A Cure for Insomnia

These days, my sleeping patterns have been all helter-skelter - when I had a full time job, sleep was always a rare and cherished commodity and I would sleep through the night, no matter what city or timezone I was in.

During my recent trip to the US, I was generally exhausted after cooking and baking all day that I'd sleep by 10pm each night and have no problems rousing around 5-6am.

Since I've been back in Hong Kong less than two weeks ago, my sleep patterns have been here and there. A lot more There than Here. More often than not, I wake up at 2, 3, 4am and have trouble going back to sleep, and if I do, it may last just over an hour before I awake again. Doesn't help that I occasionally allow myself an afternoon nap.

I read on baby websites that apparently insomnia is a regular occurrence for expectant women, in preparation for their upcoming sleepless nights when baby arrives!!!

It's currently close to 6am and I have been up since 4-ish. Munching on a bowl of grapes now typing this. I need to be up early today as will be trooping down to the airport express downtown to check in my luggage - leaving for Singapore for a few days tonight!!! Charkuayteow, Oyster Omelette, Hokkien Mee, everything delicious and local, here I come!!

For now, a mug of warm milk, perhaps?

My Guilty McPleasure

These days, I consume a lot more McDonald's than I should.

More specifically, the breakfast item Sausage McMuffin with egg. Now, where I live, they deliver round the clock. Which means if you get an urge at 5am in the morning, you give them a call, and it arrives in less than 30 minutes (unless it's at peak hour, then they'll take an hour).

The problem - if you call it that - with the sausage mcmuffin with egg (with a slice of cheese, standard) is its saltiness. Its delicious, tongue teasing saltiness and the melted processed cheese that pulls the entire concoction into a gooey yummy mess. Yumminess personified.

There is nothing like rolling out of bed and having it for breakfast. Often, I have it alone as J would have gone off to work. Sometimes, I live it up by ordering in for both of us - complete with hotcakes in order to meet the minimum delivery order. And I order him a "fresh brewed coffee" and try to balance out the evilness by having low fat milk or just sparkling water with lime for my beverage.

Guess how many grams of fat there are in the sausage mcmuffin with egg?

27 grams. Yes. Twenty-Seven Grams. It's that darn piece of sausage. The Egg McMuffin (with ham and cheese, no sausage) is 12 grams. Less than Half. You can't find these numbers on the hong kong website, but if you go to the US/Global one, it's all there for you to see. I accidentally discovered the numbers while in the US and have vowed to try to have the Egg McMuffin instead.

So that's what I did this early morning. It arrived almost piping hot, in 25 minutes flat. It was pretty good. But I tell you. There is nothing like the sausage patty in the Sausage McMuffin that consequently doubles the amount of fat and waaaaay more than doubles the amount of tastiness. Maybe I'll wait for J to have it with me next time and we can split the sausage one. What are (relatively skinny) husbands for?

photo courtesy of mcdonalds.com.hk

Using garlic again - glorious anchovy spaghetti

Tonight, I made anchovy spaghetti - salty, savoury, incredibly pungent and fishy (but in a totally delicious way).

The long and short of it is, you take pasta (the long ones go best, not the short type) and you have anchovies and make it chock full of minced garlic. I had it for the first time at Big D's Grill when he was in the Bedok coffee shop in Singapore and loved it to bits, and then suffered terribly for the enduring garlic after taste. Nonetheless, recently I begain craving for it, and decided to try making it tonight.

Found a super simple recipe from allrecipes.com, and modified it from what I remember from the Big D version and the feedback from the readers on the site.

One seemingly obvious lesson I took away from the classes at CIA is that you have to taste, taste, taste your food during the cooking process - I used to have the rather odd habit of barely tasting my food as I cooked and hoped for the best at the end. Crazy, I know. These days, I follow the recipe proportions to some extend but rely on my tastebuds and personal preferences to add and subtract appropriately.

First, I added a generous handful of chopped and crushed chili padi, and instead of minced garlic, I used 4-5 largeish cloves which I smashed with a knife (if they were oversmashed I'd discard them and start with a fresh clove - don't want to risk toooo much bits of garlic scattered everywhere). Instead of water, I used chicken stock. Also added some tinned diced tomatos (sans water) that I had leftover from the chicken jambalaya the other night.

When the garlic and chili padi came together with a dash of olive oil in a delicious and nose tickling aroma, it made me cough uncontrollably, but that soon passed. Then, threw in anchovies including some of the oil it came in, and chopped parsley. I wasn't sure how salty the anchovies will end up (during the cooking process, the anchovies get broken up into quite tiny minced pieces), so I added them gradually as I went along. Finally, the tomatoes, and the chicken stock, and simmered for around ten minutes. When it tasted a tad too salty and didn't have enough of the chili kick, I added more chili and a little water, as well as a lot more fresh parsley than the original recipe called for.

Then, after a bit more simmering, I ensured I removed the garlic pieces (which had softened considerably) as I felt it had given up enough of the garlic flavour and then added the cooked spaghetti and tossed it over medium heat to ensure it's evenly distributed before serving immediately.

I loved it!!!!! and would cook it again in a heartbeat!! Enjoyed it lot more than the Big D version because it only had a touch of garlic and I guess, because I couldn't believe I made something so delicious with my own hands - possibly a biased opinion of course.  J said it was delicious but grumbled that there wasn't any meat - apparently anchovies is not counted as... perhaps the next time round I will toss in some boiled shrimp or serve it together with a separately done piece of chicken or steak.

And I still have some of the anchovy left - considering cooking this again in the next couple of days while J is travelling, and I may try it without garlic this time just to experiment with the outcome.

Basic Culinary at CIA and Chicken Jambalaya in Hong Kong

Yesterday I got back into Hong Kong after two weeks in Hyde Park. Slept through most of the day (and tossed through the night).

Week two was Basic Culinary. There were fourteen students in my class, including three parent-offspring pairs - father-daughter x 2 and mother-daughter. What a really nice thing to do together! Hopefully one day one of my children (!) would think it's cool to do this with me.

As expected, it was more grueling than Baking the week before - day One started off easy enough, with us spending most of the kitchen time learning to chop vegetables and fruit the right way. Of course, I'd been holding my knife and cutting wrongly the entire time - you're supposed to curl the fingers of the non-knife holding hand so that you don't chop off anything human on yourself, and grasp the handle of the knife firmly with the other hand, without the forefinger sticking out.

We learned to slice, chop and dice vegetable and fruit into different sizes, the professional way - as well as mince, batonnet and julienne. My favourite was the Supreme technique- where you peel the citrus fruit into one continuous long peel and then cut out pretty slices for presentation on a dinner plate. Chef also demonstrated how to make fresh pasta from scratch - simply 1 part flour to 1 part eggs, but it was the technique of flattening the pasta and cutting that was the challenge.

The rest of the days passed by in a blur of various cooking techniques - dry heat cooking with fat and oils (eg deep frying and sautéing.stir frying), the making of sauces, dry-heat cooking with little fat (eg roasting and grilling), moist heat and combination cooking (poaching, steaming, stewing and braising). We had for lunch each except for the first day when the student assistants (ie future chefs) cooked for us, we ate what we cooked that morning - each team basically cooks different items and everything is shared buffet style.

Chef Skibitcky was American and was a gregarious man in his late 50s/early 60s who had been teaching in the culinary for about 10 years, and headed the UN headquarters kitchen and various restaurants before ending up at the culinary.

Chef demoing pasta making

My most memorable item that I made was macaroni and cheese - there are tons of ways to make macaroni and cheese - I even vaguely recall a way that utilised Campbell's Cream of Chicken when we were teenagers (correct, Esther and girls??). The one we were taught in class was a bit more... professional/gourmet (!?). Bechamel sauce was made from scratch from flour, clarifier butter and milk, and that was the main binding cream. Cheddar was used, and generous chunks of bacon. The salty meat made the entire dish less rich and more palatable and that was a good thing because it meant you can eat a lot more!

the vegetable component - wheatberries, spinach, red lettuce .

 On the last day, in our teams, we were given a basket of items and we came up with our own menus and cooked them based on that, ensuring each item is used. Each team had a different basket and the results were quite beautiful as well as tasty!

my team's creation - miso glazed cod on a bed of clam croquette, with snowpeas, pepper and winter squash

We also had two beautiful organised meals at the American Bounty and the Escoffier - fine dining restaurants at the CIA. More on those later.

Oh, and finally, a quick mention about the Chicken Jambalaya I made for dinner tonight back in Hong Kong - the student assistants made this for us for lunch on day one and it was so delicious I had to try to do it at home, with much success, I'm happy to say!

It was surprisingly easy - recipe loosely adapted from here, though I left out the onions and garlic, and used regular vegetable oil to brown my chicken instead of olive oil.  I used two drumsticks and two chicken legs and the result was the moist, slightly paella-y and risotto-esque texture that I remember with the chicken tender and nicely browned and deliciously savoury with tomatoes and the various herbs.

Baking Boot Camp at the Culinary Institute of America

I'm sitting here in my hotel room, just before 7 in the morning, on the saturday after a week at the CIA - Culinary Institute of America - attending the Baking Boot Camp class. It's nippy out there, about 3 degrees celsius and I grabbed a cup of hot tea from the breakfast table downstairs and am sitting here munching on the chocolate chip and cinnamon scone we made in class last week.

The CIA at Hyde Park - a 1.5 hours drive from New York City, was founded in 1946 and is the premier culinary school in the United States - in fact, it's the only school in the US that is fully dedicated to the pursuit of culinary arts. There are two other campuses in the US, and the Hyde Park is the original one. I'd been looking forward to these two classes for months!

I'd signed up for two classes back to back - the Baking Boot Camp and the Cooking Boot Camp - both basic starter classes designed to provide both a culinary vacation in the fully immersed environment of a full fledged culinary school as well as go back to the basics of Baking and Cooking.

And I haven't baked in years and can count on one hand the number of times I've done a cookie or a brownie from a box in my decades on this earth!

Our class had thirteen students, consisting primarily of people who have been baking and cooking for many years at home, even including a couple of them who own a bakery and online cookie store back home. I guess I was the only true novice, but the Chef instructor - Chef Juergen Temme from Germany - made everything seem not toooo difficult to accomplish even though I felt I obviously lacked the flourish and ease that the other students seem to have. Though I still managed to churn out quite tasty products indeed!

For 4 days, I kneaded dough, used a mixer for the first time in my life, and made savoury biscuits, cookies, scones, pound cake, and braided bread dough to make a giant challah, shaped dough to make baguettes, and oh yes! pies! My team did an apple and chocolate cream pie. And we made our own lunch of pizzas on the last day.

The most interesting part for me apart from the actual class and lectures, was being amongst the students doing their associate (2 year) and bachelor (4 year) programs. A large proportion of them came fresh from High School with the requisite minimum 6 months of real experience in a kitchen (excluding fast food kitchens like Mcdonalds and Starbucks) for either cooking or baking, and some of them already have an initial (non culinary) bachelor's degree. The average age of the students is 23, and classes looked intense! I also saw the occasional student who looked more mature - in their 50s and beyond. Career changers, I imagine.

Basically, everything you eat  and that takes place at the CIA is made by and made to happen by the students - from the mass production kitchen (the cafeteria where we breakfasted and lunched everyday)  to the French and American restaurants Escoffier and American Bounty and the casual cafe Apple Pie Bakery. The service staff is made up of students too, obviously - even as you're studying to be a chef (Back of House), they want you to understand the Front of House, in particular if you plan to open a restaurant or head up a kitchen in the future.

Oh boy, I sure envied those students - rushing from class to class, 12-15 hour days hands on in the kitchens, being yelled at by their chefs. I'm not sure if I would ever go to full time culinary school since the original idea isn't to open a restaurant or be a purveyor of fine cakes online, but I suppose it was a combination of non stop learning in this beautiful, immersive environment, and the idea that you have your whole life ahead of you, that made me feel a bit wistful.

More deep dive details about the week to come!

Pad Krapow Moo: minced pork with basil rice (and garlic!!)

I love this spicy, basil-y porky dish to bits and this is a must-have each time I go to Bangkok - has it been nearly two years?! And it’s good no matter where you have it in Bangkok - dingy food courts, roadside stalls, restaurants. Is it because it’s so easy to cook?

We shall find out tonight as me, the novice, attempts to cook it. And in fact, to honour this dish's authenticity, I am using garlic for the very first time in my little kitchen - not chopped up as the real version would be, but in whole cloves (not even smashed) to get a Touch of garlic flavour but not toooo much.

It was a challenge locating Holy Basil in Hong Kong, I’m sure it’s available because there are many Thai restaurants here, but the one thai grocery store I knew in Central had a basil that was either Thai Basil or Holy Basil. Apparently both work, even though Holy Basil was the preferred one if you could find it.  

I used this recipe from Chez Pim and added two fried eggs for J and one for me on top. I also faithfully asked for pork butt to be minced from the local wet market.

The result? Yumms!! There are a few things I would do differently next time to make it even better though: 

• chopped up the chili into finer pieces and add a little more chili (it wasn’t spicy enough). 
• Smash the garlic pieces a little 

Otherwise - an easy, savoury, comforting quick stir fry that takes minutes to whip up.