Transforming rice

Introduction

This is an evolving recipe. I am trying to recreate the recipe from Food wars and wish to document it here. I decided to try and not add gelatine since the chicken wings should be all you need.

On my first attempt I did not reduce the liquid by half which lead to a reasonably weak and soft aspic.

Aspic

Ingredients

- Chicken wings (full)

- light soy

- sake (I used Chinese xiao xing wine for my first try since I didn't have sake )

- bonito soup stock 2 packets

Method

- Lightly fry the chicken wings until golden on the outside

- boil water in a large pot to cover wings, add the bonito soup stock, sake and light soy

- add wings to the large pot, simmer covered for an hour (you need to reduce the liquid by half or you will get a weak aspic)

- let the pot cool for a bit, remove the wings and set aside

- poor the liquid into a shallow dish, refrigerate until set

Baby Oat Cakes

I have been doing a lot of cooking for my baby daughter recently and I was thinking of recording the recipes I use. The first one is baby oat cakes. They are a little bland but little Olivia can not handle too harsh flavours yet. Olivia loves these mashed up a bit and mixed with yoghurt.

The great thing about oat bran is that the internet tells me it is more nutritious than rolled oats. The bran is made up of small flakes so Olivia does not choke when she eats it. They are a little dry so they need to be mixed with something for younger kids. I am going to play with the recipe a bit more to see if I can make the lighter.

Ingredients

• 3 dried apricots, chopped
• 1 whole apple, cored and sliced
• 1 cup oat bran
• 1 teaspoon of bicarb of soda
• 25 grams unsalted butter, softened
• 1/2 cup desiccated coconut

Method

1. Pre-heat oven to 200 degrees Celsius.
2. Heat about 1 cup of water in a saucepan. Bring to boil and place dried apricots and apple in the water to soften a little.
3. Place the contents of saucepan in a blender and blend to a paste. Set aside.
4. Mix the oat bran and the bicarb of soda in a bowl. Mix in the butter and coconut.
5. slowly add the apple/apricot mixture into the oats until a soft dough is formed. You will know it is the right consistency when you can shape the bran into balls by rolling a tablespoon full of mixture with your hands
6. Prepare a baking tray with baking paper. Place balls of rolled mixture onto the tray, evenly spaced. 
7. Place in oven for 20 minutes.
8. Take out of oven and allow to cool.

The oat cakes should be cool to the touch before serving

Friday Night at Wills

There is some things better than cooking your own meal, like cooking dinner with friends, in a good old fashioned cook off. We had 6 participants separated into teams of 2, my Wife and I, Will and Dave, and Heidi and Cass. The mission was to produce 3 different pizzas in an epic battle searching for the ultimate pizza taste. However, before embarking on this quest, we prepared a delicious entree.

Will's Entree Recipe
The Ingredients

• Proscuito
• Greek mozzarella
• rocket

The Method

1. cut the proscuito in half
2. lay 2 rocket leaves on a half proscuito piece
3. wrap the rocket/proscuito around a chunk of mozzarella
4. skewer the parcel
   

It worked out very well and I believe that we will definately use Will's entree in future events.

On top of this, Will was most kind to prepare pizza dough the night before, that had quite nicely risen over night and was ready for rolling.

Wills Pizza Dough
The Ingredients

• 200 grams of white flour
• 180 mills of water
• salt to taste
• yeast

The Method

1. mix ingredients together
2. wait a day
3. separate into portions
4. roll out into a pizza base
   

As you can see it is a pretty simple recipe, and in no time we were all rolling our dough balls into pizza bases. Unfortunately, Will only had 1 circular pizza tray, so 2 teams had to suffice with rectangular pizza trays and bases. Here is a run down of the toppings used by each team for each pizza.

Will and Dave

• Sliced parmigiano reggiano
• tomato paste
• rocket
• proscuito
• 1/2 red onion
  

Heidi and Cass

• parmessian with pepper corns
• grated tasty cheese
• tomato paste
• button mushrooms - sliced
• cherry tomatos quartered
• 1/2 red onion
  
• sprinkling of rocket leaves
  

Matt and Ying

• 2 beef sausages, cooked then sliced
• 1/2 red onion, finely sliced
• bbq sauce
• 3 slices rindless bacon
• 60g shaved pastrami
• 6 quartered cherry tomatos
• grated tasty cheese to taste
• grated parmigiano reggiano

However after such an exhausting battle it could not be decided who won, as we could not decide which was the tastiest. In the end we all agreed it was a tie.

A night is not a night without a few good drinks, and our host Will did not disappoint. The first of which was lemon, lime and bitters hand mixed by our host Will. After which we had a very nice bottle of red that complimented the pizzas really well.

Dinner and New Super Mario Brothers

We were invited to our friends house in Chatswood to play New Super Mario Brothers, Guitar Hero and eat and drink a few wines. I must say that I was never a big fan of Guitar hero until tonight, when I realised that it had a lot of great songs that are not on Sing Star.

Here are the wines we consumed that night. We started off with nice sparkling shiraz that we drank while eating a really brilliant combination of dates, walnuts, camembert cheese with crackers and an awesome combination of fresh bread, olive oil, caramelised balsamic vinegar and a nut/spice mix. This was followed a really nice Ramon Bilbao Crianza, served with baked bruschetta... yum, the bread was nice and crisp and the tomatoes full of flavour.

The final cause was spaghetti bolognaise with a creamy goats cheese. This was served with the Wiley's creek semillion. This is a tad out of order, but we could not resist!!!

This was followed by a light tea cake, black/herbal tea and of course more New Super Mario Bros

Dinner of tortellini

Tonight my wife and I went to a friends house and made tortellini from scratch. It was a really good social experience, we learned how to make pasta and we all ate a really nice dinner. The stuffing for our tortellini was made of roast pork, prawns and prosciutto. The pork and prawn combination was designed by the friends we were visiting but it worked out really well, it was served in a vegetable and beef broth with a side of home made garlic bread ... yum yum.

For this dinner we brought over two bottles of wine, the first was a chardonnay from the coombe valley which was very refreshing while we made the pasta.

The second was a pinot noir from Yering farm which complimented the pasta very well.

I highly recommend socializing with people by cooking, getting around and making dumplings or stuffed pasta is an excellent way to get to know people better.

A simple sentance

I wanted to talk about two things in this blog, mandarin (the language) and food. So I would like to kick it off with a sentence. I recently got married to a girl who was born in China. The first three words she taught me in mandarin were "Wǒ Ài Nǐ". This is written in simplified Chinese as 我愛你. The phrase translates word for word into "I love you". So there are three words for your vocabulary:

• Wǒ (我) - Me/I
• Ài (愛) - Love
• Nǐ (你) - You

So that is it for today.