ayonecan-cook

This baby made it to the TOP 9 on Foodbuzz today, 31st May 2010. Happy Buzz Day ! Thank You to the Foodbuzz community :) A thunderstorm lashed the sky, dense, grey sheets of rain pummelled the ground, the television went blank, the house morphed into dark, gloomy and small, the wind swept through gaping windows and quivering doors and a fine spray of rain caressed an arm with chilled drops......... a cold quiver settled inside of me and I could think of little else but Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, Heathcliff's unresolved passions and Mr. Rochester's brooding misery.... what did I do? I made bread. I should have made "lunatic mugs with smiling faces" ...but I made bread. Had it been a little colder I would have lit the fireplace, if I had one, or a wood oven if I had one too. Black thunderstorms are a haunting pleasure. I love them. When I'm happy. I was.... so I made a rosemary infused bread embedded with flecks of sundried tomatoes baked to a crust on the o...

  There's a reason why 'prawn brain' or 'otak udang' (oh-tuck oo-dung) is  a Malaysian idiom used to describe an extremely stupid person. It's because prawns pile poop in their heads. And along a little vein on their backs too. So the next time you're cleaning prawns snip the front half of their heads off in addition to removing the little 'vein' along the curve of their backs.  The reason I'm telling you this is because this recipe for fried rice noodles uses a sweet, rich and creamy pink prawn stock made by blending the shells and heads of sauteed prawns to a mush and the juice drained and squeezed out. So it is a pretty good idea to make sure your prawns are poop free. Agree? Having said that, can you imagine how delicious this noodle dish is? Prawn/prawn juice is one of the many natural flavour enhancers....it contains umami ......the fifth primary taste in addition to sweet, sour, salty and bitter. Put simply umami is a pleasant savoury t...

These cookies made the top 9 on Foodbuzz today, 26th May. Happy Buzz day! I came up with a peanut thumbprint cookie with a nutella centre. Clever me. It was very very delicious.  The recipe for the peanut cookie was adapted from...here's the Link and Credit Tree......                                        Malaysia Best                                                  |                                 ...

What do you do when you have little kiddies, little grandkiddies or little great grandkiddies? You put them to work. That's what you do. (Aside: I'm a grandma with a dab of mean. And invisible eyes at the back of my head) I waited a long time for this post.  I was excruciatingly eager to get this post up because colors just make my knees go all soft and translucent, like sauteed onions. I think Peace and Light knew that. They knew I would adore these candy coloured sugar cookies. And they were completely right. I do. My sweetie pies. (Aside : We're such girlie girls, my girls and I) At only 11 and 12 they made these all on their own. After their brother H had made the brownies , a few posts ago, Peace and Light thought candy coloured cookies would make a cool post too. And the rest they say ........is a baking tray and cookie dough. Peace loves horses, she rides, she cooks, she bakes, she sews, she knits, she crochets (surpassing her Mom.......... and me ), she decorates ca...

What is large, fat, soft, huggable and can be eaten? A look alike teddy bear with its arms and legs crossed.  This Challah turned out so huge that Z was constantly exclaiming as I cajoled it from the oven. This is the hugest braided bread I've made. It sat diagonally on my largest jelly roll tray and it just grew and grew. I created a beast. Then with a brush wielding hand (if you have read my earlier posts you'll know I'm on a bread painting binge) I painted it and I thought it looked all right until I saw the photos. The design was inspired by the two pots of ferns that stand guard on each side of our front door. The longer I stared at the photos the more frightened I became. It looked reptile-ish because of the glaze-y and shiny finish. Oww. It's a Frankenstein. (I told you I preferred rustic ). But I'm still posting this because  I'm not going to make another one so soon. It's huge! I don't think painted bread look too good glazed. Dusted with flou...

I would finish a packet of this so fast and then hunger for more. But there really is no other way to enjoy this than to make your own because we all know that commercial varieties are deep fried in the same oil over and over again. Ick! I made this and it was oh! so delicious. It was sweet and spicy  clinging to crunchy. I was on high. The cassava root may appear quite intimidating because it looks very much like the trunk of a small tree with a very rough, dark and thick bark. It looks hard and heavy too. But once you get the skin off (which is actually not difficult to do) you'll find the inside flesh a smooth, silky, pristine white albeit very firm. I'm always amazed at the contrast.   These are sliced thinly and deep fried...very much like potato crisps ~ but they're not as fragile. Potato crisps almost break and dissolve the moment you put them into your mouth, without any effort at all, but these are more crunchy as opposed to crispy and slightly chewy. Lets just ...

                                 ~ T'was Mother's Day ~

This post was in the Top 9 of Foodbuzz on May 11th 2010. Happy Buzz Day! Be warned of future and probably successive posts of wildly painted bread in all flavours, shapes and sizes. I'm on an un restrained bread painting binge. But painting aside, these are truly one of the best ever sandwich buns. They have been circulating several blogs and have been raved over each time. I had to make them and true enough they are so so so good. Soft, substantial and full of flavour. Perfect burger buns that excel shop bought ones by light years. These homemade highly recommended buns have been featured on Cathy's Wives With Knives , Mari's Once Upon a Plate , Linda's How to Cook a Wolf and Lori's All That  Splatters . And probably many more!  Needing to be kneaded (yea I know.....don't we all feel that way) only once, left to rise and then baked, it's easy and quick to make as well. Maybe I've gone a little overboard with the painting but if it adds a little pers...

I never did enjoy watching tatoo reality shows on tv because I never could understand the joys of tatooing. But now I know. Painting on an object is quite different from the painting of an object. Putting in all those intricate details on skin is very much like putting in all those intricate details on crust. Like graffiti on walls. Minus the pain of your subject. And minus the authorities. But total satisfaction. So I decided to make baguettes as a canvas. For 2 reasons. I was intrigued by the way they were shaped and to feed my family. The recipe for the baguettes comes from a blog of a young chef in training, Dylan, on his blog, From Cook to Chef . The post came with a wonderful you tube video which I have downloaded as well.  It is not simply the rolling and rolling that gives the baguettes their perfectly cylindrical shape but the building up of a 'backbone', sealing it, flapping the dough and repeating the process at least 3 times before finally rolling the dough in...