Ratatouille Revisited

It's been about 1 month since my last entry - have been too busy to blog. However, have attended some really nice classes since then, one of which was the special Ratatouille class organised by Palate Sensations some weeks back. This was inspired by that wonderful film & the instructor was Chef Philippe Nouzillat, from Brasserie Wolf.

Monday night found us at PS, all ready to recreate that french dish, which is essentially a vegetable stew, which was brought to our attention by the film. On the menu for the 3-course dinner was the starter of pumpkin soup, followed by the main course of roast rack of lamb with ratatouille, ending off with dessert of chocolate petit pot. I was very excited as all these were things I have not tried cooking before.

We worked in groups of about 5 to 6, and set about quickly chopping & stirring & searing, etc. Thank goodness I didn't have to cut the onions, but even though I was not doing it, we were all quickly affected by the pungent smell which brought tears to our eyes. Ah well, it was all worth the sweat & tears in the end ( thank goodness no blood was shed except for the lamb's ).
I was very proud of our pumpkin soup, which I had spent lots of effort stirring and then blending it with a stick blender ( gotta get me one of those now ! ).

The rack of lamb was also wonderful, seasoned just nice & was nicely complemented by the ratatouille, which was classic comfort food ! Now I know why Anton Ego in the film was so affected by the dish. Even though I did not grow up in the french countryside eating this, it reminded me of the comforts of home and a good home-cooked meal ! The chocolate petit pot was quite interesting, athough I think the one we were served was a bit runny & was not the one we actually prepared as they were all put together to cook & no one could quite remember whose was which. However, that is a very simple dessert to prepare, almost effortless, and would be something to remember for future dinner parties.

There will be other classes in future similarly based on food films ( we seem to be getting a spate of these films recently ), including 2 on "No Reservations" - one French and the other Italian. Unfortunately, I am away during those classes, so will have to do those next time. Have asked Lynette of PS to repeat those classes for my sake. :-)
Here's a picture of my group of ladies having the pumpkin soup out on the balcony of PS. Don't we all look happy & satisfied with all the stuff we made ? :-)

Naan But the Brave

Had a very interesting Saturday last week at the Family Day at my workplace. This is an annual affair meant to encourage employees to bring their family members & have a good time enjoying things like games & food & such. As usual, there were many food stalls run by the staff themselves, with an interesting array of cuisine from simple pancakes to good food from Myanmar. However, as I was there rather late in the event, most of the food was gone.

I had the pleasure, however, of tasting some very nice dishes from the Khansama Tandoori Restaurant. They were doing a roaring business, largely due to the fact that they were serving freshly made naan on the spot ! I was totally fascinated by the way that this lovely bread is made & so had to take some pictures to record this.
The chef took the pre-prepared dough, kneaded it to the right shape & consistency, then uses a clothed covered coconut husk to slap the dough onto the wall of the cylindrical tandoor or oven. The naan then cooks in this interesting oven ( which is essentially a stone or concrete cylinder with burning charcoal at the bottom and when it is done, the cooked naan is lifted out using a long hook. The freshly baked naan was heavenly - both the plain one as well as the garlic one. I has these with some very nice butter chicken, which was the only meat dish they had left. Their tandoori chicken & other stuff had already sold out by the time I got there.

This restaurant also delivers, as I was pleased to discover. Am definitely going to either go to the restaurant ( I got a $10 food voucher from them ! ) or order from their home delivery menu, which is very extensive.
Naan, anyone ?

All's Well That Ends Well

Last Saturday was the finale to the series on Basic cooking skills at Palate Sensations & as befitting the occasion, the topic was Plated Desserts. With the trend towards desserts taking centrestage ( we now have dessert restaurants opening here in Singapore, where the menu only consists of desserts ), it becomes a very worthwhile skill to have, knowing how to do plated desserts. Hmm....so what are "un-plated" desserts then ? Will have to ask Lynette or Francois that one. Funny how I only just thought of that...

Anyway, on the menu were the following :
Vanilla Creme Brulee
Profiteroles
Passion Fruit Souffle
Chocolate Fondant

I was late again for the class ( had to do an emergency case at work ), so I walked in right when everyone was busy working on their creme brulee, which starts off with boiling cream. Later we would finish off the creme brulee by caramelising a layer of sugar over the top using a blow torch. Here's my finished product : it tasted great ! Now to experiment with other flavours at home - like green tea & sesame, which I have tried before in a couple of Japanese restaurants in Melbourne. Must ask Francois how best to do it.

Speaking of Francois, he had decided that the best way to gain control of his unruly students was to use a little bell, which he would ring each time he wanted us to stop whatever we were doing & listen to him. Felt a bit like Pavlov's dog after a while, but it was effective. This time, although the class was even bigger than last week ( one group had to use a side room to do their cooking ! ), we all managed to do the right things at the right time & everyone was successful in getting their desserts right.

Next up were the profiteroles, which are essentially choux pastry cases as in the eclairs & cream puffs, filled with ice-cream instead of pastry cream, and finished off with chocolate sauce & toasted almond flakes. Making the choux pastry was the hardest part as it required a lot of whisking & stirring - good thing we had 2 guys in the group who put in a lot of elbow grease ! A lot of team work went into this - including putting the finished choux pastry mixture into the piping bags and taking turns to pipe out the cases, plus maing the chocolate sauce. We all chipped in by doing our bit. We also had home-made ice-cream to put into the cases ( vanilla & coffee ! ), made by the chefs.

So with the all co-operation, this was my final product :
Tasted great, and this time around, the choux pastry seemed much easier to make. The home-made ice-cream tasted great - looks like I will have to drag my ice-cream maker out from storage again....

The last 2 items on the menu were rather more difficult & "exotic". I have never tried making a souffle, having heard all about how difficult it was to get one to rise properly. However, I am please to report that we managed to get ours done quite nicely, although this was after the first batch of egg whites refused to whip up nicely ( likely due to there being bits of egg yolk in it & the bowl being greasy ) & we had to redo the egg white mixture. The secret apparently is to butter the ramekins or souffle moulds very well along the walls as well as over the rim. This prevents the mixture from sticking to the mould & thus allows the souffle to rise unimpeded. Passion fruit is an excellent choice as the light tartness went extremely well with the sweetness of the souffle. t smells heavenly too - some of it got onto my recipe sheet & I can still smell the faint aroma of it. Still, I found the final product a tad too sweet as we had sprinkled sugar over the mould after buttering it, plus dusted icing sugar over the top of the cooked souffle.

The final dessert was my favourite : chocolate fondant, otherwise known as "lava cake" as it has a liquid centre which gushes out when the cake is cut. This recipe we used is the very same one that Francois uses in his restaurant, so we were very privileged to be able to use it. This was how mine turned out - I was rather pleased with it, although I kind of lost control with my tube of raspberry sauce, which resulted in a somewhat Tarantino-esque appearance of the final plated dessert. Nonetheless, it tasted great, all the more because it was made with much effort. Am definitely going to make that again in future - especially when I want to impress ! :-) Here's a picture of some of my classmates enjoying the fruits of their labour.

All too soon, the series of lessons has ended. I have learnt much & enjoyed myself thoroughly, making some new friends in the process. Am planning to sign up for the Intense French series, with a Gourmet Challenge at the end - gonna be fun ! On the final note, we also finished up our Mousse cakes started the previous week & this is how our raspberry one turned out.

I didn't get to taste it in the end since I was too full of dessert by then, and so I took it home. According to my siblings, it was very good. :-)

Fabulous Food Flick

Had a great time on Thursday night - went for a special screening of Ratatouille with Carmen, organised by this new local company called Quaffs at GV Vivocity.
This wonderful film has now become my favourite food flick - although it's a "cartoon" as some might say, the characters were so fantastically well-drawn out and the sets were so detailed that I was drawn into the film & found myself rooting for Remy the rat, who is the common "man"(?), that became the "greatest chef in France", not just because he had talent, but through perseverence & never giving up on his dream. Who would have thought that a rat could be so inspirational ? The team of Brad Bird ( who was the man behind The Incredibles ) & the people at Pixar have done it again !

The way in which music was used in the picture was excellent - discovering different tastes was compared to hearing different types of music or sounds, the combination of which could result in an exciting new piece of music, rather like jazz ! :-)
The Straits Times reviewer gave it 5 stars & I echo that that sentiment !

The evening was rounded off by a very good dinner at a Japanese restaurant in Vivocity, which was a great finale to a wonderful evening celebrating some of my favourite things. Here's to life, great food, great friends, great film, great music....

Paiseh Liao

Yikes, just discovered that I had strange grammar/typos in my last post - must have been the effect of blogging late at night after a long day at work...LOL....managed to make the necessary corrections & re-publish it. Hope this salvages my blogging reputation...heehee...if I had any to start with. Now got to get my dessert class photos downloaded so that I can blog about that wonderful last class that I attended...akan datang....

A Hole in the Wall & Baker's Delight

Yesterday was the long anticipated cake & pastry segment of the Basic Skills course at Palate Sensations. The day started well - met 3 of my women friends and fellow-foodies for lunch at Buko Nero, a lovely "hole-in-the-wall" ( that's what the name means ) restaurant run by Oscar & Tracy on Tanjong Pagar Road. The reservation had been made 1 month in advance ( the place is SO popular ) and we were certainly not disappointed. All the good things we heard about this tiny & unpretentious place were true ! Great food with a lovely ambience, jazzy music playing in the background, pleasant & unobstrusive service, reasonable pricing - what more could anyone ask for ? Fangs brought champagne ( corkage is charged ), so the mood was all the more mellow. :-)

We all had the 3-course set meal ( great value at $23++ ), which consisted of a choice of starter of either a bisque or a salad, choice of main of either pasta or pork cheeks with mushrooms, and finally choice of dessert of either home-made vanilla ice cream or My Grandmother's Cake, a flourless white chocolate cake. Somehow we all chose the pork cheeks(very tender, melt-in-the-mouth), which came on a bed of lovely mash potato & mushrooms(some of my favourite things !), as well as the cake, which turned out to be really yummy. I also really enjoyed my salad of watermelon, mango & rocket & stuff, which was a very refreshing start to it all. Unfortunately, I was not allowed to take any pictures of the food, so you will just have to use your imagination or better still, make your own way down to the restaurant to try the food for yourself (or check out the photos in the link above). All this, plus coffee to round off the meal, at under $40 per person ! We have plans to return in October, to celebrate Fangs' & Ming's birthdays.

Back to the baking - after the wonderful lunch, I made my way to PS, a little late but definitely in a great mood even though I had only had about 4 hours sleep the previous night. Walked straight into the thick of action - the class had been divided into 4 groups of about 4 people each & our handsome teacher, chef Francois ( yes, Lynette, as promised ! ) was busy trying to get everyone doing the right things with their ingredients.

On the menu were the following cakes & tarts :
Alsatian Tart
Almond & Blueberry Tart
Chocolate Mousse Cake
Framboisier ( Raspberry Mousse Cake )



We all had great fun, making the Genoise sponge base for the cakes, as well as short-crust pastry for the tarts. I was thrilled with the lightness of the sponge - resolve to get my as-yet unopened Morphy Richards electric mixer ( bought on sale from Tangs ) out from the box on the shelf for future baking endeavours. That would definitely make it much easier then using my hand-held mixer, which can be a bit inconvenient, although it makes for easy storage as it comes without the mixing bowl & stand.







Also learned how to make chocolate & raspberry mousse, as well as how to decorate the cakes with the mousse. "Man-power" was certainly most welcome - we had the guys in the groups doing some of the whisking by hand ( thanks ! ), which worked out very well for the way the groups were divided. We also had to learn to share our ingredients & improvise as unfortunately we did not have enough raspberry puree ( there were more students/groups than originally planned ) & cream. What a lovely way to learn about teamwork, sharing & co-operation ! :-)
( BTW, PS actually also conducts cooking classes for up to 25 people especially for team-building exercises - do check out their website for more details. )

Alas, the final picture will only emerge after next Saturday as we did not have time to finish decorating the cakes as they need to be chilled first after being"moussed". Our group also decided to exercise our creativity by making rectangular cakes, as opposed to round ones ( okay, we were just trying to save & use every bit of our Genoise sponge ! )

So we left our "moussed" cakes in the freezers at PS & the finishing touch will be done next Saturday, which, sad to say, would be the last lesson in the course.

Am looking forward to that - can almost never say no to dessert. :-) Also another chance to exercise more creativity - I think half the fun is plating the dessert & making it look irresistible. The same goes for pastry & cakes - although I would rather it looked ordinary, but tasted great, as opposed to looking great but tasting terrible ( "Ho Kua Boh Ho Chiak", as the Hokkiens put it so well ). I think my almond & blueberry tart turned out quite well - we had it for dessert ( my sibs & I ) that night & they liked it. Can you just make out the "smiley " on my tart ? :-)
Guess I'll be making more of these in future !


Our Alsatian tarts were actually supposed to have been made using apple, but we used the raspberries instead as we did not have apples. So here's how the group's tarts looked :


This is a custard filled tart, as opposed to the almond one for the almond & blueberry tart. Personally, I'm partial to almond, so I definitely preferred the other tart. For the not so nutty people, this would probably preferable. Note the nice, slightly caramelised surface of the custard filling, which is what it should turn out to be. So, in other words, the class did a good job - hurray for us ! :-)

Here's a picture of some of my fellow students & of course our very dashing & patient teacher. :-) Hope things turned out alright for him as he had to serve dinner to over a hundred people that evening at his restaurant while having a shortage of staff as 2 of his guys were on MC. Despite that, he remained cheerful & joked with us constantly during the class, even when some of us made "special", unauthorised versions of the recipes. ;-)

It has been great fun & I look forward to working with my fellow students for the final time (sob, sob) next Saturday. Maybe I'll bring a bottle or 2 of dessert wine to share in honour of the occasion.....

Fishy Business

After the wonderful experience a few weekends ago at the pastry class at Palate Sensations, I decided to sign up for a few more classes - more adventures in cooking.
This time it was a class on preparation of seafood dishes, one of the food groups that I definitely enjoy eating but always felt was more difficult to master when it came to cooking and preparation.
This was actually Module 6 of the Basic Skills series of classes at PS, conducted by one very good-natured & humourous French chef, Francois Mermilliod, who is Executive Chef at Flutes at the Fort. Must confess that I have not been to Flutes, but after the very pleasant encounter with Chef Francois, it will defintely be on my list of must-visit restaurants. The web site for the restaurant also looks really good - the setting of the restaurant looks & sounds fabulous, not to mention the menu.
But I digress....

Anyway, on the menu that day at the class was fish fillet cooked 3 ways, prawn cocktail with avocado & mango salad & salsa, and fresh oysters which we would learn how to shuck ourselves !
This class was much bigger than the last one I attended - I think there were about at least 12 to 15 people in the room. Cooking was done on both individual & group basis - we all had to learn how to fillet a fish properly, and each person did his/her own fish mousse roll thing(1st way), as well as shuck oysters & plate the prawn ccktail with avocado & mango salad. However, the making of the beer batter for the fish fillet (2nd way), the aioli/mayonnaise for the fried fish fillet in beer batter, the fish paste for the fish mousse roll, the teriyaki sauce (the above pic is of the flambe-ing of the sauce !) for the baked cod (3rd way), the avocado & mango salad & the tomato basil salsa for the prawn cocktail, were all done in groups. This picture below shows the "magic hands" effect of several group members preparing the aioli/mayonnaise.

Meanwhile, Boon Seh from Sensus Wine Studio, brought some Spanish wines for us to try, to go along with the food we were busy preparing. This kind of reminded me of the Cookworks program on the Asian Food Channel, where a bunch of people are taught how to cook by the affable Donna Dooher, who "takes the inept & makes them adept". On this program, they have an inhouse bartender who prepares complementary cocktails for the aspiring cooks, so they all have a very enjoyable time with good food & drink during & at the end of the whole cooking lesson. And if the dishes didn't turn out as great as hoped for, well, the drinks would have made it all better ! :-) Unfortunately for me, all the wine had run out by the time I had some food in me so I missed the chance of tasting them. I was told that they were great. I did get the chance, though, to try some lovely olive oils & olives brought in from Australia by 2 ladies from D'Light Pte Ltd for us to taste. Ended up buying both types of olive oil, one fruity & the other peppery, for future culinary attempts at home.

I am proud to say that we all acquitted ourselves rather commendably ( including this newbie to the class ). Even picked up some tips on how to cut vegetables properly (since I missed the earlier classes). Am rather proud of how my prawn cocktail with mango & avocado salad looked after I plated it....

Also proud of the fact that I now know how to shuck an oyster, having opened 3 during the class & gobbled them down with just a squeeze of lemon juice on top...yum....
Had loads of fun and am looking forward to the next class this saturday, which is on cakes & pastry ( my favourite things to make ! ). Watch out for the next post....

Pastry Inspirations

Went for my first cooking class in our dear Lion City today, and was inspired to start blogging again.Realised that my last entry on my previous blog was on March 14 2006 !


Something about pastry - never fails to make me feel happy and generally excited about creating more edible works of art. Guess it has to do with the therapeutic process of making the pastry dough ( all that whisking, beating, stirring, folding, kneading etc ) and smelling that heavenly aroma emanating from the oven after all the effort. Of course the final step of putting each wonderful morsel into your mouth is the peak of the whole experience. Also, the satisfaction of seeing others enjoy the fruits of my labour just gives me that buzz as well.

Today's class was on making that old favourite : the eclair.

Eclair cases are made of choux(pronounced "shoe", just in case you were wondering) pastry. Had actually attempted making cream/custard puffs ( which use the same pastry ) more than 10 years ago, so with the memories being rather faint as to the whole process, I decided to sign up for this class, run by Palate Sensations.


Here are the results - they tasted as yummy as they look. :-)
They are filled with chocolate cream or coffee cream, via little holes made at the bottom of the cases ( see above photo ).

Have to thank the teacher, pastry chef Nan Ong, of Classique Gateaux, who made the final chocolate glaze to finish the product, as well as my dear friend, Carmen, who attended the class as well & did the traditional ( log-shaped ) ones. My little touch of inspiration was the addition of almond slivers on top of the round ones. Thanks also to Lynette, the person behind Palate Sensations, who generously offered the almonds even though they were not part of the ingredients included. :-)

Am gonna make more for the upcoming birthday celebrations for our nation. Maybe I'll try some other flavours and add fruit as well. I have some nice ripe strawberries in the fridge. Yum.....