Monday, June 16, 2008

Ham&Cheese Grilled Sandwich with butter

Hi!

Laura (from Benidorm(Spain), nowadays on a cruise) had this for tea time...

- SANDWICH de JAMÓN de YORK y QUESO con MANTEQUILLA a la plancha ( Ham&Cheese Grilled Sandwich with Butter ):

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Thanks Laura!

バターケーキ/kue mentega


17 juni 2008, selasa pagi

Pagi jam 6.15 weker bunyi....wah telat nih...keenakan bobo...hehehe..biasanya seblom weker bunyi gw da bangun....wiih, abis cuaca mendung mo hujan, jadi enakan bobo kali yaaa
tapiiiii tugas menanti, blom bkin bento mei, blom bkin sarapan pagi, blom gantiin baju Mei...wah sibuk sibuk acara tiap pagi nih....

Jam 7.30 da anterin Mei ke dpn rmh, bis da menanti...balik ke rmh, balik lagi ke rutinitas gw...tumben nih Xiang da ngantuk lagi, ksh susu, langsung bobo die....so gw punya wkt luang buat bikin makanan nih....buat siangnya oyatsu Mei.....Kalo Mei pulang skul, die psti minta makan kue ato roti ato apalah, seblom wktnya makan malem...

Bolak balik buku resep, wah ketemu nih kue mentega, caranya gampang bgt...so dicoba deh aduk2 tuh tepung, gula,mentega,susu, telor....aduk rata, trus tinggal bubuhin raisin , masukin deh di over toster....10 menit bakar..tingggg...jadi deh....
moga moga Mei suka deh.....hehhehee....

Apricot & Ginger Tarte Tatin

Every month over at the Leftover Queen there is a challenge to create a brand new dish from three specified ingredients. Apart from that one caveat, the imagination is free to run wild. This is my first entry so please be kind!

I had one of those great moments when I first saw the list of three ingredients for this month's Royal Foodie Joust. Usually, when presented with a task like this one I will be wracked with indecision and spend days agonising over the potential dishes, day and night.

If it is something really serious, like when I was auditioning for Masterchef, I cannot sleep and even when I close my eyes my busy mind refuses to stop cooking. It is like a demon chef projectionist is playing a fast moving series of images into my head. Think 'A Clockwork Orange' but with more risotto.

But not this time. Instead of being teased with indecision, the words 'tarte tatin' immediately burst into my head when I read that this months creation should contain apricots, ginger and butter.

My usual take on this classic French dish was inspired by a trip to Midsummer House and involves the addition of cinnamon, star anise and bay leaf. I've done this a couple of times before so I knew that spices worked and managed to cut through the rich sweetness of the pastry and caramel. Why not with apricots too?

These delicious little bites of juicy fruitiness are great on their own and maybe it is because they look a little like the sun but I can't eat one without thinking of a warm summer's evening, no matter what the weather outside. They are also great to cook with...

Apricot and Ginger Tarte Tatin
To serve two. Don't let the simplicity fool you - it belies a warm, summery and strangely complex burst of flavour.

4 apricots, skinned and halved
a small piece of ginger, about the size of the top half of your thumb, peeled
50g of caster sugar
50g of unsalted butter, cubed
200g puff pastry, rolled to about 1cm thickness

Preheat the oven to 200c. To peel the apricots, cut a small cross in the skin at the base of each one. Drop them into boiling water for 10-15 seconds then remove and run them under cold running water - you don't want them to cook, at least not yet. When cool the skins should peel off easily.


Melt the sugar in a heavy based, oven proof frying pan (or tarte tatin pan, if you have one) until it begins to brown. Add the butter and stir to make a caramel. Use a fine grater - a microplane is ideal - to grate the ginger into the mixture. Give it a good stir. The warm, spicy notes of the ginger should hit your nose straight away.

Place the apricot halves into the pan, flat side down and return to a medium heat. Cook them for about 3-4 minutes then turn them over and cook for a further 2-3 minutes. Be careful because the caramel is freaking hot and from personal experience I can say that if you get it on your fingers, you know about it.


Remove the pan from the heat and lay the pastry over the top. It should be slightly too large for the pan meaning that the edges can be bunched up and tucked down the sides so that the fruit and caramel is neatly sealed in. Cook it for about 20 minutes until the pastry starts to brown. Turn it out onto an eagerly waiting plate (again, watch out for molten sugar trying to escape and singe your little pinkies) and serve with plain yoghurt if you're feeling healthy, or vanilla ice cream if you're feeling decadent.

To size up the competition or take part, visit the site

Champagne, chefs and Seamus

June 16

On Saturday afternoon, with the trade seminars done, the Cognac drunk, the blog updated, I headed to a restaurant called Dish, where I sipped iced coffee and met chef Jason Rogers of the St. Julien in Boulder. He was in town to cook a special dinner that evening. He had worked in Aspen for awhile, but he said he was enjoying the year-round business of the Front Range (that’s the mostly flat eastern slice of Colorado that includes all of the state’s major population centers, unless you count Grand Junction, which only people in Grand Junction do).
Incidentally, on Thursday I also met with Best New Chef Jeremy Fox of Ubuntu in Napa, a very soft-spoken young man, as many chefs are. In fact, shyness and/or hatred of people are two common personality traits in chefs, which is why they’ve chosen lives in the kitchen and why the kitchen is called a restaurant’s back-of-the-house.
Anyway, I skeedaddled from the interview to head up to the St. Regis, where a van was taking me to a tasting of Piper-Heidsieck’s Rare line of Champagne. Christian Holthausen, who’s that Champagne’s international communications director or something, and I go way back and it was good to see him. He clearly loves his job.
Even wine tastings sometimes have a little informal chatting period, like a cocktail hour except with wine, and I spent it mostly finding philosophical common ground with a right-wing journalist from Texas (we both favor free trade) and then settled in to sampling the 1999, 1998 (bottled only in Magnums) and the 1988 Rares. I sat next to former Nation’s Restaurant News columnist Ed McCarthy (whom Christian introduced as one of the world’s foremost Champagne experts, which he might be), who took copious notes with the gold pens we were given (it made sense, the tasting sheets they’d handed us were made of black paper).
Soon our car was ready to take us to the next stop of the evening, the Best New Chefs party. Our driver, who took us to the Piper-Heidsieck party as well as from it, was not your typical driver. She had a second home in the area and was driving to help out her friend who owned the company. Aspen’s a strange place. I suppose I should have tipped her anyway. It’s only fair.
Media — and I suppose VIPs; there are always VIPs — get into the Best New Chefs party early, and so I walked right past the long line of people waiting to get in (including former Best New Chef Randy Lewis — a great guy; I would have liked to have spent more time with him at the classic) and ducked inside. It’s awkward to walk to the front of a line like it’s your right to do so. It just is. But I did it all the same.
I caught up with other journalists, chatted with Jeremy Fox about his dish of peas on a spoon (it was much more complex than that, obviously, and delicious) and hit as many tables as I could before the hordes were let in.
Thomas John was at the party. He owned critically acclaimed Indian-accented restaurants in Boston before he became the corporate chef for the Au Bon Pain chain. We exchanged notes on the food at the party and generally caught up. He seemed well.
Soon after I bumped into Steve Dolinsky. I’d seen a lot of Steve because he was moderating the trade panels at the Classic. I’d met him years before at the Beard Awards, for which he is perennially nominated for a broadcasting award — he’s won 12 of them, yes 12. Steve’s an extremely nice guy, exemplified by the fact that he remembers a shrimp like me. He hasn’t been nominated for a Beard Award in, like, two years, but I’m sure that drought will end soon.
He suggested we hop on the bus to the next event, a pig roast and crab-and-beer fest at The Hickory House, where David Chang and Wylie Dufresne were dishing up pork products. I settled in at a table with Steve and his wife Amy, as well as Seamus Mullen, the chef of Boqueria in New York. I’d met Seamus once or twice, but not really, and so it was a pleasure to finally get to know him.
He’s a charming, laid-back raconteur who told me the tale of how he came to truly understand ripe, seasonal fruit when he was in Mexico (if I remember correctly this was during a bike trip he took to Panama; he took a bike trip to Panama). He was visiting a strange and remote island built by Aztecs that looked exactly like the Aztec calendar. His father had visited it years before and had encouraged him to go.
That’s how Seamus seems to tell anecdotes — long and rich in detail, but in a good way that keeps the story going.
Anyway, there was a mango tree, burdened with fruit. One dislodged itself as Seamus touched it, because it was that ripe. We also talked about Southeast Asia and how good the food is in Thailand, so naturally I recommended he eat at Rhong-Tiam in New York, where a lot of the food tastes like it does in Bangkok (Rhong-tiam recently changed its menu, removing the Thai writing in what looks like an attempt to make it appeal to white people; we’ll see how that works).
I chatted with assorted other people until the party was dead, which meant it was tricky getting cars back into downtown Aspen (Lexus was providing that service for free, but none of us had the phone number with us). But before too long I managed to get into a car that was going to the 212 House, Chef agent Scott Feldman’s annual after-hours party (his company’s named for the boiling point of water, not New York City’s area code, in case you were wondering), which was close enough to the middle of town. I figured I’d pop into the party, but the bouncer was disinclined to let me in and I wasn’t about to ask him “don’t you know who I am?” because I’m not that guy. Besides I was tired and, as I’d realized last year, disinclined to hang out with celebrity chefs and their groupies.
So I headed back to my hotel. Or tried to. At first I went the wrong way, so I doubled back, and as I walked past the 212 House again, Steve Dolinsky and Amy walked out, so we chatted about the trade seminars as we headed back into town.

Everyone loves 'apply endings

My computer broke. And when I say it broke, it really did it in spectacular fashion. I took it into the Apple store and they told me that it needed a brand new hard drive. Hearing this is hard enough at the best of times but it was coupled with a sickening sucker punch.

When they told me that they couldn't access the information on it at all, it took a few seconds for the cold reality of this to penetrate my psyche. Five years' worth of photographs. 300 music albums. All my documents - every page of notes, every essay, every recipe, every blog entry. All wiped out, somehow disappearing into that incomprehensible Valhalla where documents go to when their host dies. I tried to convince myself that there was a positive side to this but failed miserably. My girlfriend told me that she has never seen me look so ill and she has see me wrestling with the tenacious grip of food- poisoning.

I realised that it was deeply foolish not to have backed anything up, ever, but there I was, ashen faced and feeling sick while all around me gleaming iPods and Macbooks filled the store with their lurid graphics and jolly music.

And then something wondrous happened and whichever god is the god of lost data smiled down upon me. My little iMac, which in computer terms should be drawing a pension round about now, somehow managed to rise, Lazarus like, from the seemingly incurable terminal state in which it had found itself. Not a single lost song, photograph or note.


Which leaves me here sitting in front of freshly formatted computer, almost virginal in its purity, complete with all necessary things which were stored deep within its whirring cogs. And ever so ready to get back on the blogging horse. Oh, and everything is backed up, just in case.

www.justcookit.blogspot.com