Avigayil Damm

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.

Today I went to the salon to get my hair curled, wanting to have hair like this. Unfortunately, I ended up causing the hairdresser to panic because after one long hour (which would usually only take only 15 minutes), my hair still did not take on much of the curls. He blamed my hair for being much too straight and slippery. But since he was looking out for my hair’s well-being also, he just decided to stop the process. In the end, my hair did take on some of the curls, but to ensure that they stayed on, he put on loads of styling mousse and told me to leave it wet instead of drying the hair with the blow drier and risking my hair to fall flat again.

Anyways, since the hairdo thingy lasted longer than expected, I felt really faint and hungry. I had to do some shopping at Pasaraya anyway, so I went to eat at the Wata Kitchen (short for Wajan-wajan tanah air which is the food court with local food) which is located on the under-ground floor. You see, one of the downside of being  married to a foreigner (who does not fancy local food very much) is that I don’t have enough chances to savour local dishes. So whenever I have the chance to eat out by myself (or with a friend), I almost always go for a local food stall.

After looking around, I zoomed in at the Te Julfa Padang food stall, and ordered a dish of Padang satay. Different from the normal Javanese satay, the Padang satay does not use peanut sauce. For a recipe, click here (I have never tried this before). As with all Padang food, the satay is also very hot (as in spicy), but I really enjoyed it.

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.