Creative and Systematic Cooking (pt 3)

Creative and Systematic Cooking
Part 3

Presentation

Well, we come to the last episode of this delicious trilogy. Heck, I’d choose this than Star Wars.

Anyway, let us go on, shall we?

Now I wanted to have it sizzling on a hotplate. So what would I do? I’ll heat my hotplate and place it on the wooden base.

Peel off the foil from the potato. Place it in the leftmost part of the plate (that’s the place you’ll be holding the fork). Slit cut on the top and we’ll decorate later.

Then put the now-cool vegs and let it sizzle for a while in the hotplate. Place it in front (The position nearer to the diner. This is done to reduce the distance from the veg to the mouth. Thus reducing the risk of dropping the veg all over your shirt.)

Spread the bed of onions for the steak behind the vegs and place the steak just right on top of it.

Then we’ll start the decoration process. Pour the sauce on the steak and put 2 stalks of baby asparagus crossed on top of it.

For the potato: Pour the sour cream, put a sliced cheese (or sprinkle grated cheese) and sprinkle chipped bacon, sliced leek and herbs.

There it is. You’ve done a good project.

However, the intention of this series of article is to introduce you on creative cooking and creative menu invention. Of course as you go along, even though the main theme would be “to think out of the box”, relying on these articles would backfire and even put you in the box! So never rely on it. These articles are made for guideline purposes. Sure it’s highly applicable but it’s not my intention!

I’ll post and write more on these topics. So sit down, relax, and… Enjoy


Itadakimasu!

Le Conseiller

PS: The Image I posted below is taken from Noble House Steak House in Linkou, Taiwan. It’s a striploin with brown garlic sauce. The sides are sunny egg and diced carrot, peas and corn for vegs with yaki udon (fried Japanese flour noodle) for carb.

Anybody on for cooking?

For my buddies in Singapore!

As I most probably free next mon-tue (which Tue is a Public Holiday) I'll cook for you in your home for Monday (23/10) Dinner and Tuesday (24/10) Lunch. Free of charge!

Email/call for detailed appointment.

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(PS: My free time will be confirmed on Sunday. So there's a little chance of cancellation. All confirmation will be on Sunday Eve.)

Creative and Systematic Cooking (pt 2)

Creative and Systematic Cooking
Part 2

Method

Okay now we go to the part 2 of the article. We’re continuing our project on Ribeye steak. In case you’re forgetting the details we’ve decide on making a:

Ribeye steak on a bed of onions with tangy barbecue sauce. Served with seasonal vegetables and house specialty baked potato.

Now method is a more organized matters. There will be three items here: The steak, the veg and the baked potato. There are few question you need to ask.

1. Can I warm up the item? If can, I shall cook it first and warm it later.
2. Should I put close attention to the item while it’s cooking?
3. How fast can it be done?

Now the answers for all three of them:
For the steak would be: no, yes, 13-18 mins
The veg would be: yes, yes, 2-3 mins
The baked potato would have: no, no, 14-18 mins

So the cooking plan would be as following.
1. we’ll pan-fry the cabbage and set it aside
2. we’ll take care of the baked potato
3. while the potato is cooking, we’ll grill the steak!
4. Assemble them together
5. Diner est servi.

We’ll then. Let’s start with number 1.
Throw in some butter or olive oil, let it hot and throw the shredded cabbage to the pan. Toss it for a minute or two (depends whether you’ll like it crispy or chewy) and set it aside. Same thing can be done for the ingredients medley I mentioned in the first part (peas, baby carrot and sweet corn). Of course to add some taste, you can have a finely sliced bacon to be tossed with the veg.

For number 2,
Jab the washed potato all over with fork, pat/sprinkle with salt on its skin (if you like), wrap it with aluminum foil and throw it to the oven toaster for 15 mins (preheated. Turn on the oven 2 minutes with nothing in it.) If you want express, Skip the foil wrapping and bung it to the micro. 6 mins on high.

Then we concentrate for number 3. Make sure you do it when the potato almost done.
What method you’d like for the steak? Flame-grilled or Pan-grilled?
How would you like it done? Rare, Medium rare, Medium, or Well-done?
For me, Ribeye would be best pan grilled medium rare. So I would heat my beloved Tefal® with medium fire and sizzle it with olive oil. Then throw the meat, wait for about 7 minute, turn it, wait another 7 minute and put it on a side plate. (Note: the doneness of the steak is just for guidelines. This guide is applicable for 3/4 in. thick steak. Different thickness would give different time for similar doneness)

Next I would pan-fry the onions on the remaining oil. As I’m going to use hotplate for my presentation, the bed of onions will be useful to keep the steak warm without further cooking it.

Right after you finish with the meat, Bing! The potato’s done…

All right! All the elements are here and we’ll assemble it.

I’ll continue with that one on the next episode.

(oh, man. Jack’s place gotta pay me for these articles! They’ll sure get some of you there after reading this article. Even I want to go there now!)

Cons

This week’s new item (42/2006)

This week’s new item

Well, it took me hours to get me back my creative juice but I’m thrilled to announce this week new item

This week’s new item: (2006 wk 42)

Banana Croquette

Croquette is a traditional food from Dutch (kroket) which is normally involving potato and meat (such as chicken or fish) or ragout. This influences the Japanese to develop their own corokke ( コロッケ ) which normally filled with potato, to fill with other thing of their own favorite. There are Salmon, Cheese and Salmon, Potato and chicken, Tuna, sweetcorn, Sweet potato, pumpkin and many others. (Aw, shucks. Just see the Wikipedia, will ya?)

So, all these ingredients have been used… Why not start it with fruit? Corokke style with mashed banana inside. Heck, you can even dip it in chocolate sauce or even have it with vanilla ice cream! Yummy

Enjoy!

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PS: I'll follow up this posting on how menu creation works

Creative and Systematic Cooking (pt 1)

Creative and Systematic Cooking
Part 1

Ingredients

Ingredients are the number one that matters when it comes to food. No matter how it sounds or how it looks, ingredients decide everything. Croissants made with butter will have distinct taste compared to margarine. Chicken rice made with or without pandan leaves will taste different. Even the freshness of garlic will decide the outcome of a teppanyaki meal. In short, ingredients are the most basic factor for a food.

Choosing an ingredient

There are layers of importance in ingredient choosing. I’ll call them Primary, Secondary, Tertiary and Complementary.

Primary is basically the main item for the menu. Let’s say we are going to have a beef steak, for example. What are we going to do with the beef steak? We want to serve Beef steak (meat) with vegetables (sides) and potato (carb.).

So we split into three sections. Meat, Vegetable, and Potato. These are the primary ingredients.

Let’s take a look into meat:
As we’re making a beef steak, we can choose the meat that is commonly made into steaks.
Now we have Sirloin, Striploin, Tenderloin, Ribeye and T-Bone. (let’s limit to this five most favorite parts.) (And if you feel your mouth watering, there’s nothing wrong with that. Mine already started 2 minutes ago)
As the outer loins (sir- and strip-) tends to be lean (less fat content in the meat itself), it’ll get tough as its going. Tenderloins however wouldn’t as it have a nice and tender taste in your mouth. A certain part of the tenderloin, called Fillet Mignon is so superbly tender that KwikGourmet (http://www.kwikgourmet.com/) is selling 4 pieces of 5oz. Fillet Mignon for US$49.95. (That’ll be around S$140/kg.)
For this case, I’ll stick with my favorite. I’ll choose ribeye. It has an even spread of fat all over the meat which makes it very tender and kinda chewy. Just the one I really like.

What I want to do with the meat? I want a ribeye steak on a bed of onions and topped with barbecue sauce. So the ingredient would be Ribeye (primary: the main thing), Onions and butter for sizzling the steak (secondary: important) and barbecue sauce (tertiary: replaceable. I can choose hollandaise, teriyaki or even honey mustard). I might add some baby asparagus for decorations (complementary. Not important at all)

Now goes for the veg.
As I don’t really want to make such a big fuss with veg, I’ll pick a cabbage for this. You can actually imagine and toss everything you like. But as an alternative, I’ll write in peas, corn and baby carrot as well. These are all the primary ingredient. But as I want to pan-fry them, I'll need some butter or margarine as well. Eventhough olive oil will become a healthier but fancier alternatives.

ing, straight cut, cheesy, spiced?), or maybe potato chips (home made or store bought? With dips? Sour cream with mashed onions, guacamole, salsa, thousand island or just sprinkle with salt.) The combination is beyond imagination! Again as I’ll choose my favorite, I’ll pick baked potato. (So I would need a whole potato and American Russet is the best for baking. That would be the primary) with sour cream (Secondary), melted cheese and chipped bacon with leek for its topping(tertiary) and shredded herbs for taste (complementary).

There you go! We’re done with part one.

To be continued

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Fruit and Seafood Salad (s3)

Fruit and Seafood Salad

This is the invention of a Japanese chef, a friend of mine. He actually convinced me that melon (cantaloupe/honeydew… not watermelon) will get along when married with mayonnaise. Believe it or not… they are. So I take liberty to improve it. Here it goes

Ingredients
* Melon. Ripe and sweet preferable.
* Nata de coco. Drained
* Pineapple (fresh – peeled, washed and/canned – drained and) diced
* Shrimp (Small. The one that sized around your little finger)
* Fresh: peeled, deveined and boiled
* Frozen: thawed
* Crabsticks. Prefer the small chippies type. If you can only find the normal long one, make 1cm slices
* Ebiko or Tobiko (shrimp roe or flying fish roe. Available in sashimi counters or Japanese specialty shops)
* Mayonnaise (I prefer using Kraft™ brand. For Singapore readers, choose the one made in Philippines (Dark blue label). MasterFoods’ Real Mayonnaise works as well)

Method:

Put everything in a huge salad bowl and toss it. Enjoy!

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PS: the ones in bold are essential ingredients. The rests are optional. I don’t put how much you need for every ingredient. Just put it considerably… as much as you like. But try to keep them balanced.

Creative Cooking (1)

Well, just yesterday I've read about this prata goreng in the news paper. They make a crispy prata, shred it off and toissed it in the wok like mee goreng (Indian fried noodle.

It’s kinda crazy but again it’s an idea that actually works. And someone beat me to it. The fundamental of this menu is so simple. You see:

prata is basically flatbread made from flour.
A majority of noodles has flour as basic ingredient
Why don’t we just treat prata as a noodle? Shred it and fry it?

There you goes, a new food item for this year Festival of Light (Deepavali/Divali).

Don’t you just hate it when someone beat you to a new menu and makes you feels like bonking yourself in the head and muttering “Why oh, why didn’t I think of that?”

My friend the sushi chef invented the prawn and mango salad which was absolutely delicious. Well, I indeed improved it to my Seafood Fruits salad. (salade de fruits et fruits de mer) Heh, I’ll post the recipe tonight. But again it’s not something new.

I can whip up honey glazed chicken wing in 10 minutes with only honey, chicken wing and oven toaster. Throw me some cloves and I’ll make this extra-fast food as if it’s come out of 3-star hotel’s kitchen. I might improved the “how” but the concept of the honey glazed wasn’t even mine.

Nevertheless, there’s nothing wrong if you try to imitate somebody else’s. Especially in cooking, there’s no such thing as copyright for recipe. That’s why instead of copyrighting it, KFC just put the papers in a vault! There’s no way they’ll even put that in digital storage. (Note: Original recipe for Coca-cola is also written in papers and locked in vault.)

But then, how are we going to find something new? Assuming you’re interested in cooking, you can start by putting attention. There are 3 main items in cooking which I will elaborate at later part. They are (1) ingredient, (2) technique, and (3) presentation.

After you collect and gather information about all three of this, all you need to do is mix and match it. There you go, a new menu of your own!

To be Continued

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