Scrumptious Stew

There's usually a can of coconut milk sitting in the pantry somewhere but I don't usually have taro sitting around in the fridge. I'd been rather curious to try out Ken Hom's Taro Coconut Stew recipe, and so when I finally remembered to grab meself some taro, I whipped me up some stew!

Surprisingly, it was delicious! It was very much so a stick-to-your-ribs type of stew because of the starch of the taro and the fat from the coconut milk. It was absolutely wonderfully unctious in the mouth while the curry spices tickled my taste buds and olfactory nerves with great delight and a bit of heat. The taro and carrots became nicely soft which just added to the whole heavenly feel in the mouth. I'll be making this one again for sure!!

Multinational Cookies

Ahh...these cookies sound like me. They've got two different citizenships. ;D

"American" Style choc chip cookies. AB's thin chip recipe, but with a touch of Brit but according to Brits, a touch of USA. =P If you've never been to UK, their version of milk chocolate is different from ours. Just eat a Hershey's milk choc, then a Cadbury's milk choc. Their's taste milky. I guess there's a reason Cadbury label's it as dairy milk with a pitcher of milk flowing in. ;) While at the Morrison's supermarket chain in London, I came across baggies of cookies. Never shop when you're hungry. Well, I was hungry. I checked out what sweet delights I could nosh on and I spied a bag labelled American Style Chocolate Chip Cookies. Well, I gotta see what that's considered! In the end, I'm not too sure what they meant because I never got around to getting the "normal" chocolate chip cookies to compare. But the immediate impression I got when I ate them was that it doesn't taste like cookies from home at all! Rather, Britified with the use of their version of milky chocolate chips. Hahaha!!! It's like...Americanized Chinese food or Britified Indian food. So I had Britified American cookies. They were enjoyable regardless. Something different.

Anyhow, I've been wanting to recreate these funny cookies (well, I did get a laugh from it) upon returning to the states but never got around to it. Also, not having Brit version of choc chips sorta makes it harder to do. ;P So I came up with the bright idea of using Cadbury bars in place of the chips. At least one year passed after I had that eureka moment. Finally one day, I wanted to make a dessert for my friend's birthday. She too stayed in London for an extended period of time so I decided to try these out on her!! Besides, I couldn't think of a good birthday cake to whip up for her. And so 2 bars of Cadbury went into AB's thin chips. The verdict? Not quite what I had. The milkyness gets lost either in the cookie dough or from the oven heat. It's there, but really subtle whereas the Morrison's cookies really whacked my tongue with dairy. She enjoyed the cookies though for their rich flavor (all the butter that got crammed in). Hooray! Plus, it brought back childhood memories of the type of cookies she used to love, but only had on special occassions. I understood where she was coming from. I always thought of these types of cookies as the ones you must wash your hands after consuming. She understood where I was coming from. Hahaha!! Thus, she has chosen to restrict her intake of these cookies as it seems this concoction is out to give her a coronary in celebration of her life. Go figure. =P

Alpen Cereal

I was at the market today and found the Alpen brand of cereal that was a source of an unpalatable nightmare from my stay in London. I no longer recall why I had no milk, but I did have cereal. I think I had planned to eat it with just yoghurt ala Euro style as I had a big tub of Biopot (yum!). Well, upon dumping the cereal out into a bowl, I noticed a lot of white powder all mixed in. Ehh??? Has it gone bad? Or is this an enhanced cereal of some sort like soy powder that's all the rage in smoothies? I had a bad feeling about this...but I threw in my yoghurt anyway. Of course, it congealed into a huge ball that sucked the yoghurt dry. Yuck. Worse still to come a few mornings later when I ran out of yoghurt. What did i do? I added water to the cereal. After all, maybe the powder is for those without milk, like...instant cereal, right? The answer is a big NO. Don't do it!! It was just awful. It looked disgusting as well with the powder floating on top. If I'd used milk, at least they're both white and so would be camouflaged. Thankfully, these boxes of cereal aren't that large though they come with a hefty price tag. I shook the remaining cereal around to let the powder drop away and then ate it dry. Not particularly better in that plenty of powder remained to make my mouth dry while leaving a gritty coating on my teeth and tongue as I ate. Ugh! The next time I went to market, I chose pure muesli. None of this Alpen stuff. Back then, I had concluded the powder was whey powder as listed in the ingredients. It doesn't matter whether I read the ingredients list or not as it seems rather innocuous on the label. The picture on the box had none of it clinging to the cereal either! Who'd have guessed???

So back to the present. As I stare at the all too familiar packaging, I notice it's on sale. Hmmm...I wonder whether it's the same stuff...so I pick it up to read the ingredients list and aha!!! I see skim milk powder as an ingredient. I suppose whey powder is either unacceptably worded here or too unfamiliar or even perhaps negatively associated with body builders and their giant tubs of GNC whey powder. =P Or they changed forumulations even. I'm sure my fellow shoppers thought me crazy as I audibly laughed upon finding the revolting ingredient that still makes me cringe. Sure enough, I am crazy as I threw it into the cart. This time though, I knew I had milk in the fridge. I figured I should at least give it a 2nd chance by eating it properly...

Well I ate it with a massive amount of milk and the verdict? Better, but still gross. Considering how much inexpensive wheat flakes they throw in, this stuff is still overpriced. How can they call it muesli with a straight face? It's more like skim-milk powder covered wheat flakes with a smattering of oats and raisins. If you're lucky, some invisible nuts (sliced they say) too. I'd forgotten what it tasted like, but ah, the unpleasant memories rushed back. The first few spoonfuls were a bit gritty from undissolved skim-milk powder. Lovely, lovely. Fortunately, it had all dissolved a short while later, but then I started to relive the *next* unpleasant memory. I now realize that it's not just the skim-milk powder that sucks any liquids up, but also the wheat flakes. Before I was halfway through the bowl, the cereal had already congealed into a loose ball. It's no wonder my yoghurt attempt was such a massive failure!! I'm incredibly thankful (again!) that this is a relatively small box of cereal. I may need a gallon of milk per bowl's worth to finish it off though...

On closer inspection of the picture on the front of the box, I could just make out white specks on the cereal, but only probably because I was *looking* for it. The picture is like a drug addict out of rehab who's starting to snort again but denies it. What you get out of the box is cereal that is flying high on cocaine with white powder all over his nose. Doctored marketing shot? I'll say. The offending specks as seen below all over the cereal and clinging to the bowl:

So am I crazy? Stupid? Well, I've concluded I'm stupidly curious...sometimes outrageously so. It's like watching a train wreck in slow motion. This is reinforced by the same question people always ask: "What were you thinking?!?!" Hmm...well...it usually starts off like this: "Hmm...I wonder...."

Gravad Lax

My trip obsession centered on Scandinavian foods has not abated. I've been trying my hand with that fishy delight of gravad lax or gravlax depending on the language. It's finally done curing. What's it like? First off, I tried one slab or arctic char and one slab of standard Atlantic salmon. Unfortunately, both were way too salty. Texturewise, they seemed to have been over-cured. I was also disappointed with the lack of dill flavor despite the bushes of dill I crammed in. Before digging in, I was quite apprehensive being my first go at curing raw fish. Was it full of bacteria? Were there parasite eggs in the flesh ready to overtake my body once they gained access? Would I be paying a visit to the emergency room tonight?? Should I write a will?? =O I took a deep breathe and dove in. I slapped it on to a buttered slab of Wasa rye crispbread and added a few hunks of avocado that was ready to disintegrate from lack of attention. Afterwards, I couldn't stop drinking water from the saltiness. It really didn't hit me until later.

I'm now just waiting to fry up the leftover skin (after I thinly sliced the slab up) in some butter. Mmm!!! Crispy, fatty goodness! =9~ I can't wait to eat it up with some hot rice....ooohhhh yaaaa!!! Or maybe have it with some salad. Ah ha! =D

Plokkfiskur

My desire to relive my meals from my travels continues. Actually, this happens every time I return from a trip. =) It's like taking a bit of the trip home. Well, I've had an overwhelming desire to relive the heavenly flavours of the traditional Icelandic dish of plokkfiskur that I enjoyed at 3 Frakkar (3 overcoats) in Reykjavik. I scoured the internet in search of it. Not too many results but most of them more or less were the same. It's peasant food so it's rather basic in both ingredients and cooking method. Hmm, from the looks of it, the recipes aren't going to yield what I thoroughly licked up in Iceland. Granted the dairy products available in Iceland are tastier (fattier) that all the homogenized skim crap found here, I still can't imagine such a simple concoction of boiled potatoes and leftover fish would be as lipsmackingly delicious as the unctuous version at 3 Frakkar. Hmm, I suppose they're famous for a reason...My impression of their version is that that gratinated the plokkfiskur. Nevertheless, I forged ahead and made my own version of plokkfiskur cobbled together from a bunch of recipes. It turned out expected nevertheless: inferior. It essentially tasted of mashed potatoes with fish in it. Nothing special. It didn't even look particularly interesting. Ah, I shall have to revisit this.

Matjes Herring

Having returned from trekking across Iceland and Stockholm, Sweden, I'm finding that I'm missing the taste of pickled fish for breakfast. Eh?? Yup. I thoroughly enjoyed the various forms of their pickled herring and other fishies. I also delighted in trying their potted fish, shrimp, mushroom and some such. Yes, I had some big breakfasts as a result of wanting to try everything offered up. Thankfully, the potted _____ (fill in the blank) came in small containers like you'd find with butter so I could share one with my travelling mate and still have room in my belly for the next flavour. What fun!

So I return with a hankering for pickled fish. Of course I could find some at Ikea's marketplace but I wasn't about to head out there just for that. Instead, I scoured my local markets. I scored at the second place I visited. Most everywhere else had the local varieties, mostly of Jewish origin. Sorry, but I have the goal of finding the Scandinavian stuff. =P And so I was terribly delighted to find Finnish Matjes herrings pickled with spices at the local King's Supermarket. I had a wonderful appetizer of matjes herrings at an incredible restaurant in Stockholm so finding matjes herrings made me drool. Being from Finland made it Scandinavian. Sounds like a winner! To add to this though is the spices in the pickling mixture. The jar's contents looked an awful lot like some reddish-brown herring I had for breakfast. Compared to the white version, the reddish-brown one tasted of...spices such as cinnamon. Ooh, sounds like I really hit the nail on the head with this one, eh?

I couldn't wait to dig in so I bought some Wasa rye crispbread to go with it. Of course I had to save a bit of both for my travelmate to experience as well. Incredibly, both of us determined that it tasted exactly like what we had overseas! Hooray! Now this supermarket better not stop stocking it! =O Next goal now is to see if I can find the potted shrimp/mushroom/etc spread at breakfast. ;) Or maybe I'll have to find a recipe to make my own!