Asian Dishes, Bread and Batter, Desserts, Singapore, Snack

Muah Chee

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Muah! Muah! Muah! I love muah chee and now, thanks to my new toy, the Happy Call pan, I can make my own muah chee anytime I want! Muah!

Add a cup of glutinous rice flour to a cup of water (or slightly less) and stir till it forms a smooth mixture.
Make sure the pan is not hot or it will instantly cook the mixture before you can even form it into a dough. Using a very small fire, heat the pan and then add onion oil. If you have no onion oil, then fry some sliced onions until they are browned and then remove the onions. I used barely a teaspoon of oil to fry my onions and then after removing the sliced onions, poured the mixture in. Do not cover.
Stir the mixture into a dough. Something like this. And then you cover to cook the dough. It takes only about two minutes on one side. Turn over to the other side and then cook.
Once it’s cooked (the inside is not pasty and raw), take it out onto a board and snip or cut into small chunks.
Drop the nuggets of dough into a bowl of powdered peanuts and sugar (make sure lots of sugar. I used 3 tbsp to 3 5 tbsp of peanut powder) and roll till the nuggets are all nicely and evenly coated. And there you have it, muah chee! Yummylicious indeed. And so economical!
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Happy Call Salmon

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I’ve joined the club and am loving it. The Korean pressure cooking pan – Happy Call – has taken over Singaporean women by storm and as I really am truly a patriot at heart, I got one two weeks ago. The only thing that I regret was not finding out about it earlier.

For my first try using the pan, I made salmon. The salmon turned out moist with a rather crispy skin. One needs proper heat control in order to ensure the food inside does not get burned. Before I cooked the salmon, however, I fried potatoes in it. Just a wee bit of oil (1/2 a teaspoon) and potato wedges. Cover the pan and cook, turning over several times (just for the fun of it, really) and then voila! Healthy chips.

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Meat, Middle Eastern/Turkish, Soups

Harira

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I wished I had discovered this soup earlier. This is such a tasty, lovely, tomato-ey soup which everyone I served that day slurped it up dry.

On Mothers’ Day, I invited my family over and made harira, moussaka, a salad and tiramisu for lunch.

This harira recipe I got off the internet and they are basically the same ingredients: blended onions, lots of finely chopped fresh coriander and parsley, paprika (I used smoked), black pepper, powdered ginger, black pepper, salt, tomato sauce (a bottle of passata works perfectly), tomato paste/puree, meat cubes (I used brisket), lentils, chickpeas, vermicelli, water,  and a mixture of flour and water paste to thicken.

My version that day was without the chickpeas and I made my soup slightly thicker so that they could dunk it with toasted bread. This is a Moroccan dish, one of their national dishes I think, and I have influenced at least two colleagues to cook this dish, one of whom made it two days consecutively for dinner.

Harira Soup in the tureen
The Mothers’ Day spread. Mommy brought beautifully baked salmon and dill rice. I forgot to place the salad plate for the table but it had beautiful yellow, orange and red baby capsicums.
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Prata Dessert

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I learnt of this from my colleagues. Not the prata dough, that I know, but what innovative ways one can do with it!

One colleague, because of an absolute no fry rule in the house, had to be ultra innovative. And she used prata dough ( you know, the kind you get at the frozen section in the supermarket) to make epok-epok! She cooked all the filling first (meat and potatoes) and then waited for the dough to get slightly soft before quickly folding and crimping with a for, I presumed. And then she baked it.

Another colleague told how he and his wife would sprinkle sugar on the prata dough, roll it up like a cigar and then sprinkle some more sugar before putting it in the toaster for breakfast. Yummy!

So I did it today for breakfast. The sugar version. I had cinnamon sugar left from making the pretzels the other time. I also had like 2 strawberries in the fridge. So I sprinkled the cinnamon sugar and a bit more caster sugar, topped it with sliced strawberries and then folded in half. One I folded in half, the other two I managed to be patient and wait a while longer for the prata dough to be more pliable so that I could roll it. The toasting in the oven took rather a long time -a good 20 minutes. But it was yummy. The prata was toasting for so long that when it was finally ready, the filling had turned jammy. Mmmm….

Before toasting. Cinnamon sugar in and on.

Desserts

Orange Flavoured Caramel Egg Custard

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This is a super simple recipe my mom taught me when I was a teenager. Its caramel with custard, steamed and then refrigerated, and then eaten for tea.

I hated steaming because well, I am too lazy to take out the humongous steamer out. So I baked this. The result was tasty but it didn’t have that silken texture. It was pockmarky and dense. Hahaha..but still lovely enough, even for my mom.

All I did was in a bowl whisk 5 eggs with sugar (I estimated, but I reckon about 3/4 cups) and then added a bit of vanilla essence (extract of course better if you aren’t Muslim). And then a whole can of Carnation milk. I squeezed in a whole Sunkist orange with its zest into the mixture. Before that, I melted a cup of sugar till its caramelized and poured that into my pyrex bowl. I added the mixture to the bowl and then baked it till done. And then refrigerate.