Avigayil Damm

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.

Since my hubby is away, I opted to eat everything that he would otherwise not have on his menu. One of them is Indian food. Although he doesn’t mind having them once in a while but such occasion is just too rare for me. So when I went shopping the other day, I took some ready made Indian food from the supermarket: beef curry, chicken tikka masala and nan parantha for accompaniment. It was quite practical to heat up too. I just popped the beef curry in the microwave for a few minutes, while the tikka masala and nan went into the oven for about 20 minutes (wrapped in aluminium foil). Yes, I do realize the instruction on the box said 7-10 minutes in the oven but I took the food out from the freezer so it did take longer to actually heat up.

The beef curry was good although not particularly special. It reminded me a lot of Padang beef curry (rendang) although it was much more rich in spices. The tikka masala was really nice, it was a bit spicy (as in chilli hot) but still tolerable. The nan was actually disappointing because it was not as expected. It was too plain and too fluffy, and tasted like ordinary bread. So next, time I will try the other tastes of India (I could see they had plenty to choose from) but I may just try to make my own nan. We’ll see.

This week’s theme is going to be what I cook or buy to eat alone. My hubby is on one of his business trips, and this time he is going to India for a training. He’s been gone since last Sunday actually, which means my solo culinary adventures have started since then.

On Saturday, my friend who moved to Bogor from Yogya came to visit and stay over the weekend, so on Sunday we went to Sushi Groove (second time this week for me), but this time I didn’t take any pictures to post here. If you want to know what I think about this restaurant/sushi bar, click here.

On Monday, I tried out an Indonesian instant food from a box. I forgot what the brand is, but it comes in a box, and is available in Hero supermarket. I forgot to take a picture of it, and although I would not recommend it to you, the picture would have at least showed which brand you should avoid. It didn’t even earn its right to be posted on this blog.

On Tuesday, I stopped by at Hero supermarket in Kemang to do some dinner shopping. Since I left late from the office, plus the bad traffic, I arrived at Hero quite late. I was determined not to have anything complicated for tonight, because I imagined that I would arrive at home at 7 or maybe later. So I took a box of ‘Quick & Tasty’ which was something like plane food, simple food that came in a box and that you only have to heat in the microwave for four minutes. I also took some other food that would be quick and easy to prepare, which I will review in later posts.

As suspected, I arrived home a little before seven. After putting the groceries in their places, I heated up my food in the microwave. I have actually tasted quite a few of this ‘Quick & Tasty’ food box, and I particularly liked the chicken terriyaki. They didn’t have that variant today so I picked up the black pepper beef. The beef itself was good and tender but the vegetables were not so good. Of course, what should I expect from such instant food right? Well, I was hoping, the instant food genre would not try to exceed its reputation once in a while. Plus, as I said, the chicken terriyaki was good, so I should probably stick to that one next time.