mousse

In anticipation of eating lots of heavy food when I go visit Edinburgh in 2 weeks, I've been trying to eat mostly vegetables. But I also can't resist trying out all the stovetop bread recipes from Joe Pastry.

First up is my perfect pantry dish of sweet potato with lentil and frozen spinach dhal (previous iteration). It's hard to beat this in terms of price per meal.

Made some chapati as a side, which turned out moderately successful. I selectively read the instructions, paying attention to where it said to roll them thinly...while disregarding the part where it said to roll them to ~7cm diameter. Mine were about 15cm in diameter, and needless to say too thin to puff up. They still tasted fine and was good dipped in the dhal, but not super exciting. I think my preference lies with leavened breads that have a chewy crumb. Gonna buy some more flour and make naan next.

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Previous dinners were the skillet cheesy beef pasta:

I only made this to use up the last bits of a smoked cheddar that I had, since I'm generally tired of american style meat/tomato sauce because it was the first and only pasta sauce I knew how to make for years. But it's pretty tasty, the sauce clings well to the pasta since the pasta is boiled directly in the sauce. The downside to this method is that reheating leftover pasta makes this far too soft, so I'd only make this to feed a crowd. It was also hard to control how much water to add since I wasn't making the same amount as the recipe, so the pasta was a tad overcooked to begin with because I wanted to thicken the sauce more. Next time I'd use the empty tomato can to measure 1 can of water, and add some tomato paste to increase the tomato flavour.

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Speaking of cheese, another one that I found at Waitrose is the famous (to me) Kirkham lancashire:

(This also means I have yet to visit Paxton & Whitfield, which I will! But it's gonna rain for an entire week, so that's my excuse for continuing to stay in)

It doesn't taste like cheddar at all...it taste tangy like good yoghurt. I think having it on a whole wheat  cracker would be better than eating it alone, maybe with some jammy fruit too. Too bad I bought McVities rich tea biscuits instead of digestive, but I've yet to try a biscuit by them that I don't like. Sigh I'll miss the dairy and biscuits from UK :(

ReRe Hello

I've been reading a lot of manga lately since switching to MangaDex. Most scanlators are still uploading their previous projects, so it's the perfect time to discover new titles.

This shojo is one of the best. It has the standard list of plot items, but the characters react in more mature ways. Maybe because I'm so much older than the characters in shojo manga now, but my tolerance for super contrived drama, even well executed, is pretty low. Instead this delivers the fluff and heart warming feels in a more straight forward way. It also takes care to flesh out the supporting characters well too.

Ah I admit that I've over-dosing on shojo manga cause I miss my boyfriend. Wah.

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Of course after I post this I find updates for an old series that I was following, which is very dramatic.  It's also very good and I must admit more satisfying to read in a marathon.

Also picked up this series, which is more like my original example. I like the pacing here, 6 chapters and there's already concrete character development. The art prep school setting also vaguely reminds me of H&C, so that's very favourable bias.

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A change of genre: Immortal Regis & Cavalier of the Abyss
I wonder if I'll ever get to see the ending of this, at least the raws are complete but a 9 month hiatus isn't promising. I was fooled that Immortal Regis was complete and failed to notice the rather obvious link to the sequel in its description ;_; The last chapter had to be the beginning of the final flashback too...

It reminds me of...Id (yet another great series that I'll never know the ending of) and Ares (A-Team scanlated a couple chapters of these two series too), which is great praise. I think the pacing and plot development is similar to Ares, whereas characters are more like Id. Though I must admit that I don't really like any of the characters, and feel that Nex and Serin's ship came out of no where like Tidus and Yuna's. The second generation is not too likeable either. Though it should be intentional that there's no one heroic.

grass

Sigh so out of it from staying up too late...

osmanthus

I pretty much stopped posting tea things here since a) it takes a lot of effort to stage interesting looking photos of tea and b) I really can't make any meaningful comments either, tasting notes are too subjective to be useful and I'm know way too little to make objective statements about quality. But I am drinking through my samples at pace!

But today I opened a sample of YS' 2004 Song Pin Hao Yiwu (no longer in stock, much to my dismay) and it was so yummy that I'm gonna post an uninteresting photo anyways to commemorate.

 I do like how both my gaiwan and Muji cup has concentric circle design elements.

I've heard of Song Pin Hao before, probably on Teadb, and was intrigued enough to look them up (another article). I found out that they (the house's full name is Qian Li Zhen Song Pin Hao to avoid confusion later on) made a (the?) legendary pu er tea in the 1910s to 1920s. The sub-label of "Song Pin Hao" is reserved for their top quality productions, which ceased in 1930s under China's communist regime (another good thing lost).

Obviously what I had today isn't the legendary stuff, but it is the taste that I look for in raw pu er. A 2006 Xiaguan that I got from my dad tasted really similar, perhaps it's the aged-ish raw taste? Sort of a woody category of taste is how I can best describe it. I read a lot of descriptions of more aged raw as having camphor taste...but I have no idea what camphor taste like.

Unfortunately it seems non-trivial to source this, so I guess I'll just try to find more raws from the early to mid 2000s and develop my palette more.

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I got more tea from YS a couple days ago:

taking this photo makes me want only daylight bulbs in my home, such awful color balance 

As much as I'd like to say that I won't be buying more tea this year...we both know that it'd be a lie. Especially since this is my 本命年 so I wanna buy a tong of 2018 tea to store until the zodiac cycles through again. That means at least 2 more orders: one full of samples (and full size of previously sampled tea) and another actual order. Aka I need to get a job soon, not a fun process :(

malt

I was totally enabled by Luxirare (she / her blog is amazing) to go and try robiola. It's everything I want in a spreadable cheese: taste of a brie with the texture of ricotta. Man this sentence shows how little I know about cheese haha.

Waitrose's selection is also much better than Sainsbury, good thing its located far from me so I can't be tempted to buy my regular grocery there.

farl

What I fed myself last week:

Lunch was this rice cooker mixed rice, adapted from here. Sainsbury strangely were out of stock on many produce, including sweet potatoes, so I've replaced it with butternut squash. Unfortunately butternut squashes are rather tasteless unless roasted, so this dish didn't turn out that great. My rice cooker's capacity is also way too small, so I had to steam the squash separately. Will keep experimenting with other ingredient combinations, thinking of using these peas with some smoked mackerel next.

Dinner pasta #1 was this bitter & sweet pasta. Radicchio, which was not in stock, was replaced with red cabbage and I would even replace the fennel with regular onion next time as the anise flavour didn't show through. That takes care of the two most expensive ingredients. I really like the flavour combination, but it would probably work better in a grain salad format. But that introduces the trouble of contrasting shapes which I dislike: round little grains and long slivers of vegetables.

Dinner pasta #2 was the no-cook tuna pasta, which is essentially just a warm tuna pasta salad. Its very  tasty with lots of contrasting flavours: tuna against the acidic lemon zest and juice (I added waaaay more than the recipe specified), and salty olives. This is one of those eat from your pantry meals.

English Muffins

The first Joe Pastry recipe that I made: English muffins

Aside from the couple tries it took to learn the heat/time for my stove, they turned out wonderfully without much fuss.

The dough is pretty much dump and slightly mix. My measurements were pretty inaccurate and imprecise (eyeballing butter, using dry measure cups for liquids...oh my) but the dough doesn't seem very sensitive. This shows half a batch of the dough, but I've further reduced the yeast since I gave it an overnight rise in the fridge so I can cook them fresh in the morning. I left it on the counter while I went to shower, so there was some time for the yeast to start eating. There was evidence of yeast activity before I put it in the fridge, and by morning (photo) it was very obvious that the dough has risen.

This is the second test muffin (the first was made free-form and ended up quite flat, do not recommend). I DIY'd a muffin ring from folding aluminium foil, which works fine. Maybe even better than fine since you can un-crimp it to release the muffin easier. The sides are torn here because I forgot to grease the mold. The top is also burned from trying to determine the optimal heat level. But the crumb! Glorious crumb! It's moist, airy, yet offers some resistance when you bite down.

The successful two: heat level 2 is good for just forgetting them on the stove while heat level 3 is better for a more brown crust but gotta watch over them more. I should time the next batch though. The height is also more like a standard english muffin, I think this corresponds to filling the mold ~ ⅓ of the way.

Overall I'm quite happy with these, but even happier now that I can make fluffy bread on the stove top.

canal

After visiting the "castle", we headed down to Sydney Gardens and the Holburne museum. The afternoon started off with rain but proceeded to tease us with peaks of the sun by the time we got down to the garden.

I've been really captivated by the texture of moss ever since visiting the gardens in Kyoto

This is a glass sculpture in the Holburne Museum, which was endlessly fascinating to watch as the light changed

hill

Went on a walk to Sham Castle with PhotoSoc last Saturday...lured in by the promise of a castle. In reality, the castle is really one wall. But it was a lot of fun photographing the rich texture of the wooded area in front of the "castle"

I feel that this is going to be my mental image of Bath long after I leave

decennial

It's kind of scary that this blog's been alive for a decade. Let's see how long it'll live.

crunch

Some food related thoughts:

 Finally made some sea salt caramels, a bucket list item checked off. I didn't realize how long it would take for it to cook up the 260˚F after adding the cream, forgot about the fact that all the water needs to evaporate before the temperature can raise. Next time I'll probably just cook it to about 240˚F so the final texture is softer. I also didn't realize how many caramels this made, I doubled the recipe since my pan is about twice as big as the recipe's and actually thought I made too little while cooking the sugar syrup. But what you see in the photo above is only ⅓ of the yield durr.

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Sort of carbonara, mostly without bacon. The egg-based sauce is quite simple to make with a double boiler set-up, and dare I say foolproof as long as you never stop stirring. It took a while for the sauce to start thickening so I stepped away from it twice, but the second time the egg just started to scramble in the time it took to throw in some salt and pepper. So never stop stirring.

How do you take nice photos of extremely sauce-y dishes? It just looks blurry even in focus...@_@ although this bowl was extra sauce-y since 1 egg makes enough sauce for two portions whereas this amount of pasta is barely one.

I've also regrettably been convinced of the value of mid-range pasta, or at least ones that advertise bronze die. The al dente texture is very snappy / has a bite to it...or "jing" (not sure which Chinese character it is), which I love in noodles. But I do find that it's harder to get this perfect texture, there's a lot less leeway before it overshoots to just meh. There goes another escalation in grocery budget.

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I've never cooked any beans to a satisfactory creamy texture...and I ate a quite a lot of beans. Sometimes I wonder if its just because I haven't cooked them enough, but the times when I've cooked beans until they've fallen apart still results in a...chalky but fallen apart texture "orz Are my beans just too stale? Perhaps...one day I'll suck it up and buy Rancho Gordo beans to compare. Do I need a pressure cooker? Do I have unrealistic expectations of how beans should feel...unlikely since canned beans are acceptably creamy. *shurg*

On the other hand I am so forgiving of bread texture. Made some whey flatbreads to go with these chickpeas and oh boy that didn't turn out well. I partly question the recipe but also know that I've added too much liquid because US cup =/= 250ml like the rest of the world and I used dry measure cups. The whey does make the bread taste great, I might just keep making ricotta so I have whey ah ha... But the bread dough was so wet that the only way I could handle it was to stretch it directly in the hot pan. So some turned out thin and crispy, others turned out chewy, but they all tasted good to me. Why do I even love bread so much? I didn't eat it with regularity until maybe middle school when I accompanied my mom grocery shopping and got to pick out breads from the adjacent asian bakery. Ugh I still haven't tried making milk bread yet, but that was always included in my choice.

Speaking of making bread, I've given up on keeping a small pantry here in Bath. Just bought some yeast today, which will soon be joined by various flours. In addition to the 4 types of oils, 3 types of vinegars, 2 types of sugars and I-haven't-dared-to-count amount of spices.

flowers

It's nice when you randomly look away from your screen and see a spot of pink in the sky.

passata

I've avoided making any sort of "pan cooked egg in tomato sauce"...or rather it's most famous version shakshuka for the longest time because the first couple recipes of it that I came across all prominently feature pepper and I thought I wasn't a fan of pepper.

Then I made these kerala style egg curry, so good omg.

Even better with a giant dollop of yogurt mixed in with the heavily spiced tomato sauce and rice. This recipe also wastes no time, it comes together so perfectly:

• The slow heat from turning on the hob gently toasts the spices (oh yeah I learned how much easier it is to grind toasted spices in a mortar and pestle). 
• Chop onions while spices toast, both tasks finish at about the same time
• Sweat onions while chopping the remaining ingredients, it takes quite a while for me to finely mince ginger and garlic
• Add in ginger and garlic and grind up the spices while those cook
• Add in spices and tomato puree and cook. Not much left to do...drink some water and wash some dishes. 
• Add in eggs and cover to steam. Microwave rice in the meanwhile.
• Assemble & eat :D

Will try with pepper next.

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This song and this manga is a good pairing.

strike

I've found a treasure chest of baking science: Joe Pastry, bless this man. I'm fully reading the comments section too.

I made a graphical summary of his guide to sugars, which is a category of ingredient I find exceedingly confusing. So many things to keep in mind: acidity, moisture content, sucrose vs glucose, NA vs UK names "orz

Though I'm sure I'll feel equally overwhelmed by the flour section which I'm about to read. Fats was alright, the key difference is mostly saturated vs non-saturated fats and knowing which synthesized fat was made to replace which natural fat.

ladybugs

My (animal crossing) life is complete!

after all you told me I'd be okay

Rejoice! For I finished the first draft of that awful renewables energy assignment yesterday.
It's been a while since I wrote such a long report by myself, was super carried by my team for capstone. But Paul would be proud at how succinct my executive summary is! Capstone also trained my patience to make long appendices (I recall our report body was about 30 pages while just our structural calculation appendix was 60 haha...thanks Ang & Eleanor!) and caption all those tables and charts...and fix all the formatting at least 3 times because an entire appendix would appear in the cross referencing field due to some weird glitch.

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I'd also like to thank these Martin Garix songs for helping me fill tens of thousands of cells in excel (even if most of it was dragging to copy formulas, it still takes time to fill in 8760 rows of hourly load data twice). I did learn how to make a stacked and clustered column chart in Excel, which is useful knowledge.





and So Far Away which has the embed option disabled :(

slide

Bath can't deal with snow at all... actually no that's more so Atlanta, Bath is just a bit better.

Walking an hour each way to friend's house is not as bad as I imagined it to be, as my reference was that one New York trip where I wandered from lower manhattan to midtown when it was -20. This is no where as near cold, but walking on fresh snow dissipates a lot of energy. I ate until I was absolutely full, but felt fine once I reached home.

glide

Adding sesame seeds is a substantial improvement to cashew brittle, maybe I'll try chia seeds too next time. Salt and chilli pepper are also nice flavour boosters.

There is a need to increase the amount of caramel. I stuck with my original ratio of ⅓ cup mix-in to ¼ cup sugar and it turned out pretty dry. The caramel is also more viscose because of the butter that I added, which does add a lot of richness. Next time I'll probably use a 1:1 ratio of mix-in and sugar, with some additional eye balled amount of sugar syrup to decrease the risk of crystallization (but really because I admit that I'm not that into pancakes so I need to use up the syrup that I bought). I'm not a fan of having to stir the caramel as it melts, my laziness very much prefer making pure dry caramel, but it's easier to add the butter in the beginning than having to carefully drop it in 300˚F molten sugar.

I also feel smug that I realized to use my big non-stick pan as the form.