Monday, February 9, 2009

Chocolate Brownies

10 januari 2009, selasa,

Abis anter Mei n beres2 rumah, nyempetin bikin brownies, buat cemilan Mei ntar siang. Niat bikinnya si uda dari seminggu lalu, sayangnya kalo ke spmarket kelupaan trus beli coklat batangannya...terpaksa ditunda tunda deh.

Bahan
60 gr coklat batangan
60 gr mentega cair
2 sdm susu
30 gr cocoa
2 bh telur
100 gr gula
150 gr hotcake mix
Cara
1. Lumerkan coklat, lalu campur dengan mentega cair, aduk rata. Masukkan susu, lalu masukkan cocoa, aduk rata, sisihkan
2. Kocok telur n gula dengan mixer mpe mengembang
3. Masukkan adonan 1, aduk rata
4. Bagi 2-3 bagian hotcake mix, campur rata
5. Oven 170 drajat selama 30-40 menit.

Decorating...

I made a few decorating changes in the past couple weeks. The first thing is that I got new curtains for the living room.

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I also got the quilt square that is hanging on the wall in the stairwell. And yesterdays quest was painting the dining room. I painted it a classic taupe color.


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I also purchased the new table runner; it's lace with brown bows on the corners and the candles with the berry and star rings around them. Here is a closer look.


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The next step is getting nicer book cases to put in the dining room. I need to go through all our books too and put all the school ones downstairs. Everything is coming along slowly but surely!

Hearts and Thai food

February 9

I bet you don’t have a model of a defibrillator on your desk. Well, I do. It’s an exact replica of the Medtronic Virtuoso™ with Conexus™ Telemetry that gets installed into people whose hearts have a tendency to stop beating. The defibrillator gives the heart a little jolt and the patient continues to live.
My new friend Jennifer Watson sells them and she brought one to dinner for me to have. It's missing the Virtuoso’s guts, but it looks the same.
Or so she says. I wouldn’t know, really, but is that something to lie about?
Jennifer doesn’t just sell defibrillators. She watches the doctors install them to make sure they attach them right. Because it’s important.
And she loves eating. She loves it! She has no interest in cooking, though. Chefs have flirted with her, hoping to seduce her with the allure of a private lesson, but that is not the right approach for Jennifer.
I’d told her about Rhong Tiam, my favorite Thai place in the city, and she thought our eating there together would be a good idea.
And indeed it was, as Jennifer has possibly a higher threshold for spicy food than I do, and thinks eating is just about the greatest thing in the world to do. So she gets up early in the morning to work out to make up for it.
Me, I just eat. I used to go to the gym regularly, but when I stopped going and the world didn’t end I realized I didn’t have to go, and I find it hard to work up the motivation to do so.
At least if I ever need to have a defibrillator installed, I’ll know what it looks like.
What we ate:
Thai chorizo (sai krok isaan)
Vietnamese summer rolls (Jennifer apologized, but she loves them, and I’m not the purist I once was — I mean, go ahead and have Vietnamese food in a Thai restaurant if you want to; even on Rhong Thiam’s menu in its Thai classics section the first dish listed is rendang, and that’s actually Malay)
Thai beef salad (neua nam tok)
Southern style chicken (khua glin gai)
Honey duck (a bit different from the classic pet yang nam phueng, but still delicious)
Then we chatted for about an hour and decided to finish up with tom yam noodle soup with beef

10

February 9

Today is my 10th anniversary at Nation’s Restaurant News. Can you believe it?

Elevenses and Solving the Credit Crunch with Cake

Much like knowledge, a little nostalgia is a dangerous thing.

Get too wrapped in thinking that life was better ‘back in the day’ and you start to forget that everything wasn’t chocolate boxes and roses. No matter what the right-wing press will have you believe, life is better now than it ever has been.

However, take off the rose-tinted glasses for a moment and there are still some aspects of bygone times that are just as appealing: train travel, picnics, cricket matches, slow food as the norm rather than a concept. And elevenses.

Elevenses is a notion that, along with Gentlemen’s Clubs, steam engines and cholera seems to belong to the past, to an age seen only in history books or episodes of Jeeves and Wooster (or Zimbabwe).

Elevenses don’t belong in an era of conference calls, celebrity perfumes and instant messaging.

But they should.

In fact, I have an idea: it should be mandatory for employers to provide coffee, tea and cakes and a fifteen-minute break at some point between 10:45 and 11:30. Actually, sod it, make it twenty minutes.

Hear me out on this one. Not only would it make the work place a far happier place (little things go a long way), it would also make the prospect of Monday mornings a lot more bearable, knowing that there was a steaming mug of coffee and a slice of Victoria Sponge cake just round the corner.

It would allow socialising and chatting and catching up and all those important human interactions to be done in a designated window.

It would foster a sense of community spirit and help to iron out any differences or bubbling animosities. It is hard to be angry with someone if they have cream running down their chin or chocolate round their mouth.

It would give employees a sense that they are being appreciated and not just being shafted by ‘the man’ in return for the privilege of a monthly paycheque.

Pretty soon, this happiness would start to spread from company to company, city to city, politician to politician, nation to nation and NGO to NGO.

The UN would be a different place altogether if they stopped for Sachertorte every day and imagine how much easier diplomatic relations in the Middle East would be if they knew there was a baklava break to look forward to in an hour?

For those that have to whittle everything down to a balance sheet - Happy people are happy employees. Happy employees are more productive and more productive employees are more profitable.

In short, it would make the world a better place.

The logic is flawless and my own projections (done on a spreadsheet, I’ll have you know) suggest that not only would the cake start to pay for itself after just a month, you would start to turn a profit (thanks to productivity going through the roof) after only six weeks. Depression, recession, credit crunch solved and a new era of world peace and harmony entered. All through cake. Here’s one to start with:



Recipe – Chocolate, Hazelnut and Coffee Cake
This is based on a Nigel Slater recipe which he, in turn, adapted from a Tamasin Day-Lewis recipe. It is awesome. Serves six.

125 grams of unsalted butter, cubed
125 grams of Demerara sugar
2 large eggs
A large shot of espresso
A heaped teaspoon of baking powder
125 grams of plain flour
100 grams of ground hazelnuts
125 grams of ground dark chocolate

Mix the butter and sugar together until they are fluffy and pale. Unless you have arms like Brian Blessed, I suggest you use an electric mixer. Add the eggs, one at a time and beat it all together.

Stir in the coffee then sift in the flour and baking powder. Using a spatula of some description fold the mixture together before adding most of the hazelnuts and chocolate. Hold some back for topping the cake.

Tip the cake mixture into a lined cake tin and pop into a pre-heated oven (about 180 degrees). It will take about an hour. You know its ready if you stick in a skewer and it comes out clean. Turn it out onto a wire rack and leave to cool for about fifteen minutes.

If you are feeling really decadent smear on some cream cheese mixed with icing sugar and cocoa powder.

Call someone, anyone, who enjoys cake. Brew some coffee, cut large slices and enjoy, smug in the knowledge that you’ve done your bit in fostering a new age of global harmony and happiness.

For more world-changing ideas, follow me on Twitter.

Food for the HEART!

Since heart day is just around the corner , I wanted to share to all of you what I have just learned ...


"Love is not about finding the right person, but creating a right relationship. It's not about how much love you have in the beginning but how much love you build 'til the end"


Hope you guys are with me as I ponder on this note... :-)

hugs,
joanie xxx