Archive for August, 2006

Cooking for Company

August 13, 2006 at 12:12 am · Filed under house events


There was a time when cooking at home was seen as cumbersome and old-fashioned and was the unfortunate preserve of those who can’t afford to dine out. Those with extra cash to spend would splurge on a good meal at a trendy restaurant or at the very least, a decent café, while those with a little less cash would still prefer to grab takeaway at a fast-food joint. This was when Maccas’s was the in thing and all the cool kids ate burgers.

Nowadays fast-food outlets are facing a huge image crisis, brought about by the onslaught of obesity and the unflattering comments by chefs and chef-y foodies, eager to rid the world of preservative-laden and over-salted burgers. Fast-food is fast becoming the new tobacco. The rise of television cooking shows and books by renowned chefs and food experts have brought about a renewed interest in transforming conspicuous consumers into competent cooks. This democratization of good food has helped make home-cooking not only acceptable, but de rigueur.

Over the weekend I had the pleasure of having some of my closest friends over for a relaxing Saturday lunch. I normally make lunch or dinner with friends a (relatively) simple affair. However, this time around I decided to make lunch a slightly more theatrical occasion. Going over-the-top can be fun sometimes, in that stressful, tiring but it’s-all-worth-it-in-the-end sort of way.

Sushi with avocado, cucumber and imitation crabstick filling laced with mayonnaise was relatively easy to prepare, although to my regret the avocado was unripe and did not provide the creamy, mushy comfort that I normally associate with it. However, the rice was judiciously seasoned with sugar and vinegar which adequately countered the bitterness of the unripe avocado, and so a potential disaster was averted.

Another appetizer dish was my very own version of Sigara Boregi. Mine deviated slightly from the original Turkish creation in that the filling was bursting with spinach and feta, whereas in the traditional version, the spinach filling is quite sparse. The abundant filling resulted in the pasty shell unable to retain its ideally thin, cylindrical cigar-like figure, instead transforming into a flat, rectangular rod, like a morbidly overweight spring roll bursting into the seams with spinach and feta.

For the mains, I modified a recipe obtained from Jamie Oliver’s The Return of the Naked Chef for baked fish which he cooked for Tony Blair and the Italian prime minister. The fish fillets are baked on a bed of roasted sliced potatoes and fried mushrooms, so that when it is scooped from the baking tray onto the plate, the fish rests on a beautiful pile of mushrooms and potatoes that is an appealing visual effect on its own. Of course, a ring of paprika sprinkles for added colour and spicy accompaniment wouldn’t hurt, nor would the sprig of fresh rosemary for a rustic feel.

The pre-dessert was inspired by Chocolate Fire, a newcomer to the Melbourne chocolateria scene. They dip Pringles into melted Belgian chocolate for a salty-sweet combination, much like peanut butter and Nutella.

We finished off with the cake, which consists of choc cinnamon mousse sandwiched between thin layers of hazelnut meringue. The chewy meringue provided good contrast to the creamy smooth mousse; however it was quite a messy affair to eat because the meringue was quite hard to be penetrated by a fork and we ended up eating with our hands, treating it like an oversized wafer biscuit.

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Chocolate Trickery

August 6, 2006 at 12:11 am · Filed under sweet treats

This website, The Cocoanut, is a play of words, where the meaning of ‘cocoa nut’ can either be taken as its literal meaning, the nut of the cocoa plant from which we derive chocolate, or a person who is mad about cocoa. The phrase ‘Cocoanut’ also alludes to coconut, whose milk forms the basis for many of Malaysia’s well-loved dishes.

The motive for choosing a name that conjures images of smooth, velvety chocolate is pretty obvious. Chocolate is universally loved and anyone who is not mad about chocolate is himself quite mad (there’s never been a case of a woman who dislikes chocolate). A less obvious reason is that the first thing I ever made in the kitchen was a batch of truffles.

It never fails to amaze me how easy they are to prepare in relation to the decadent, luxurious taste they impart. Truffles are essentially a mixture of melted chocolate and cream, cooled and shaped into mounds and rounds and dusted with cocoa to resemble their namesake, those highly sought-after and extremely expensive fungi from Italy and France.

For my latest batch of truffles, I decided to deviate from the usual path of cocoa-coated truffles to try my hand at chocolate-dipped ones. Colour would be a dominant theme, and I wanted a play of colour to both confuse and excite the eater.

Milk chocolate is almost universally cherished, but its other cousins, dark and white, lie at the extreme spectrum of chocolate appreciation and have often divided what would otherwise be a United Chocolate Lovers Front. Purists maintain that the only chocolate worth its weight is the darker variety, while its fairer cousin seems to have attained cult status among the small but growing number of white chocolate fanatics.

I often find that those who like dark despise the white, and vice versa. This is unfortunate because their arrogance stems from complete ignorance of what the other has to offer. Dark chocolate lovers complain incessantly of the sickly sweet taste of white, while exponents of White Power whinge endlessly of the strong bitter aftertaste of the Dark Side. I personally find that the sickly sweet taste only occurs in cheap white chocolate. The better ones assert a comforting aroma of vanilla with a rich velvety texture that is unmistakably chocolate (or, technically speaking, cocoa butter).

The bitter aftertaste of dark chocolate only lingers during the first few samplings. After a while, the bitter aftertaste actually becomes a delight rather than a bother. There is something about dark chocolate that really invokes the sensation of decadence and guilty pleasure.

If only lovers of dark and white took the time and effort to give each other a chance, we could all then concentrate on more pressing issues, such as the pros and cons of margarine, why chicken skin should only be fried and never steamed, or the merits of using free-range eggs.

To trick them into eating the chocolates, I coated my white chocolate truffles with a layer of dark chocolate and vice versa. Although this is a rather dishonest method, I feel that in this particular circumstance, the Machiavellian attitude could perhaps be justified.

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