Avigayil Damm

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.

After a few days of no serious cooking, I am back. Just a recap, on Sunday, after my visiting friend left, my hubby and I just heated some paprika meatballs which we stored in the freezer, so that was an easy dinner. On Monday, we anticipated coming back from work late, and being lazy to cook anything so we ordered in our favorite cheese burger from Amigos. Unfortunately I forgot to take pictures of those, but will do it next time and post it. On Tuesday, my hubby went to the field, so I was alone at home. I had some leftover lasagna in the freezer so that was my dinner that night, and on Wednesday I asked our guard to buy me some chicken from the street kitchen nearby. No pictures of those either, but will add them on later.

Anyways, today I whipped out the recipe which we did not get to cook last week because we came home late from the office and ended up eating something very easy. This recipe is one of our favorites because it’s fast, easy and tastes good. The usual prerequisites for a recipe to be repeated in this household. It’s peppered paprika beef. And the surprising part is, that it’s all made in the microwave!

All you have to do is prepare some thinly sliced meat, approximately 700 grams, mix in some corn flour, half a cup of water, 3 tbsp of soya sauce, 2 tbsp of sesame oil, salt and pepper. Mix these well before adding in chopped onions and chopped green and red paprika. Cook covered for 10 minutes, stirring twice, and then cook uncovered for about 5 minutes on medium. Voila! The dish is ready to be served, with any choice of side dish. We opted for Basmati rice.

My visiting friend and I went out today for a successful shopping spree at Melawai and Pasaraya, and we arrived home rather late in the afternoon. Having anticipated arriving late from the shopping, we decided on a simple menu: wagyu steak – simple to make but tasting very good.

We bought the steak at Gourmet Garage, the only place we know so far that sells good steaks. This wagyu steak, as my hubby claims, is the best meat we could have, and it’s so juicy and tender, that asking for it to be cooked ‘well-done’ would be the crime of the century. The carbohydrate source choice of tonight was boiled potatoes. We also caramelized some onion rings for additional taste. As for the sauce, we opted for our own home-made béarnaise sauce.

The steak, caramelized onion and boiled potatoes are of course easy to make, nothing that I can share with you. But the béarnaise sauce recipe may be of interest.

Ingredients:

• 150 gr butter, melt separately and let cool
• 6 egg yolks
• 150 ml beef bouillon (or use 1 cube beef stock in 150 ml water)
• 3 tsp white wine vinegar
• 1 tbsp lemon juice
• 2 tsp dried tarragon

In a medium heavy sauce pan, I mixed the egg yolks with the beef bouillon, white wine vinegar, lemon juice and dried tarragon. Once the butter has cooled down, I added it into the sauce pan and started to cook it at very low heat, stirring.

Now, in the original recipe the butter is melted in the sauce pan and then the egg mixture is added in it, but one time I accidentally discovered that my way (as above) is much better. It’s important that the butter is cooled down first, because not only does it help avoid heating up the egg yolk too quickly so that it becomes scrambled eggs, but it will also allow you to heat the sauce slowly, giving enough time to allow the sauce to thicken. Once the sauce starts to thicken, turn off the stove to stop the heat, as the heat from the sauce pan will be enough to keep it ‘cooking’. I have come to ‘master’ this sauce and my hubby has voted it as his favourite. Try it out and tell me what you think!

After more than two weeks of chicken overdose, tonight’s menu is finally going to be beef. It’s still in the form of meatballs though, but my hubby didn’t seem to mind.

The usual stuff went into the meatballs: breadcrumbs, salt and pepper, and some Worcestershire sauce. After it’s fried, it’s set aside in an oven proof dish. The sauce is made of stir fried onion, cooked until tender with a quarter cup red wine vinegar, one and a half cup beef stock, one third cup of cranberries sauce (originally the recipe called for plum sauce/jam but during our shopping I forgot to look for it). Once the onion is soft, the sauce is poured over the meatballs. As for the parsley crust, it’s made of self-raising flour, butter, milk and, obviously, some parsley. It’s used to cover most of the dish to prevent the meatballs to get too dry and the sauce to evaporate and thicken too much.

It turns out that the onions absorbed most of the vinegar taste so it ended up being the most sour part of the dish. Mixed together it was quite ok but the taste of the sauce did not seep into the meat much. Maybe it wasn’t supposed to, I don’t know. But in general, I thought the taste of the three main ingredients of this dish had completely different taste. I guess they were supposed to compliment each other, which they did, although I would probably put less vinegar in it next time.