Reine's Kitchen 2024
I think it's been a while since I've posted any cooking adventures, but this Christmas I had plenty of time to really treat myself to some fancy food!
I think it's been a while since I've posted any cooking adventures, but this Christmas I had plenty of time to really treat myself to some fancy food!
Ok, this cake was not something I made haha. This is my second ever whole cake purchase for just myself, a pistachio trifle cake from Teeter Bakery and it was amazing! I was worried it'd be too big for one person to finish, but I managed it over 3 days, which was pretty good!
Christmas Eve spread included a trial of a caprese tower (which evolved to something way more epic on Christmas Day!), some sashimi, Big Don's Smoked Meats ham, berries and cherries galore, and a prawn salad - originally I wanted to make a prawn roll as well but I didn't manage to source brioche buns this time around and the salad was just as good!
Also these fruit mince pies from Miller and Baker were great too! Turns out I am having a lot of trouble with my Japan Zero teapot; I can't pour it cleanly if it's got anymore than about 30% liquid in it, for some reason with my tilt it keeps coming out of the lid rather than just the spout? And if I tilt it less, nothing comes out. Still a conundrum!
And here is the epic caprese tower! It was a post by Poly that inspired me to try it, and I loved how ridiculous it looked, especially on my obnoxious plate!
Luckily my senses returned and my remaining tomatoes and burrata were plated normally!
And then for New Year's Eve and New Years I made my best chirashi yet! This time I got some sashimi, whereas previously I'd used just smoked salmon and some prawns as the seafood. Also, the tamagoyaki this year was really good too! I paid attention and used a brand new stainless steel pan which actually helped the egg glide smoothly! Who needs a non-stick pan dedicated to eggs XD
Another fun experiment was to try and make einspanners while Giant Coffee was closed. I used whipping cream, and only lightly whipped it, but it still came out too heavy. I am wondering if it's meant to be like half cream half milk as the secret? Who knows, I don't really need to continue researching the topic of lightly whipped cream since I have a cafe that does it better already!
I also found some mugwort mochi powder at the Japanese shop so I tried my hand at tri-colour dango. The pink ones were made with a raspberry and strawberry syrup I'd prepared earlier. Turns out that dango requires a mix of rice flour and glutinous rice flour, but I only had the glutinous type, which actually still turned out good but I suspect that the mix makes the dango lighter; my ones were quite dense compared to how the green ones turned out since that was a pre-mix. I also need to reduce the wetness of the dough; the mugwort balls were the most deformed because they had the highest water content, even though I tried to fix it by adding a bit more glutinous rice flour, but I guess I didn't add enough. This might be something I'll try again, but not sure!
New year's chirashi which used up the last of my sashimi :D
And lol, I had bought some sashimi grade scampi so I did some dumb things and made an abomination hand roll, which tasted really good!
And a cheese plate for lols. King Island black label brie, King Island Roaring Forties blue, and a red cheddar I found. I was actually after reypanaer but the shops didn't have any of the super aged stuff. I decided for the cheddar instead since I hadn't had it before and to my (dumb) surprise, it wasn't the flavour profile I was after haha. It tasted like cheddar when I was hoping for caramel and crystals! It was still good though, so I can't fault the cheese, just my poor life choices. Oh also, the black stuff is Kangaroo Island dried sticky figs - they were so good I was temtped to go back and buy more, but they're an expensive luxury item so I guess I can only search for and buy them once a year.
Merry Christmas Happy New Year!!!
Reine's BBQ and kitchen adventures
Yeah I know I didn't post 2020 Christmas cooking, but it was kinda boring lol. This is far more interesting!
Cube time!! I wasn't planning on using this on Saturday, but I'd found a cheap fish and figured it was the perfect practice object. I already had the coal and firelighters for a situation just like this, so here we go!
I added just one firelighter at first, not knowing exactly how many I'd need since I only wanted a small set of coals. But the first one burned out after a while and I started panicking, because some of the coals were hot and I wasn't sure I could get in close enough to light a second firelighter as I only have normal length matchsticks. But, I was successful! And so most of the charcoal started turning white. Gosh, the firelighters STINK while they're heating up the coals. Luckily I'd already closed the balcony door as I'd seen first hand how BBQ smoke outdoors can set off an indoor fire alarm when it happened to my flatmate XD
Here is my fish! I put some garlic in the belly cavity, and seasoned both sides with salt - just something simple, as I decided I would finish it would more salt and lemon juice once it was done. Good simple flavour. Why cabbage? Because there were sugarloaf cabbages at the shops, and a while back a few food people on my feed were posting about them. They're a conical shape so I find them fascinating. I don't think they taste that different from an ordinary cabbage, maybe they are a tad sweeter based on the name? Plus it was more expensive than the fish lol. I like cheap meat and expensive veg.
Once all the fire went out and it stopped stinking, I put on my fish! For some reason I figured that meat cooks slower than cabbage, when I should have actually done it the other way around, or put everything on at the same time. Here goes nothing!
Why am I moving my fish all around the bbq? I have no idea lol. The head cooked much slower than the rest of the fish, but my goodness it started smelling good real fast. I attribute that to the garlic! But it was just a good cooking smell in general, and the cabbages actually smelled good grilling away too!
After a while, I felt everything was ready! Hopefully. The fish was already done but the cabbages weren't, but I figured raw cabbage is fine haha. I had no idea how long everything cooked for, since I'm an instinctive cook so I just wait and hope for the best, but I was tracking it by the look of the belly since i could sort of see inside a tiny bit, and also by poking the back to see how firm it was.
And the final result! Fish, cabbage with kewpie, and a sriracha, vinegar, salt, sugar marinated apple cucumber and tomato salad. Apple cucumbers seem to taste like normal cucumbers? And these were pink roma tomatoes. It was a fun adventure in cooking, I call it a success!
Now for part 2 of cooking adventures - "fake xiao long bao"!
So, I decided to revisit a chef's Instagram account to see if he'd posted any more recipes, but he hadn't, so I did my usual scrolling thing and found an image of dumplings. I don't know why, but I decided that the instructions of "200g flour, 170g boiling water > Filling: ground pork, ginger, chive, pork jelly." was sufficient for me to give it a go. Am I crazy?! That shouldn't even be a question!
Ok full disclosure, I actually did look up one of his gyoza posts too and revisited the shallot pancake recipe (that I followed successfully!) to get more understanding about how the dough would work. I did the boiling water thing, and then kneaded it till the gluten activated and then it started sticking to itself, and let it rest. However, the ratio was off? Even though I followed it to within 3g? Either that or the warmth and humidity affected my dough, so after several hours when I was finally ready to use it, it was extremely wet and sticky again :(. I had to compensate by dusting the board heavily which helped a lot!
It turns out you really don't need a large amount of dough at all per wrapper! This was one of the first wrappers that was way too large.
I did find it extremely easy to roll each one to super thin though! That wasn't a problem at all. It was very satisfying, albeit very time consuming.
It's embarrassing just how much size variance there is in this dumpling set haha. The final four were because I wanted to ration out both the dough and the filling, since by some insane miracle I'd portioned it almost perfectly.
Into the steamer they went, and lo and behold, dumplings!! Wow!!! Ahahahaha I can't believe I managed to pull that off, especially as I was convinced I had messed up at the dough stage and had been thinking about going to plan B (which was "noodles and stir fry, where I'd just spaetzle the dough and then fry up the filling haha, but luckily I didn't have to execute this plan!). Perseverance pays off!
YAY
So, I originally wanted to do this with the pork filling, but I didn't have the time to buy the ingredients for, and prepare pork jelly. I wanted to save it for the next long weekend, but at the same time, I figured I should do a test run first to make sure I could at least get somewhat close. So I'm really glad! But, now I'm not so sure I want to make them again. I'm really proud that I managed to make handmade noodles and shallot pancakes using 3-sentence recipes (and maybe I'll make shallot pancakes again? I bought beef tallow for the next attempt!). But these are all things that are incredibly time consuming. Now I really appreciate the advantages of modern machinery for food making, because even though the raw ingredients are cheaper, the amount of time and experience you need to make these things from scratch is mind-blowing. I remember reading an article about how a Chinese food vendor can't raise the price of his dumplings for fear of losing out on business as he's already operating on razor thin margins, but at the same time, it's not reflective of what it costs him to make them. Man, such a tough situation, since Chinese food is still considered "cheap". Definitely not. I was fairly confident I could fold up the dumplings to a somewhat passable stage, but I fell well short of my own expectations. It takes a long time to learn how to do this efficiently!
I love cooking!!!
Earl grey panna cotta
I wanted to make some earl grey and rosewater panna cotta, and then garnish it with blueberries, blackberries and some sort of green leafy thing - I was thinking shiso rather than mint. But I didn't want to spend money or time buying rosewater and shiso, so I used what I had instead - which was dried rose petals from a shopping spree ages back, to give the rose aroma without needing rosewater. I can't figure out how to homogenise the panna cotta yet though, I always get the separation....
Reine's Xmas 2018 cooking
So I just looked back at my 2017 post, and it was so detailed! My 2018 post will have considerably less content, but I think that's because a lot of it is really the same food, just slightly different.I spent heavily on non-food activities in 2018 and I've got some very extravagant travel plans for 2019, so I tried to stick to a small, sensible budget of $200 on top of my normal weekly food spend. Me being me though, I ended up spending about $400... whooops!So where did all that money go?
I only bought one marron this time, and named her Henrietta. I'd learned from my previous year that the pan grilled version tasted better than the soup version, so this time I went for the grilled method again! However, instead of the pan, I tried using the oven in an attempt to make the entire shell red, but it still didn't work - I had a half red, half black shell by the time the meat was cooked. I guess I really do need just a firepit in my dream kitchen!
I actually got the idea of the witlof salad when I randomly stumbled across a site (maybe BBC Food? I can't remember) that had crab, roe and witlof canapes, so I decided to try my own!The garnish here was micro ice plant that I'd found at the shops. Pretty cute! I liked the presentation of this better than my previous year's attempt. The marron kind of reminded me a bit of Attica's marron presentation.
Throughout 2018, I've had a fascination with insanely sharp knives that can slide across a tomato effortlessly. I really wanted to get my flatmate's Wusthof knife sharpened, but she's really not that great at taking care of kitchen stuff whereas I worship every tool, so instead, I decided to get my already sharp Global, sharpened a bit more. I think even the knife sharpener was a bit puzzled as to why I wanted it sharpened, but he did so regardless.This was an experiment from the night before my actual dish, to see how thin I could get the slices. These were squishy, overripe tomatoes, so I guess it was a good effort?
YAY plates of sliced tomatoes! While it was easier to work with not overripe tomatoes, it was still a challenge because the waterier the tomato, the harder it was to keep the "insides" intact. But I love the colours and how they all overlap! It's like jewels!
And the finished result, my perennial caprese salad! This time though, there wasn't any moneybag burrata at the shops, so I settled for fiore di burrata instead. I kinda miss the big ones because these little ones didn't ooze as much cream. I loved the presentation though, I feel that this one was a fun exercise considering the last two years have all been "normal" looking!
There was no quail this year. Instead, there were some duck ballotines for sale, but when I asked how much they were, a 2kg duck-chicken-cranberry stuffing portion cost $110! That was a bit much for me, so I opted for just duck pieces instead. This was a fennel and garlic grilled duck breast with charred witlof and roast carrots. Yeah!! The duck was delicious, I actually surprised myself! I really loved my duck dishes this year!
This was a fun one to make! I'd seen pictures of this being served at The Dolphin Hotel in Sydney, and I always wondered how much it would cost, because it looks simple. Avocados are now a running hipster joke about not being able to afford a house, so this dish was also humorous in that regard - pairing an "expensive" avocado with expensive Yarra Valley Caviar salmon roe! What you can't see here is that there's creme fraiche underneath the roe. I'd never read the restaurant's official description of their version, but I'd happened to see some Meander Valley creme fraiche at the shops, and bought it on impulse, and decided it'd go well in this dish.I wasn't wrong! This tasted way better than I thought it would! After adding some salt, olive oil, and a dash of lemon juice (I forgot to add pepper, whoops!), this dish became more than the parts. I think the creme fraiche has to be there, because it made it more than just roe and avocado. The tanginess that came from the cream was perfect for the roe!! It works WAY better than sour cream. It just... made the roe pop while the avocado flavour and texture were there and surprisingly, didn't add any heaviness to the dish! It was as if it made the avocado itself taste better too!What was just a "for fun" dish actually ended up being really impressive!
I actually made a few more roe and avocado dishes, since I'd bought 100g of salmon roe and 100g of golden trout roe. I didn't realise how tedious it was to try and stay awake till midnight for New Year's, since I hadn't done that the last few years (or if I did, it didn't feel like that much of a struggle). Because I was feeling peckish, I sliced up some potato and made chips. I'd run out of creme fraiche, so I bought some cheap Woolworths sour cream (don't do this - it doesnt even come close to creme fraiche!), and added some golden trout roe, then overkilled it with gold foil! Always gotta send off the old year with excess :)
Yay for knife skills!
Isn't it so pretty?
I also made some more sea salt and fennel crackers. These ones actually didn't turn out half as good as the last attempt at all! For some reason the fennel flavour wasn't as prominent. I'd also changed the recipe and the texture just wasn't right and it was too buttery. But that's learning for you; it makes me want to experiment more to find out how to consistently make these tasty!
Garlic, honey and mustard duck maryland with porcini rice. The rice here is a couple of days old which is why it didn't stick together, but hey, it's not all just for photos - this is the reality of cooking for one. I plan out photogenic dishes when I can, but what people usually don't see is the "normal" stuff where leftovers are used. A good tip for this is saving the duck fat, because it makes the rice so tasty when it's all mixed in!!
And final picture is how I usually prepare meals. Work meals are generally one pot wonders now (being time poor made me super efficient in 2018 and I bet it saved me money! I just can't see those savings cause I used them elsewhere!) and look like one big heap of stuff.I wonder what I'll do this year since I don't expect to have a lot of money left at the end...YAY EXCITING 2019 AHEAD