Pressure Cooker Cherry Sponge Cake

Nice spongy cake without the heat

120g butter
2/3 cup sugar
Cream the two ingredients until nice and light

2 eggs, no prior beating. Just drop it into the creamed butter, one at a time.
At this point the mixture might curdle. Don’t freak.

1-11/2 cups self raising flour, sifted.
Mix that in rather well.

Add milk till you get a drop spoon consistency. That means the batter is thick and thin enough to drop “plop” from a spoon

Mix in glazed cherries, cut into halves. Vanilla essence. Fill pressure worker with water. Put in a bamboo steamer. Start the water boiling. With much care, put the cake tin into the pressure cooker. Must sure no part of the water touches the cake tin. Close and steam in pressure cooker for 35 minutes (if your cooker has a kind of 2 notch regulator like the Fissler, steam at the lower notch).

Oh, it helps if you lined the cake tin with greased paper. And over the tin with paper as well so that drops of steam won’t make craters on the cake.

enjoy.

Smoked Beef in a Kettle

This is done with a normal Weber kettle and a lot of briquettes. Don’t use natural charcoal as they kinda die when you put the lid on.

Also required some hickory chips, or fruity wood chips eg: apple, pear, that sort of thing.  You want about 5 or 6 handful and have them soaking in water for couple of hours.

A nice cut of roast – I like bolar blade, or rump. A bit of fat won’t kill.

Rub salt and pepper over the meat and let it rest at room temperature for a couple of hours.

Heat the briquettes until there are no black bits... those things are compressed with fuel... black bits mean the fuel’s still there. Once they start glowing, move the briquettes to one side, leaving space on the other enough to fit the meat.

Put the meat directly over the fire to sear all sides. Then move it over to the cooler side.

Take a handful of soaked wood chips and scatter them all over the briquettes. Throw in a sprig of thyme, lavendar, oregano, sage if you want to be fanciful.  The roots of fresh coriander is kinda funky too.

Cover the weber and wait.  For about an hour or so. Do not panic if you see smoke emerging.

In the meantime you can construct a charcoal chimney. His is a little fancy. I used a large milo tin opened at both ends. Punch holes around the rim of one end to create ventilation. Put this chimney on a piece of flat, metal plate (a flat shovel works best).   Fill it with briquettes and light it.   The idea behind this is when the briquettes are warm and glowy, you lift the shovel with chimney still intact. Then just over the old set of briquettes, lift off the chimney and tilt the new set of burning briquettes into the fire to rekindle the heat.

With gloves in hand remove the Kettle lid, remove the meat, remove the grate, pour in the glowing charcoal from the chimney and return everything to place. Add in more wood chips. Cover. Repeat until you can’t stand the process anymore.

About 4 hours or earlier, you will have a nice piece of smoke roast beef. My suggestion is to let it rest an hour or so before carving. And I wouldn’t keep this too long.


PS: You can do the same thing with duck... use soaked t-leaves instead of wood chips... except you might want to put a drip pan under the fowl because it tends a lot towards the greasy side.

Zitoni

A word about Pasta
I got this strange packet of pasta. It’s like a macaroni except the factory kinda got lazy and didn’t cut it. So it’s one long tube. Zitoni. After googling I discovered the zitonis are marconic in length. More google and I found this pasta thesaurus. Rather entertaining although a tad academic.

Still don’t know what to do with the zitoni though.

update: OK, this site has a more functional explanation of what to do with zitoni and all kinds of pasta.   But she’s also brought up a contentious point: are the origins of the pasta Chinese? She says it could be Etruscan.  Hmmmm.... this deserves another blog.    

Doughnut

Pumpkin Doughnut
(an adaptation of the Kueh Keria which uses either tapioca or sweet potatoes)

A large wedge of pumpkin (about 500g)
some cornflour or glutinous rice flour or rice flour

Boil the pumpkin till soft. Mash.  Let it cool and dry out.
Sprinkle enough cornflour to handle the dough. Don’t overdo the flour or it’ll be gooey doughnut.

Heat oil in wok and deep fry the doughnuts till they kinda float. Remove and
pour out the oil. Do not clean the wok, but return it to the heat.  Add in quarter cup of cold water with a cup of sugar. Stir it around. A pinch of cinnamon won’t kill.  Mix till it’s syrupy. Toss in the doughnuts and coat with this syrup thing. Remove from heat. Keep tossing the doughnuts around in the wok until the syrupy doughnuts crystalise or till you get sick of it.      Use a soft spatula to lift and turn would help.

A Used Lamb Bone

Things to do with a used roast lamb bone
I made Mee Rebus which is Hokkien mee with a gooey sauce.

A used bone from a roast lamb, bits of meat remaining would be nice
2 sweet potatoes...mashed
2 spoons of miso paste, mashed with a pinch of sugar
Spice paste of 4 garlic, 1 onion and 1cm ginger
(handful of dried prawns pounded to powder)
(teaspoon of belachan powder, or inch of the genuine article)
some curry powder

Garnish:
cucumber, alfafa sprouts, hard tofu, hard boiled egg, fresh green chillies

Boil the bone to make a good stock. Add pepper and salt. Add in a few slices of galangal.

Remove bone. Fry spice paste. Add the powdered dried prawns. Add the miso paste. Mix well. Add the belachan powder and the curry powder.  Add this to the stock and boil for about 10 minutes or however you like it. Stir in the mashed sweet potato. Mix it well... simmer for 10 minutes and that’s it. The gooey sauce is done. If not gooey enough, thicken it with cornflour.

Blanch hokkien noodles in hot, boiling water. Remove. Slice cucumbers, tear up whatever bits of meat leftover from the used bone, chop up tofu, slice up egg, cut the chillies... spoon gooey sauce over noodles and top with garnish.

Quick and Easy Gado

Quick and Easy Gado Gado
Peanut sauce: 2 spoons of smooth peanut butter blended with a spoon of lemon juice or balsamic vinegar

Toast a piece of fried tofu in the mini oven till warm ... but if you can’t be bothered, then don’t bother
Cucumber, sliced
Handful of alfafa sprouts
Tempeh (toast that in the oven first)
Hard boiled egg(s)
(etc)

Introduction

This used to be part of my main blog. It's been re-assigned. It's a series of posted recipes that I've made up or adapted