From My Mum's Recipe

Yesterday I tried out one recipe from the old lady's book. A very simple one called Ayam Masak Ros.

It is a chicken soup.  With not so much spices.

It makes a mildly fragrant, woodsy, comforting and wholesome kind of soup, with uncomplicated taste.  Little oil.

Ayam Masak Ros

Recipe

1/2 chicken pieces
2 tsp of coriander seeds.
1 tsp of pepper corns
4 shallots
4 garlic
1/2 inch ginger
6 cloves. 3 pounded.
Salt

Pound coriander seeds, pepper corns and 3 cloves with ginger

Boil chicken in water in a pot. Water just above the chicken, not so much

Pound the shallots and garlic.  Fry with remaining cloves in a little oil.  Add the other spices and fry till fragrant.  Add all this to the boiling chicken. Salt to taste.  You can omit oil all together. Just pound and add to the pot.

Apple cake recipe

As you know, my cakes have been modified to cut sugar and fat. So it is not the best cake in the world but a substitute to not eating cake at all and to me, it is good. I put alot of fruits or veg in my cakes.

5 apples, diced.
3 cups of floor.
1 cup of brown sugar
3/4 cups of veg oil
3 eggs
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp cinnamon powder


Sieve the floor and other dry ingredients.

Mix egg with oil. Add sugar and vanilla. Add dry ingredients.  This is a thick batter.

Add diced apples.

Bake in 180 oven for 45 mins or so

It will come out a bit hard at first but leave it for a few hours and it will become moist and delicious.

Rewriting the old lady's recipe book.

Eventhough my mum did not cook much, but she did went for cooking classes.  ( I  think she went more to make friends...)

The 45 year old book is tattered and torn.

The legacies she left to us. I could write pages on that.  And this recipe book is one of them.

Apart from the book, she showed me that we should write down every important matter, because that's what she did.  In the address book are  listed down dates we got married,  move houses, gave birth, got divorced, dates when someone dies,  when she employed a new teacher, or when a teacher left, what date she payed for what, all is jotted down doggedly,  for the records.

So I am rewriting this recipe book and will try insyaAllah each of them out.  I have to move on from my stir-fries and 'campak-campak' dishes, enough of my egg soup and tumeric fried beef and chicken soup.  Let's see what the old lady had compiled during her hay days and would we stumble upon a killer recipe that can  make me rich and famous. Hey....who knows...as soon as I can comprehend and  make out  her Jawi transcriptions which I read at a snail pace. A slower snail.

This is one of her few tangible legacies that I manage to keep. I hope I can do the honour of passing it down to the girls and their children. InsyaAllah.

Noriah's chocolate cupcake

                        Noriah, a fellow single parent made this for me to send to the mosque.

Apple cake

Cooking is....

Cooking is many things to many people.  From what I see in Jamie Oliver, cooking is not only his passion, but his life and soul, that when we watch him cook, we know he is having a hell of a good time.  From Anna Olson, she is a magician baker because she can poof  beautiful cakes with her magic hands.  To Chef Lyn in Pitching In, she is the ambassador of great cooking,  and Anthony Bordain, food is his ticket to discover the world.  Yes, I watch a lot of AFC on channel 703.

To most of us, cooking is an act of nurturing.  The basic primal task of feeding our lot, a part of our natural makeup as a mother to nurture our family. The picture of a nest, a mother bird with a worm in her mouth and a few nestlings with agape beaks epitomize this task. There is this idiom, 'air tangan' which means that when a mother cooks, their hand exudes a chemical that bonds her to her family or whoever that eats it.

To some of us, cooking is an act of love. We can buy food outside but we want to cook ourselves because of many reasons. For working mothers,  they would cook during the weekends or whenever we can. To bring the family together.

To many it is a talent that can make money and be a source of livelihood.

It is also a hobby, to try out the recipes when you have the time.

To me,  it is more, because you cannot go wrong with it.  Cook up something to visit the elders, to give the sick,  to cheer up someone, to share, to say sorry, to give as charity.  I am a woman Jamie Oliver in a closet.

In every meal there is a story

It was said, in a meal there is a story and every story there is a journey.

This is one loaded statement that can bring a foodie back to many happy places in the past because when there is food, there usually is love and family and friends. It makes you feel all fuzzy inside.

When we cook, it is not just love that gets into our dish, but like I wrote, a story and a journey.

The first dish I  actually cooked seriously was when I was around 16 years old, for my great-grandmother, Mok.

It was always the both of us in the house and she was so old that the house was permeated with ancient air and old stuff.  Old values, old teachings, antiques items like the 'gobek' and tepak sireh or betel leaves set, her worn out  'selendangs'  or scarves that smells like betel leaves that she would cover her head, even in the house. In the kitchen, brass pots with handles like ears  and brass ladles that would fetch a high price at the flea market today.

That day she was not feeling well, so I thought I'd do the cooking and had my heart on a crab dish.I guess I always did things that was beyond me, even now. I took a bus to the wet market, something I have not done before and felt quite lost when I arrived there, among the older folks that were coming and going with purpose and familiarity

I practically traipsed slowly on the wet smelly flour to find what I wanted.

It was a long way to the market and back but it was a new day for me with the crabs in my hand.

Mok taught me how to cook it and when we both sat and ate lunch, she did not comment much.  But Mok did not believe in complementing people because she said it would make them cocky.  So I never really knew how my crab dish fared that day.

It all come in stages

I think I have lived long enough in this world to figure out a liiiiiittle bit how it works.  And what I noticed is stages is apparent in almost everything.  If you understand the stages, you have a better chance at it.

For example.  Cooking. Of course, cooking.

Stage 1. Getting the ingredients.  That would mean going to the shops. Looking around, choosing, and buying.  You must get moving first to get buying.  And if the shop is not close buy, it can be alot of getting to.

Stage 2. Preparation. Washing, cleaning, cutting, peeling.

Stage 3. Cooking.  First the oil, then the onions and garlic and if it is a Malay dish, it can take about 10 steps before it is ready, more if it is an intricate recipe.

Stage 4.  More washing up.

Another example.  Sewing a simple thing, say a table cloth.

Stage 1.  Purchase the material.  Must get moving too.

Stage 2. Planning.  Cutting.  Hemming.

Stage 3. Sewing and unpicking if you make a mistake.

Stage 4. Using the finished product.

The same applies to giving birth, to starting work, to building relationships, to living your life.

If life is giving you a hard time, remember you are going through some stage or other, probably the process of making you a better person.

Ok, I planned, InsyaAllah to bake an apple cake today.  And I have just completed stage 1.  If this cake turns out fine, will post the pictures.

cooking moments

cooking moments to remember

Cute business

The house is smelling of bread and cookies.  And what a nice smell.  Life little pleasures I am lucky to experience.

One of my dreams is to have a small cottage industry making cute goodies to sell.  And most importantly to have a product that people like and will pay for.  I imagined a smallish space,  a few helpers, one corner is to be the baking area, another the small production line , and another where the finished goods will be  packed in cute packaging then in a cute pink  little van with our brand name, sent them out into the world.  Thats my dream. One of.  Hehe. Bottom line, cute. And of course, a happy bunch of workers.

Unfortunately I myself could not come up with sort after product but Alhamdulillah,  Hajar did  and we are trying  to market it  and hope and  pray it can turn out to be an ongoing business and all the above would materialized one day, InsyaAllah.

Now it is just 3 ovens, our dining table and a steel table cum rack  I bought at IKEA.  And delivered in my handed down MYvi.  We are selling at the rate of 10 bottles in 2 weeks. Unfortunately, due to unavoidable  reasons,  production is unpredictable.

But Alhamdulillah, we got the cookies off the ground stage 1.  I have sold it to the public at flea markets, to family and friends, that is stage 2.  Now we are at stage 3.  To widen our marrket.

We just need to work hard and pray that Allah turns our effort into a lucrative cute little business. Our ad is in www.mudah.my.
.

Recipe for vege pizza

Vege pizza

Pizza crust
3 cups flour
3/4 cup warm water
2 tblspn instant dried yeast
1 tspn salt (small spoon)
1 1/2 tbsp sugar
1 tblsp margerine
1/2 cup warm  milk

Mix dried ingredients except salt.  Pour in warm water and  warm milk. Add salt last.
Rub in everything and kneed into a ball of dough. Leave in a warm place to rise.

Vegetable topping
 1/4 zucchini
1/4 brinjal
1/2 belll pepper
3 tomatoes
2 cloves garlic (chopped fine)
2 tblspn tomato puree
1 tspn of italian spices or bolognese spice
salt
Bread crumbs. ( bought or make yourself by toasting a piece of bread)

Cube all vegetable in even size.

Add a little oil in pan. Fry garlic till fragrant. Put in zucchini and bell pepper.  When wilted, add in cubed  tomatoes.
Add in tomato puree.  Put more if you like a tangy topping.  Add spices and salt.

Assembling the pizza:

Roll the dough into  flat round shape  on a pan dusted with flour.  Thickness according to however you like the crust to be. Poke with fork and bake for 12-15 min on 150 oven   When half cooked, take out.  If crust balloon up in oven, poke with fork to level it. Spread a bit of olive oil on crust (optional) before topping it with filling.  Sprinkle with breadcrumbs.

For more topping, you can add cheese, mushroom, big onions etc.  Whatever you .like.

Put in 180 oven for 20 mins.

first day of baking spree - Vegetable pizza

We made vegetable pizza

The dough out in the morning sun to rise

                                                               

Baking spree

Hajar and  I, God willing, are embarking on a baking spree.  I just unleashed this buried passion of mine and  I  am rearing the talent in Hajar.  We are going to get our hands dirty with flour.

At times like this when you lose something important, you need to fill up the space with something else which is also important. As substitute.  Then the lost becomes less painful.  And it is when in lost, you realize what lies within. What you have and what you don't.

So you are going to see alot of cooking and food pictures. As I go into recovery day to day.

And will grace the pictures with recipes too.

To all chefs and bakers, present and past, big and small, known and unknown,  this path is indeed for the foodies at heart.

Whatever you intend to be, be your best

That's what Anna Olson kind of said on her program, the one on her graduation at her college.

To my family Anna Olson is Britney Spears's sister.  They look alike.

Both famous in their own right, doing what they love doing, what they are good at.

We should learn from Anna Olson.  She is an expert in a field permissible for muslim women to pursue, cooking and teaching other people the craft.

When she bakes, her cakes turns out so beautifully, she has long passed the stage where cakes turned flat and burnt. Understanding the chemistry of butter, flour and sugar.  The alchemy of ingredients.

We should all try to achieve this. EXCELLENCE.

I am still far from excellent but I will keep on trying.....caiyok caiyok to myself.

Will post many cooking pictures. Of food, glorious food.

Our own bread

Hajar and I got to making bread.  I love bread. Bread is life. Bread is universal. Bread is among the blue skies and everything nice.

Our bread is made out of the usual stuff, no new stuff like improvers or softeners. Just don't be cheap with the butter to make it soft and fluffy.  You can put fillings if you want or fruits.

Look, look......  :)  

The recipe:

3/4 cup of warm water

2 level tablespoon of instant yeast

1 tsp salt

1 1/2 tbsp sugar

1 egg

50g butter

1/2 cup milk

3 cups all purpose flour

Sieve flour in bowl.  Add yeast, salt and sugar to flour. Mix well.

Make a well and add beaten egg, milk, warm water and softened butter and kneed into a soft dough.

Leave to rise.

When risen, cut into equal shapes and roll into balls. Or any shape you like.  Leave to rise again.  Brush with mixture of egg and milk.

Put into 200 C oven and bake for 25-35 mins.  Brush again before fully cooked to give it a gloss.

I 

Anchovy writer

Last night I watched a movie about J K Rowling on Diva Astro. Magic Beyond Words, was the title of the movie.

Me, a writer wannabe was trilled to bits to be able to see the life of J K Rowling, a great writer, her life, her self, her background.

Apparently she was born with the talent and being smart and bright with her mother's enduring love and encouragement,  she had achieved great phenomenal  success.

How and how and how could she had created such a story in her head that took the world? MasyaAllah.
How and how and how could she imagined each detail in her head.  MasyaAllah.

As for me, as long as there are more then 3 readers of my blog,  I will keep on writing.  And the 3 have no choice but to read since I am their mother.

I am only a tiny fish in the sea of writers.  An anchovy.  Ikan bilis

But this anchovy, believes that a kind word can be a balm in this big big world.

All my life I find many answers, signs and enlightenment from what I read. I was not lucky enough to have many people guiding me with love.  I had to find my own answers and most times I learnt the hard way.

My greatest source is The Quran. The Miracle. There is where I chart my life from.

Many yesteryears I would look forward to read 'As I was passing' on the NST by the great Adibah Amin or Sri Delima as she was known, and relished her stories with all my heart.

My escapes were The Reader's Digests at my school library which I would always find in my hand instead of the school books even how hard I try to study.

Someone must write something nice to make this world a better place.There will be some lost person somewhere who is looking for answers to her sufferings, or maybe a very sad person who had lost her hope and found some solace in a few lines she came across and kept hanging on,  or someone who lost trust in everyone and felt safe and less lonely accompanied by a book.


Nevertheless, I have one thing in common with J K Rowling,  that is we read to our children.

I always read to the girls bed time stories when they were young and when I get too tired and sleepy, in that state of semi-consciousness the story would take a turn into 'utter nonsense' which the girls found very amusing and would laugh about it for a long time.

If only I can come up with a  magical story......I don't think I can.  My imagination does not get fired up enough.

I will just stick to writing from my heart.