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.