Going bananas for bananas

I'm not a big fan of bananas. I get really happy when there are bananas in the house, but mostly because Tortilla the Emo Turtle likes bananas and it means he might eat something and fill his little tummy. Lately I've been thinking of banana bread, though. And lately I've been feeling really happy when I see ripe, squishy bananas, and thoughts of hoarding them in the fridge have crossed my mind quite a number of times. Last month, the right moment came (ripe bananas + free time + opportune moment to use the oven) to bake some banana bread. I found a good recipe and tweaked it some.

You've to make sure you've got all your ingredients ready. You don't wanna be drooling over thoughts of banana bread only to realize you've run out of flour, or don't have enough bananas to push the banana factor to the max. You can rummage around and use a recipe you like, but most recipes will have the following: bananas (duh), flour, eggs, sugar, baking powder, salt, and oil. Spices optional.

Beat your eggs. I like mine with plenty of bubbles. Not sure if that helps the bread, but I think it makes for a prettier picture. And you can work those arm muscles (optional).

Mash your potatoes bananas. Some recipes tell you what the texture and consistency of the bananas should be, and even discuss techniques of mashing, or even if mashing is the way to go. I don't care. A squished-up banana is a squished-up banana.

Mix all the ingredients together. If you're like me, you end up with more banana bread mixture on your shirt than in the bowl. Tastes good, eitherways.

Pour or ladle or throw mixture into a bread tin and put in oven to bake. I had to constantly check on my banana bread to make sure it didn't burn, and really I guess it depends on what temperature you set it to.

Be patient. Don't rush the process. And don't burn your fingers and tongue by grabbing and munching on fresh-out-of-the-oven banana bread, no matter how pretty and yummy and warm and toasty it looks. Because fresh-out-of-the-oven banana bread is really pretty and yummy and warm and toasty.

And the aroma that wafts up and tickles your nose when you slice that first slice of crusty banana bread. And that first taste of crumbly banana-ey goodness, with just the perfect amount of sweetness to whet your appetite for more.

And maybe then you'll understand why you feel that sudden urge to hoard bananas in the fridge.

Pancakes with The Girls!

Last weekend we decided to make pancakes from scratch. By 'we', I mean The Girls. Maybe I should put some emphasis on that: The Girls. There, much better.

Anyway, The Girls and I, we go way back. Like, some of us have known each other for maybe even more than two decades. That's a very long time. I remember running around with some of these girls. Literally. We played catch. I remember the hair-pulling and tickling and kicking (all in good-natured fun, of course). In fact, we're hitting our thirties soon *gasp!* and we still hair-pull and tickle and kick. But then again, I still crack lame jokes. Along the years, we've shared boy problems, jammed in a band together, watched other friends come and go, had slumber parties, debated third (and first) world problems, watched movies, taken road trips to the beach and back, kept each other company through diarrhea sessions, gotten lost in big cities, and grown up, but somehow, The Girls have still managed to hold it together and remain pretty firm friends. This year, our ages total up to a grand 142 years. Which means this year, the average age of The Girls is 28.4.

That doesn't stop us from giggling over pancakes. Especially if they're made from scratch. The Girls (minus one, who's in a different part of the country), when we meet, there's somehow always food involved. Sometimes we like to go to fanc(ier) eateries and have our dinner cooked for us and laugh while someone else is doing the dishes in the back, but sometimes we enjoy cooking our own meals. Although how what was supposed to be a light afternoon tea ended up being full-blown dinner remains a mystery, we managed to eke out 15 thick fluffy pancakes (and a few crepes) with the following ingredients:

Flour, baking powder, butter, milk, eggs, and mandarin oranges and a lime for a suzette sauce. The glass of black liquid is Coke, and no, that wasn't part of the pancake batter (one of The Girls asked).

We zested the lime and an orange, but the pot of suzette sauce was bitter and we had to toss it out because we burnt the butter. We left the zest out of the second pot, and watched it like a hawk, so it turned out pretty and sweet and all sunshine-y. Tasted like marmalade, actually.

It was really a team effort, and halfway through there were designated teams (really: Pancake Team and Suzette Team). It was really therapeutic, greasing the nonstick, ladling out the batter, watching it form a neat circle, then seeing the batter gradually dry up and the little bubbles emerging and flip flip flip. Steaming hot golden pancake. Wonderful aroma wafting through the house.

We had our pancakes with suzette sauce, honey and butter. But only after taking lots of pictures of our beautiful 15-level pancakes.

At the end of the day, The Girls remind me of pancakes. No, they're not oily and greasy friends. And no, they don't taste like waffles. But they're the ones from your childhood, the ones you grew up with, and the ones with all the memories of warmth and laughter and fun. Comfort food. Comfort friends.

Fuyu cake!

It's fruit season here, and it's a little crazy, the amount and variety of fruit we have lying about the house. I'm quite picky when it comes to certain fruits though, and I can't seem to enjoy some of them. Persimmons. I don't like persimmons. Not even as a child. I find them strange, and can't wrap my head around the texture or taste. I recoil in disgust at the sight of persimmons.

But what do you do when you have a whole lot of persimmons lying around? What do you do when they threaten to rot and fester?

You make cake!!!!

I did some research online, and concluded that the persimmons we had were fuyu persimmons and not hachiya persimmons (fuyu = short, flat bottom, hard texture, crispy; hachiya = more elongated, eaten when soft and squishy). And fuyu cake is pretty popular, or so it seems, and I thought why not, might as well give it a try. And fine, I was craving cake.

The recipe was easy, the ingredients readily available: mix together flour, fuyu (I diced them up), baking soda and/or powder, sugar, salt, butter, raisins and some spices, then bake. There are plenty of recipes for fuyu cake online, and they've all got varying measurements and ingredients (some have raisins, some don't, some have nuts, some are too simple I got scared), but I suppose it's all really a matter of personal taste. Adjust accordingly.

And here's what my beautiful fuyu cake looked like, fresh out of the steamer (I used the high-tech rice cooker thingamajig again). It was quite amazing: great texture, all soft innards and crisp crust. The spices gave it a real depth and richness, and the aroma was like something you'd get walking into a fancy restaurant.

I might just squeal in delight the next time I see persimmons in the house.

Coffee cake

There comes a time in every girl's life when she craves cake.

Actually, scrap that. The average girl will crave cake several times in her life. About two weeks ago I was in such a mood. I was also coincidentally in a cooking mood (aka mixing-random-ingredients-hoping-they-turn-out-good mood), and if you don't wanna buy a cake, you bake one.

I had a few problems when it came to this.

Problem #1: I had never baked a cake on my own before, i.e. unassisted, without adult supervision.
Solution: There is a first time for everything. Even culinary catastrophes. Breathe. Relax. Problem solved.

Problem #2: We don't have that many ingredients lying around the house. Or rather, we have those ingredients; they just choose to play hide-and-seek with me.
Solution: I needed to find a recipe with the simplest of ingredients, the kind of ingredients that are available in the average kitchen. That, and ingredients that have labels on them/ingredients I don't confuse for other things because they don't have labels on them. Found a recipe for coffee cake (with the help of online research) that required only the basics. Problem solved.

Problem #3: I couldn't use the ovens because they were too 'heavy-duty' for just one tiny cake.
Solution: I discovered a cake function on our high-tech rice cooker. Problem solved!

And so the cake assembly was off to a rocking start! Very very simple, as evidenced by the following pictures. Flour, baking soda (or was it baking powder?), sugar, salt (really?), eggs, butter, some milk, and coffee! Whisk eggs, brown butter, make coffee, pour, mix, smear batter on someone's face (optional).

The uncooked batter was really really good. I tried a bit, and really, it's so good, you could just spoon some into pretty glasses, sprinkle some chocolate powder on top, and serve it as dessert. Just don't tell your dinner guests they're eating uncooked cake batter and you should be fine. Rave reviews even.

It was so easy with the high-tech rice cooker. I know it sounds really odd to bake a cake in a rice cooker, but you've got to take a look at the manual that comes with the rice cooker to understand (that's right people, I read the manual, I'm a geek that way). This was no ordinary rice cooker. This was a high-tech repeat for emphasis high-tech rice cooker. I just dumped the whole gooey mass into the pot, closed the lid, and pressed the cake function. Takes the thinking out of the whole process.

I was quite nervous about baking a cake in the rice cooker though. When the timer went off signalling the end of cooking time, I took a little peek and was rather horrified. The surface of the cake had quite a number of holes and looked quite soggy and shiny. I gave it a little tentative poke, worried that it would squeal in pain, but it didn't: it was cooked perfectly. The steam circulating inside the rice cooker must have done strange things to the surface of the cake, but there was a slight crunch in the first bite. I'm afraid the crunch subsided with subsequent slices, although that's prolly pretty typical of cakes once they've cooled. I would have preferred a more baked-brown kinda look (the one you would usually get with oven-baked cakes), but for a rice cooker, I was pretty impressed. A high-tech rice cooker, mind you. Don't go trying to bake a cake in a normal rice cooker, you might end up with *cue suspense music: ta-da-daaaaaaaa!* ... THE BLOB!!!!!!!! (sorry, inside joke)

Overall, I guess you can say the cake was quite a success. If you put aside the whole baked-brown-crunchy-crust issue, the taste and texture of this coffee cake were pretty close to one you would get with an oven. The people who tried it (very brave, these folks) were surprised that it was made with a rice cooker. Maybe I shouldn't have said anything about the rice cooker.

And that's it, people. Here's to many more slices of coffee cake, in the near future! Cheers!

Bagels from scratch!

I made bagels the other day. From scratch. No mean feat, anyone will tell you that, especially when one has not much experience with bagels or baking. But my first batch turned out well. Very well, in fact.

They're relatively easy to make. Or rather, relatively easy to put together. The ingredients are pretty straightforward; I found a few recipes on the 'net and tweaked them to my convenience. It's the shaping them into bagels that's the complicated part. Lots - and I mean lots! - of patience required as you wait for the dough to rise, over and over. Plenty of time to watch some reruns on the telly. Or if you prefer, brew yourself a cuppa and contemplate the changing of the seasons (we have only two here, hot summer and wet monsoon).

The first batch of bagels came out perfect. Pretty little circles of doughy, yeasty baked-brown goodness. The generous sprinklings of black and white sesame seeds made me smile. The second batch, not so much. I was impatient and didn't wait as long for the dough to rest and rise, and I was careless when it came to making the holes, so the bagels were more oval than round. Harder to chew too, but the taste was good, if not better than the first batch (I tweaked more and was even more generous with certain ingredients).

They were so good, I'm intending to whip them up again, sooner or later. Preferably sooner than later, but for good homemade bagels, it's worth the wait.

Cheers y'all, and here's to plenty of fresh bagels in the near future!

Homemade guacamole

In the past few years, I've slowly discovered a great liking for cilantro. I guess tastebuds do change as you grow, because I don't remember liking this as a child. I know a few of you (maybe even a majority!) are shuddering in disgust as you read this. Some people can't stand the herbal grassy taste. I've read that some people even liken its taste to soap. But my tastebuds have always been a little quirky, and I now like to add a generous amount of cilantro to my food (when we have cilantro around, that is). Halfway through my stay in Sydney, I started craving common everyday Asian ingredients like garlic and ginger and chilli and fermented prawn paste (belachan). These are the building blocks of Asian cooking, but not used much in Aussie food. There were times I would lie awake thinking of Asian food. The cravings got so bad once, I even made Hainanese chicken rice, and from scratch. This period of deprivation has prolly affected my brain and appetite in some weird way because I've been back home in Kuching for almost two years now, but I still crave major doses of these ingredients from time to time. And I've got a newfound respect and appreciation for these oft taken-for-granted items.

This morning I woke up to find a whole batch of avocados in the kitchen. Which caught me off-guard, because they'd been sitting there for some time but I'd mistaken them for mangoes. I'm not sure which variety of avocados these were, but they didn't look like the avocados I thought I knew: pear-shaped, green bumpy skin. The ones in my kitchen were rounder and smooth-skinned and speckled with brownish-black spots. A localized breed, perhaps? I was thrilled. Instantly, I thought of guacamole. It sounds really fancy, but it's a great-tasting dish that's made from very basic ingredients. What makes guacamole really good, though, is cilantro, the more the merrier. Thing is, I didn't know if we had this lying around the house. I worried about the fate of these avocados: one was rather squishy and on the verge of over-ripeness. I would have to eat it soon, but I didn't fancy having it with honey today. Imagine my joy then, when I entered the wet kitchen and found a whole bunch of cilantro, all chopped up and ready to be used in some other dish. I grabbed a handful, and gathered my other ingredients.

Scooped the gooey greenish yellow flesh out of their husks, diced half a tomato, some garlic, red onion, chilli, a squeeze of lime here and there, mash mash mash, season to taste. Amazingly easy. So little effort for such a great-tasting dish.

I toasted some buns and ate my guacamole with great relish. The cilantro definitely makes this dish. The chilli adds a kick of heat and spice too, and I oomphed the guacamole up even more with some Thai chilli powder. Brewed some tea and added some lime to that. Breakfast time.

Tangy. Rich. Zesty. Exotic. Sweet sour salty spicy. Ka-pow! What a little feast.

We've still got quite a few avocados waiting to ripen up, and I'm looking forward to more guacamole! This would be good as a filling for tacos, a dip for nachos or normal potato/corn chips, or if you like what you see in these pictures, as a breakfast spread on toast. The garlic-onion-chilli-lime blend reminds me of some Asian-style pickled condiment, so if you want to localize this, you could even try this as a side dish with rice. Not the way I like my guacamole though. *runs away*

Mushi pan!

I first learnt about mushi pan and what it was about a month or two ago, and I was immediately intrigued. I think it started out with the urge to bake simple muffins, but all of them required baking, which would be inconvenient, so I was looking for a cake that could be steamed rather than baked. I did my research by visiting several blogs and some cooking websites, and took note of the main ingredients (the 'common' ones that would appear in each recipe).

Mushi pan is a Japanese steamed cake and draws comparisons to steamed puddings, and is typically eaten as a snack (and is really popular with children). I was pretty grossed out at the thought of pudding, because I don't like the texture of soggy bread, but I thought it sounded too good to pass up, and this evening I finally decided to give it a go. All went well until I realized I couldn't locate the baking powder in the kitchen, and I left the bowl of dry ingredients in my bedroom (don't ask) and went out for dinner. I managed to grab a small container of baking powder from the supermarket, and eagerly anticipated the amazing cakes and cookies and yummy food stuff I would be able to whip up with the magic of baking powder.

Until I got home and discovered cockroaches and insects in my bowl of dry ingredients which I had stupidly left uncovered in my bedroom. I threw the ingredients away (don't worry, I don't use tainted ingredients!), but was enough of a klutz to drop them all over my bathroom floor.

All distractions aside, I finally got around to whipping up a new batch of mushi pan batter. It's really very simple, just a matter of assembling everything you need into one bowl (or two, as some of the other blogs instructed, but I'm lazy and cleaning up's a mess with the water problem we've been facing for almost 2 months now). I didn't measure the ingredients, and I just added however much sugar or flour or milk or cocoa powder I thought I needed. And an egg. And about a teaspoon plus of baking powder. And some splashes of water, because the original batter ended up quite thick and gritty. I added enough water to make the consistency of the batter smoother, more silky, slightly thicker than pancake mix. Then spooned the batter until it filled about three quarters of the mould (grease it with some oil or margarine or butter if you want an easier removal of the mushi pan from the mould when it's cooked).

I had a pot filled with water on the boil while I was mixing the batter and scooping it into the mould. When the bubbles are rolling furiously, I put the mould into the pot (on top of a little bowl so it wouldn't overturn in the water, just in case and all), covered it, and turned the fire down to small. Left the mushi pan steaming away for 15 minutes like the other blogs recommended, feeling rather nervous the entire time because I didn't know if my mushi pan would 'work'. At first it looked like it wouldn't set, the batter was that thin. But it did! And it didn't really need 15 minutes because the mould I used was really small and shallow. The second batch I put in to steam (same batter, but small mould and I ended up with more batter so had to try to finish most of it up) was pretty much ready in about 5 minutes, but then again, that's because of the size and depth of the mould I was using, so a bigger/deeper mould or ramekin would logically require more steaming time. The second batch kinda poofed up a bit, whereas the first batch remained quite flat and actually split a bit. I'm not sure if it's because of the difference in steaming time or amount of heat (kinda forgot to lower the heat with the second batch). I stuck a wooden skewer into the mushi pan to make sure they were thoroughly cooked; they came out clean, so now I know all I need is 5 minutes if I'm using the same mould.

I was so chuffed when I took them out of the mould. They were so smooth, brown and beautiful! Look at them! Wouldn't you be happy, too? They tasted great too; not too sweet (next time I'll try using condensed milk like some of the other blogs/websites suggested), and the cocoa powder (I used Milo) gave it a nice richness. The texture was beautiful, too. I was rather worried because the mushi pan looked like soggy bread (which I run away from) when I first took them out of the mould, but it was probably brought about by the condensation of the steam, and inside it was dry and fluffy and like eating a light sponge cake!

I've got some matcha and I'm thinking of whipping up matcha mushi pan the next time I try this. I think it'll be really good, and I'll try sprinkling some matcha over the top of the mushi pan when they're done (I sprinkled some Milo powder over the top of the mushi pan this time). This is definitely something that's staying in my culinary repertoire as they're really really very simple to make, and they would make a good last-minute oh-no-friends-have-dropped-by-and-we-have-nothing-to-eat snack, or even as presents, especially if you wrap them up all pretty and cute.

And besides, everybody likes cake.

Give it a go, people, and cheers!