Avigayil Damm

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.

Although I had the meatballs earlier today at the airport, I couldn’t resist accepting the hot meal offer on the Garuda flight that took me to Medan city. My excuse is that the flight was delayed another hour (from the original half hour that was officially announced) so I had enough time to digest the bakso and was actually slightly hungry. Besides, by the time I get into the hotel in Medan, it would be midnight and I would not be able to get anything to eat anyway so I better prepare now.

Anyways, I always have a dilemma when it comes to plane food, especially when they actually have an option of two different menus. They offered chicken or beef, and this time I chose the chicken. It turns out the chicken was opor ayam which is cooked in coconut milk. It was not too bad, and actually I recognized the taste to be awfully similar to an Indofood instant spice package – and the reason I could recognize it is obviously because I used it before. So basically the taste was pretty ok although most of the taste did not ‘infiltrate’ the chicken.

The chicken came with white rice as well as tofu and bean sprouts stir fry (which was a bit too dry). Oh, and two pieces of crackers.

Oh yes, I do realize that my pictures suck. Especially this one, since I had only a little space from the food while my phone camera (don’t worry, it was set on offline, hence no network searching) has a very annoyingly bright flash.