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

Holidays are hereee!

So it is finally time to relax. BUT since my sleeping pattern is so messed up from uni, I've been finding it hard to fall asleep so early at night despite feeling super tired :( I'd be lying in my bed, trying to sleep but to no avail. And not only that, my neighbours are fixing their roof so there are tradesmen coming in at 7am in the morning who decide to blast music at insanely high volumes. It's not a club for goodness sake! And people are trying to sleep here!! To top it all off, the neighbour's dog has this weird complex where it barks at anyone and anything non-stop. So there is the noise of the power tools and hammering, the insanely annoying pop music, and a dog that won't shut up going on continuously from 7am in the morning... I seriously do not understand how that dog can continue barking for that long. Doesn't it run out of air capacity in its lungs?! All in all, this just means I've been getting even less sleep compared to when I've been going to uni... HOW IS THIS EVEN POSSIBLE? Le sigh.

On another note, I made mung bean hummus today. It tasted... funky haha. I boiled the mung beans until they were soft, added parsley, peanut butter, paprika, cumin, salt and pepper. I'm not going to lie, it did not taste that great. The only positive thing about it is that it's very healthy, especially with the added chia seeds! But I'm either going to have to tweak it (add garlic, onions, lemon juice?) or stick with how us Asians normally eat them - as a sweet dessert soup. Which is not good because an insane amount of sugar goes into it! Speaking of desserts, I still have a Betty Crocker brownie mix to use up before it passes its overdue date.

Anyway, I'm going out to Ms G's tonight with my high school girls so that should be fun since I have not seen them in such a long time! And not to mention I've been wanting to go to Ms G's for their lunch/dinner menu for quite some time (I went to their Charlie and the Chocolate Factory dessert degustation that was part of the March into Merivale event). Must try their cute pre-packaged cocktails! It shall be awesome. So expect another restaurant review post soon!

I shall do some pilates before I have to head off - time to feel some pain!

xx