In the next two days we learn how to cook red meat, which is great since I really love red meat especially when it’s grilled. So for today we learnt how to cook roasted sirloin fillet served with pureed (mashed) potatoes. The recipe is good and quite easy to prepare, so I will share it in this post.
I’ve made some modification with the recipe at home. The juice (sauce) recipe is the basic recipe, we can add mushroom or black pepper to make it into mushroom sauce or black pepper sauce.
Continue reading Roasted sirloin fillet with pureed potatoes
It’s been almost a month since my last bento. Tonight is Christmas’s eve and I want to celebrate it in a nice bento way. I made a simple snowman theme with some usual bento fillings.
The snowman was made with three onigiri. As for the facial details, I used shiitake mushroom and a heart foodpick for the hat; nori cut with hole puncher for the eyes and the buttons; black sesame seeds for the smiling mouth, a maize ear (corn) for the nose, and crab stick skin for the scarf.
As for the bento fillings, I made chicken karaage, ham and lettuce roll, and put a cherry tomato, cauliflower chunks (I didn’t use the usual broccoli chunks since I wanted more white like snowy Christmas day for the bento), and a half mandarin orange.
The other ornaments I made were a Christmas tree shape cucumber made with vegetable cutter and a pair of snowflake cheese. I cut those snowflake with the art knife, took a while to made them but I’m quite proud of the result.
So I think this is the last bento I made for 2009. I will post some more post from my cooking class before the end of the year. Merry Christmas to everyone and happy holiday, God bless us all ^_^
In Jojo’s school there is a weekly event that on each Friday one children must bring some snacks to share with the other students. And this week is Jojo’s turn which meant that I must prepare something on Thursday night. Usually the other parents just buy foods from supermarket for their child to share but I and my wife agree that we will prepare a special homemade food for our son to bring.
I saw this broken glass pudding while I was surfing for recipes a couple of weeks ago and I really loved it so I proposed making this kind of pudding to my wife and she’s agree, as long as I’m the one who make it. No problem for me.
The original recipe was using jell-o with various kinds of colors but my wife doesn’t like jell-o because (and I agree) she thinks that thing has too much artificial flavors and coloring. The other reason I don’t use it because those stuff are imported so the price is too pricey for just a pudding.
Continue reading Retro style pudding
Today’s lesson at the cooking school was a continuation from our last class. After watching cooking demo from the chef, we had our puff pastry ready to bake. We rolled the pastry dough with rolling pin until it became very thin and broad. We knew that our pastry won’t expand perfectly but still we wanted to know the result.
While we wait our pastry in the oven, we prepared the poach egg along with the albuferra sauce. There are several method to make poached egg (I googled while I’m writing this post) but I think the way we taught by our chef is one of the simplest. We only need to boil water in a sauce pan, add 2 tbs of vinegar and break the egg near the water edge and like magic, the egg white automatically swirl and approaching the egg yolk. We just wait around 3-5 minutes depending on how hard we want our egg, and then we need to soak the poached egg into water with some salt on it to remove the vinegar flavor. It’s done.
Continue reading Puff pastry with leek and poached egg with albuferra sauce
After finished the class I had this urge to make something at home and I decided to make an apple pie using the dough recipe I’ve got today. I’ve baked apple pie several times but it’s been one year since I made the last one. I remember that we have lots of trouble this past year finding a good housemaid that can help me as cook assistant. And after changing 3 housemaids we found a good one now, she’s a good cook and quite reliable as a kitchen assistant.
So at home I only prepare all the ingredients and measure them right and let our housemaid to finish the dough and prepare the apple sauce. But I still have to roll the dough and put it on tray and check the oven myself. We only have a simple portable oven at our home, so if we want to use it then we have to heat the oven on top of the gas stove. We can’t possibly know the oven temperature, the only way to know is using our feeling and checking the oven often until our food is well baked.
Continue reading Homemade apple pie
I brought lots of food from the school and while driving back home I was thinking about the decoration for today photo shots. And since Christmas is almost come I taught that I’d better make a nice Christmas theme decoration.
I have a good portion of rice ‘au grass’ so I’d better make a good use of it and then came the snowman idea. I made three rice balls with different sizes so I could balanced them while I stacked them, but still the top and middle rice balls were easily fell and then fall apart. I realized that I have to do the photograph quickly and made some preparation for it.
I used carrot and nori for the details on the snowman. Carrot was use to made the hat, the long nose, and the scarf; all of them were cut with knife. And I use nori for the eyes, mouth, and the buttons; all of them were cut with emoticons puncher. The additional materials were toothpick to stick the hat to the head and parsley stalk for the snowman arms. The rice balls were decorated one by one before I stack them together. I still needed a skewer to put them together and did the shots very quickly after I assembled them together.
Continue reading Poached chicken with supreme sauce
It’s been a full week I haven’t updated my post, the longest since I started this blog. My cooking class and the always busy December is keeping me very busy. And with our Jojo’s growing so is his schedule, I need to arrange more time to accompany him to friends birthday, Christmas celebration, and other things to attend. I still managed to take some pictures of my cooking and edited them with Photoshop but I just couldn’t find a time to post them.
I already post my minestrone pictures on flickr a week ago but haven’t wrote anything about it. So it’s better late than never.
This is the first menu we did at the professional cooking school I attend. The lessons to learn is that we able to cut various vegetables and making tomato concasse (the process of removing tomato skin by soaking the tomato into boiling water). I found out later from Wikipedia about this Italian menu that minestrone is one of the cornerstone of Italian cuisine, and is just as common as pasta on Italian tables.
Continue reading Minestrone
It’s been almost a week that I haven’t post anything and I also didn’t make any bento during those time. I started my cooking class this Monday, everyday until Friday. Each class takes about 4 hours and since the school is quite far from my home, I need about 90 minutes driving from home to school (total of 3 hours back and forth). First I thought that I can manage to make some bento on afternoon after school, but then I still need to spend about 4 hours to manage my business (usually 2 hours before and then 2 hours after school). Basically I’m beat, too tired to make anything.
Somehow I manage to make this one. I made shrimp tempura and Japanese beef curry for dinner, so I thought I could make a simple bento since right now I feel guilty if I don’t make a single bento after a few days off. And also I want to see how straight I can fried my shrimp with some additional cutting (hmm, I should really ask my chef teacher about this next week).
Continue reading Shrimp tempura bento