The creme de la creme of coffee - Blue Mountain

This morning, I finally tasted the limited edition UCC Blue Mountain freeze dried coffee which I'd bought from Carrefour some time back. This is despite I still have not finished the bottle of organic Columbian freeze dried coffee. I think it is a limited edition because I haven't seen this blue mountain coffee anywhere else, not even at Isetan Orchard where there is currently a promotion on UCC coffee. This blue mtn version comes in a small bottle about half the size of the usual UCC freeze dried coffee, yet it costs almost double their usual price!



Anyway, the blue mtn coffee (with evaporated milk) tasted very very smooth, with no hint of bitterness at all. Whatever acidity there is in it was so very nuanced, that I think it can be drank black, and even a non-coffee drinker like that SO can drink it.

Notes about this coffee (from Wikipedia):
Jamaican Blue Mountain Coffee is a classification of coffee grown in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica. The best lots of Blue Mountain coffee are noted for their mild flavor and lack of bitterness. Over the last several decades, this coffee has developed a reputation that has made it one of the most expensive and sought-after coffees in the world. In addition to its use for brewed coffee, the beans are the flavor base of Tia Maria coffee liqueur.

Thai Pineapple Rice

I've been cooking dinner yesterday and today, and cooking dishes which I would normally leave for the weekends because they require more steps, more ingredients or more preparation time. I had time to cook them because I'd been on sick leave from a toe injury...smacked my toe against the corner of the granite stone (from the water feature)! The senior doctor at the clinic was very kind and understanding...he gave me 2 days' mc to rest! *grin*

Anyway, I cooked pineapple rice using the paste from Dancing Chef. I had previously tried their Thai curry paste which tasted quite authentic and hot. I didn't cook their curry again because SO can't take the hotness, but if it's not hot, it wouldn't be authentic, right? *roll eyes*

The list of other ingredients and steps are listed at the back of the package. It's not difficult lah, except that one has prepare the cooked chicken and prawns before frying the rice. The paste is quite watery, so better make sure the cooked rice is not soggy/overcooked to start with.

As I didn't want to have bland-tasting chicken, I marinated them in some chicken stock, a bit of wine and sesame oil. I've also added chopped garlic and ginger, both of which were not called for by the recipe (only onion was listed). To me, fried rice without garlic is like soup without "body" - flat! :P


The main ingredients are chicken, prawn, pineapple, onion plus a topping of fried egg strips and spring onion. I skipped the red and green chillis as I didn't have any.

I forgot to buy fresh pineapple today, so I used canned pineapple instead - just rinse them, drain well and chop into small pieces. In fact, I gave the pineapple a little squeeze - which turn out to be necessary in order not to have wet fried rice.

Pineapple rice served with a plain salad to counter the sweet-spicy (but not hot) taste of the rice.

Oh, by the way, the rice taste good, not because my cooking is good, but the paste is good. :)

Potato salad with zing

Two weekends ago, I made potato salad - my very first potato salad, in fact. It's not a difficult dish to make, yet it's not often that I come across a version that makes me want to have second helpings. Most of the potato salad (whether home-made or purchased outside) I've tasted are rather "common", or bland even.

Hence, I'd had no inclination to make it myself...until I bought this balsamic vinegar dressing from Carrefour. The bottle of dressing has a potato salad recipe at the back.

Preparation:
I saw some potatoes from New Zealand at the supermart and decided to try them, only because they were washed and looked clean and "golden". The other ingredients not commonly found in potato salad are the black olives and green beans (cooked).


This dressing which contains the flavourful balsamic vinegar gives the potato salad an interesting zing which I like (although the SO didn't quite take to its vinegar taste). I used bacon bits instead of salami which I don't have and which I don't usually eat, anyway.


The end product

Cork remover video

How to remove a cork that's stuck in a bottle?

I found this amazing...so simple and it works! From Yahoo! Video.

Japanese mushrooms

Last week, I cooked a pasta dish that did not have the usual tomato sauce which we're rather fond of. Rather, it was pasta fried with scallops and 2 or 3 kinds of mushrooms. I bought a pack of this interesting looking fresh Japanese mushrooms ($3.10 from CS supermarket) and a pack of Everbloom fresh shitake mushrooms to fry with the pasta.

Fresh Japanese mushrooms



I bought the 2 types of mushrooms during the workday lunch hour, and left the grocery bag in the office. By the time I collect the bag home after work, I notice a very strong pungent smell coming from the bag. Interestingly, when I smelled each pack of mushroom individually, there was no bad smell at all, but when both are packed in the same bag, they produced a small that's somewhat akin to human fart!

I took an aircon bus home, and not wanting the neighbouring passengers to suffer, I tied up the bag tightly so as to prevent the pungent smell from infiltrating the bus, but by the time I stood up to alight at my destination, I began to smell that fart smell again...the smell must have escape out of the bag somehow.

When I went home and unpacked the mushrooms, the strange thing was that neither product has even a hint of that bad pungent smell, yet when when both are put together, somehow they smelled terribly bad. It's a puzzle.

Anyway, the Japanese mushrooms tasted quite good. They didn't get soggy, and does not have a strong taste that might otherwise overwhelm the pasta, so it's fresh and tasty.

Edit: These are called Buna Shimeiji mushrooms; a cheaper version (at $1.95) from Korea is now available - they are smaller but taste as good.

A food-ful weekend

Last week was the long Good Friday weekend. It was good, and this morning, I felt like I finally have enough R & R.

Very sinfully, I ate and ate a lot over the weekend! Lots of sinful food and lots of salty food!

Thursday: Even before the long weekend started, we met up with friends at Botak Jones - where sinful, salty American food is served at kopitiam prices. The Cajun chicken was acceptable but the kitchen staff definitely had been too heavy-handed in sprinkling the salt over the fries, that it's was almost inedible. We also have a small bowl of the yummy gumbo which I'm sure was high in salt and other assorted spices (besides the hot green chillies). It was a warm night plus the salty food made me very thirty, that I had to have 2 cans of drinks (shared with SO though). And because dinner was late, I had to eat an Indian mutton curry puff drenched in a watery so-called chilli sauce to stave off my hunger first.

Friday: Had lunch at a hawker centre, plus the sinful friend carrot cake, plus sugar cane juice with lemon. After that, the SO still can tempt me by asking me if I wanted to eat ice-cream! So we had 2 scoops of lemon-plus-pink grapefruit gelatto or whatever (??) but they tasted more like sherbet.

Then we bought some snacks (from Thai Express Kovan) to visit mom's place where we...erm...ate the snacks and more! So we had Thai tapioca drenched with syrup and thick coconut milk, onek onek (Nonya snack), agar agar and friend bee hoon by mom. Mom's beehoon has got more "liao" (ingredients) than beehoon. Besides prawns and fish cake, she had even added a can of the fatty, sinful Ma Ling stewed pork (sum cham bak). After that, sis-in-law came back with home-made brownies and some fried snacks given by friends - but I resisted and didn't eat them (anyway the flat-looking brownies didn't look too great also :P ). Later, we had porridge with a large fried you tiao (fried flour fritters) for dinner outside, plus supped on some Kettle chips at home. :PP

Saturday: Ate the 3 meals quite normally, including some sumptious sambal sotong (squids) and water cress soup for dinner at MIL's. After that, our mouths being itchy, went to Icekimo for 2 scoops of ice-cream with a wafer bowl. Ahahaha! The SO is suddenly so into these not-so-cheap hand-made ice-cream...maybe it's the humid weather.

Sunday: Ate normally although there was too much salty food, including the Kettle chips (finished whatever remains in the pack of Three Cheese flavour while watching Korean dvd; I must hide the new pack of Cheddar Beer...). The worse thing was that while hungry and waiting for SO to finish watching his video on his pc, I opened up a can of oily GuLong spiced pork cubes and munched on it straight from the can. It's ultra-sinful...must be near that time of the month. :PPP

We went out to have dinner and I had this lousy, psuedo- Hawaiian chicken chop that had this coat of curry powder mixture on top of it. The SO had his hor-fun with egg, but still wasn't satisfied and wanted supper (right after dinner!). So we ate pork porridge with a strip of freshly fried you tiao (fried flour fritters).

Tsk...tsk...tsk... I had better eat lighter meals for the rest of the working week before I pass the point of no return (on the weighing scales).