Soy-butter grilled Salmon.

The week past was a a whirlwind, I was out of the house everyday despite allergy attacks. Despite being called Ferien (holidays), we were most busiest and wasn’t able to stay much at home. Some days you’d see us lugging our neck and shoulder-breakers around, shooting here and there. Some days I went with the dawty out as far as an hour away from home as she familiarize herself with what to do at the play rehearsals. Yes, I’m a stagemom once again. ^_^

In between, I rarely got the time to cook…which I’ve been missing out on a lot too.

So on Sunday we were finally able to have a peaceful lunch at home. I bought this salmon fillet Saturday (stores being closed on Sundays) on our way home from rehearsal. weew!

Salmon is what I consider the king of all fish. (lol) If there’s even such a thing. You know how I’d go and throw down the drain the hard-earned 2-kilos-lost-from-dieting  if salmon is served…really don’t care.

There are quite a few recipes I enjoy with salmon and I love every bit of them. When in a hurry, this filet soy-butter, that’s simply soy sauce and butter is the easiest I can prepare.

Ingredients:

Salmon Filets
Butter, melted
Soy sauce
Lemon
Pepper

needs:

Grill Pan or griller
brush
spatula

Clean and prepare filets. In a small bowl, combine melted butter and soy sauce. Brush filets with soy-butter and sprinkle with pepper and lemon.

Place filets, skin side, on your grill pan. Grill for 6-8 minutes depending on thickness. Flip once. Brush with soy-butter again. You can try flaking it with a fork, salmon is done then. Serve with rice and miso soup and veggies.

Serve with rice and veggies or soup.

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Join us on Food Friday

Breakfasts. They’re supposedly the foundation of everyday and yet I fail to prepare one that would energize the kids, hubby and myself. It has been my goal to wake up earlier so I can have all the time to make a decent meal. I fail…all the time. The easiest I can prepare are toasts which the kids normally like with just butter.  For hubby an egg and coffee with the toasts would suffice. So to spice those bread on some days, here’s my cinnamon toast for easy fix. Four ingredients and a toaster and here’s your comfort food.

What you need:

• Bread
• Butter
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 4 teaspoons of ground cinnamon

1. For the bread, choose ones that doesn’t have butter in them already. I find these cheap loaves from the grocery across our place, they’re at 0.40 cents. They’re not the best tasting bread when eaten alone but when made into cinnamon toasts or spread with nutella, they’re the best. So get some slices off for buttering.

2. Toast a few pieces on low…better use the grill-toaster than the pop-ups. While waiting, mix brown sugar and ground cinnamon. I prefer brown sugar but granulated would do. Take the bread slices out, be careful: they’re hot! Spread butter  and sprinkle some of the sugar-cinnamon mix.

3. Toast them again until sugar melts and your done.

Best served with milk+honey for kids and coffee for hubby.

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Food Friday, Yummy Sunday

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There are a lot of baked goodies that son1 would request from time to time. I could easily make almost all of them except for doughnuts…I found this recipe from youtube but I changed it a slightly. My dilemma was    I deep fried it instead of baking so maybe it was not a good idea after all. The next time my son requests for donuts, I’ll bake this.

Ingredients:

1 egg
3/4 cup castor sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/2 cup of milk
50g melted butter

2 cups plain flour
2 tsp baking powder

Glaze:

chocolate bars
white chocolate bars

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1. In a bowl beat eggs using a hand mixer. Put in castor sugar, vanilla extract, milk and melted butter. Mix well.

2. Fold in flour and baking powder into the egg mixture and mix again, when it gets tough to mix, use a wooden spatula. Let the dough sit in half an hour or so.

3. Heat up oil for deep frying.

4. Flour surface (table or countertop) and flatten dough…not so thick so that they cook easily.

5. Shape your doughnuts, I use a small glass to shape the doughnut and I make use of a piping tip for the small whole.

6. When oil is hot enough, drop dough one by one, just when there’s enough space for them. Flip after 30-40 seconds using a wooden stick. If you think that they aren’t cooked through leave for some seconds more.

7. Let oil drip, leave doughnuts on cooling rack.

To make glaze:

I make glaze out of laziness; simply melt the chocolates and dip the dough one by one. You can add color to the white chocolate too, I made use of matcha powder for it. Decorate with assorted candy sprinkles. Serve.

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Food Friday

To be happy over someone’s misfortune is not my thing but to be thankful that I am one who doesn’t have allergy with shrimps must be the same thing.

We’re all shrimp lovers at home. It doesn’t matter which dish, as long as there’s shrimp, expect that there’d be none left.

This entry is almost the same (but different) from my Tempura post I did before…because I didn’t made incisions to straighten the shrimps. I basically used the same recipe though, please click here.

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We first got to savor a slice of Oreo Cake from a cafê that daughter and I frequent. We really liked it, even my older son who is very particular with cakes liked it too…When we visited mom-in-law at my brother-in-law’s place my son saw a box of ready-to-make Oreo Cookie cake. The idea is to make a cake that resembles an Oreo cookie…white filling – ‘cream’ or ‘creme’, sandwiched between two circular chocolate or golden cookie pieces, here that would be layers of chocolate cookie crust.

This cake is very simple I believe the packaged ingredients are the same with the original recipe. I saw that most have the same ingredients but this one is something I’ll try.

Ingredients

1 (20 ounce) package oreo cookies
1/2 cup melted butter

500 grams cream cheese (Philadelphia)
500 grams Mascarpone cheese
230 grams confectioners sugar, sifted
2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
720 ml  cold heavy whipping cream

Directions

1. Crush cookies, leave some as bite size pieces or reserve some of the crushed cookies for the top. Combine melted butter and crushed cookies. Press the mixture into 9×13 pan. Leave in freezer for 5 minutes.

2. Beat half of cream cheese and half mascarpone in a bowl, pour half of sugar and mix in remaining cream cheese and mascarpone.

3. Include vanilla extract and slowly put in whipping cream, mix until smooth and thick.

4. Spread the cream cheese mixture evenly on crust and top with remaining crushed cookies or if you prefer bite size pieces, top the cream cheese with those. Put in the fridge for an hour or two.

 Carefully remove from pan, slice and serve. Voila, one happy lil’ kid…

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for:

Food Friday

At first look you’ll know that this is like Morcon, a rolled meat with fillings of vegetables, cheese, hard-boiled eggs, hotdogs and pickles served on special occasions back home. Rouladen simply means rolled meat. The German and Austrian counterpart has less filling and has a different sauce from what I remember my mom makes. Well, I don’t expect them to be the same, that’s one good thing about food, there are similarities and differences that you get to enjoy whichever you like.

Roulade:
4-5 Beef Roulade (thin strips)
8-10 slices of bacon
2-3 onions
1-2 tablespoons spicy mustard from Dijon
1 tablespoon butter
2 tablespoons butter
freshly ground white or black pepper
Sea salt or coarse salt ground pepper

Sauce:
2-3 onions
1  carrot (cut in half)
1 / 4 celeriac
1 clove of garlic
1 large tomato
1 tablespoon tomato paste
1/2 l beef stock, chicken stock, veal stock, vegetable stock, broth or bouillon cubes
1 sprig of thyme
1 bay leaf
freshly ground white or black pepper
Sea salt or coarse salt ground pepper
butter

Preparation:
1. Peel the onions and cut into rings.
2. Wash the roulades and pat dry with kitchen paper.
3. Clean the carrots, peel and cut half of it into thin strips.
4. Sprinkle roulades with salt and pepper, brush with mustard and top with two slices of bacon, onion rings and carrot strips.
5. Roll up and fasten with toothpicks or roulade needles.

Procedure:
1. Wash tomato with hot water and quarter them.
2. The fat can be extremely hot, fry the roulades on all sides, add salt and pepper.
3. Dice the remaining carrots.
4. Remove the roulades from the pan and pour off most of the fat.
5. Fry the diced vegetables and herbs (onions, carrots, garlic, celeriac, thyme, bay leaf) in butter. Let contents of the pot thicken with tomato paste.
6. Scrape off the browned bits with a wooden spoon from pan bottom.
7. Bring the sauce to a boil and place the roulades.
8. Then add in chopped tomato.
9. Let boil and let simmer for about 1 hour and 50 minutes.
10. Pour sauce and season to taste.

Serve with rice or pasta.

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Food Friday, Yummy Sunday

Winter is getting the better of us. We’re becoming much like squirrels…we only get out of the house when need be. That is to go to school and buy food. That is why I am so thankful for the corner shop that sells vegetables and fruits in bulk, they also have meat that I can get for less – well, compared to grocery prices. Most importantly, eggs in abundance. I can get 30 eggs for 4euro whereas 10 eggs at the grocery shops cost 2euro already. The eggs are important for hubby and I, building up muscles from protein, for the macarons that we so love to make and for the cupcakes…for the same reason as the macarons.

There are a number of red velvet cake and cupcake recipes around but I wouldn’t go test each of them as they did here. Though I got to be thankful I know now which recipe I should follow next. These cuppies were made some months ago, unearthed from archives and posted oh so late. ^_^ I anyway hope you enjoy these eye candies. This is from one of my favorite bakers, Stephanie Jaworksi of Joy of Baking.

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Food Friday, Yummy Sunday

 I am not much a fan of spicy food, hubby is and the kids took that from him. Wasabi peanuts? Go ahead, they’ll munch on those as they would popcorn. If there’s one chili dish to exempt, it would be chili con carne and when I cook it, it’s not really that spicy. Actually I am missing the chilli hotdog that hubby and I like from 7-11, a 24-hour store back home. Being often out late due to the nature of our work (publishing), 7-11  has become a favorite hangout when we get hungry in the middle of the night.

For the recipe I follow this one I found online sans the yogurt and coriander garnish. I also had to put less spicy ingredients, the kids and hubby could spice theirs later. I dropped in red beans too and since I removed the yogurt, I topped it with cheese instead.

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for:

Food Friday