Though I’d never actually tried beef stroganoff before, I’d always had a mental association of it with winter and comfort foods, the creaminess of the sauce teemed with flavoursome beef and mushrooms seemed ideal for cold winter days.
So, when I bought this month’s edition of the Delicious magazine, they had a recipe from Jamie Oliver for a creamy beef stroganoff (p31) and I thought this would be a great opportunity to give this a try.
This doesn’t look anything like Jamie’s mouth-watering photo.
Ingredients
Olive oil
50g unsalted butter
500g beef fillet steak, cut into thin strips
1 small onion, finely diced
1 garlic clove, finely chopped
300g mushrooms, thickly sliced*
125ml whiskey
3 gherkins, finely chopped
Pinch of smoked paprika
300ml light sour cream
*Jamie suggests using oyster, chestnut or chanterelle mushrooms. I just used field mushrooms as that was all I had.
Pasta or rice to serve.
1. Heat a wide, heavy-based frypan over medium-high heat, then add a splash of olive oil and half the butter.
2. Season the beef well with salt and pepper, then working in small batches, briskly fry the beef for 1-2 minutes to brown all over. Transfer to a plate and cover to keep warm.
3. Melt the remaining butter in the pan, reduce the head to medium-low and cook onion and garlic gently for 5-7 minutes till soft. Add mushrooms and cook for 1 minute. Add whiskey with cooking juices from the rested beef.
4. Bring to the boil and cook for 2-3 minutes. Add the gherkins, paprika and sour cream, and reduce the sauce slightly over medium-high heat for 7 minutes, then stir in beef and warm for 1 minute. Season, sprinkle with chopped parsley, and serve.
This tasted fine, but I hadn’t actually expected it to be sour. Clever right, especially considering that the recipe called for gherkins and sour cream. DUH. It was very indulgent and tasty, but I think I felt the kilos adhering to my thighs with every bite.
Would I make it again? Perhaps, if for a large group of people. My sister was the only other person who was interested in it, and I found that when this was reheated, there would be little pools of oil floating on top of the cream, which wasn’t particularly appetising….
Mm, winter comfort foods…
Technorati Tags: pasta, rice, beef stroganoff, pasta sauce
Mr. Woofy curls on my bed and slowly drifts off to sleep… Don’t you love his little fluffy tail curled around his leg?
Since he thought it was bedtime, I thought it was only appropriate to tuck him into bed with my favourite stuffed toy 
Head over to Sweetnicks for more pretty pooches doing their thing for WDB #43!
Technorati Tags: golden retreiver, dogs, weekend dog blogging
Well, mung bean’ed at any rate For the opening of my parent’s new business we had to prepare a whole lot of food, and this particular food was made in great quantity.
Made with a base of pureed mung beans, it’s called ‘bin-dae-dduk’, it is another of those foods which appear at most feast day tables in Korea, and for very good reason! It’s one of my favourite dishes and I think I can speak without bias to say that my mother’s recipe is the best I’ve ever tasted!
Topped with a little thinly sliced thai red chilli, their crisp brown exterior hides a world of delights inside their crispy shell
Ingredients
250g dried mung beans with skin removed *
250g pork mince **
250g bean shoots
135g kimchi, all liquid squeezed out and roughly chopped ***
1 bunch of spring onion, well rinsed
100g dried fernbrake (called ‘gosari’ in Korean), boiled to rehydrate then drained
1 tsp ground ginger
2 tsp minced garlic
10 thai red chillis (the small ones about 1 inch long), seeds removed and thinly sliced
1/2 cup water
* Trust me when I say this is an important thing - if you don’t then you’ll have skins from the beans floating around in the mixture which are difficult to blend, chewy and generally icky.
** To make a vegan version, you can replace the pork mince with ‘dry’ tofu, an extremely firm tofu that has had almost all the liquid squeezed out. Just mince it by mashing it with a potato masher.
*** Kimchi can be bought in small containers from any Korean grocery store, but failing that you could always try and make it yourself 
1. Soak the dried mung beans overnight, the next morning they should be soft enough to squish between your fingers without too much force. If you haven’t gotten skinned mung beans, then after the soaking you’ll need to lightly rub the beans to remove the skins and manually remove them from the water.
2. Use a food processor or stick blender to process the mung beans with 1 cup of water, blend till completely smooth otherwise you’ll have chunks of raw mung bean in the pancakes and it’ll be strange.
This is the processed mung bean, see how smooth the mixture is?
3. Put the blended mung beans aside, and put on a pot of water to boil. Blanch the bean shoots to slightly cook them, but don’t leave them in any longer than about 2 minutes - you want them to be kinda floppy, but still retain a little bit of crunch when you bite into them. Refresh them in cold water and strain all water from them.
4. Cut the spring onions (scallions) into 2-inch lengths and put them aside, then lightly fry the rehydrated bracken fern in a tsp of oil till fragrant. In a large bowl, mix the chopped spring onion, bcracken fern, pork mince, kimchi, ginger and garlic till well combined.
Aww, the lovely mix of flavours and textures!
5. Pour the mung bean puree into the pork mince and mix till everything is once again well combined.
Look at the consistancy of this mix - thick, not too watery, when you scoop it up with a soup ladle and pour it back it should be ‘gloopy’ (yeah, I’m all about the technical terms here!)
6. Heat up a frying pan or griddle over a low-medium heat and make sure it is extremely well oiled, then pour the mixture into small pancakes, about one soup ladle scoop per pancake. Place a few thin slices of chilli on top of each pancake - it is mostly decorative, but also provides some warmth when the little pancakes are being consumed
These are a little over 1/2 an inch high, when you flip them over you should lightly press down with a spatula to help flatten and even them out.
7. Fry till the underside is firm, crunchy and golden, then flip and fry the other side till it’s also crunchy and golden.
See the oil bubbling around the pancake? I guess they really should be called fritters as they should be fried in about 3mm oil to make sure the sides of these thick pancakes is cooked also.
8. Leave them to drain on some paper kitchen towels. These can be fried and lightly refried before serving, but they do need to be served warm otherwise they are a bit tough.
By the time me and mom had finished, this wooden basket was piled high with these crispy little bundles of joy
Thanks to the kimchi, these don’t require any dipping sauce, but you can make a simple one of vinegar and soy sauce in a 1:1 ratio with a 1/2 tsp of dried chilli powder mixed in.
Technorati Tags: korean food, fritters, mung bean
Now, I’ve had one prior success with a muffin/cupcake recipe which turned out well as you may have seen, but unfortunately the next day the oil started to ooze out of the cupcakes, and by the third morning they were extremely dry and stale. Not impressive at all, I must admit that I was quite disappointed with Stephanie Alexander for providing such a recipe…
However, I’ve decided to tackle the beast again thanks to the purchase of my brand spankin’ new ‘500 Cupcakes’ cookbook, and so armed with a wooden spoon and rubber spatula, I led a full-scale assault on cupcake-land.
Now, there were two recipes which took my fancy - the recipe for chai cupcakes and the chocolate & chilli cupcakes, however I encountered a slight problem - I didn’t have the full set of ingredients for either, and only 1 stick of butter in the fridge (this was at 1am this morning and I definetely wasn’t about to head out to the service station to buy more butter!). So what else could I do but mish-mash the two with the hopes of a success.
It worked
So, now without any further ado, I present to you Ellie’s Chocolate & Chai cupcakes
It’s amazing watching this…
…turn into this
Ingredients
225g unsalted butter, softened
225g caster (superfine) suger
225g self-raising flour
4 tbsp dutch-process cocoa powder
1 sachet instant chai-latte powder*
1 tsp baking powder
4 eggs
1/4 cup milk
100g semi-sweet dark chocolate chips
*The book actually recommended using chai tea powder, but I couldn’t locate anything like this at the supermarket so I just bought that lipton’s instant chai latte stuff.
1. Preheat the oven to 175 degrees C and line your muffin tray with cupcake papers.
2. Combine all the ingredients except the chai powder and milk and beat with an electric whisk till smooth. Heat the milk and dissolve the chai powder into it, then slowly add this to the mix whilst beating. When it’s combined, stir in the chocolate chips.
3. Spoon the batter into the cases, filling no more than halfway full. Place in the oven and bake for 20 minutes, or till a toothpick inserted into the cupcake comes out completely clean.
4. Remove, cool and enjoy
This recipe is AMAZING. The cupcakes turned out as light as air with a texture that was so smooth it was like biting into a cloud. They are very chocolatey without being overly sweet, and the chai powder added some warmth to the mixture, which I imagine would be similar to the effect of putting some chilli powder in the mix.
Now, these actually are meant to be enjoyed with an icing which I didn’t have enough butter to make, but here it is for anyone who is interested!
Ingredients
175g icing sugar, sifted
50g dutch-process cocoa powder
3 tbsp Tia Maria
115g unsalted butter, softened
Blend all together till smooth, then spread onto the completely cooled cupcakes!
Now, my parents recently opened their own business, and today was the official ‘opening’ where the Korean community was invited to come and celebrate the new space whilst it was being blessed by their priest. They’d asked me to make a few baked goodies and I immediately agreed. However, later whilst I was wondering what to bake, I asked how many people would be there and the answer was “Oh…about 30 to 50″. WHAT??? This is what led me to bake from 1am to 5:30am this morning…
Furthest to the top are the chocolate and chai cupcakes. In the middle are some financiers, and closest to the front are some carrot and walnut cupcakes I made from my carrot cake recipe.
And again, so you can witness the sheer amount of miniature baked goods!
So, I was feeling a bit fragile last week and in need of some retail therapy. So, what did I do? Forget buying some cute outfit or snazzy shoes…I got COOKBOOKS!
First up, we have “500 cupcakes” by Fergal Connolly. Honestly, I needed this - how else am I expected to get over my fear of cupcakes?
Next is “Harumi’s Japanese Cooking”, a book which provides detailed, step by step recipes to some favourite Japanese dishes. Apparently, Harumi is Japan’s answer to Delia Smith
Last, but not least, is Jill Dupleix’s “Totally Simple Food”. And having a look through the book, it does indeed have some extremely quick and easy looking recipes which sound great!
Can’t wait to give these a shot. Does anyone who has any of these books have a favourite recipe they can recommend?
