[the finished product]
[before baking]
[before second rise]We had our Thanksgiving Dinner today, and it was not nearly the disaster I had feared it would be! (Muaha, my roommates didn't know that I had anticipated disaster)
[the whole spread: sticky rice, gravy, salad, pumpkin cheesecake and turkey]
First of all, the
[unidentifiable turkey innards]
But anyways. As unfamiliar as I am with
[turkey breast, still on the bone, in a bag]
[brining in our fridge]
Today I fried up lap cheong, choong choi, mushrooms and ground turkey, seasoned it with salt, sugar and soy sauce, and then layered it with the pre-soaked sweet-rice in the rice-cooker.
[lap cheong]
[choong choi]
While I was wrestling with mushrooms that stubbornly did not want to reabsorb any water, Miwako and Mélissa started making the pumpkin cheesecake.
[graham crackers for the crust, ground ginger, cinnamon and nutmeg, and the pumpkin puree]
Ahahaha, we only realized belatedly that we didn't have a proper pie-plate to bake the pumpkin cheesecake in, so we made mini-pumpkin cheesecakes in a silicon muffin-tin, and used the rest of the graham cracker crust and cheesecake batter in a loaf pan.
[mini-pumpkin cheesecakes – not yet baked – Mélissa, Miwako and I were trying to be s0mewhat artistic]
[the result of Miwako being super!fancy with the loaf-pan cheesecake]
[mini-pumpkin cheesecakes – after baking]
[sticky rice – not as good as gung-gung's! ]
Once we had gotten the turkey into the oven, we started on the gravy. We started with a roux, then added in chicken stock. After the turkey was finished roasting, we took the drippings, skimmed away the fat, and poured the turkey drippings into the gravy and let it boil till thickened.
[thickening gravy]
[the skin of the turkey burned, but it was weird because it didn't smell burnt…]
[another shot of the turkey]
[my dinner plate]
[1] It was actually the first time Miwako had roast
Oh man, I am so getting the hang of this cooking for myself thing.
bok choi to a dish and save some of the veggie broth in the wok. Next add the doong gu and fu jook with all the liquid into the wok. Add sliced water chestnuts, hoa yau, pepper, and chicken flavour salt.
Prep work for this begins the day before with mincing ju yuk and marinating it in see yau, pepper, salt, and ginger.
minced water chestnuts.
marining ju yuk in mao po sauce.
I made a Chickpea Curry yesterday - with onions, potato, garlic, ginger, and tomatoes. And, of course, a green chili pepper. It's pretty tasty, even if it's not all that photogenic! The tomatoes, I think, and the ginger, made a difference.
Steamed eggs - usually this comes with pork, but my version comes with green chilies.
Steamed Tilapia with Blackbean sauce on a bed of ginger and carrots- usually this comes with green onions, but my version comes with green chilies.
So I bought a demibaguette from Whole Foods a while ago, and was cringing at the price. It was a dollar something, nearly two, for half a baguette! I also checked at Dominion, the local grocery store, and they charged something like $1.79 per baguette. Which seemed about normal, but of course I wasn't satisfied and decided to see if I could make my own bread. Yeeaaahhhh, I'm having mixed feelings about that now.
I have no baking implements. No pans, no trays, no measuring cups. But I decided to try anyways, following this recipe for "Bread in a rice cooker."
I tried to gauge the amounts of water and milk according to the mL graduations on my Nalgene bottle, and used regular soup spoons as teaspoons and tablespoons.
Er, I may have put in too much milk, as the dough seemed more like mush than dough, but that's nothing that more flour won't fix! And I heard that the amount of flour you put in bread is not that important – it will differ according to the humidity of the atmosphere, often by several cups.
So it all seemed to go pretty well until I added in butter. It seemed like a ridiculous amount of butter. This is what the instructions said:
Add butter to the dough ball. It might be easier to cut the butter into small pieces. Also the butter should be soft and at room temperature. The butter will also help to grease the rice cooker bowl, so that the bread will not stick to the sides. Knead the butter into the ball until the butter is completely absorbed into the dough and has no lumps.
Now the recipe warned me that different rice cookers work differently, and that I'd have to watch it. It also suggested that you jam an eraser into the rice-cooker switch, because the rice-cooker would probably turn off once it reached the temperature at which rice is cooked, and bread requires a higher heat.. I didn't have an eraser, but I did have a heavy bottle of soy sauce that would do the trick though. Unfortunately, I probably shouldn't have listened to that tip. That bread burned. It was way more burnt than my peanut butter brownies.
Luckily, it only burnt on one side, and I learnt my lesson for the other side of the bread. The trick for my rice cooker is to hit the switch, let it turn itself to the 'keep warm' for a while, and then when it's cooled down too much, then you hit the switch again. Rather time-consuming, but as I'm supposed to keep an eye on the ricecooker anyways (for fear of burning down my suite by using a rice-cooker in a non-conventional way) it's not so bad. It tastes ok - it's certainly not the best bread I've ever tasted, or even made, but it was certainly edible, and pretty good with that Bleu D'Auvergne. I don't know if I'll try and perfect this method though– I think I might just get a loaf pan or baking sheet ,and try making bread the old-fashioned way : )
I got two cheques in the past two days and decided to celebrate ... by eating meat! Oooorrrrr, you could argue that it took me about two weeks to work up the courage to cook with meat. Who knows? Who cares? Look at the lovely chunks of pork in the picture!
My substitutions were as follows: I didn't want to buy green onions, since I already had so much stuff I don't know how I'll use in my fridge, so I just used onions instead. I also had a bunch of zucchini and green chilies in my fridge, so I added a zucchini along with the green-beans, and put in one diced green chili (seeds removed of course) near the very end of the simmering process. 
The recipe also called for egg linguine, but I decided to go for some noodles I found in chinatown instead, since I was already there to get the chinese 5-spice[1]. The package says 'ho fun' on it, but it didn't seem quite like the ho fun I'm used to - maybe it isn't rice-based or something. Above is what the package looks like, and below is what the noodles looked like (after having tossed them with some sesame oil)
All in all, I thought it tasted pretty good! The sauce was sweet, rich and savoury, while the green beans were crunchy and refreshing. And the noodles were smooth and a little resistant, not too soft. I probably could have put in another green chili though, to kick it up another notch, but I was very satisfied with what I made. My only regret is that I didn't pull the fat off the pork first (I bought the pork already in chunks, the package said "for stew") since I had to pull it off while I was eating, and it's not like the sauce lacked for flavour.
Shopping for the ingredients was an interesting experience - the recipe calls for half of one green chili and half of one red chili. Now, I don't know if it's just because I was shopping in Koreatown, but I went to three different places, and at none of these places can you buy chili peppers in quantity less than about TWENTY chili peppers. They seem to only come prepackaged in amounts of 20 (or 40 if you want the big package). I couldn't find a lone chili pepper anywhere! And I'd be damned if I bought one package of 20 green chili peppers, and another package of 20 red chili peppers. So I just bought one package of green chili peppers, and used one whole green chili. I'll be eating chili peppers in my food for probably the next two weeks as it is[2].
Oh, but I'm so glad I didn't skip out on the chili pepper. The stew was so satisfyingly savoury, with the wonderful kick of spiciness that I was missing so much when I had my Blackbean Tofu. And one chili pepper was just right for me and my weak-sauce threshold for spiciness. I had the stew ladled over rice[3]. Mmmmm, so good. It doesn't look as good as the picture on My Korean Kitchen, but it tasted good : )
[My dinner: Blackbean Tofu on rice, with steamed green beans and a white peach for dessert]
