible which are easy to make and won’t take much time. This time, I chose one dish I really like but have never tried to cook myself before: beef stroganoff. I must confess that I don’t always follow the recipe to the letter. So this recipe is how I made it (not how it is specified in the book).

Ingredients:

• 400 gr. beef fillet, cut into thin stripes
• 2 tbsp plain flour
• 50 gr butter
• 1 thinly sliced onion
• 1 clove garlic, crushed
• 250 gr button mushroom, sliced
• 50 ml brandy (I actually used cognac)
• 1 cup beef stock or 1 cup water with 1 beef stock cube
• 1 1/2 tbsp tomato paste
• 3/4 cup (185 gr) sour cream
• 1 tbsp chopped fresh flat leaf parsley

Dust the beef strips in flour and shake of any excess. Melt half the butter in a large frying pan and stir fry the onion and garlic over medium heat until they soften. Add the mushrooms and cook for 2-3 minutes, then pour in the brandy (or cognac, whichever you’re using) and simmer until liquid has evaporated. Add the beef and cook until browned, and then add the beef stock and tomato paste. Add the sour cream. Cook for a few minutes until the liquid is slightly reduced. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Originally the recipe suggests to stir fry the beef separately and then put aside. But I don’t think it made much difference in the end result that I actually fried the beef after the mushroom is cooked. I served it with mashed potato, which went very well with it. It was definitely a keeper, and we had some leftover which we took with us for lunch the day after next.

My hubby arrived back last Friday and I had planned to make him a cheeseburger. Unfortunately I came home a little too late from the office so we called Izzi Pizza instead because we didn’t want to bother with the preparation and all that.

Yesterday when I wanted to make cheeseburger, I realized that I forgot to buy the burger bun. Doh! So my hubby and I decided to make burger steak instead. I thought this wasn’t such a bad back up plan. Since we had plenty of minced meat, we had enough burger steak for today as well, but we served them differently. Here’s how.

The photo on the left is how we served it on Saturday: with boiled potatoes, grilled tomatoes, caramelized onion and brown sauce. The brown sauce is nothing fancy, just cream stirred into the pan which was used to fry the steak and onion, and then we added a bit of brown food colour to make it less pale. Looks quiet and pretty plain eh. But I tell you, it tasted damn good.

The Sunday version was served with roast potatoes, sunny side up egg and béarnaise sauce. For a recipe of béarnaise sauce, click here. Which one looks to be to your liking? If you ask me, I liked them both.