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!
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!
Recently I’ve been having this urge to cook lobster. Lobster… anything! I initially wanted to make a lobster roll, then I went to Signor Sassi in London and had a variety of lobster dishes. I eventually settled for making lobster spaghetti in tomato sauce and a lobster version of the Sang Har Tong Fun (big head prawn with glass noodles in wine soup). I’ve done a little research online on how to make this dish. A lot of chefs tend to boil the lobsters and then remove the meat to cook in the tomato sauce. The carcass of the lobster usually goes into a shellfish stock or a bisque later on. I do it a little differently, and I firmly believe that the lobster flavours are able to come out in all its glory this way. Obviously it would involve cooking the shell and head in the sauce ;D.Ingredients (for 2-3 pax)
Half a lobster (this is of a larger lobster)
10g salted butter
2-3 thin slices of ginger about an inch in diameter and about 2-3 mm in width
1/2 cup dry white wine
1 tbsp chopped fresh basil
1 tbsp chopped fresh parsley
2 tbsp chopped onion or shallots
1 tbsp chopped garlic
1/2 cup chicken stock (best if you have shellfish stock but chicken is fine too)
1/2 cup tomato puree
1/2 cup diced tomatoes preferably with herbs and garlic in them
2-3 pinches of chilli flakes
1 tsp sugar and another 1tsp in case the pasta needs a little more sweetness
200g pasta (or around 1/3 of a 500g package of pasta) – spaghetti is slightly too thick so I used San Remo’s vermiccili pasta. Instant spaghetti by San Remo’s will do as well.
Dash of dried oregano
Salt, black pepper
Cooking Instructions
Prepare the lobster (prepare yourself I meant…. cutting that thing into half is no joke! It’s all spiny and painful! Coupled with a very tough shell, you may need a lot of strength to cut the head into two… or a very heavy object to help get that cleaver through). I suggest you use a towel to protect your hands from the lobster’s myriad spikes and a pair of strong kitchen scissors to cut through the tail end of the lobster.After a lot of effort… finally..See all that golden stuff?? That’s where the flavour’s at!Heat up some oil in the pan and fry the onions, ginger and garlic.
Add the lobster, brain side down, and let it fry for a minute (do not let the meat sear! It should be on medium fire), before adding the wine to the mix. I wanted to try to flambe the lobster, but the kitchen is so small and I was worried I might singe something so I just put the alcohol into the pan and let the alcohol cook off. This step is where you draw out the flavours in the lobster into the broth.
Add the stock. Cook the lobster for about a couple more minutes in the stock before removing from the mixture.
Add the diced tomato, tomato, chilli flakes, some salt, pepper and oregano to the lobster broth.
Remove the meat from the lobster shell. You can see that it isn’t cooked through and this is what we want as we will add the lobster meat back in to be cooked fully along with the pasta noodles. Otherwise we’ll have dry, overcooked chunks of lobster, which is a waste of such an expensive ingredient.
Place the lobster shell back into the tomato sauce mixture and simmer until the sauce is reduced and thickened like so. Then add the butter and mix in. I stuffed the sauce into the lobster shell to get the most of that lobster goodness!
At the same time, start cooking your pasta in boiling water with some salt. Cook it about 2 minutes less than the instructions stated in the packet because you’ll finish cooking the pasta in the sauce.
Get the chopped basil and parsley ready. Add the lobster chunks back into the tomato sauce probably a couple of minutes before adding the pasta so that it’s cooked just right by the end of the whole process.
Drain the pasta (but not too much as we need some of that pasta water… about 2-3 tbsps or so) and add it directly into the sauce. I forgot to mention, remove the lobster shell before you add the pasta in, otherwise it’s going to be a struggle to toss the pasta in the sauce. Place the shell in the serving dish, it will serve as an aesthetic component.
Toss the pasta over low-medium fire so that the sauce gets incorporated into the noodles. Add the basil and parsley and toss a little more. Check on the seasoning and add more salt/pepper/sugar as you wish.
Place the pasta on the serving dish, top off with the lobster chunks, more parsley and some cheese.
If you like your spaghetti with more sauce, just add more puree and white wine but make sure you season accordingly. You also don’t want the sauce to be too wet otherwise it won’t stick to the noodle very well.
Will most likely make it again as I have another lobster in the freezer! Happy to say my brother seemed to enjoy it. He ate three quarters of it by himself.
Here’s a video that I think quite closely reflects how I cooked it:
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 😉
This is another quick uni and white truffle combination that I love. Super easy to put together because you’re gonna be using ready-made garlic bread!
Just grab your favourite brand of garlic bread, pop it into the oven until its nice and hot and crispy on the outside and then top it off with a heaping mountain of golden orange sea urchin roe (make sure it is fresh uni). Finish it off with a sprinkling of chopped chives and fragrant slivers of white truffle. The garlic bread should have enough salt content, but you can add some fleur de sel on top if you wish.
Love ❤
And then there’s salad. I put together a salad of baby spinach leaves, radish, cherry tomatoes, a handful of dried blueberries, some ikura/salmon roe (personally I love ikura but you can leave this out if you think it’s weird), shaved parmigiano reggiano cheese and white truffle on the top. Dressed it lightly with my favourite dressing; a simple honey, lemon and mayo mixture. I can’t remember now if I added any truffle oil to this or not. Good time to try making this again when I get hold of some truffles!
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