bend in the road

my first thanksgiving dinner

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 07:58:35 GMT

When dear April proposed that we have thanksgiving dinner and that we roast our own turkey, I went- what? make our own huge turkey? But then I got fond of the idea and put some effort into making sure that the thanksgiving dinner to be hosted at my house would have edible food. So, I was happy reading twenty different recipes for roasted turkey, looking for French's Fried Onions in the supermarket and oven-roasting even more pumpkin.

Finally we had the dinner! On the menu was (recipes based on, but always modified)

Roast Turkey (from Food Network's (FN'S) Good Eats) with Gravy (from How to Eat by Nigella Lawson)

Cranberry Sauce (from FN's The Essence of Emeril)

Green Bean Casserole (from FN's Paula's Home Cooking)

Mashed Potatoes (from FN's Food 911)

Stuffing (from Ian's (the real American's) mum)

Bread (from Delifrance)

with Arbor Mist drinks

and Pumpkin Pie (from FN's Follow That Food).

There were huge portions of each that 5 of us stuffed ourselves full but only managed to finish half the food.

Photos and commentary, dessert first:

practice pumpkin pie, which was made out of Bake It!. I changed recipe because this one came out looking really brown, whereas people said that pumpkin pie should look bright orange. But I made the butter-sugar pecan topping that night anyway- and we ate all the pecans as a pre-dinner snack while they were supposed to be cooling on the tray.

so I went with another recipe (this one had cream cheese inside, so I think it's really a flavoured cheesecake) and the colour went overboard in the other direction because it looked really yellow, incredibly mustard-like before baking. But thankfully it darkened in the oven.

Final product wasn't too bad!

Stuffing! I looked up stuffing recipes, but none seemed inspiring (perhaps because they require me to produce bread crumbs/cubes that I am too lazy to make). However, Yina said stuffing was her favourite part, so she and Ian ended up preparing it. And I have to say, it was good. YUMS. Even with my prejudice against celery, I ate it. Part of the reason it tasted so good was because the celery was swimming in butter.

Mashed potato, mashed by Ian. I'd only found the masher the day before; it made his job much easier. And he went light on the cream- the recipe recommended 2 cups, I don't think he even put half that.

Ooh! Green bean casserole. Easy to make, nice to eat. I just followed the ingredients, not the amounts in the recipe and it still came out okay. We put in 4 cans of fried onions inside- 2 inside, 2 sprinkled over. And, surprisingly, the Campbell's mushroom soup blended in well and wasn't overpowering, even though I rashly added 2 entire cans inside when I think one would have been enough. I do like Campbell's mushroom soup, though.

Brining the turkey (not that big, 4.5kg, I think) which involved defrosting the turkey over 2 days, taking up huge amounts of space in the fridge, and praying that the handles wouldn't break as I carried the turkey+brine around. The turkey looks cute.

turkey resting after being roasted. This is actually the practice turkey, and we'd already sliced off a bit to try. I bought a Norbest turkey, which has the timer thing that pops out, and it popped out at roughly the time it was supposed to be done, so that was good. Next to that is the practice gravy being made. On the real day I had a much nice roasting pan to work with, because I went out and bought one. The real day gravy was surprisingly orange, but still tasted fine.

Final products: sliced breast meat and the wings/thighs. I understand now why carving a turkey can be so pressurising- everyone wants to eat it, but they can't while you are still hacking away at the turkey and wondering where in the world the joint you can sever is.

Thanks for helping prepare, cook, and clean up. Casual dinners rock.

As you can see I spent quite a bit of time on the Food Network website, but also on allrecipes.com and marthastewart.com. HA.

But that wasn't all of the weekend's cooking/baking!

The night before, I had a cousin's wedding helpers' briefing/dinner that I had volunteered to bake for, and I wanted to make something sweetheartish. So Grace, I think, suggested Jelly Hearts, and so I asked Patty for a recipe and had to try it a few days before:

That went pretty well. So I adapted the jelly and made a personalised version for the engaged couple:

And also made, as backup:

double chocolate mini-muffins (from TJOC)

and more banana cupcakes (from How to be...), which make me happy!

It was a rather busy week, and I had to draw out a timetable at the beginning of the week to make sure I did everything at the right time and could fit all the cooking/baking/preparation(like making stock!) in between meetings and going to weddings and such that populate a normal weekend.

Toodles!

pumpkin

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:06:14 GMT

There's going to be a thanksgiving party soon, so I'm trying out lots of pumpkin desserts. I bought 2 pumpking halves and one packet of frozen pumpkin, and that produces alot of mashed pumpkin. I've used not quite half and I've already made three pumpkin things.

But first, I had bananas, so there was

Banana Bread (from How to be...)

which I modified by adding buttermilk. Like previous attempts, the results were delicious and perhaps even softer than usual. I was going to eat one as a post-10K run snack and also share some with people at church, but I brought them to them family gathering and they all disappeared.

10 muffins can disappear really fast

So, on to the pumpkin things:

First,

Pumpkin Pudding (from my aunt's recipe)

which is simple, really, and lets the pumpkin flavour come out. Except for the eggs. I had a little trouble with the instruction "boil the pumpkin" because I boiled it for too long. This made the pumpkin hard to separate from its skin, and when I finally blended in pieces of pumpkin, there was a noticeable amount of skin still attached. This made the resulting and the final puree take on a distinctive greenish tinge. But it still tasted fine.

Second was

Pumpkin Pecan Bread (from The Cake Bible)

which was supposed to be a Pumpkin Walnut Ring but possesing neither walnuts nor a baby bundt pan, I replace them with pecans and a loaf pan respectively. I cut down on the required amount of nutmeg (I don't really like nutmeg- and the last time we used it we had the disastrous apple cake) and put in too much pumpkin. It took a long time to bake but I was pleased with the result. Very hearty and carrot-cake like, and not too sweet.

Third, today's venture, was

Pumpkin Muffins (from TJOC)

which had almost the same ingredients as above but added milk/cream and orange zest, giving it a lighter taste. I think I like this a bit better, but if the bread had cream cheese icing, I might defect.

pumpkin pudding. It looks greener in real life

pumpkin pecan bread. I like pecans more than walnuts. Walnuts seem to be a little too pale.

lonely pumpkin muffin. It looks adorable!

There's still more pumpkin, so still more baking in the days ahead.

backlog

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:56:11 GMT

I've been such a lazy blogger... But I am going to rectify the yawning gap by getting up to speed.

Thus, in chronological order (with some missing, because I forgot to take photos):

Oreo Cheesecake (from some allrecipes.com recipe; I can't remember which one) with Microwave Lemon Curd

which is really quite a weird combination, but since I had lemon curd in the fridge to use up, we just slathered it on. The cake was actually round, but we hacked off the sides so it could fit in the box, and so it would look more presentable.

old friends making a birthday cake and taking many silly photos.

Next was an attempt to use the frozen raspberries that have been lying in my freezer for a while now. I was looking for something with a gloopy berry section and found a recipe for Cranberry Bars, and substituted the cranberries for glorious

Raspberry Bars (from the Taste of Home Baking Book, henceforth know as TOHBB)

. I didn't think they were very tasty when they first came out of the oven, but they improved on standing in the fridge and by Sunday, I was eating quite a few slices at one go. Besides the fact that the streusel topping was a bit soft, I think this is how I like these berry slices- not overly buttery or sweet.

they look ugly, don't they? but they taste good.

Then one week I had lots of banana, so I turned back to TOHBB to see if there was anything that fitted my needs. There were

Banana Oatmeal Chip Cookies

and

Southern Banana Nut Bread

which had different degrees of success. The former was actually nice, light and addictive, especially with the chocolate chips. The latter just tasted very sweet and didn't have the hearty banana flavour I'm used to getting from banana bread and cake recipes.

clo ate 5 in a row! I think; looks nice but I couldn't eat much of the banana bread

There were

Lemon Curd Bars

and

Double Chocolate Muffins

from TJOC for the announcers' get-together. Actually, just the lemon bars, because I baked the muffins early in the morning, and when I put them on the cooling rack, the rack moved and one of the legs moved off the counter, so that meant upon application of pressure cause by the muffins, the rack and hence the muffins all fell on the floor and went SPLAT. They looked very sad, so I didn't bring them to church, and ate them at home as the days went by. They still tasted fine. This was the weekend of the F1 race.

Social baking: Wan Li came over and she had chosen a recipe beforehand which was for

Cheese Raisin Bars

or something like that. It called for cream cheese and goat cheese, but we didn't really like goat cheese, and I didn't have any, so we substituted that with cheddar with cranberries. We had to fold in egg whites- I usually avoid this kind of recipe because I don't like cleaning my electric mixer- and we also soaked the raisins in Bailey's.

This gave us a rather strange but stimulating slice. It wasn't sweet enough to be whole-heartedly dessert, especially with the salty cheese, but it wasn't what I would term as savoury.

i think the Bailey's gave it a heady edge

Okay, there was major baking day with Clo. We were only going to bake some cookies: first, my lovely

Citrus Slices (from Bake It!)

for which Clo grated all the rind. It's still such a nice cookie- bursting with flavour, easy to make and has never failed me yet. While she was busy using my microplane, I headed to make the dough for a recipe I'd been eyeing in TOHBB:

Macadamia Cream Cheese Cookies

which were basically made the same way. But they tasted terrible. I kept on trying to eat a cookie by taking a bite, but every time would spit out the part I had bitten and then throw that away with the rest of the cookie. I thought perhaps it could improve a bit by keeping it a few days, but one, two and three days later, the result was the same. My father bravely ate some, though. Maybe it was the low-quality macadamias. Or the strange taste of orange in the cookie. Never again...

Then Chloe was browsing through TOHBB and she spotted a rather easy-to-make

Apple Cake

which we then made. Which also tasted terrible because it had way too much nutmeg; every bite was like peppery spices exploding in my mouth. I think we were trying a particularly trying corner, but I didn't dare eat any more after the first day. I bundled most of it with Clo and she said her loved ones actually deigned to eat it and say it was not bad (I think).

citrus cookies yums, my friends

cream cheese yucks and apple cake yucks, not my friends

The failure of the apple cake/ macadamia cream cheese cookies made me back off a bit from my baking binge, but I'll have to resume my kitchen wanderings soon. The next project will be to prepare a thanksgiving dinner with the relief-teaching friends. I'm not sure how much of it will be bought and how much of it will be made at home. Turkey? Rolls? Sweet potato? Pumpkin?

chocolate cakes

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 16:10:37 GMT

I made the

Birthday Cake (from How to Eat by Nigella Lawson)

which is a sweet chocolate cake (it has condensed milk inside). I bought the book as a treat for myself after I submitted my final year project paper. I've read it, but the recipes are all over the place, so I don't know what to try next.

Grace came over and helped me make the cake! Stirring everything up. In between waiting for it to cool we planned our overseas escapades.

Mini-disaster struck while we were trying to ice the cake- too many reasons- made it look a bit horrible (Grace at one point said the icing looked like liver), but after cutting it up the cake up all the pieces looked eminently eatable and it was eaten over Friday and Saturday night, and Sunday morning (last piece to Zhou I think).

This is how it looked like before it was cut up. The ganache was too runny. But it still got consumed, so I'm satisfied. It probably wouldn't have been so successful if I hadn't used my atas chocolate, which made it so chocolately it had to taste good.

But there was another chocolate cake on Saturday night, the chocolate of my childhood and beyond, much lighter and much fudgier and just a reminder of the important things:

And this is long overdue but here is a picture of the chocolate chip cookies mostly Joel made for the random party at ys's, the same day we made alien jelly.

I think the recipe is from NYT and it features rock salt sprinkled on top. They are very nice and round too! There were many cookies to start with but they were decimated quite quickly.

I've been buying blueberries wanting to make some kind of blueberry slice but I keep on eating the blueberries for breakfast which usually consists of maple pecan granola+fruit yoghurt+raisins+blueberries! Doesn't that sound healthy! It isn't.

Like how they say eating at home is healthier. Here's a random dinner I had at home: hotdogs.

Not healthy. Toasted buns and swathed with copious amounts of mustard and barbeque sauce (not chocolate sauce, Grace!)

in the lab

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 16:58:35 GMT

Well, well. I've almost come to the end of undergraduate life, and I made some cookies for the people in my lab. I'm giving them out tomorrow, in what may be my last time there. They are actually

Citrus Slices (from Bake It!)

and I chose this mainly because I could decorate flat cookies with icing. I was debating between this and more sophisticated-looking banana cupcakes, but the bananas in the house just were not yet ripe enough.

Not that I went too fancy decorating the cookies, but I just repeated A T C G for the white/cream icing, and A U C G for the coloured brown icing (I used "blueberry" colouring in the hopes of a shocking blue colour but all I got was something that looked remarkably chocolate-like). I tried to draw double helices on a few cookies but they looked so ugly I ate them up.

I shall bake more in the coming weeks. And also, exercise more.

more lem-lems

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 09:19:16 GMT

Ah, yes I even give pet names to my baking ingredients, like lem-lems :) which are refreshing and oh so flavourful.

So there's the remnants of Patty's cake, which Clo said improved in appearance after a few days in the fridge.

she was eating another piece. we left the rest for her brother and father. i never did hear whether they liked it or not.

But since I had extra lemons, and a new lemon dessert book (Luscious Lemons by Lori Longbotham) (doesn't all that alliteration make you dizzy...), I made, from said book,

Lemon Shortbread

which wasn't really very nice, maybe because of the lemon extract. It had a rather strong fake-lemon taste. But the family ate it anyway. Oh there was

Passionfruit Curd (from How to be...)

to go with the shortbread. I would eat the curd by itself, and I've had multiple breakfasts with white bread dipped in a bowl of this. YUMS. But going back to the lemons. I wanted to have something to bring to church, so I got my cousin to help me make

Lemon Curd and Shortbread Bars

they look better than they taste? now the cookbook is in the "dubious" category. despite the many 5-star reviews on Amazon.

which used up all the leftover lemon curd, and had a very curious "shortbread base" since it used dark brown sugar. But this was nice- a good kick-start to a Sunday morning, but some people found in a little too sour. It also didn't hold up very well outside of the fridge, since the toppind wasn't baked,

I also ate the last 5 pieces for breakfast on Monday. I remembered to take a photo of the last piece.

bright yellow lem-lem!

birthday

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 15:12:56 GMT

Clo helped me make this

Victoria Sponge (from How to be...)

with Lemon Curd (from allrecipes.com)

and Cream Cheese Frosting (from TJOC)

for Patty's surprise party. The cake pans were a little too big, the cakes were a little uneven, the lemon curd was a tad too sour and frosting didn't behave very well but it still made a nice cake. It's just another excuse to eat lemon.

Although I think I should have been studying for my test.

seasonal baking

Sun, 28 Dec 2008 13:28:52 GMT

It's been a busy, but not harried, Christmas season. Funny to hear Christmas music being played in stores while seeing Chinese New Year clothes and goodies on display. Chinese New Year does come early next year. Orange season, which I missed this year.

With April I made:

Butter Cookies (out of a Donna Hay magazine)

at first we used the festive Christmas cookie cutters, but when April was packing up to go I became lazy and took the easy way out.

which tasted like those Danish butter cookies sold in those round tins. The dough was suspiciously soft at first, so we added more flour, but they still turned out okay.

There was also the

Deep Chocolate Sour Cream Pound Cake (from Tisch Boyle's the Cake Book via chubbyhubby.com)

this was a heavy heavy cake. and we also got to test my new cake carrier (not shown).

which had an amazing full 500g of sugar and we had to drive out to get sour cream. This was an opportunity to use my new silicon bundt pan. We didn't eat this because it was meant for her pastor, but when she went home the cake got broken so she didn't give it away.

Finally, there was

Banana Cake with Bailey's (from How to be...)

One batch was baked in April's paper cups and looked very professional; the second batch was made into a shallow loaf cake.

which, again, just reeks of Bailey's Creme Caramel but is quite addictive due to the plump raisins dotting the cake.

I didn't make anything specially for Christmas itself, but I made desserts for two parties that I was going to after Christmas day. First was

Cranberry Upside Down Cake (from How to be...)

It does look like the picture in the book, only that the rest of the cake doesn't have cranberries showing because they sunk and disappeared into the batter.

for which the sugar syrup was a failure because it became caramel and then hardened in the pan, thus failing to soak the sour cranberries. So it was tart. No it's cake. I think the cinnamon in the cake itself was a bit too strong as well. The cranberries also sunk into the cake so you couldn't really see the cranberries on the top, except on one side.

In order to save the people who didn't like sour stuff (and to use up all the other cranberries, I also made

Cranberry Curd (from How to be...)

what a strange colour: I think cerise is the better word, not magenta

to drizzle over the cake. It was quite a messy experience, having to mash/puree the cranberries and the bowls and my hands really looked quite bloody. But after that we have three nice jars of curd in a rather absurd shade of pinkish red. And it is not sour. But the party I brought it to had an awfully chocolate chocolate cake there too. Which sounds a lot more appealing than cranberry cake, don't you think?

And for a party the next day, I made

Love Those Lemon Dreams (from BSCC)

looks normal... but underneath it is sad.

but the crust dough wasn't crumbly like it usually is, so I added more flour, but this made the base super thick, and the lemon topping seamed meagre in comparison. But at least it was lemon. But it wasn't really very nice. :(

And today, I'm making

Madeira Cake (from How to be...)

which is a rather plain lemony loaf cake. Which I will eat with cranberry curd. And share with Clo as we watch melodramatic Chinese serials tomorrow. It's in the oven now, so that's why there are no photos of it. Yet.

fruits

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 10:15:03 GMT

This is rather old:

Banana Bread (from How to be...)

scrumptious

for which I was supposed to soak raisins in rum or bourbon, but not having those at home I opted for Bailey's Creme Caramel. It turned out to be the flavour of creme caramel more than anything, even though I put it lots more banana than I was supposed to. Still, I think it's one of the nicest things out of Nigella's book yet. I might make another batch near Christmas, because it's fruitcake-like without the icky fruitcake stuff like candied peel.

Then, after exams, for the family, I made, with my mum, 2

Lemon Meringue Pies (from TJOC)

and I finally made one without a liquidy center, only because I accidentally put in 1/2 cup less water for the filling. The crust is ready-made because my Daddy bought some and we didn't have much time.

the stable filling! so the pie could be cut into nice slices.

However, not everyone liked the sour curd. They just ate the crust and the meringue and then left the curd on the plate! Hmpf!

So I ate the leftovers up.

Another fruit-thing that I didn't make:

bread pudding from paulaner brauhaus. It's fruity because it had bananas on it, but I took a piece without bananas.

spicy and sweet

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 10:30:29 GMT

I've been making so much chocolate and fruit stuff lately that I decided to go with spices one afternoon. So I was lazy and used How to be... because it specifies most things by weight (meaning I don't have to wash many measuring cups) and made

Snickerdoodles

which turned out to be rather unremarkable. I suppose that since I was making an American cookie, I should have used an American cookbook. These differed from other snickerdoodles I made before by having nutmeg, and also for spreading out less. This made the cookies have dryish bland insides (while the cinnamon sugar coating is always its saving grace). If I wanted poofy ones, I'd go with the recipe in BSCC, and if I want the rich and indulgent ones, I'd go with TJOC.

But to Nigella's credit she does recommend that it go in puddings and trifles where the cookie would be swathed in cream and jam and all sorts of other puddly things that the cookie would soak up.

So even though my small group happily ate half of what I brought, when I got home, I emptied the cookies into a bowl and drenched it with passionfruit curd. For passionfruit curd makes alot of things edible. I imagine it would look nicer in a tall glass with cream to alleviate the brown/yellow colour scheme. And maybe we could mix in some raspberries.

the snickerdoodles with the curd

Speaking of fruits, here is my newest food addiction: Starburst Squirts. I used to only eat them when I went to Australia, but with globalisation and all, you can get now them in Singapore. And they've been on sale, so I've bought quite a few packets. I've given some away, but I've eaten two. All by myself. Bad. That's alot of crazy babies in one sitting.

juicy and full of sugar