Free the Robot (Singapore CBD)

Tags

CBD, healthy, quick meals, restaurant review, singapore

Ah the perennial go-to for lunch, for the working crowd in CBD. It serves up many  hearty meals, from morning breakfasts to satisfying lunches, even managing a decent cuppa. After all that, it transforms into a cocktail bar come nighttime. Free the Robot manages a pleasant, cozy ambience should you arrive before the lunch hour rush.

Said decent cuppa.

Salmon bowl with onsen egg, avocado and acar, it is wholesome, healthy and filling. The salmon is smoked, so beware if you’re not a smoked salmon fan. Otherwise this is a perfectly acceptable, even delicious, lunchtime meal.

Chicken and avocado sandwich. Tender slices of chicken, sandwiched with cheese and creamy slabs of avocado and slathered with pesto sauce. Griddled to perfection. Great combination of flavours.

I regret not taking a proper photo of their burgers, but this might be the only way to showcase the juiciness of their patties. Very good execution, sufficient sauce and topped with a fried egg. It is difficult to find decent burgers in Singapore, and thankfully this ticks the right boxes.

My absolute favourite however, is the crab pasta. Generous chunks of crab cooked in a fragrant tomato base sauce, topped with pine nuts and chives. I could eat this every week (every day would be a stretch for anyone!). It is also a tad spicy, which ties all the flavours together in a neat little bow. Lovely.

This is comfort eating; foods that we are all familiar with, with a dash of inspiration. Affordable eats to soothe the stress of the work day.

Free the Robot
118 Telok Ayer Street Singapore 068587 (Telok Ayer MRT)
Opening Hours: 8.30am – 4.30pm (Tues-Sat, closed Mon and Sun)

Myhumblefood cookbooks are finally out!!!

Tags

myhumblefood; myhumblefoodcookbook

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!

 

Korean Chicken Soup

Tags

chicken broth, chicken soup, cleaneating, cleaneats, easy recipes, garlic, healthy, Home Cooking, homecooked, Korean, korean chicken soup, Soup

I’ve previously mentioned in an earlier post on how to make clear chicken soup. This recipe is similar except that there’s a lot more garlic and scallions in it. It’s a healthy dish and an easy one to make too. All you need is a little time to draw out the chicken essence into the soup.

Ingredients:

• 1 whole chicken (3 – 4 pounds) – some say that cornish hen works best but as I couldn’t find one, I used an antibiotic free adult chicken
• 10 – 12 garlic cloves
• 1 small piece ginger, sliced
• 1 medium onion, cut into halves
• 3 scallion stalks – white parts
• 1/2 teaspoon whole black peppercorns (optional)
• Codonopsis roots (very much optional!!! I only added this because I had it in hand but the traditional Korean chicken soup does not include any herbs – this excludes the famous Korean Ginseng Chicken soup which has young ginseng and red dates in it)
• 3 Red dates, pitted (again, very much optional)
• Extra chicken bones (optional)
• 10 cups of water
• 3 scallions – green parts, finely chopped to garnish
  salt and pepper to taste

Cooking Instruction:

1. The chicken has to be at room temperature before working with it. If you’ve kept it in the fridge, allow it to sit, covered of course, for half an hour at room temperature.
2. Cut off the wing tips and the tail end. If the chicken came with its head and feet intact, cut those off too. I’m unfortunately squeamish in this area.
3. Remove any excess skin, otherwise the soup will end up overly loaded with oil
4. Remove giblets from the chicken cavity.
5. Wash the chicken under running water and pat dry.
6. On high fire, prepare a pot of boiling water (pot has to be large enough to fit all the ingredients with room to spare so that the water doesn’t come splashing out as it boils)
7. Lower the chicken (and extra bones if you have any) into the boiling water and boil for 3-5 minutes before draining the water from the pot. This step helps to ensure further removal of impurities (blood, gunk, etc)
8. Add the garlic, onion, white parts of the scallions, ginger and peppercorns (and only if you have it, the roots and the dates) to the pot. Lastly add the water. The water level should be at least 2-3 inches above the chicken as it will reduce during the cooking process.
9. Bring everything to a boil over high heat and then reduce the heat to medium-low to simmer, covered for about 40 -50 minutes. During the cooking, skim off any foam that starts floating about on top. Otherwise you’ll have yourself some really murky looking soup!
10. Remove the chicken from the broth and place into serving bowl. If you’ve used extra bones, continue simmering for another 30 minutes. If I were just making regular chicken soup, I’d be simmering the lot for 1.5-2 hours. Doing that would compromise the chicken meat but it makes for extremely flavourful soup. As this recipe goes, the chicken should not be overcooked, yet we need the soup to be flavourful. This is where the extra bones come in handy – you can boil those without caring if they become tasteless in the end!
11. Add salt to the soup to taste.

To serve, you can serve the chicken and the soup in a large decorative soup bowl, garnished with the green scallions.

OR you can ladle some rice into a bowl, top with bite sized chicken bits and pour the soup in, topping everything off with the scallions.

I chose to eat mine with plain rice porridge and some kimchi. Seaweed would have been amazing too!

Hoedeopbap again!

Tags

dinner, easy recipe, healthy, hoedeopbap, hotate, hwedeopbap, koream sashimi salad, lunch, One bowl meal, quick meal, sake, salad, salmon, sashimi, scallops

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 😉

Mix it up well and good.

Devour!

❤

Deconstructed bibimbap bento

Tags

bento, bibimbap, breakfast, character bento, character bentos, cute, deconstructed, easy bento, food art, healthy, Home Cooking, Korean, Kyaraben, lunch, lunchbox, panda character bentos, vegetables

Pork loin tonkatsu

Tags

breaded, deep fried, easy, easy recipes, flour, japanese, japanese cuisine, katsu, panko, pork, pork loin, pork tonkatsu, potato flour, tonkatsu

Pork tonkatsu is a deep-fried, breaded pork dish, very common dish in Japanese cuisine and generally comes in two types;  pork fillet (ヒレ, hire) or pork loin (ロース, rōsu) cut. It goes well with Japanese curries or on its own with some lemon or tonkatsu sauce (you can get these at your local Japanese grocer). I opted for mayonnaise and english mustard for mine. This is the basic pork tonkatsu, using pork loin. First you dust the meat in flour, then in an egg batter and finally some Japanese panko breadcrumbs before frying them until golden brown. You can play around with the fillings using this concept, some restaurants roll up some sliced meats and layer them with cheese, mentaiko etc. to make tonkatsu, and those are amazing as well!

Ingredients (3 pax: 1 pork loin per pax)

• 3 pork loin cuts
• 1 beaten egg lightly seasoned with salt and pepper
• 1/4 cup of potato flour
• 3/4 cup or more of Japanese panko breadcrumbs (adjust as you see fit, I normally eyeball the amount and add when I feel that the loins could do with more breadcrumbs)
• enough cooking oil to submerge the pork cutlets

Cooking Instructions

• In preparing the pork, remove the excess fat if you’re not a fan. If you like it then by all means leave the fat on. Either way, you will need to make several cuts on the side where the fat/tendon is. Make sure the fat/tendon is cut through in each incision made. This ensures that the pork does not curl up during the cooking process
• Next, use a meat tenderizer and pound at the meat on each side. It will flatten out a little after the pounding. Don’t go overboard as you might end up with pork shreds! Just enough pounding to ensure that the pork will be juicy and tender after cooking. Rearrange the pork back into its original shape (pat it back into shape!)
• Season both sides of the pork loin with some salt and pepper.

• Press the pork into the flour, lightly covering all surfaces of the meat, and tap off the excess flour
• Next, dip the pork into the egg mixture, lightly coating the pork in egg
• Lastly coat the pork in panko breadcrumbs. It should look like this when you’re done:-

• Heat up some oil in  wok or a pot on high heat. Ensure that there’s enough oil to completely submerge the pork, otherwise it will not have an even colouring.
• Before placing the pork into the oil, test it with a pair of cooking chopsticks. Tiny bubbles should form around it, as shown in the following photo:

• Gently place your pork into the oil. It is very important NOT to overcrowd the pan as that again will lead to uneven colouring and the tendency to overcook the pork is pretty high. We all have moments where we think the heat is not high enough and end up leaving the meat to cook way longer than it should. Lesson learnt, do not overcrowd the pan so that the temperature remains high and food cooks as it should.
• Cook until the pork turns golden brown.

• Flip the pork once halfway through cooking so that the top part of the pork gets a chance to brown evenly too!

• Remove the pork cutlets and place them on a wire rack to drain off the excess oil.

• If you are going to make another batch of tonkatsu, make sure you skim off all the burnt bits from the oil before frying the next batch. Otherwise, other than uneven colouring on the next batch of tonkatsu, you risk burning them too. It’s not what I’d call appetizing 😉

• Slice it up and take a moment to appreciate that satisfying *cruncchhh*~ when you cut through the crispy golden layer.

❤

Serve!! In Japanese restaurants, this is normally served with some steaming hot white rice, miso soup and some pickles with some lemon and sauce on the side. Along with a mountain of shredded cabbage. Makes you feel a lot better about all the deep fried food you’re about to have ;D

Er…. but the Malaysian that I am decided to serve it with a variety of other foods. Made a simple fried omelette dish, some deep fried breaded silverfish, stir fried green vegetables and my favorite garlic soy lamb!

White truffle series part 2: Uni rice and uni sushi with white truffles

Tags

easy recipes, fusion food, ikura, japanese, japanese food, sea urchin, sea urchin and white truffle, sea urchin rice, sea urchin sushi, seafood, sushi, uni, uni and white truffle, uni sushi, white truffle, white truffles

Above: Uni RiceAbove: Uni sushi

Technically this isn’t a recipe but rather just an entry to record the combination of ingredients used for these two dishes. White truffle just goes so amazingly well with uni *drool*.

I just had to show the sheer size of the uni tray that I bought… crazy big!

The only difference between these two dishes is that one has ikura and the other has mayonnaise. Otherwise the ingredients are exactly the same. Let’s start with the uni rice:-

This I copied from the chefs at restaurants like Shinji and Sushi ichi. It’s a small mound of lightly vinegared rice (the mound was way smaller at the restaurants because… well the more rice you put it, the more sea urchin you’ll need) where you plonk a generous helping of uni and use a pair of chopsticks to mix the rice and uni until each grain is covered with that silken orange. It shouldn’t be dry, it should be almost like a risotto (and to achieve this you need quite a bit of uni to rice ratio). Then you top it with a spoonful of ikura, more globules of uni and if you have it, some chopped negitoro (spring onion and otoro) before finishing it off with shaved white truffles and chives. Use a spoon to drip some soy sauce onto the rice. Really good combination there. Too bad I was missing the negitoro bit ;(

Next, the uni sushi. I molded some vinegared rice first. The rice should be warm and you should have a bowl of salted water next to you when you do this. The water will keep the rice from sticking to your fingers and allow for easy molding whereas the salt is just to flavour the rice.

I think I might have used too much rice for each sushi T____T. Use less rice!

Yes, perhaps just dab a little wasabi onto the rice before spooning a generous amount of uni on top. Then squeeze some of the japanese mayonnaise over the uni like so:-

My massive white truffle! (and my hungry puppy)

Add the chive sections to the sushi before shaving the white truffle all over the sushi. 

Indeed a delightful mixture, I wish I could have some now ;D

White truffle season is here!!! ~

Tags

truffle, white truffle

I’m all truffled out… *urp*

More to come 😉

Japanese style rice porridge

Tags

creamy porridge, Egg, healthy, japanese, nori, okayu, porridge, quick meals, rice, rice porridge, seaweed, spring onions, zosui

This is one of those quick fixes that can be done with just cooked rice and an egg. The other ingredients are cupboard ingredients (those that can be stored for a really long time), which is the beauty of this dish really.

If you’ve heard of the nabe (hot pots) that Japanese really love, you’d have also heard of them adding rice into the leftover stock once they’re done cooking the rest of the food. They then turn the rice into porridge, and thus, nothing is wasted.

And it is really delicious! I tried this “zosui” (the Japanese refer to thick rice porridge as zosui/okayu) in Hokkaido after a delicious kani-nabe ( I did NOT just swear at you lol!). Kani means crab, so what we had after the crab hotpot was some delicious stock. The waitress added more stock to it and then added precooked rice and let it simmer for a while before adding egg. It was the best porridge I’ve had!

I try to replicate it here the best I can without such expensive ingredients, crabs don’t come cheap in Singapore. I’ve come pretty close to it I think.

Ingredients (For 2 pax, or 1 hungry person)

• 1 cup cooked rice
• 1 egg, beaten
• 1/4 cup dashi (this is the second bottle from the left) – you can make it yourself, using konbu, anchovies and soy sauce but I found this more convenient
• 1 cup water
• 1 tbsp mirin
• 1 tbsp sake/cooking wine
• Handful of chopped spring onions for topping
• Handful of seaweed (nori) strips for topping

Cooking Instructions

Pour the dashi, water, mirin and wine into a pot and bring to a simmer.

Add the rice and cover the pot with a lid. Simmer on medium high heat until the rice softens. If you prefer really soft rice in the porridge, you could simmer it a little longer, just add some water so it doesnt dry up and stick to the bottom of the pot.

Once you’ve reached your desired consistency, turn off the heat and pour the egg into the centre of the porridge.

Work quickly and use the bottom of a ladle to stir the egg round and round until the egg is completely incorporated into the porridge.

You want the end result to look creamy. This is the end result of stirring the egg well. If you let the egg cook before you stir it in, it is going to look like an egg drop soup. Not like it tastes bad either, it just will not be as creamy as the picture below.

So the egg has to be quickly stirred in, in circles starting from the centre of the pot. If you were to stir it any way you wanted, the egg may end up streaky -___-

Then ladle it into a bowl and top with spring onions and seaweed.

So there it is, creamy Japanese porridge (obviously with zero dairy in it).

I love spring onions so I went overboard with it ;p

Naruto kyaraben (character bento) with ikura

Tags

bento, character bento, foodart, ikura, japanese, Kyaraben, lunch, lunchbox, naruto, naruto bento, naruto character bento, naruto kyaraben, naruto seaweed art, sashimi

So for my next bento, I did a Naruto Kyaraben seaweed art. Again, I used the same tools as before but its easier this time around as the ingredients required for the seaweed art is only cheese and seaweed. I thought ikura would be perfect for giving him that volcanic bubbly nine-fox demon effect so I added that in as well. It helps that I love ikura 😉

Tools used are the same as before or maybe less… :  cutting mat, cutter for intricate designs, paper, pen/pencil, binding clips

So first, you draw an outline of your bento so you can draw your design within these boundaries. And then you draw your character, emphasizing on the black areas. You will cut out only the white bits. I think I shot myself in the foot by finding a drawing so intricate that it was difficult to cut the white bits properly T___T

Next, place the sketch over the seaweed on the cutting board, and clip paper and seaweed securely onto the board.

Start cutting the white bits. That is the cutter I used. I initially used a ceramic cutter but this is way easier. 

And continue the cutting while removing the seaweed bits at the same time. It will be easier to keep the board free of excess paper/seaweed moving around. 

You can see here that the patterns are starting to develop on the sheet of seaweed.

I suggest cutting the smaller bits first before you cut the large areas. This is because its easier this way and will result in less tearing of the seaweed. 

Almost done.

I put some rice into the bento, topped with seaweed and placed the slice of cheese where I wanted it. I’m not sure if it was a lucky mistake that I placed the cheese on the rice while it was still hot! So basically my cheese was warm and sticky such that anything that stuck to it cannot be removed! Therefore if you mess up the placement of the character here, its all ruined! On the bright side, the seaweed is more adhesive and very unlikely to fly away. 

Once you’ve stuck the seaweed character onto the cheese, build your bento! Ikura against a dark seaweed background lends a little mystery to the overall effect 😉 and the tiny yellow tomatoes were just there to contrast with the smaller ikura.

We’re done!

This bento is made for immediate consumption because there is no way you can put sashimi in a lunchbox and expect it to keep well in room temperature. Bacteria and all.

So yes, devour once you’re done with your pictures!

Time taken to complete: 1.5 hours