Thursday, January 6, 2011

New Year's Eve Turkey for 2011


Hello mates! Allow me to say Buon anno a tutti!

Year 2010 was the best year of my life so far. It's just hard to say goodbye to the year that was very amazing, fantastic, superb and euphoric! No sufficient adjectives to describe what I have learned and experienced the past months. The turn of events and scenarios tremendously accelerated as the year ends. And to give the exclamation mark for this year---it was about the magical moment of meeting the one and only person I admired the most and he's none other than Mr. Jamie Oliver! Since he's my inspiration about my great passion in cooking, I have finally tried doing turkey for the first time. Definitely I followed the Jamie's variety of turkey recipes he had in his cookbooks and website. I also did his roasted vegetables recipe although I didn't copy his gravy but came out with my own version. And thank God I can say it's also a gravy that is to die for!


To recap what happened in 2010, I remember it started with my barbecue cooking for Australia day on January then followed by my very adventurous jungle trekking. Came February I visited the world's famous Angkor Wat in Cambodia and experienced the Vietnamese holiday during their Lunar New Year. The next month was March, which is the most challenging part of my life because I have to undergo an operation. It was a successful operation and my father came here in Saigon to take care of me. After March came April-- my most favorite month of the year because it's my birthday. It was a different birthday because I spent it on the beach with my friends and did parasailing for the first time. Then the middle part of the year arrived between the months of May and June where in I was able to get my UK visa. Third quarter is another travel experience for me when I visited Singapore for the first time to catch up with some friends and rode the Singapore Flyer. July swiftly ended and before I knew it--it's already August.



August was the time of the year where I had to go home to Manila and fixed a lot stuff as I received my Schengen visa for my Europe trip. The arrival of September means excitement because of my first solo painting exhibition. But at the same time itwas the toughest month because of my new job and then I have to take off for a month long vacation by October. The most difficult situation I had was to bargain my unpaid vacation leave to my boss. In the end I victoriously win and went for the October UK-Europe trip.

The most special month for last year was October. I travelled to UK and European countries then experienced a lot of new things, met a lot of amazing people and of course as I always repeat---I met my one and only idol Jamie Oliver! November was just about rejuvenising and reminiscing the best 25 days of my life in UK and Europe. Certainly December is for Christmas and it was my first here in Saigon and just spent it on the Beach and got a bit of a tan.

That's pretty much for the year that swiftly went away. I already said my farewell to 2010 and toasted for the new year with a few good friends in Saigon with my lips-smacking turkey for New Year's eve dinner night!

Here's to an exciting 2011 that ROCKS! :-)


big hug,
joanie xxx

Good eats and other thoughts

Today I tried a delicious meal for supper! I will be sharing the recipe this coming week. I have always wanted to try risotto. I picked up some boxed risotto to try out last week. I wanted to see how it would come out and how it is suppose to look before I try it from scratch. I also tried a new recipe from my Pampered Chef vegetarian cookbook. It is called pan-fried polenta with mushrooms and zucchini.


I am also excited that I got my new kitchen gadget organizer in the mail from The Pampered Chef. I use to have everything in a small container on the counter, but I needed more room and wanted things to be a little more organized. Since I sell Pampered Chef, it was easy to get this ordered for myself. :) 

I love it! It turns so you can reach things on the other side without having to fish through it. My counter definitely looks a lot better. 

I've been reading Clutter Rehab by Laura Wittmann, author over at Orgjunkie.com. She has written 101 tips to help us de-clutter and form good habits to keep our houses organized and neat! I am loving her book and it has energized me to organize areas that I haven't touched since we moved into our house 2 years ago. The closets in the upstairs have been holding lots of things that I thought I needed two years ago, but when I went through one of them the other night I was thinking why in the world did I save this? I have quite a few piles of things to move to the basement or get thrown away. While going through one of my boxes, I found all of my old journals, as far back as 1996. Wow, how silly I was back then!! I came to the one where I started talking to my now husband and when we started dating, ah young love! It was definitely a good laugh to read back through all the memories. And no I didn't throw those out! :)


Liver and Bacon Risotto


When I made the New Year resolution to include more healthy eating tips on this blog to help others perhaps keep their resolutions, I thought that I had to start with something particularly significant. I therefore deemed to come up with something representative of my favourite healthy forms of cuisine. For many years, Chinese food (real Chinese food - not the monosodium glutamate enhanced concoctions churned out by a great many takeaway restaurants) was my favourite form of cooking, both for its quickness of preparation and its delicious textures and ingredients, as much as for its healthy properties. Although Chinese food remains a great favourite of mine in all of these respects, it has in modern times at least been matched by Mediterranean cuisine, specifically that of Italy and Spain.

So I had to decide: Italy or Spain? In the end, I decided to do a combination of both. Risotto is of course an Italian dish but this Liver and Bacon Risotto was inspired by a dish which I remember eating in a small cafe on the Spanish island of Majorca, quite a number of years ago. I unfortunately cannot recall the Spanish name of what was a local Majorcan dish but it was, as closely as I can recall, an offal based paella, incorporating liver, heart and all sorts of other delicious cuts of meat. I decided to be less adventurous, however, on this occasion to ensure wider appeal and confine myself to liver, along with bacon and a selection of vegetables...

This recipe is for two people.


Ingredients

1/2lb lamb's liver
2 rashers of bacon
4oz risotto rice (note that long grain or basmati are not suitable substitutes)
1 pint of fresh chicken stock (A British pint, ie 20 fl oz = 1 1/4 US pints)
1 small white onion
1/2 a red bell pepper
2 closed cup mushrooms
1 tbsp broad beans (preferably fresh but canned in water will work)
1 clove of garlic
1 oz butter
Sunflower oil for frying the liver and bacon
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Few mint leaves for garnish

Method

It is firstly necessary to fry the liver and the bacon. This can be done in the pan in which the risotto is to be made, which needs to be fairly large and deep, with a lid. A little bit of sunflower oil should be added before the liver is gently fried for about three or four minutes until cooked. It should be removed to a plate or small bowl and the bacon fried for a couple of minutes each side, before it is placed with the liver. The pan should be set aside to cool slightly, before it is wiped clean with some kitchen towel.


The onion should be peeled, halved and finely sliced. The garlic clove should be finely sliced. The butter should then be melted gently in the frying pan before the onion and garlic is added. They should be gently heated for around ten minutes until transluscent but not browned. One tip here is to add a couple of teaspoons of cold water after a couple of minutes, which will help to keep the onions from discolouring.

The dry rice should be added to the pan when the onions are transluscent. It should take around five to ten minutes for the grains to take on a similar appearance.


It is then time to heat the chicken stock in a pot and begin adding it to the pan. This should be done in three or four evenly spaced stages, over the course of about twenty minutes, without stirring. The remainder of the ingredients will then start to be added.


The bell pepper half should be deseeded and thinly sliced. The mushrooms should also be sliced. The liver and bacon should be fairly roughly chopped. All of these ingredients and the broad beans should then be added to the frying-pan, very gently folded through and the mixture allowed to simmer for a further five minutes. There should after this time still be a little bit of liquid remaining. This will be absorbed when the lid is placed on the pan, off the heat, and it is allowed to sit for ten minutes.


When the lid is removed from the pan, no liquid should remain but the rice should be fluffy and light, not stuck together or to the frying-pan.


Basil would perhaps be the herb most commonly used to garnish a risotto but just as mint sauce would be added to more traditionally prepared lamb's liver, I have on this occasion used mint, to what I believe to be great effect...

Icelandic food and fashion

January 6

I was not a high-ranking reporter at the fashion show I went to last night.

When I checked in they handed me a card with the letter ‘C’ on it, meaning I was to be seated in the third of three rows.

That briefly hurt my feelings until I remembered that I wasn’t a fashion writer.

I was at the show, at Volvo Hall in New York’s Scandinavia House (does it it surprise you that Scandinavia House has a Volvo Hall? I didn't think so), as a guest of Hlynur Gudjonsson of the Icelandic consulate, whom I met at a lunch a couple of years ago, just as his country’s economy was on the brink of ruin.

An Icelandic outerwear company called 66° North was holding a fashion show last night, and it was being catered by Lava restaurant at The Blue Lagoon, a hot spring that’s a short detour from the road between Iceland’s Capital, Reykjavík, and the national airport.

Hlynur and I agreed that the food was reason enough for me to go to the show.

Nordic food isn’t exactly all the rage these days, but there is a lot of buzz about it, largely due to my fellow food writers’ current love affair with René Redzepi, chef of the much ballyhooed Noma restaurant in Copenhagen. But there are other factors at work, too (I wrote about them last July).

So I sipped a cocktail made from Icelandic vodka and ate assorted delicacies. The one pictured above is brandade with tarragon mayonnaise and rye bread. The bread is crumbled on top and looks like dirt, as is the current fashion.

Speaking of fashion, I didn’t realize until it started that this was the first proper fashion show, with a catwalk and everything, that I’d ever attended.

And I realized what a terrible, miserable job being a fashion model must be. I mean, you’re basically a coat rack, but it’s still hard work. You have to stand up straight and walk smoothly and no-doubt spend hours waiting to put on the clothing and walk out on a runway for a few seconds so everyone can look not at you but the clothing that someone made you wear.

The models themselves looked beyond bored. They looked downright resentful — so much so that I wondered if they were instructed to look that way for some reason or if they just couldn’t help it.

My phone’s camera was not up to the task of taking pictures that brought out the models’ inner pain. The one on the right was the best I could do. But here are some good ones from the blog Her Campus.

What else I ate:

lamb filet with peanuts and basil

smoked Arctic char with celery root purée

fried langoustine with garlic and Jerusalem artichoke

dill-cured salmon with (honey) mustard on toast

skyr with blueberry and crumbles

BOOKS

Another post today, I know I know its a record. 
I just wanted to share some good books I've read lately and I'm totally into swapping if you're down. I usually give books away to friends when I'm done, and for some reason I still have bookshelves full of them.

The last one I finished was
I would undoubtedly suggest this book especially to dog owners and lovers. The story is told from a dogs point of view. Strange I agree but somehow the author just makes it work. It is fiction.

The book I am reading right now that I am so excited about is
 
I haven't finished the book yet but let me tell you, it is one of the best books I've read in a long time. You know...the kind you can't put down? Yeah its like that. The story is about a mom that was abducted and kept in a shed called "room" from which she bears a child with her abductor. Sounds disturbing I know, but really its a story of survival and realization that things like this really do happen in our world. It is told mostly from the little boys point of view..I can't wait for the ending. 

With that being said I'm already looking for another good book, any suggestions?

-kat

And no more shall we part.


I had the best New Years' party that I could imagine with my friends... if only Rose and Jairo had been here...


We started at my home. Esther, Kim and I. And then, we took the tube, trying to get into the Agbar tower. but the train stopped near Plaza Catalunya, so we received the New Year there.

 
 
 

And after that... dance, dance, dance... during all night, with the best people from Barcelona I've ever met...

 
 
 

And sunrise came, and we all were angels with dirty faces in the morning...

I've been working so hard since that day, that's why I didn't updated with this before... but you know, sales are coming... and as I work in a shop, we had to prepared them!! Now, everything's ready, and I hope I could post as always... thanks for being there and be so patient!

The Great Turkish Breakfast


my Turkish breakfast
 This is my breakfast day in, day out, winter, summer, I love it. I never skip it. The colours, the textures, the  tastes appeal to me every time. I also like the fact it's so healthy. In comparison, cereals leave me cold.

 Breakfast really is my favourite meal. I think Turkish breakfast beats any other breakfasts hands-down although I make a concession to scrambled eggs when I'm in England. And even though I love Turkish çay, I admit that I have to have my cup of Yorkshire with milk in the morning in order to get me going.

Sunday breakfast with Ali and Susan
Traditionally a Turkish breakfast includes white cheese/beyaz peynir and olives/zeytin as well as cut up tomatoes and cucumbers. If I am going to stay anywhere for a long time, I'm so picky I take cheese and black olives with me. As far as I am concerned, only Turkish olives will do. We lived in Tokyo for a time and even though the selection was vast in the international supermarket National Azabu, I went through Spanish, Italian, Greek, you name it, and was always disappointed. It was the same with olive oil.


Sunday breakfast includes an egg
  If I wasn't so careful about calories, I would keep my olives in olive oil but I just  have them plain. I have lovely dried thyme/kekik which I usually get from my neighbour Leyla in Assos who picks it and dries it.  I crush it between my fingers and sprinkle it lavishly over everything. Oh the smell! It's so evocative. Flaked red pepper/kırmızı  biber is another must for both the cheese and olives.

 At the weekend when the weather is fine, all the little cafes along the Bosphorus here in Istanbul fill up rapidly as people relax with their friends and enjoy having their breakfasts outdoors reading the papers. It's a very typical Sunday morning thing to do here.

Just look at this picture of the ultimate Turkish breakfast served at a place called Saklı Vadi or Hidden Valley, halfway between Selçuk and Şirince tucked amongst the olive trees down towards İzmir.


 I have a friend, Frances (she of the fabulous quinces) who organizes Turkish textile tours and this is one of her favourite stops. She says there are usually 18-20 different items on the breakfast table according to season. The last time she was there, she tasted an 'extraordinary walnut jam made with the green shells whole before hardening'. The honey, cheese and salad items are all local and eating them either outside in the garden or in front of an enormous open logfire all adds to the pleasure.

So you can see my breakfast is simple compared to this feast! You certainly can't be in a hurry to savour a breakfast like this.

2010 - A Year In Photos -

Its a New Year, welcome 2011!
Everyone else is doing it, I might as well jump on the poop train.

JANUARY  -2010-


Brain Testing for my constant dizziness. Boo!

FEBRUARY


Our friend Kristy came to visit, drinks at BB Kings Jazz Club

MARCH


The Gelino's Tie the Knot

APRIL


Camping by the beach at Fort De Soto

MAY


Trip to Colorado, my first time Horseback riding in the Rockies

JUNE


Margarita season kicks off at our pool

JULY


I look hot in a towel turban with Laura

AUGUST


We spend a lot of time at the beach in the summer. Nathan and Bella look happy here.

SEPTEMBER


Full Sail University Reunion. Not really.

OCTOBER







Pumpkin Carving Party and Our Costumes

NOVEMBER


A Thanksgiving Dinner For Two

DECEMBER


Our Honeymoon in Costa Rica and Fires for Christmas

Whew! That was a shitload of pictures. I had to improvise with two of the months because at some point iphoto decided it would lose about half my photos I've taken. No I don't really want to talk about it. It really makes my widdle heart ache.