Planning

Am currently planning the dinner that I am cooking for my daddy dearest's birthday next Saturday! It'll happen either on the Saturday or Sunday depending - probably on the Sunday as he normally spends the day at his takeaway shop preparing for a week of cooking and feeding people who come into his shop. At the moment, I'm thinking of the following:

Entree #1: Szechuan broth with pork dumplings
A recipe from "Heston Blumenthal at home". It was originally duck dumplings, but I'm serving a duck main so I thought that eating duck twice in one sitting would be too much haha.

Entree #2: Ratatouille
Fell in love with the beauty of this dish from the Pixar film.

Main #1: Salmon sashimi with Rice, Honey and Soy
Tweaked Tetsuya's pan-fried duck foie gras and replaced it with salmon (:

Main #2: Linguine with a Ragout of Oriental Mushrooms
I really liked the sound of this recipe from "Tetsuya" as the flavours are Asian, but it's a pasta dish which is Italian. I really want my grandparents to try other cuisines, but their tastebuds have been wired a certain way from eating Asian food all their lives. Since I didn't want to overwhelm them, I thought that this was a subtle way to introduce them to another cuisine, fusion style.

Main #3: Five-spiced duck breast
Once again, an Asian-style Heston Blumenthal recipe. Contemplating whether I should add rice to this recipe..? But I probably won't as I'm using rice in the first main - though it is a small amount... Ah well.

Dessert
I was really enamoured by Jowett Yu's deconstructed lemon tart that can be found on Ms G's menu. Taking inspiration from this dessert, I decided to do a pina colada version because of my love for both coconut and pineapple yum! So probably a pineapple curd topped with streusel, then pipe on some coconut mousse with some hidden coconut gel pieces and some lychee lime granita to finish.

I have quite a few things to buy and prepare for... Especially cleaning the house...

On another note, my mother came home with puff pastry remains from my parent's takeaway shop. They used to it make pies, so essentially, they cut out circles from the pastry for the pie casing and were left with the edges. Seriously, what did she expect me to do with those crappy remains?! So I waited for the pastry to thaw out and I pieced them all together to form a square and rolled it out until it was flat once again. We have quite a lot of cinnamon sugar remaining in the house that no one ever uses so I decided to make some cinnamon scrolls and since I was at it, also some ham and cheese ones.

Before baking (you can still see all the cracks from a gazillion little pieces that were essentially smushed together to form a whole pieces of puff pastry...)

TIP - cut the pieces with thread as knives would squash the rolls.

After baking - so good fresh from the oven!

OH YES CHECK OUT ALL THAT BLISTERED MOZZARELLA CHEESE!! AND THAT OOZY CARAMELISED SUGAR. The cinnamon scrolls were very good with vanilla icecream. It would've been better if I had made a sugared glaze like they do at the bakeries but I couldn't be bothered - rolling out the pastry was a lot of hard work!

Off to clean up house which will be very hard work since I have all my model materials just lying around everywhere... Fun times.

Happy weekend everyone!

xx