Banana Pancakes

"This song is meant to keep ya

From doing what you're supposed to

Like waking up too early

Maybe we can sleep in

I'll make you banana pancakes

Pretend like it's the weekend now."

Banana Pancakes, Jack Johnson

Jack Johnson's lyrics pretty much sums up the perfect kind of day to make banana pancakes: a lazy morning lie-in, a day dedicated to "you and me", a day for slowing down and taking your foot of the accelerator of life. I made banana pancakes on such a day.

I woke up to a nice long bank holiday weekend, one of those days where you turn around in bed and see your loved one lying next to you, and the sun rays are just peeking through the little gaps in the curtains, and everything seems perfect. No need to think about work for a good few days. My other half had had a long week at work and I thought it would be nice to make a lovely breakfast for him. I slipped out of bed quietly and went to see what was available in the cupboard.

I pulled out my big book of breakfasts, aptly called Breakfasts & Brunches, and flipped through the pages. This book, I think, was a real find. It was the one and only copy on the shelf of a popular bookstore in Singapore, and it seemed out of place being there, as though the bookstore happened to have it and did not know what to do with it but plonk it together with the other cookery books. Written by the Culinary Institute of America, the pages are filled with delectable breakfast dishes, from homely omelettes to full-on steak.

I turned to the section on pancakes and found what I was looking for: a recipe for banana pancakes. This one had an accompanying blueberry maple syrup which I sadly had to leave out as I didn't have any blueberries; as for the bananas I had plenty. I got busy mashing bananas, measuring out the ingredients and within the half hour had whipped up a nice big plate of pancakes, which I served to my other half (who was awake by now) topped with generous dollops of butter and syrup. So unhealthy, yet so perfect. Nothing beats eating banana pancakes in your pyjamas with your loved one and a nice cup of tea.

New beginnings...

I've talked for so long about this with friends and family (and anyone who had dared venture to ask!) and till then it has always seemed like a Plan. Now the time has come for this Plan to come to fruition and I can't believe that it is going to happen. How do I even describe what it feels like? A sharp turn on the road, or better yet, like being on a rollercoaster: you know that first bit after you've done that almighty climb and the rollercoaster's sort of teetering at the cusp, and you think "uh-oh" cos you know that in a matter of nano-seconds, your heart is going to lurch out into your stomach. It's the scary-exhilarated-anticipation kind of feeling.

It's taken quite a bit of courage for me to leave behind a good job with good pay in the corporate world and venture into the realm of cuisine, pretty much the unknown. But I guess it is true, if I don't do it now I will never know. I read something on a friend's FB page today, one of her thoughts of the day. It said that sometimes you just need courage to seize the moment, else you will in retrospect, wish that all you had was a little bit more courage.

I have read so much about the culinary world to prepare myself mentally and emotionally for it, but I still don't feel like I am equipped. So many "what ifs" still swimming in my head... I used to have a sense of adventure, but I think that has mellowed as I have grown older. I think it is the devil-may-care attitude that youth is so full of, and that was me...then. This is now. With age comes responsibility, obligations - you think more about the future and about raising a family, buying a house, retiring. And you think about whether you have the personal capacity to still go ahead with this despite not knowing what lies ahead. It is an adventure, and I'd like to think that all adventures test a person's mettle. I will be tested by fire (maybe literally, being in the kitchen!) but I pray that I emerge unscathed.

Class starts on Friday.

Is your goose cooked?

Christmas is over, and the fa-la-laas have come and gone all too soon. The 12 days of Christmas have seemed like one day and this has made me wish I had spent more of that holiday time doing just that: taking a holiday. We are all well too familiar with the whirlwind of activity that comes with the holiday season, (and more so for me as I was moving house this year) and how we are thrown into a frenzy when things go awry… I get quite concerned about that because that’s not what Christmas is all about. Hence to try not to get too caught up that I forget what it truly means, I tend to tiptoe rather gingerly into the festive period trying not to set off any “whirlwind mines”.

My undoing at Christmas is usually the roast. Actually, I’ve only cooked Christmas dinner three times, and during the first I cheated. I bought the roast ready-made. Two years ago, I scared the living daylights out of my guests when I emerged from the kitchen sweat-soaked and stressed. It was my first time making turkey, but thankfully and most mercifully, the turkey turned out well. This year I was in two minds. I debated with the other half on roast pork or goose. He won, and we had roast goose. It was also my first time making it. So I followed a Gordon Ramsay recipe on the internet, complete with sides, and made goose gravy using a recipe from Nigella Lawson’s Christmas book. The goose was not perfect sadly. I had forgotten to baste my goose at the start and a whole hour had almost gone by before I remembered, resulting in the meat being a little dry in places. Otherwise, the bits that were still moist were actually rather good. Kudos Gordon! (I was so ready to let the recipe take the fall if it turned out adversely)

There are a couple of things I don’t do when preparing a roast for a dinner party, or any dish for any party for that matter. Firstly, I don’t normally like using a new recipe without first testing it out. Sounds so simple, but I can get quite caught up at the sight of an exciting recipe accompanied with the glossy pictures and I’m like “ooh I could do that too”. Experience has taught me that doing that is the fastest way to utterly destroy your mood and the rest of the evening. But sometimes, as with a goose or turkey, testing it can prove a bit difficult. Our goose had already cost us close to £50 and I wasn’t about to spend another £50 for trial-and-error. Maybe that’s why I stress out so much over the roast. Pork is more versatile. In fact I had tested out a roast pork recipe some weeks before to see if I fancied it more than goose. It was a crack(l)ing recipe to say the least (courtesy of Marcus Wareing) and I had been pleased with it. But the other half thought that I should be more adventurous and festive. Point taken.

The other no-no that I don’t do is to roast for the first time in an unfamiliar oven. New ovens leave a funny burnt rubber kind of smell and that gets absorbed into your roast. Worse still, the heat intensity varies in different ovens despite the same temperature and that could either spell success or cinder in the roast. Let’s just put it this way, an oven can be as temperamental as a woman with pms and I’m not being sexist here. It’s true. Again, experience has taught me to avoid this, and so despite that I was moving house this year, I insisted on staying put at the old place for Christmas dinner just so that I wouldn’t have to deal with possible tantrums the new oven could throw at me.

It’s a bit strange writing all this in hindsight, but better late than never. I guess if all goes a bit wrong, it’s a good idea then to have a great dessert at hand to cover all manner of cooking sins cos at the end of the day, that’s what really lingers on your tastebuds no?

Happy 2010 to all!

Reconnecting

I’m in need of a mug of hot chocolate today.

It has been a tiring week, emotionally and mentally draining. Sometimes you just want to wind down, you feel the need to step back because life just seems to be moving so fast, seems to overwhelm you. It has been one of those days for me. I’m writing this at the end of the working week, and it is absolutely pouring outside. Winter is coming on fast and the clouds out there have cast their gloomy shadow in my room.

I made myself a mug of chocolate earlier. Where I come from, I’ve only ever known Milo. Where I am now, Milo is found only on World Food shelves in my local supermarket or in Chinatown. Strange. I thought Nestlé and chocolate were universal… Of course I now know more brands of chocolate that are out there, but I’d like to be fussy for a change. Sometimes it helps to go with what you know, what you’re familiar with.

When I was about ten, my parents went on holiday with my brother, leaving my sister and me in the care of my aunt. My aunt is cool, she still is. She loves cooking for people, and nothing is too much trouble for her when it comes to feeding the brood. When we were kids, the extended family used to congregate at her house for weekend dinner. Sometimes we went unannounced, but it didn’t matter to my aunt. She always made sure there was enough food to go round. Anyway, the prospect of staying over for a week was like a mini-holiday for us. We were allowed to stay up, watch tv, play with toys and pretty much did whatever we wanted. She made rice dumplings for us, and every night before we went to bed, she’d always make sure that we had a cup of iced Milo. For me, that was the high point of my stay there.

My aunt would chill the drink in a big stainless steel teapot and when it was cold enough, she’d call for us from the kitchen and we’d go running because we knew what was coming. We’d stand there in front of the freezer waiting expectantly with our mugs – my cousin, my sister and I – like Oliver Twist asking for more, except that we hadn’t even had some yet, but we also knew there was always more if we wanted it. Not that we were spoilt – we were polite kids I think – but this was my aunt’s brand of generosity, the way that she showed she cared.

And now I’m older. My aunt has moved out of her house. We don’t go there every weekend anymore. Chocolate drinks as I know it have become watered down. Life has become more complicated. I can pick my coffee beans from 10 different varieties. I can choose ground beans or grind it myself. I can choose to have tea in different combinations: rose and peppermint, earl gray and elderflower… That’s great. That’s absolutely super. But sometimes I just want to keep it simple. Sometimes I just need to reconnect with my old self to find myself. Because when we are surrounded with so many choices we can get caught up with it all and lose sense of who we are. All these new choices don’t have a piece of me in it. Research has indicated that our sense of smell has the strongest imprint in our memory bank. And being able to smell, and taste, something from my past that evokes such memories helps me slow down, and for a brief moment, helps me rediscover myself.

“Feasting is also closely related to memory. We eat certain things in a particular way in order to remember who we are…”
Jeff Smith 'The Frugal Gourmet Keeps the Feast'

I think I’m going to have another mug of Milo…

Breakfast at The Wolseley

I had breakfast at The Wolseley the other day. Well I had a sneak preview a few days before when I dropped by for some tea and cake and to make my reservation, but I was really more interested in the infamous breakfast.

Mind you, breakfast at The Wolseley on a weekend is no mean feat. You need to make reservations days in advance to secure a decent time slot (not good for late risers like myself), drag yourself out of bed in the wee hours of the morning on a Saturday (again not good if you’ve had a late Friday night out) and make sure you get yourself there on time to fight off any last-minute, no-reservation stragglers waiting like vultures for your table to be released. Talk about working up an appetite. Well okay, maybe I might have exaggerated the vulture bit but there is some truth behind it. The Wolseley, while admitting reservations, operates a policy of seating a proportion of seats on a first-come-first-served basis which means that it is possible, if your stars are aligned, to get a table for breakfast on a weekend without a reservation. Having said that, I noted a number of would-be patrons were turned away at the door that day.

So why The Wolseley? That was precisely what I wanted to know. So much has been said about this place that I wanted to see what the big deal was. The Wolseley was originally commissioned to be a car showroom for Wolseley Motors in the 1920s, before becoming a Barclays Bank branch. That too closed to become The Wolseley that we know today. Inside, the interior is opulent, magnificent even. The expansive dining hall leaves you momentarily rooted, but as you settle in you start to notice the tiny details. Black and gold is the colour palette here, from the artwork on the panelling to the marble floor tiles, and the black iron chandeliers with their yellow-gold cups of light. At the coffee bar, black urns of tea with gold Chinese script adorn the shelf, and above that, a Japanese lacquer painting in gold of mountains, streams and trees. And if you look high enough, tiny black painted leaves like fern slowly fan out from the tops of the pillars towards the beige-white ceiling.

The buzz of breakfast was already in full-swing when we arrived. It actually gets quite noisy here on weekends. Clinking of cups and clattering of silverware compete with the chattering of well-heeled patrons. They say that The Wolseley is the place to celebrity-spot, not that I noticed anyone familiar. A breakfast menu was swiftly handed out by a smiling waiter. He made me feel at ease; in fact there was nothing stuffy about the service. The wait staff encourage the indulgence of eating your breakfast in whatever way you like, without raising an eyebrow. I ordered a hot chocolate.

The menu is not unlike any café-on-the-corner that does breakfast, but at twice the price. It mainly consists of standard fare: full English breakfast, porridge and muesli, bacon rolls, eggs in a variety of manner. In addition it serves an array of bread (the viennoiserie). There isn’t a lot that could go wrong with that, and nothing overwhelmingly exciting at first glance. Why do people come here then? Is it because it is posh, a place to see and be seen? Do we come here so that we can tick the box and say yes, we ate at The Wolseley, and regale the tale to our friends? Are we trying to keep up with the Joneses or are we just curious, to see what makes The Wolseley tick? If we praised the food would we be doing it because it is The Wolseley?


The food arrived and we tucked in. My eggs tasted, well, like eggs. And you can’t tinker around much either with the taste of mushrooms at breakfast. As I mentioned, there is not a lot that could go wrong with breakfast staples. But here’s the distinction: a lot of effort goes into making your food look out-of-the-ordinary and taste perfect. I think we underestimate how difficult it is to get something simple as eggs to cook right. Even mushrooms need to be grilled just right so that you don’t cook the hell out of it. But that’s the beauty of it, these guys make something simple look actually simple and effortless. They know that you are paying good money for regular fare and make darn sure they pull out all the stops to get it right, right down to the presentation. The guy who did my salmon and eggs, you could tell that he took the patience to slice the salmon to equal widths and overlapped them lengthwise to form a ring around the scrambled eggs. The sausages were evenly browned. My croissant was beautifully puffed up, it looked like it was about to breathe…. Even my hot chocolate was sufficiently thick, yet not too hot as to burn my tongue. These are details that we take for granted, because we assume it is ordinary fare. But these guys pride themselves on perfecting these details where others fail. Why should breakfast be spared the extravagance and attention to detail compared to dinner? Is it not considered to be the most important meal of the day?

The guys at Wolseley have got it right I think. Talk about product differentiation. And if you read A.A. Gill’s book “Breakfast at The Wolseley”, you will come to appreciate the mechanism that runs behind the kitchen doors and on the floors. They take pains to recognise regulars and note your favourite beverage / food / newspaper / allergies. That is service. And maybe this is another reason why some people keep coming back: the familiarity and expectation of a good breakfast is sometimes better than in our own homes.

The Wolseley
160 Piccadilly
London W1J 9EB
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7499 6996

Rice to the occasion

I’m currently reading Julie & Julia, written by Julie Powell about her pet Project – cooking her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in the span of a year. An admirable effort, and I take my hat off to her especially when you have to deal with bits of animal that you are not generally accustomed to.

I reached the part where Julie has to prepare rice, and an online debate ensues on her blog about relying on modern gadgets (i.e. the rice cooker) vs. the traditional way of cooking. I wondered about that, and concluded that I couldn’t decide which side of the line I was on. By sheer coincidence, I had decided to make a Chinese dinner during the weekend which more often than not calls for a big, steaming pot of rice, and my encounter with my own modern gadget got me thinking about this argument.

So I’m making this Chinese dinner, because I like Chinese and because it is the mid-autumn festival a.k.a. mooncake festival, on the Chinese calendar. If you’re in China, or a predominantly Chinese country, this festival is a big thing. People go to town with this, almost like a second Chinese New Year. I decided that this at least warranted a decent meal and set about making a steamed chicken with ginko nuts wrapped in lotus leaf, tofu with egg gravy, and mixed vegetables with wolfberries and lotus root crisps. It sounded absolutely simple when it was a seed of an idea, but come execution time and I was like a headless chicken running about the kitchen. I was behind time, and my tofu had not turned out as I hoped it would be. Whatever confidence I had at the start of prep sort of crumbled away with the minutes. Anyway, just as I thought I had things under control and was about to pop the chicken into the wok for a steam, I realised I had forgotten about cooking rice.

A little background here. I recently acquired my little rice cooker. I didn’t do it for my benefit, as much as it has been great help. Nooo... I acquired it more for the other half really, so that he’d be able to cook rice when I wasn’t around (something he has yet to do!). It isn’t difficult, and it is rather cute, with its little beeps and blinking lights. Rice cookers have evolved from the white / olive green aluminium standard, with the spring button. Nowadays, you can program (program, mind you!!) the cooker to do all kinds of things, even bake a cake apparently (nope, not tried that yet). In any case, a rice cooker is a pretty “new” thing to me as I’ve been brought up to cook rice the traditional, manual way. It is dead simple. Just chuck the rice into a pot, and fill it up with enough water to reach the first notch of your middle finger when you stand it upright on the surface of the rice. Then leave it to boil and watch the heat till it starts drying out and crackling a little, like rice krispies. Then plonk the lid on and turn off the heat. Easy-peasy, and takes much less time than a rice cooker.

These days however, I use the rice cooker. I might as well since I forked out a decent amount of moolah for it. The thing is, with manual cooking you’re always reminded that you have a pot there that needs washing. With the rice cooker, these things can escape you, and it did. I forgot I had remnants in my cooker from a previous dinner, and it was three weeks later that I discovered I had forgotten to clear it out. The rice, as you can imagine, was in some stage of fermentation, probably would’ve turned into rice wine if I had left it longer. But it was bad. Real bad. It had changed into some shade of pink, secreted its own liquids, and smelt so rancid I had to hold my breath through the entire clearing process and Febreeze the kitchen after that. And all this happened while I was doing the headless-chicken-chasing-time thing. See, when shit hits the fan it tends to be quite a big splat isn’t it?

With the clock ticking, I decided that I’d have to resort to the old way of cooking. There was no way I was going to cook in that rice cooker without a good intense soak first, and there was no time. Funnily enough though, I surprised myself by discovering that it was like second nature to me, that to a certain extent I preferred cooking rice this way. Yeah the gadgets work well thank you very much, but I liked that I wasn’t at the “mercy” of automation, making sure I had programmed the right buttons etc.

I managed to serve a decent dinner that night, with enough fluffy rice for seconds. And as for Julie’s debate, I concluded that while I don’t mind being on the gadget side of life, where convenience rules, I think I’m pretty much old school. And I’m comfortable with that.

Back on radar

It has been a while since my last post, I fell off the radar for a while for a variety of reasons: work being the primary one, and procrastination the second. Well maybe a close second. I've also been travelling, doing my "big" UK trip. More about that in another post.

On the food front, I've definitely kept myself occupied attending the London food festival, meeting Tristan Welch in person (he is a lot smaller than I thought, but terribly friendly), meeting Michel Roux in person (!!! speechless!), and celebrated my birthday at Maze, one of Gordon Ramsay's many restaurants. Nope didn't get to meet GR. A previous birthday goer mentioned in a restaurant review website that she and her hubby were lucky enough to be invited to the kitchen for a tour. No such luck for me despite that I was there for a double birthday celebration (and I thought that would have at least counted!). I was lucky enough to get away with a free slice of birthday cake and the chef's menu for the night... Un-autographed! Bah!

In any case it has been an eventful time, and I have also been making plans for next year. Also more on that later. But for now, this post is just me saying I'm back on the radar. Stay tuned!