Spotless or Business as usual?

My Hippo and I have different opinions regarding how much efforts we should put into cleaning before inviting friends over.  I like to try my very best and make our place spotless (or as close as we can), Mr Hippo, on the other hand, thinks there is no need to try that hard and some improvement over the business as usual is enough. 

Obviously we are not the only couple who disagree on such a matter.  According to Mr Hippo, his parents argued about it too when he was rather small.

It seems to me that the difference is more of a cultural origin.  In general, I am a messier person than Mr Hippo, so it is not because I had a higher standard to start with.  More likely, it is because I am from a culture where people will give their best to guests.   In the case of my parent-in-law, Papa Hippo was from Germany, and Mama Hippo is from Australia--now you see my point?

At least we agree on when to invite friends over--rightly after our house inspection.  We are still (happily) renting, and once in a while (six months?), our landlord will send an agent to check us out, which means we will have to clean the house,  whether we will like it or not.  Over the course of five years, we have formed the habit of turning the lemon into lemonade and inviting friends over rightly after the inspection.  This way our friends will enjoy a cleaner and more orderly environment (at the condition halfway between spotless and business as usual?).

We invited four people over today, two visiting from Sweden and two of our American friends from ANU.  The top picture shows how neat we set the table for a change (um, minus Mr Hippo's glasses).  Someday when we buy a house with a proper-sized kitchen, I will buy a set of serving plates with more than four.  For now, Mr Hippo and I get to use our special Moomin set to disguise our identities (you have to know the Moomin story to get the joke). 

What kind of food did I serve?  That is always a bit challenging to summarize...OK, how about "Hybrid Swedish food with an Australian theme?"

I prepared Swedish main course because our Swedish friends had been away from home for a while and they were going to have dinner with a Chinese colleague tomorrow night.  The main course was grilled ocean trout with asparagus, tomato, pine nut and potato salad in home-made pesto sauce.  I used this recipe from Curtis to prepare ocean trout (minus Buk Choy part) and it turned out pretty good (it would have been more Swedish, if I had added dill to the herbs though).  Gordon Reamsay's video also helped but it was more about how to intensify tomato's sweetness by roasting it first.

My cooking is always hybrid because I enjoy mixing things together and creating a symphony of flavors.  For Hors d'oeuvre we had home-made guacamole and hummus.   I was happy when one of the American food commented how great the guacamole was.  I was even happier when Mr Hippo, who lived in Israel for years told me the texture of the hummus was about right; I had worried it was a bit too dense.  The only Chinese touch of the meal was the Chrysanghdmum and Goji berry tea as shown in the middle picture.  It is not tasty but supposed to be good for tonight's crowd, who sit in front of computers most of our days.

Last, the dinner was of Australian theme because I tried to stick to Australian ingredients as much as I can.  I also bought a beautiful bunch of native flowers (the last picture).  For dessert, I served three OZ cheeses (Mr Hippo's favorite triple-creamed brie, my favorite goat cheese, and an aged Cheddar from Margaret River that was appreciated very much by our Swedish friends), along with three types of fresh fruits (strawberry, kiwi, and mango), three dry fruits (date, fig and prune) and three nuts (macadamia, pistachio, and walnuts).  In theory, there were 81 combinations of flavors and the idea was people might found another crazily fantastic combination such as bacon and milk chocolate (dark chocolate is a no-no, according to one of the American friends) .  Not sure that was accomplished, but people were certainly quite into the three of a genre thing, because they were very disappointed when I told them there were only two kinds crackers to choose from! 

Cook a chicken like Heston

Mr Hippo and myself are very into a cooking show called "How to cook like Heston" these days, where Heston Blumenthal, the magician chef, explains how to cook simple and complex dishes at home with a key ingredient for each episode.

I missed last week's episode on chicken because I was running a workshop and had to work till late that night to prepare for the next day.  But I immediately got the point of Heston's roast chicken recipe, which takes 12 hours plus, when Mr Hippo told me over the phone.

The idea is to maintain the maximum amount of juice and flavor by slowly roasting the chicken at 90C for 3~4 hours first and then by browning the bird as quickly as possible (the recipe actually says "Turn the oven temperature as high as it will go, " and that was worrying--I'd never turned my oven above 220C).  A Chinese recipe called "Beggar's Chicken" has pretty much the same idea but uses clay to form a crust for slow cooking.  Jamie Oliver used a crust made of salt and eggs. 

Anyway, we decided to give the recipe a shot this weekend and here is the picture of our joint-effort.  According to Mr Hippo, this recipe produced better leftovers than my usual recipe but the chicken is not necessarily more desirable at the first meal.  This is because the leftover is more succulent due to slow-cooking, but bone joints still looked red/uncooked when the chicken was first served, which was not very appetizing.  The chicken was also more salty than we like, but that is probably because we left the chicken in brine for too long (16 hours or so).

In conclusion, Mr Hippo recommends we stick to the old recipe in the future.  I concur because 12  hours is simply too much, especially when I am in a rush.  A Hippo-house tradition has been before I leave for a business trip, I roast a chicken for Mr Hippo so that he does not have to cook when I am away, and I have been on the road a lot lately... 

Pickling time

With plenty of fresh fruit and vegetable around, autumn is the peak time for pickling.   I've picked hot chilly peppers and eggplants so far, and today I did lemon and ginger. 

I pickled lemons in Moroccan way.  It is actually quite easy when you get started.  The most time-consuming bit is to prepare lemons by removing their wax.   This recipe is perfect because the jar I used can just about fit five lemons with intensive squeezing.  I am not going to open the jar and compressed more juice out though, which seems to be a recipe for introducing bacteria.  Hopefully, time will do the trick as this other recipe says. I did shake and flip the jar whenever I remembered.

Pickling young ginger the Japanese way  is slightly more complex, because it involves dissolving sugar in rice vinegar over heat.   When the sugar-vinegar solution meets the ginger, it magically turns into a pink/reddish color--very pretty!

Almost perfect focaccia

I always like focaccia for several reasons. First, it is very tasty.  Second, the scent of rosemary can make you smarter.  Last, but not the least,  not every bread still tastes nice after a day or two like focaccia does. I like to slice it, toast it, and then make a sandwich with grilled eggplant (using garlic-infused olive oil), feta cheese, and sun-dried tomato.  Of course, the prerequisite is that you have some left-over of the bread at the first place.  

We probably wouldn't have had any crumbles left today, if we weren't both on diet.  Of the two bread I baked, the round one mysteriously disappeared even before dinner was served! 

I have been using this recipe for baking focaccia for quite a while, and today's result is the best. My focassia is almost perfect, though it is still a bit moist in the middle when eating fresh. I am sure it won't be a problem anymore tomorrow.

The trick was to add a bit more water then the recipe says, about 30ml more.   This extra amount of water resulted in two improvements.  My dough was less thick, which makes it easier to spread when being poured from my mixer to baking pans (no worries if there is still unoccupied space though, during proof the dough will gradually invade empty space anyway).   In addition, the extra water made the bread less dense and more puffy (hence more popular then usual...).
 
The other thing I did differently was to omit sprinkling salt on top of the bread--I found it was not so desirable to bite into coarse grain of salt.  There is enough salt in the dough to make it tasty, and I wonder if the extra salt on the surface was only supposed to make it pretty?!

DIY 腌咸蛋

已经有10个春节没在国内过了, 对现在流行送什么已经没概念了.  前些日子和老妈聊天的时候，惊闻家里的鸡蛋太多吃不了。Apparently, 现在国内已经开始送油盐酱醋茶这类居家过日子的东西了， 居然连馒头豆包也有送！


上网搜了下腌咸蛋的做法，发现小小米桶的方子 看起来比较靠谱，又简单易行。 尤其是方法一，不用大大的容器和浓浓的盐水，只需要买一瓶高纯度的酒就可以。和老公一说，他很欢快的选了一瓶Absolut Vodka （Because I only need about 1/20 of the bottle and he can have the rest--what a win-win situation!). 

照片上是四周后的成果。蛮好吃的/不是很咸，但是还没出油。值得把方子推荐给老妈。 下次再做的时候，可以考虑再腌长一点时间/five weeks?

PS.  我用的是free-range eggs, 个头比较小。  如果用标准的蛋，大概可以再长点时间。

My best pizza ever

Both Mr Hippo and I agree today's pizza has been my best ever.  In fact, it was so good that I had to move fast to protect the last piece from being devoured by Mr Hippo.  Otherwise, I would not have these two pictures to show off! 

Over the years I've learned the No. 1 rule to make pizza is simplicity, aka, do not over-load your pizza with tons of exotic ingredients!  The most peculiar thing I have ever experienced was Chinese cabbage.  Don't ask me why: either that American friend of mine happened to feel improvisational that day or he attempted to make me feel at home.   As much as I love both the cabbage and pizza, I can ensure you the two do not click.


For today's pizza I just made a simple sauce, prepared in a frying pan beforehand.   It is made of vine-ripened tomatoes, onion, garlic and olive oil.  Then I baked pizza dough at 220C for about 7 minutes until it was fully puffed up, as if I were making a pita.  Next, I took the 'pita' out of oven and poked, poked, and poked until the dough shrunk to more or less like a normal pizza base.  I emphasized the action of poking not because that was a strenuous task.  On the contrary, it was fun and even somewhat magical to turn a monster-like puff into a low-key flat bread in 30 seconds.

Then I topped the bread with the tomato sauce and sliced mozzarella cheese.  Put it back to the oven until the cheese fully melted.  Then I took it out, decorated with basil from my balcony garden and served!

This twice-baking procedure resulted in a pizza gooey at first bite and crunchy when I sunk my teeth into it.  For sure I will stick to the method in my future pizza-making endeavor!

Two other factors might also contributed to my success today.  First, I threw a teaspoon of sugar into my mixer when making the dough at 10am, because I wanted to make sure the dough was ready by noon/the time I started to make lunch.  As a result, the sugar-powered yeast grew like crazy and at one point, Mr Hippo said, "hi, your dough is over-flowing!"   It is not we got a one-cup mixer that was too small to hold one pizza dough, but because I purposely made enough fermented dough for making one pizza for lunch and some steamed buns (Mantou/馒头 in Chinese) for dinner.  So here comes the second factor, I did not put any olive oil when making the pizza dough as I normally do, because I didn't want olive-oil-flavored Manto.  I doubt my success was due to the lack of olive oil, but if it is possible to eat less oil, even it is the healthiest type, why not?!  The tomato sauce has it, after all.  So we hardly missed the flavor.

These are only intended to be entrees in Australia!

Soon after arriving in Australia, I realized the word 'entree' means something different.  Here entree is an equivalent of appetizer in America.  Unlike the others in the world, Americans use 'entree' to describe their main course.

Whenever I serve an appetizer, however, it is likely to be in the amount of an American entree, reported Mr Hippo.  

History repeats itself today.  We invited a friend over for lunch to celebrate his birthday, and he was shocked to learn the dishes in the picture (on the right) were only intended to be entrees in Australia.  In addition, I made two main courses, along with rice.  We also had yogurt and passion fruit for dinner, but that was very light and perfect for accelerating our digestion. 

It is the season of Chinese New Year, so the dishes all have an Asian theme.  For entree, I made three cold dishes and of course, a long-life noodle.  The three dishes were snow-pea and red capsicum in garlic-infused oil (top left), pine-nut, corn, carrot and baby peas stew (top right), and a Thai papaya and prawn salad (bottom).  

The papaya salad was the most popular one, probably because that was the only spicy entree dish.  The recipe for the cold noodle salad requires chilli oil, but I used Sichuan pepper oil instead--Mr Hippo claimed the friend does not have an appetite for spicy food.

I am particularly proud of the presentation of the noodle salad (picture on the left), especially considering the limited time I had to assemble it.   Our friend just walked into the door when I started shaping the noodle balls.  I could definitely make it prettier next time, with a bit more practice and extra time in hand.

It was a fun afternoon, and after lunch we enjoyed chatting over some cashew nuts, chocolate and a good cup of jasmine tea while I was making a mind note for myself: serve less food next time! 

To my excuses, to serve a feast is a family tradition (or possibly due to epigenetic inheritance as I recently learned).  Growing up with my grandma, who suffered from years of famine in her life, I tend to cook too much as well.
 

Perfect summer dinner in the Hippo House

This is the time of the year when we hippos prefer to soak in water and stay away from sources of heat as far as we can.  So tonight Ms Hippo decided to serve a dinner with the minimum amount of cooking involved.  The Mediterranean meal as shown in the picture was what she came up with in the end, including toasted Turkish bread, cut veggies (celery, carrot, and cucumber wedges) and three dips.

It is Mediterranean because the three dips are of  Levantine, Italian, and  Levantine/Arabic origins (from the top to the bottom, respectively).  The baba ghanoush (at the top of the picture) was probably the best Ms Hippo had ever made, and the trick was to use quite a bit of mint from the garden (a baby eggplant was also essential).  The pesto (in the middle) was actually a basil, Parmesan and cashew dip, though she only added about half of the basil as the recipe says.  The hummus (at the bottom) could have been improved by removing a table spoon or so tahini.

There was almost no heating involved for making this meal except for using oven to grill the eggplant and toast the bread.  Even so Ms Hippo sweated a lot because she made all the dips with a mortar and pestle, which weighs about 10kg in total!  If you think all the pounding and grinding helps in shaping arm muscles, wait until you have to pick up the 10kg monster to give it a wash before making another dip!

But all the hard work paid off: Mr Hippo was very happily fed and we devoured every bit of food on that wooden serving tray!

Home-made pesto, stone age edition

We both love pesto very much, and it is great in sandwiches, pasta and as dipping sauce.  I make a batch of pesto every time after giving my basil plants a haircut.  Today's pesto is special though, because we used the traditional way of using a mortar and pestle ONLY.

The picture here shows Mr Hippo in action. Making pesto with the mortar and pestle turned out a fairly labor-intensive task, and by the end of it we were both exhausted.  By comparison, it is a piece of cake to use a blender.  This is the time when you have to appreciate modern technology, I guess. 

But the #1 reason for using the stone age technique, apart from shaping our muscles,  is that we can control how coarse the pesto is.  We are not a big fan of pesto that is too fine/runny, and with the stone-age technique, we can just stop grinding whenever we like/exhaust ourselves. 

We canned about three cups of pesto (without Parmesan cheese), which will be good in the fridge for a couple of weeks.  I had also successfully kept pesto in the freezer for months so that we had home-made pesto all year round :)  If memory serves me right, I got that idea from French women don't get fat.

当腊八粥变成了红豆沙

昨天晚上和老妈网聊的时候听她说熬的腊八粥如何如何好. 于是心向外之. 今天就打算自己也煮上一锅.

好多的红豆, 一点儿糙米, 一点儿小米, 一点儿荞麦, 一点儿燕麦, 加水, 大火煮开, 再转小火,徐徐图之. 然后再加红枣, 莲子, 银耳之类的.

想法是好地, 但一小时后, 发现计划是赶不上变化地. 我的无水锅动静小了一点儿, 我看小说太投入了一点儿, 时间过的太快了一点儿, 最重要的是, 呵呵, 水加的少了一点儿.

我心心向往的腊八粥变成了一锅红豆沙?!

好在我还没准备红枣, 莲子, 银耳之类的 (laziness has its own virtue), 好在我发了面准备蒸馒头, 好在我有一个品种齐全的储物柜, 最重要的是, 呵呵,  我有一颗灵活善变的心.

于是, 计划中的6个馒头变成了12个豆沙包!

虽然没有红枣, 莲子和银耳, 但是我放了葡萄干,桂花, 又在某只豆沙包里放了榛仁巧克力(my idea was that whoever lucky would bump into it, but it turned out to be me of course--Mr Hippo wasn't very into my sweet improvisation). 

于是, 腊八粥变成了八宝豆沙包 ;)

Quick Caprese pizza, Chinese edition

Ms Hippo loves to test new ideas when cooking.  For instance, she enjoys tossing together ingredients from different cuisines and integrating them in her dishes.  Here is an example where she used Chinese flat bread (bing, 饼) to fix a Caprese pizza lunch for Mr Hippo.

Top freshly-made and halved bread with mozzarella cheese and grill until the cheese melts.  Snip 8 basil leaves, wash and dry.  Slice a tomato and a bit of onion.  Assemble everything as shown in the picture, grind salt and pepper and add 4 olives for the center piece.  Last, spray some extra-virgin olive oil and serve!

Mr Hippo's testimony: "Pretty good, very crunchy!"

How a duck is served in the Hippo House/ 一鸭 N 吃

鸭性凉, 所以夏天是吃鸭的大好时节 (生活在北半球冰天雪地中的同志们, 现在澳洲正是盛夏哟). 而且一只鸭可以作为N餐的主菜或调味品, 举四例如下.

Dish One: 'Peking Duck' in 30 minutes
菜谱一: 快手'北京烤鸭'

鸭胸可以剔下来(手生的大概得用5分钟?), 用这个菜谱的方法, 最多15分钟就好, 然后让煎好的鸭胸 rest 5 分钟. 就可以上桌了!

照片上秀一下我做的成品. 切开后里面是粉色才对, 不然就太老了. 我只拌了个醋椒芹菜作配菜 (5 分钟), 比用酱油炒油菜要清爽些.

Dish Two:   Osmanthus flowers flavored duck stew
菜谱二: 桂花鸭

鸭腿, 鸭翅和鸭骨架可以用来作桂花鸭. 据说是美白润燥的. 我把鸭腿提前捞出来,剩下的煲到骨肉分离才停火.

Dish Three: Duck noodle soup/菜谱三: 鸭汤面

桂花鸭的汤可以用来作汤面, 冬瓜薏米汤等等. 煲桂花鸭时我放的是干桂花. 所以出的汤并没有甜的味道, 这样自由发挥的空间大一些.

Dish Four: Steamed buns, duck flavored
菜谱四: 鸭油包

鸭油是最健康的动物脂肪, 不用很多就可以提味, 保存时间又长,  真是好东西. 提取鸭油时, 我觉得水提法比较好.  鸭油可以用来烤土豆, 炒菜, 或者像我这样用来包鸭油包. 大约800克的发酵好的面, 500克的蔬菜和鸡蛋, 只放了两勺就很香!

P.S. 鸭油炸酱面也很香哟--有烤鸭的味道! 今天的新发现 ;)