After two long years my books are finally done and dusted. I’ve compiled two books, the first Myhumblefood book concentrates on Asian home cooking. The second book is a little more fun; along with some Western home cooking, I’ve also added a section on Food Art which is something I really enjoy. They’re both priced at RM 300 a set for people residing in Malaysia, or SGD 120 a set for those in Singapore.
Free delivery for those in Bangsar and Damansara Heights only.
Please PM me for details!
Special note: 50% of gross profit from the sale of the books will be donated to the National Kidney Foundation as well as the Great Heart Charity Foundation. Should you decide to also donate in addition to buying the book(s), 100% of your donation will go directly to these causes.
Thank you all very much for your love and support!
I’ve been itching to have a go at making this pie for a while now! What’s not to love about creamy mashed potatoes and a hearty thick lamb mince ragu all in a single bowl? It’s a pretty balanced meal is it not? Carbs, protein and vegetables? Let’s forget for a moment about the amount of cream and cheese that went into it and label it as the ultimate balanced meal.
Comfort food. Easy to put together. I will definitely make this again! The recipe calls for peas and corn as well but I made do without them since I’ve got a picky eater on my hands today!
Ingredients
Meat Layer
Minced lamb – around 700 grams
2 carrots, diced into smallish cubes
1/2 cup fresh corn kernels
1/2 cup fresh English peas (if you’re feeling lazy there’s always the frozen mixed vegetables option which has carrots, corn and peas all in one convenient bag. Use 1.5 cups of the mix then)
4 cloves garlic finely minced
1 cup minced onion
3 tsp chopped rosemary leaves
3 tsp thyme leaves
1 1/2 cups chicken broth
1 cup dry red wine
3 tbsps Tomato puree, have an additional 3 tbsps on hand if you prefer more of it in the ragu
2 tbsps Worcestershire sauce – other recipes call for 1 tsp, I found it insufficient and ended to my taste, so add to your taste
2 tbsps all purpose flour
pepper to taste
Potato Layer
700 grams peeled russet potatoes approx.
200 ml cream
30g salted butter
pepper to taste
1 tsp garlic powder (optional)
1 cup grated cheddar cheese
fresh thyme leaves
Cooking Instructions
Heat up butter in a large deep skillet on medium high heat
Add the chopped onions first, and cook until translucent and starting to caramelise.
Add the garlic and fry for about half a minute or so until that’s soft
At this point if the mixture is getting a tad too dry, add a little more butter. After which we can now put the lamb mince into the pan to brown. Break up the meat into small pieces (the smaller, the smoother the ragu will be, but that’s only if you like it that way)
Mix in the vegetables, we’re only adding them now as we don’t want to overcook them
Sprinkle the thyme and rosemary over the mixture and give it a good stir.
Pour in the red wine, chicken broth, Worcestershire sauce and tomato puree and flour.
Bring the sauce to a boil and lower the heat to simmer for a couple of minutes. The flour should thicken the sauce in the process.
Turn the heat off and cover with a lid.
As for the potatoes, place them in a large pot and cover with cold water
Add salt to the water
Bring to a boil. Once they are pierced easily with a fork, drain them. Check in about 10 minutes, if the potatoes are still resistant to the fork the leave for a bit longer. However, take care that you don’t overcook them. Don’t want mushy potatoes!
Press the potatoes through a ricer (or mash them by hand) and put aside.
Meanwhile, melt the butter in a saucepan and add the cream. Bring this to a gentle simmer before adding the potatoes to the cream and mixing it all up. Season with salt and pepper.
(Additional step:- you can put the mashed potatoes through a sieve to get rid of all the lumps for that smooth mash)
Ladle the ragu into your prettiest deep dish (one that is oven-compatible). Sprinkle a layer of cheese over the ragu. Spread the mashed potatoes evenly over the ragu like so. After which you’re done. You can use a fork to create patterns on the mash which will turn out a little crispy after some time in the oven. My ideal meat ragu to potato ratio is 3:1.
However, you can add more if you like your mash. Here, I decorated the top by squeezing the potatoes through a decorative nozzle.
Sprinkle some cheese over the top of the mash layer, and arrange some thyme leaves strategically into the top layer as a sort of garnish and for the fragrance.
Bake at 205 Celsius for around 20-30 minutes Added some chopped chives before serving, just because I like chives.
This is one super easy and delicious don! (don = rice bowl dish in Japanese). All you need to actually cook is the rice. The rest is all about slicing up the sashimi and avocado and assembling the rice bowl. Since the current trend now is all about clean eats, clean foods and healthy eating, I suppose this makes the cut (if you ignore the ubiquitous mayonnaise blobs popping up among the luscious chunks of creamy avocado and fresh maguro). Ingredients (for 1 person)
100 grams sashimi grade maguro tuna
1/2 ripe avocado, pitted and skinned
Mayonnaise – amount at your discretion, I used Japanese mayonnaise
Cooked short-grain white rice
2-3 tsp soy sauce depending how seasoned you like your tuna
Optional (for garnish) – chopped chives, seaweed flakes and thinly sliced leeks (only the white parts). I would highly recommend you add these as they add texture, lots of flavour and freshness to the dish
Optional – furikake (a type of Japanese rice topping/seasoning)
Method
Slice up the maguro sashimi into thick chunks, I cut mine into 3/4 inch cubes but do it however you like.
Season the maguro with soy sauce and set aside.
Cut up the avocado into cubes/chunks roughly the same size as the maguro.
Place the rice in a bowl (if you’ve opted for the furikake, mix it into the rice before arranging the rice in the bowl) and pile the maguro and avocado on top.
Squeeze mayonnaise over the dish in zig-zag lashings or you can add them in blobs like I did.
Add the ikura and garnish with chives, seaweed flakes and sliced leeks.
Serve
I enjoyed it so much I had it again for the next meal… only in the sloppiest, most disgusting way one eats when alone:- Still tasted amazing nonetheless!
Just another quick picture post on some scrambled eggs I made while I was in London. Found some black truffle at Borough Market, so I shaved some over the eggs. I still think nothing beats the aroma of Alba winter white truffles!
A minute twist to ordinary scrambled eggs… add some truffle oil and mild cheddar cheese shavings to give boring ol scrambled eggs a little kick! Top with chopped chives and serve over slices of sourdough bread, pan toasted in butter. Recipe for the basic scrambled eggs here.
Here is the second half of the lobster (first half of which went to making the lobster pasta) and the easier recipe of the two. The original version called for fresh river prawns/big head prawns but since I had the lobster, I figured I could use that instead and add in some large prawns as a bonus. Since there is no recipe that I could refer to online I tried to recreate the taste the best I could remember. Turns out I’m actually quite satisfied with the results! Now without further ado, the recipe:-
Ingredients (4 pax)
1/2 lobster
6 large prawns (in my first attempt I used 3, but the attempt with 6 prawns tasted better)
1 inch ginger, sliced
1 tbsp minced garlic
1 tbsp minced onion
1/2 cup Shaoxing wine (maybe a dash more if you like)
5 cups chicken stock
Chinese lettuce (I used a quarter of a head), cut into bite sized pieces
1 tsp sesame oil
150g Glass noodles
Spring onions chopped into large three inch sections.
Coriander for garnish
Finely chopped spring onions for garnish
salt
The array of ingredientsGlass noodlesLarge lobster.
So we shall start with the prawns. De-shell all the prawns and set the shells/heads aside. Do NOT throw them away! Then devein them and cut each prawn into three sections.Size of the prawn heads and my hand, just for comparison. Lots of flavour in those prawn heads!
Cut the lobster into half. If the lobster is as spiny as this one, do use a towel and be very careful when handling it. A pair of strong kitchen scissors would be a great help here.
More pictures of the lobster… as you can probably tell, I’ve added pictures from a second lobster noodle attempt into the mix. The second lobster looked way fresher and more succulent with its firmer white flesh and golden globules.
When you’ve managed to cut the lobster into half lengthwise, chop the tail into three parts and dig out some of the flesh from the head (I forgot to do that here) and set that aside with the prawns. Leave the orange/golden stuff behind.
Heat up some oil in a large pot and fry the ginger, garlic and onions until the onions are translucent and the aroma of the ginger comes out. It helps to crush the ginger before or during this step.Add the prawn shells and fry until half cooked (almost that coral colour they become when they’re fully cooked) before adding the lobster head to the pot.Continue frying for a minute or so, adding a little oil if it gets too dry. Then add the shaoxing wine to soak up all that flavour that’s coming from the prawn shells and lobster head. I actually would have liked to add another half cup of shaoxing wine but I was worried my family may not like the taste so I stuck with half a cup, but go ahead and use that extra half a cup if you like.
Add the stock and simmer for around 15 minutes before turning off the heat. Cover the pot with its respective lid and leave it for perhaps an hour.
Then, remove the prawn shells from the stock (if you had a strainer bag in the first place, use it to hold the prawn shells because it can be a chore to pick them out from the soup).
Toss in the lobster and prawn meat that was set aside earlier, along with the spring onion sections, lettuce and glass noodles. The reason why we cook the shells and the meat separately is so that we can extract the most flavour out of the seafood from the shells without overcooking the meat, which is only added at the end. If you were to cook the meat right at the start, you’re going to end up with some very hard, overcooked and dry chunks of prawn/lobster which is such a waste of good seafood.
Place the lid back on and bring the soup to a boil.
Add the sesame oil at the end and season with salt. Top with chopped spring onions and coriander. Easy peasy!
Bought some really fresh, plump salmon sashimi and some scallop as well. Thought I’d just quickly whip up some hoedeopbap (Korean sashimi salad) to go with some freshly cooked rice. Rice is one of my guilty pleasures and I try not to have carbs at night but I couldn’t resist… yet again T___T
Here’s the link to the initial post I did up on Hoedeopbap. I just changed some of the vegetables and type of fish according to the ingredients that I have on hand. The one thing that doesn’t change is the sauce. Also, I managed to get hold of Korean perilla leaves (kkaenip)! It was so difficult to find in Singapore, so I was shocked when I came across it by accident in a korean grocery store in Kuala Lumpur. I quickly snapped up 3 packs of it!
My prize: the korean perilla leaf in all its glory
And the rest is just arranging the salad so it looks pretty 😉
The above picture is from my 2nd attempt at making tamagoyaki. Its a pretty common food in Japanese and Korean cuisine. Perhaps the only difference is that the Koreans don’t make it with sugar, dashi or sake. Of course, the Japanese tamagoyaki has both sweet and savory versions but I prefer the sweet version. While it is helpful to have a rectangular pan for this recipe, it is not necessary. You can make tamagoyaki using a normal frying pan.
For my first attempt, I made tamagoyaki using only 3 eggs and using a low fire. Not only did I have to wait a longer time for the egg to cook, but the egg roll came out kinda small, flat and not as fluffy. It was worse when it got cold and shrank further in size T___T. I poured in only enough egg to cover the surface for the first round but this was a mistake in my opinion.
In my 2nd attempt, I used 5 eggs on medium-high heat in a smaller and deeper frying pan. I poured in half the eggs for the first round of cooking and that made the egg roll fluffier. The end result? Thick egg rolls!!! ❤
Other than that generally the cooking methodology is still similar, which is why I’m including my first attempt here as well.
Ingredients
5 eggs
1-1.5 tbsp sugar
5 tbsp water or dashi
1 tsp salt (more or less depending on how salty the dashi is)
1 tsp mirin
1 tsp sake
You will need some kitchen paper for oiling the pan after each round of frying as well.
Instructions
Combine the dashi/water, sugar, mirin, salt and sake into a bowl. Mix thoroughly.
Break the eggs into the bowl with the dashi mixture and beat to just combine but do not overly beat it as we want some egg white bits in the tamagoyaki. Run a chopstick a few times through the mixture to ensure that the eggs are broken up and can be poured easily.
Keep a bowl of oil with kitchen towel next to the pan. You will use this to continuously oil the pan after each round of cooking.
Oil the pan and heat it up on medium-high flame.
Pour in half the eggs.
Scramble it a little. Fold over when the bottom is set enough to flip it over. Oil the exposed side of the pan, and then gently push the “omelette” to the side of the pan. Oil the rest of the pan before adding more egg. This time add just enough egg to cover the pan.
Above, I’ve already pushed the first layer of egg to the side and added the 2nd thinner layer. Lift the first “Omelette” so that the second layer of egg goes underneath to coat the entire pan. See those bubbles forming? Pop them!
Hehehe! Once this layer is more or less set, flip the thicker part onto the thin layer. This would create the “roll” layer. Again, oil the exposed part of the pan, push the egg to that side and oil the rest of the pan. Then add another layer of egg. Continue the process until all the egg is used up.
The last bit of egg… and you’re done! Brown the outsides if you like but don’t overdo it. If you want to shape the tamagoyaki into something more rectangular/oval you can make use of a sushi mat, but you have to shape it when it’s still hot.
Lastly, slice the tamagoyaki and serve 😉
I did not shape the tamagoyaki so the shape of it has a mind of its own T___T
I’m also going to add pictures from my first attempt. You can see that the heat is lower and the pan is bigger. So I “rolled” the egg several times and pushed the egg to the middle instead of the very end.
Waiting for the egg to cook before flipping the roll towards the left.
Above, after pushing the roll to the middle, I added another layer of egg.
Continue the process…
Finally done.
Now to cut it!
As you can see, the roll isn’t very thick. Also, it shrank after it cooled and wasn’t as fluffy. Which is why I prefer the first method of cooking on medium high heat and in a smaller pan. Cooking half the eggs and scrambling them in the first round saves time and also makes the eggs fluffy. So try it yourself and see which way works well for you.
I’ll leave you with some youtube links on making tamagoyaki :-
Just a quick post on what I made for dinner the other day when my family came over to Singapore. Typical food that you’d get in a Malaysian/Singaporean home.
Steamed fish, tofu with minced pork, fried egg onion omelette, stir fried vegetables and something that veers towards Japanese cuisine, the fried pork cutlets and prawns (Tonkatsu and ebi furai).
My kitchen, with the deep fried tonkatsu on a cooling rack and the ebi fry bubbling in the hot oil.
Beautifully golden ebi fry. My first attempt at it, will put up posts on how to make the tonkatsu and the ebi fry. Both dishes use almost the same method of preparation and cooking though 😉
Whoops, this picture came out sideways. This is the tofu dish, but I think I went overboard with the minced pork topping. May need to put up a proper post on this dish too. It goes amazingly well with rice and healthy to boot.
Steamed barramundi fish with lots of spring onions and chinese parsley (cilantro).
Here’s an easy kyaraben (Character bento) that you could attempt. This anime character is Shin Chan, one of the many anime characters that bring back a wave of university nostalgia. For the list of tools used, please refer to my first bento post.To make Shin Chan’s face, I used some rice mixed with Salmon furikake (to make the flesh tone). I couldn’t find a furikake that had no seaweed in it so unfortunately my flesh tone had little specks of seaweed in them T___T. It turned out ok in the end though.
For the hair, eyes and eyebrows I cut out strips of seaweed using a sharp design cutter as shown in my first bento post.
As usual, I drew my design on paper, just to make the face fit in with the other food I wanted to put into my bento. Using this design as a template, you can then cut out the hair, eyes and eyebrows by clipping the paper on top of a sheet of nori on a cutting board as shown in the pictures below.
So the sequence is: Paper, seaweed and then cutting board. All fastened together to make it easier to cut out the delicate pieces of seaweed. Then you mix your Salmon furikake into the rice, place it into the bento box and shape it into the form that you’ve drawn in the design, roughly in the same size as accurately as possible. Then add the seaweed hair, eyes and eyebrows.
If added the seaweed directly onto the rice, the seaweed will shrivel. However I find that cutting out cheese to form the base for the seaweed infinitely cumbersome so I skipped that step. Cheese normally should be the base for any form of seaweed art so that the seaweed remains nice and flat instead of all crumpled and shriveled like it was in my bento T____TSo there it is. I cut out some flowers from an apple, added an egg and some chicken. Then I used a chunk of chilli for Shin Chan’s mouth. I suppose you could use ketchup or do it the professional way and use an egg sheet dyed red. Too much trouble to make the egg sheet for such a small area. Plus I like the spicy kick that the chilli lent. This is the second part of the bento. Just a compilation of the stuff I wanted to eat. Make sure that moist foods like fruits are separated from dry foods using rubber separators or in this case, leaves 😉 I wouldn’t want that egg tart to turn soggy!
I’d like to draw your attention to the apples. I saw these designs in a magazine but couldn’t understand how it was made so I freestyled it… basically I winged it. I cut some apple chunks with the skin still on, in large cubes. Then I made four shallow cuts in the skin with a small knife, in the form of a hashtag # (I hope you understand what I’m bumbling on about, guess this is where a video would be much more educational than my incoherent words). Use the knife to gently peel off the skin slices in alternate blocks, leaving the skin on in some blocks so that it forms the design as shown. It is actually easier than it looks.
And there you have it, a Shin Chan bento. This was quick, delicious and fun to prepare. Definitely fun to eat as well 😉
H
The array of ingredients
When you’ve managed to cut the lobster into half lengthwise, chop the tail into three parts and dig out some of the flesh from the head (I forgot to do that here) and set that aside with the prawns. Leave the orange/golden stuff behind.
Heat up some oil in a large pot and fry the ginger, garlic and onions until the onions are translucent and the aroma of the ginger comes out. It helps to crush the ginger before or during this step.
