Going Solo

I'm off on holiday.  Alone.  Not particularly out of choice, but because it's my half-term holiday and Rob couldn't get time off this week.

I've been surprised by the fact that many people have said I'm 'brave' for doing this - but people holiday on their own all the time, don't they?  I don't think it's too big a deal...

I'm going to Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand.  It's a city I've been to before (my brother lived there for a few years and I went to visit him there in 2005), so I know it's a lovely place.  I'll be there for 5 days, and my guesthouse has free wifi, so 'virtual contact' with home should be easy (how ever did we manage before Skype and Facebook?!)

I'm hoping to spend a day doing a Thai cookery course, and am looking forward to browsing the markets and doing lots of shopping.  I'm also taking plenty of things to read so am planning to spend time sipping watermelon juice (or cold beer...) in cafes, immersed in a good book.

But I'll be honest, despite my excitement I am a little nervous.  I have 4 flights and 3 airports to negotiate on my own, and I arrive back in Brunei next Friday a mere hour and a half before a dinner we're attending, so I'm worried about delays. 

Hopefully I'll have plenty to blog about on my return, but in the meantime - wish me luck!

Card Production

Pendlenton Industries in in production! 

I've long had a little ambition, to see some of my photos printed onto greetings cards.  This had been on my mind for a while now, and earlier this year I made some enquiries to see whether this little ambition might perhaps become a reality...

What seems like months ago now, I posted an album of 42 photos onto facebook and asked my friends to comment on the pictures that they thought would look good on cards.  The response was amazing, with a flattering amount of people taking the time to look through them and 'like' or comment on them.  I found it a fascinating process, to see which images were most popular (incidentally, not always the ones I had thought!)

Since then I've selected images and had many many visits to a printer here in Brunei.  Much discussion ensued about the style of the cards, whether they should be matt or glossy, what should go on the reverse, etc, etc, and finally - when I was beginning to think it might never happen, a couple of weeks ago I saw the proofs:

They looked great; I was so pleased. 

Since then I have sourced envelopes, and plastic sleeves in which to protect them.   And today I collected my cards from the printer...  450 cards in total - 50 cards each of 9 different designs.  This is what the dining room table looks like tonight; a production line fuelled by large mugs of tea (soon to be moving on to mojitos I feel!).

So now I am pleased to announce that tomorrow I will be putting my cards on sale.  Just at my school first of course, closely followed by the LS Office on Base, but I hope to be able to persuade a local craft gallery to take some too. 

I'm not going to make my millions but the satisfaction of undertaking this project should, I hope, make it all worthwhile.  Exciting stuff!

Back to the production line now...

Ferrero Rocher Cake - Happy Birthday Rob!

Having given my new blog-friend Ben a glowing review recently, I thought I should put my money where my mouth is and give one of his cakes a try.  And what better occasion to do so than Rob's birthday last week.

Looking through Ben's list of cakes, one immediately leapt out at me - the Ferrero Rocher Cake.  Rob is a big fan of Ferrero Rocher, and they're one of the few chocolates we can buy here that are the same as the ones you buy in the UK (all the bars of Cadbury's chocolate you buy here for example are either made in Malaysia or Australia, and are most definitely not up to UK standards!).

A quick Facebook message to Ben was all it took to place the order, and we arranged a rendezvous in a local supermarket carpark to exchange money-for-cake on the day itself.  It was great to meet Ben in person after chatting on our blogs and Facebook; good to put a face to the name of this talented local baker.

I could hardly wait to try this cake so rushed home with it to wait for Rob...  annoyingly (for him even more than me!) he was about an hour late home as he had got stuck in a meeting, so we didn't have time to try the cake before heading out for his birthday supper.  Luckily we refused offers of dessert in the restaurant so we could have birthday cake instead.  And wow, I'm glad we did!  This was better than any dessert we could have bought while eating out, and definitely more pudding than cake.

 
The cake was made from layers of sponge, brushed with vanilla syrup and sandwiched together with a chocolate mousse.  The mousse was studded with chunks of crushed Ferrero Rocher, giving it a lovely nutty crunch.  The whole thing was smothered in a rich chocolate hazelnut ganache...  rather like Nutella (and that is of course a good thing, not a criticism!)

I e.mailed Ben to ask how he had made this amazing creation, and this was his reply:  I used a regular oil-based sponge cake so it stays nice and soft even when chilled though you can use a chiffon cake too. For the chocolate mousse, I used an egg-yolk based mousse as I found it to be richer than the egg white one. The other layers are hazelnut dacquoise which is basically a meringue where ground nuts are folded in and then piped in a spiral to form a flat disk, it is hard and crunchy upon baking but softens wonderfully upon chilling.

This is the kind of cake I dream of making, but I'm self-aware enough to know that it's just something I couldn't do.  Not couldn't perhaps, but just wouldn't manage to do without inordinate amounts of stress and quite probably bad language.  Thankfully there are people like Ben in this world who make complex layered cakes such as this as a form of stress-relief, and for that I'm definitely willing to pay!  This cake was $50, but provided us with 12 good-sized portions - and this cake was rich enough that you didn't need any more than a 'good-sized portion' to feel thoroughly satisfied.

Incidentally - and shhh, don't tell Rob (thank heavens he neglects to read this blog, eh?!) - I also purchased a single-portioned Salted Caramel Tart from Ben.  He had sent out a message to some of his Facebook friends saying that he was baking them, and would we be interested in buying one?  Would I ever?!  I adore salted caramel.  I picked this up on the same day as the cake, although Ben had made them a few days earlier.  I was expecting the pastry to have softened somewhat over those few days, but it hadn't suffered in the least.  It was still as crisp as ever.

The filling was layers of deliciousness, involving salted caramel and chocolatey yumminess (can you tell I forgot to ask Ben for details of this one?) and Oh. My. Word. it was incredible.  I snuck it into school to eat for my mid-morning snack...  and made it until I shooed my class upstairs to the ICT room at 7.30am before sneaking a bite...  which then of course turned into several more bites until, oops, it had all gone.  I think that having a friend like Ben might be dangerous to my waistline!

So Happy Birthday to Rob - and thanks to Ben!

Packaging Style in Brunei

I'm an advertiser's dream.  I'm so easily swayed into making purchases based almost solely on the attractiveness of the item's packaging.  Brunei - indeed, most of Asia - is great for retro-styled supermarket items, and I can occasionally be found roaming the aisles of local supermarkets with my camera in order to capture them!

Here's some Andy-Warhol-style displays of tins.  It amuses me that the Sardines are 'Ayam' brand...  Ayam means chicken in Malay!

Tinned mushrooms always seem to have lovely labels here.  There are often some strange-looking mushrooms inside the tins too.

Rose syrup - love it or hate it, it's found everywhere here.  It tastes like liquid Turkish Delight.  I'm solidly in the 'love it' camp, and particularly enjoy it mixed with crushed ice and condensed milk (known for some reason as an 'ABC').   This is the only brand I'll buy... obviously because of the sheer beauty of its label!

And then there are the items bought so that I could keep the fabulous tins.   These Lucky Spot crackers are OK to eat (if a little bland and uninteresting), but the tin is now used for storing home-made biscuits.

My lovely Shake Hand Brand curry powder tin is now a pencil tin on the computer desk.  Look at the fabulous retro-font that they've used for 'Curry Powder'.  This is actually very tasty too and we use it a lot.

This tape tin is from school.  I asked for some more sellotape for my classroom and it was brought down from the office in this marvellous tin!  Again, superb retro-styling - and just the right size for a kitchen utensils holder.

I'm not quite alone in this fascination for packaging...  An author and cookbook write who shares the love is Jake Tilson.  I first heard of him when I picked up a copy of his book Twelve Kitchens in TK Maxx, at some ridiculously cheap price.  The book is beautifully written with some lovely recipes, but more to the point is beautifully presented in a collage style, and includes many photographs of gorgeous packaging.  Some pages can be seen here on Jake's website. 

Hot Cross Buns

Easter is proving to be a strange time here in Brunei.  In the UK the shops are no doubt filled with the secular signs of the season - chicks and rabbits and chocolate eggs - and churches across the country will be preparing for the most important event in the Christian calendar (and oh how I miss my church-choir days at this time of year).  But here... nothing.  Not even a day off work on Good Friday or Easter Monday.

My only Easter egg has been a lone Cadbury's mini-egg which was perched atop a chocolate-crispy-cake nest at Book Club last week (thanks Lis!).  Still, I suppose I should just take the view that it's much healthier not to be stuffing my face with chocolate this year, and virtuously nibble on some fresh papaya instead...

But I couldn't let the season pass without some culinary celebration.  We've planned a roast for Sunday (chicken, because the only joints of lamb we could find were vast frozen legs of it which would never fit into our tiny oven) and I'm making a fresh lemony drizzle cake, which always puts me in mind of Spring. 

In previous years I've made a Simnel Cake, but somehow didn't fancy that this year.  The recipe I like to use includes a lot of dried fruit, notably pears, and I just haven't seen them in the shops here.  So last night - on Good Friday itself - I decided to have my first ever attempt at Hot Cross Buns and I turned straight to Nigella for inspiration, 'Feast' to be exact.

The recipe can be found here, on Nigella's own website. 

You begin by heating milk and butter with cardamom pods and cloves.  I threw in several extra cardamom pods as I love them and I was worried mine might be losing their flavour (although they are a relatively 'new' purchase, being only 18 months out of date!)  The recipe also calls for the zest of an orange, but I didn't have any so added a tsp each of Boyajian Orange oil and Lemon oil.  The smells wafting from this pan were incredible!

This recipe proved an excellent way of using up some of the things lurking in the cupboards:  My Canadian friends will recognise these 'Club House' brand spices, which dates them to our time living in Ontario from 2006-2008...  but they have no use-by dates, and still smell fragrant and delicious, so I will just keep using them.

I used Pumpkin Pie Spice (which is a heady mixture of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, allspice and cloves), plus some extra cinnamon.

I also grated in plenty of extra nutmeg - my favourite spice I think.

The sultanas were looking a little dry and unappetising, so I had the brainwave of putting them into the warm buttery milk to rehydrate.  This was an excellent idea, apart from 2 fatal flaws...  it meant that I could no longer see the cloves which I was meant to take out once the milk had cooled a little, and it also meant that the fruit became very squidgy, making kneading the resulting dough rather a messy affair!

Anyway, I think I managed to locate and remove all the cloves - after a traumatic childhood incident where I bit into a whole clove which was lurking in my bread-sauce I have a horror of doing the same thing again. Well, I put 3 in and after much searching got 2 and a half out, so there'll be a certain Russian Roulette element to eating the finished buns...

I used to think I was very bad at making bread products, I felt that yeast and I just didn't get on, but since moving to Brunei I now feel myself to be quite the expert!  I'd love to claim that it was my superior culinary skills, but sadly that would be wrong.  It's just that it's really warm here, perfect for proving bread. 

Unfortunately, as the dough had its second rise, my previously round buns splurged out into weird shapes.  I didn't think there was much point trying to force them back into the correct shape so just drizzled the crosses on as best I could and chucked them into the oven.

When cooked they had a quick sugary glaze which I hope goes a little way to disguising the fact that the bun pictured above was the only vaguely circular one of the 12...

Today, Easter Eve morning, I enjoyed a Hot Cross Bun with a hot strong coffee.  The bun was warmed in the oven and slathered with salted butter.  I'm really pleased with these - they taste amazing, full of spices and moist fruits.  They're heavier, more doughy than the buns you'd buy in a supermarket, but I think that's always the way with home-made breads.  I'm looking forward to trying them toasted as well.

A very Happy Easter to you all, wherever you may be and however you may be celebrating.

Myanmar Salads

Salads in Myanmar aren't quite like salads I've ever eaten anywhere else.  For a start, the main ingredient of perhaps their most famous salad dish is pickled tea-leaves!  I had heard about this dish, known as laphet, and was determined to search it out.  However, it was nowhere to be found in Yangon - or perhaps it was on the menu but it was written in Burmese script?!


Anyway, the first we saw of it was when we reached Bagan, and stopped to grab a drink at a roadside stall.  Hanging from the side of the stall were these little sachets...  yes, labelled only in Burmese, but I felt sure that this was it.  We bought a packet and decided to sample it with our pre-dinner lager that night.

As you can see, it looked slightly sinister...  The tea-leaf paste was mixed with crispy fried peanuts, sesame seeds and broad beans.

But if there was ever a case of something tasting a LOT better than it looks, this was it!

In fact, we went straight out to supper at a vegetarian restaurant we had found in Old Bagan (The Moon) and I ordered a large plate of the same salad (Rob had pumpkin curry).

This salad was even better than the stuff in the packet.  It had lots of extra ingredients - I had a chat with the restaurant owner and took notes while he told me what was in it:  pickled tea-leaves (of course), peanuts, sesame seeds and pumpkin seeds (both toasted), fresh chillies, crispy fried garlic, raw garlic, fresh tomato and fresh lime juice.  It was the garlic that really elevated it to new heights I think - fried garlic has such a distinctive taste, and paired with the raw garlic (in vampire-scaring amounts) gave the salad a real lift.

I've been trying to research more detailed recipes for this salad, but they seem fairly few and far between.  However, I have noticed that in many restaurants the salad is served in its constituent parts and either assembled by the diner, or tossed together at the table (see video below).

I see from the video that dried shrimp can also be added, but I think I'd prefer it without; those shrimp can be very pungent.  We bought several more small sachets of the salad, but also a larger bag of the pickled tea, along with a bag of the crispy nuts and seeds, so we'll definitely be having a go at it now we're back at home.  Of course sourcing the pickled tea-leaves might be somewhat of an issue in the future, but I'm sure there are ways and means... and perhaps I might even try making some myself?

However, in the absence of a ready supply, the Myanmar salad can be created without the addition of tea.  We also ate it in several other versions, notably made with lemon.

This was a base of shredded white cabbage, mixed with ground peanuts, peanut oil, toasted peanuts, fried and raw garlic, and large chunks of fresh lemon.  Wow, this was zingy - a perfect refreshing lunch on a hot day.  Another variation was made with a local leaf called Pennywort.  We saw this in a supermarket and didn't recognise it as anything we'd seen either in the UK or Brunei, but the salad was made with similar ingredients and had a delicious savoury flavour.

I've always been someone who would rarely think of having a salad as a main meal, but these salads in Myanmar went a long way towards changing my mind!

Myanmar Curries

Considering that tourism isn't a big thing in Myanmar (yet) I was surprised to see lots of restaurants, particularly around Inle Lake, advertising pasta and pizza, clearly in an attempt to appeal to visiting Westerners.  Now I didn't go to Myanmar to eat Italian food, but after nearly 2 weeks there I was almost beginning to see the appeal...  as most Myanmar food seems to consist either of curry or salad.

Salad?  Don't pre-judge, these salads were some of the most amazing foods I've ever eaten...  but that's for my next blog-post!

When you hear the word 'curry' you probably immediately think of spices, and heat...  but the curries in Myanmar don't really fit this description.  They're more tomatoey (tomatoes are grown a lot in Myanmar, notably in the floating gardens on Inle Lake) and, whilst I think they are subtly seasoned with spices, they lack any chili heat.

Harvesting tomatoes by canoe on Inle Lake (shot taken about a second too late, but never mind!)

We ordered curries several time and in various restaurants.  They always had the same sauce, and we always had to ask for extra chili!

I'm aware that this is a bit of a luke-warm write-up, but don't get me wrong, I liked them.  They were tasty and often made with interesting alternatives to meat, but they were just all a bit same-y.

Here's my tofu curry.  Now there's a sentence I never thought I'd say!  I didn't intentionally go vegetarian on this holiday, I just ended up eating lots of vegetarian food - partly because we found 2 excellent veggie restaurants whilst in Bagan, but partly because there was a lot of nice vegetarian food available.  The tofu here was local to Inle Lake and was made with yellow split peas, giving it an unusual texture more akin to polenta.  You can see the little dish of dried chili in the background.

Here's Rob the following day, eating the same dish while I sampled Egg Curry (same sauce, different protein!).  He's not looking that impressed is he, but to be fair he was on the road to recovery after a nasty bout of D&V (hence me eating alone the previous day) and was still a bit nervous about eating anything at all.

I can't find any kind of 'Burmese Curry' recipe that looks anything like the curries we ate, but I suspect it's something that could be relatively easily recreated at home.  I think I'd make a paste of garlic, ginger and turmeric, and fry it with some diced onion before adding diced tomatoes and dried chillies.  A lovely addition to many of these curries was chopped spring onion, added just before serving.  Much as I enjoyed the tofu curry, and the hard-boiled-egg option, my favourite variation on the theme was pumpkin - cubes of pumpkin or squash simmered in the sauce until meltingly tender.

I think I'll give it a try.