Dinner on 01/28/09

Our 1st Sushi Making Experience

We like to eat sushi.. and one day we decided to DIY sushi..
I bought a sushi recipe book in book fair... and after got all the ingredients..
we started our sushi project :-)

The output...
















Sushi making is time consuming, but it's fun & surprisingly our self-made sushi taste very good.. :)

Dinner on 01/19/09

What's cooking on Dec 23rd 2008? The dinner we had ..

The dinner we had on 23rd December 2008...







Stir-Fried French Bean and Carrot with Fishcake






and ...






Pan-Fried Pollack Fillet in Creamy Chives Sauce







Looks good? :)
They tasted good too. Too good in fact, that we forgot to have the photo taken until we had partly devoured the fish. :p

We'll share the recipe for the fish in another post soon. The creamy chives sauce was our creation inspired by one of Ikea Malaysia's salmon dish in its restaurant.

Dinner on 01/16/09

Recipe #2: Homemade Pancake

I made some pancake not too long ago, which cw likes a lot... :)
Below is the recipe for the homemade pancake...



Ingredients:

1.5 cup ........flour
3.5 tsp ........ baking powder
1 tsp ............salt
1 tbsp ..........sugar
1.25 cup ......milk
1 ................. egg
3 tbsp ..........butter

Methods:

• Mix flour, baking powder, salt and sugar in a mixing bowl.
• Melt butter.
  
• Add butter, milk and egg to earlier mixture, mix well.
• Heat greased egg-pan and pour approximately 1/4 cup of pancake mixture to the pan.
• Remove the pancake from pan once both sides are brown.
• This should get you about 8-9 pancakes.

The pancakes can be served plain, or with peanut butter, jam, honey... etc.

-et

Dinner on 01/14/09

Best Job in the World?

The Aussies sure are a publicity-seeking lot.
With a movie ("Australia") whose title is corny to the max still making its way round the globe, here's another PR campaign from Down Under.
Only, this time it comes in the form of a job.

Australia's Tourism Queensland is offering a six-month contract job on Hamilton Island. The person that gets hired for the job will have the chance to live rent-free on Hamilton Island in a multi-million oceanfront villa and whose key responsibilities include exploring the islands of Great Barrier Reef and other job duties such as feeding the fish, cleaning the pool, and collect the mail.

Salary? A nice, cool sum of AUD150,000 !
And the job is open to applicants from all parts of the world.

To find out more, you can visit their site here.

Tiny little ones + Falling asleep = oh so cute

This is a blog site that I had chanced in to while reading TIME.com yesterday.
It's all about the sleepy little ones falling asleep, and/or trying not to fall asleep.
Some were irresistibly cute, and some are downright amusing.
Take a look :)

Cute Things Falling Asleep

Dory? Sutchi? Pollack? Pollock? Disambiguation and Comparison

** Dory vs Sutchi

Increasingly in supermarkets across Malaysia, and apparently in other parts of the world too, we are getting lots of frozen whitefish originating from Vietnam.

Often labeled as Dory Fillets, these frozen fish fillets can be found in all major supermarkets such as Tesco, Giant, Jusco etc.

However, it seems that the so-called Dory Fillets had been mislabeled after all.
These fillets from Vietnam are actually an entirely different fish species, namely Sutchi catfish (also known as Siamese shark or iridescent shark, though it is not a shark, but catfish).
And the supermarkets know this.
Initially packaged and labeled as Dory Fillets, now most packages are labeled as Sutchi Fillets.
But to most people, they are still known as dory fillets, including yours truly until not so long ago.

The real deal, John Dory, is a really, really ugly fish which is the top predator in its habitat.
For more info, refer to this entry in Wikipedia.

Meanwhile, here's the deal on Sutchi catfish. A rather much more handsome fish compared to John Dory :)

However in terms of nutrition, John Dory champions over the Sutchi catfish.
Briefly, John Dory has higher polyunsaturated fatty acids percentage over the saturated ones as shown in this page from Australia Government's Fisheries Research and Development Corporation.
Contrastingly, the Vietname-sourced Sutchi Fillets contains high percentages of saturated fatty acids and low percentages of polyunsaturated fatty acids in a study published in 2008.

Hmm ... I guess I'll think twice the next time I feel like buying the Sutchi Fillets from the supermarkets. Which brings something else to mind, are our local restaurants that offers dory in their menu really do source the actual John Dory, or are they getting the 'not-John-Dory' Sutchi Fillets from their suppliers? As certain restaurants charges over RM20++ for their Dory selection, it'll be preposterous if you pay that amount only to get the inferior Sutchi Fillets.


** Pollock/Pollack
Pollock and Pollack is one and the same. No idea why there's two names for it. I'm sure the answer is out there somewhere. Here's the description on the fish in Wikipedia.
And the nutrition data for pollock can be found in this page.
Quote from page:

The good: This food is low in Saturated Fat. It is also a good source of Magnesium and Potassium, and a very good source of Protein, Vitamin B12, Phosphorus and Selenium.

The bad: This food is very high in Cholesterol.

So, a picture has now formed. That is, Sutchi Fillet (not nutritional), John Dory (nutritious), and Pollock (high cholesterol).

In terms of taste alone, John Dory has a distinctive light, sweet flavor. Sutchi Fillets has comparable flavor to John Dory though at times, they could be almost tasteless alone. Pollock has fairly strong fishy flavor, which necessitates the use of ginger or lemon juice to help "tame" the flavor.

Recipe #1: Sour and Spicy Fish

Ingredients:

200g ----- Fish Fillet (John Dory, or Pollack)
10g ------- Ginger, sliced thin
1/2 ------- Onion, sliced
3 --------- Garlic cloves, sliced
1 ------- -- Bird chilli, cut thin
1 ---------- Red chilli, cut thin
40g ------- Preserved vegetable ('cha choy')
1 ---------- Tomato, cut
3tsp -- ---- Lemon juice
2 ----- ---- Kaffir lime leaves
Salt and pepper

Methods:

1. Defrost and clean fish fillet. Season top side of fillet with salt and pepper. Leave alone for 10 minutes.
   
2. Add the rest of ingredients onto the fish fillet.
3. Steam for 10 minutes, and serve immediately.

Serving size: 2

Doing some cooking...

Nowadays, I cook often for the day's dinner, and for et to bring as the next day's lunch.
Occasionally, I follow recipes that I googles from, but mostly the cooking is done using whatever ingredients that come to mind and are available.
So ... yeah, et is at risk everytime I cook for dinner .. ahahah .. :p
Fortunately, I've had more hits than misses so far. :)

And for those that we consider are hits, we'll share the recipe here.
Please note that the recipe is not the final version, heck .. they probably can't even be categorized as drafts. So for those interested in trying, and have inputs to improve the recipe, by all means, let us know :)

Dinner on 01/05/09

Tonight's dinner is green curry plus stir-fry vege with fish cake. Hot and spicy but yummy.. :)

The green curry is cooked with a Thailand-imported green curry paste, added meat, eggplants, curry leaves and red chillies. The curry turned out to be nice :D

We also purposely took a photo of the green curry paste package, so that we remember this brand is worth to try again next time.

For vege dish, we tried to finish all raw vegetables available in the fridge. So, here is our "mix vege"... celery + baby carrot + cabbage + fish cake.

Something happened ...

Hello everyone,
This blog will be the place for rantings, musings, opinions etc. by both cw and et.
Hopefully not too many rantings, more on others :)

As for me and et, something happened circa end of year 2007, and we became together sometime during last year, beginning at someplace in Malaysia, and at a somewhat ungodly hour for some :p

This post is meant to start things off. So here we go, hopefully you'll stay for the ride ... :)