It’s vacation time! We arrived today a little bit delayed; although our airline had previously informed us that the schedule was moved up by 20 minutes, we ended up leaving Jakarta 20 minutes after the original schedule. Talk about irony. (more…)
It was the 31st of December 2007. My then-partner-current-hubby and I and my boss had decided to spend New Year’s eve at Ritz Carlton’s Prime Steak House, for a New Year’s six-course menu dinner.
Since it was quite a long time ago, I don’t remember what we had, but what I do remember is this small bread (served in its tiny little baking dish) that they called roti sambal. Roti means bread and sambal is a mix of chilli which is usually served together with Indonesian dish. There are many different kinds of sambal, depending on the mixture. This bread was made with sambal terasi (terasi is dried shrimp paste) and it tasted really good. It was not very spicy actually so I thought it went well as a bread taste. It was also very unique as I never came across anything like this before.
See how small the bread (and the pan) is compared to my hand? It’s so cute, I had difficulties controlling myself not to snatch the bread pan. (I am crazy about small things) I may try to go back there and see whether they still serve these.
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. 
I managed to complete a large part of my big plan for today. I cooked sausage and leek soup with Irish soda bread, and carrot cake. The bread was to accompany the soup, obviously, while the carrot cake was baked to be served in two different meetings on Tuesday. One in my hubby’s office, and the other in mine. All recipes are from epicurious.com which is a site I very often turn to for ideas on what to cook.
For the sausage and leek soup, I actually substituted leek with spring onions because I wasn’t really crazy about leek. For the sausage, I used Rookworst by Unox, because I could not find smoked kielbasa.
There is a video on how to make Irish soda bread here. I didn’t use raisins and caraway but I used sunflower seeds instead because I intended to serve it with soup and didn’t think that raisins would go with it. What I should have also done was reduce the amount of sugar used, because the bread still ended up a little too sweet to go well with the soup.
As for the carrot cake, you can find the recipe here, and it was a big success in both the meetings in which it was served 
When I made the icing, I used less icing sugar because with the amount of maple syrup in the recipe, the icing became much too sweet. Unfortunately the reduction of icing sugar also resulted in the icing being too soft and ending up too creamy. I still have some leftover of the icing and it really goes well with toast. 
Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture of the soup and the bread when it was served together. This picture was taken the day after (we had some leftover of the soup but not the bread). Try it out yourself!
Today my hubby was struck by the ‘cooking’ lightning, and decided to bake bread. I, on the other hand, was due to cook chicken meatballs in tomato sauce, according to the one week menu.
First, the bread. My hubby found a basic white bread recipe which he followed. It’s the basic all purpose flour, yeast, milk and butter. This recipe also called for three teaspoons of honey. The dough is kneaded for a while, left to stand and raise for 45 minutes, kneaded again, divided into two baking forms, and left to raise again for another hour. My hubby read somewhere that instead of egg yolks, you can also use cold coffee (as in the drink, not the ground beans) to brush the surface of the bread to give it a nice colour. That’s exactly what he did, before he sprinkled some poppy seeds on the top. Right after it has cooled a bit, we dug right in, and were very happy with the result. Of course, nothing really beats the taste of freshly made bread.
As for me, I started my cooking process a few minutes after the bread was finished – or shall I say, after I have finished tasting a piece of the newly baked bread. The chicken meatballs (yes meatballs again, and yes I can see the ‘chicken’ tag grow bigger and bigger in the cloud) also contains fresh chopped thyme as well as breadcrumbs. The 
meatballs are fried first until golden brown, and then set aside. The sauce is made of chopped onions, stir fried in butter until soft, combined with crushed tomatoes, chicken stock, some balsamic vinegar and Italian seasoning mix. I added some tomato sauce which gives a little sweet taste to balance out the sour taste from the tomato and balsamic vinegar. After the sauce has thickened slightly, the meatballs are returned to the pot and left to simmer for some minutes. I served it with spaghetti (second favourite carbohydrate source) and sprinkles of parmesan cheese. The result left my sole customer happy – and customer satisfaction is the most important thing in my line of business!
