Dainty Bites

My girl has recently developed a fondness for listening to my childhood stories. Stories about my schools, friends and all sorts of things that I did when I was little. But I am going to leave out parts like the fact that her mommy joined a gang of boys racing bicycles, and maybe the reckless stories of me in a monsoon tunnel with fish nets catching guppies. These will have to wait until when she's older, I suppose. One of her favourite stories goes like this: "When Mommy was a little girl and Aunty Nemo (aka Bigfoot) was a little girl, Mommy and Aunty Nemo like to bake cakes together. One day, Mommy and Aunty Nemo made a banana cake in school. So Mommy put the cake into the oven. But Mommy forgot to turn off the oven, and the cake got burnt. Aunty Nemo took out the burnt cake and it was black. Our teacher was very angry with us for burning the cake." The above was based on true story except that I changed it somehow so that she could understand. We (Bigfoot and I) were m

Something that I have noticed while flipping Jap food magazines is that the focus has shifted to warm comfort food for winter. And earthern pot dishes seems to be one of them. なべもの(鍋物) Nabemono - A class of dishes cooked at the table and served from the pot direct. (From A Dictionary of Japanese Food by Richard Hosking) Well, I didn't cook my nabe at the table but instead on the stove and then we eat at the table out of the pot. The food keeps warm until we were almost three quarter way.

It has been a long while since I baked anything. Scones has always been my favourite bakes for one reason that it is very simple to make. In fact my first cookbook was probably a book about scones, muffins and teacakes! So you can see my love affair with scones went way back then. I have always thought that the scones from my supposedly first cookbook were great, but the moment I bit into these, I wonder why haven't I tried this recipe earlier. This recipe is from The Joy of Cooking ('97 ed.) and it is called Classic Currant Scones in there. These scones are really flavourful, moist and cakey. Yum! I realised that one of the reasons I don't bake often is that I can't stand the prep work required for baking. Unlike my cooking, my baking still needs to follow strictly to the books and that means that I would need to measure everything. The actual making of the scones takes less than 10 mins and the baking took another 17 mins, but the prep work took me almost an hour! Don

In all my years, I have had lotus roots in soup only. Never have I seen it otherwise until I started reading Japanese cookbooks. So here is my first foray into cooking lotus root in a non-soup style. 豚バラ I think refers to pork belly, but I substituted it with sliced lean pork. The original recipe can be found here .

This seems to be our regular weekend dish cos it is so easy to make and it is good for dumping all those odd and end veggies in the fridge. We recently found a shop that sells lots of Korean foodstuff. So we loaded up on kimichi, kimichi paste and hot chilli paste. Yum! If you are interested, the shop is located at Burlington Square. Sorry can't remember the exact details of the shop. (^.^)