Homemade Pottery

I love potteries. Especially asian or Japanese style potteries. Above is a photo of my shelve, showing you some of the insane bowls and plates I have. Mainly, I love Japanese looking bowls and potteries. I don't buy them in sets any more. Maybe use one unique piece on its own. Cause with Japanese food presentation, its ok to have everything of different design. But the main reason for this post is, I got a lot of homemade potteries from my husband's cousin recently. She stays in Melbourne, and took up pottery not too long ago. I think what she made is just beautiful, and she gave me some of her pieces when we went to visit her. I would have love to bring everything back, but my husband was already frowning at me. After coming back, I've placed them all in my shelve. But one day, I decided to use them, and shared the photos with her of her beautiful creation. So this post is also to share with you.

To be honest, it was inspired by the shisamon fish you see here. I recently found that you can buy them and bbq/toast them and they taste really really yummy. So we got a package of it for less maybe  less than SGD10, with 10 fishes inside. I decided to make a meal just using all her potteries. Above is actually my Japanese breakfast set! Just fish and sweet egg rolls and rice (which was still cooking at the time the photo was taken). For drinks, my fave houjicha. 

So let me introduce you to all the pieces shown here. The rice bowl, which looks small but hold the same amount of rice, if not more, from my normal japanese bowls. It was stripes on it and looks rather ragged. The blue cup is very beautiful although it may not be obvious from this photo. It is actually decorated with cat figures all around it. It was been promoted to my fave cup. I use it for hot drinks like tea and coffee. 

Next is this beautiful patterned plate. It just looks fitting for the shisamon. I now also use it for desserts and tea time cause it looked so pretty. I didn't really fancy it at first, but it is kinda artistic and goes will with random food I placed on it so far. 

Above is a little ragged small cup/bowl. Although not visible in the photo, it actually has the word "川"  on it, which means "river" in Chinese/Japanese. This word has a special meaning to me, because two of my favourite person in my previous company has the word "川" in their names. 

Above photo is taken on another day. And this is lunch. So from top left to right are: shisamon, boiled prawns, picked squid. And the overnight rice is heated up with left over sweet egg rolls, and some baby corns. I've been addicted to baby corns recently after eating them at a yoshinoya for lunch at my new work place. 

Lastly, a few random photos of tea time snakes. Above chocolate chip muffins served using the pattern plate, and Korean coffee in my Daiso SGD2 cup, which has been recently promoted to my office cup. I brought it to the office cause they have a fancy coffee machine there, and I wanted to use it to have a cosy coffee when I am feeling bored. 

Here again, blue berry muffins with Australian granulated coffee blank. The color of dark blue and pink is so contrasting that it looks good together. 

So thanks for letting me show off some of the new potteries I have at home! These are not all of it. Just some of it. 

Western Food Creation

Today's post is all the yummy main courses I've made using my air fryer to date! So let's start with the very first, tonkatsu don a.k.a. fried pork rice. I love eating tonkatsu from the restaurant cause they usually offers free flow rice and vege. On a hungry day, I can usually finish 2.5 bowls of rice from such restaurant. The cost was around SGD25 and above. So I thought, why not make it myself. So above was the result of it. I bought some pork pieces from Isetan, and mix it with flour and panko (Japanese breadcrumbs). On my first try, it was a bit under cooked, but it was still yummy, especially with the okonomiyaki sauce. The only thing missing was the cabbage. Cost of this? Probably around SGD3? Cause the pork cost around SGD4, but I made 2 to 3 portion of it, the sauce cost around SGD2 for 200g. 

Next was chicken karaage curry rice. This was one of my favourite dish to order at Yunomori Onsen. So I tried creating this at home. The chicken pieces are actually chicken breast covered in panko. I used half of it to make japanese curry as well. Chicken breast cost only SGD2 for such a large piece, and its supposed to be healthy for you. If you're making the above dish, then no problem! So cost of the above? Maybe SGD3? Chicken breast is only SGD2, cabbage maybe SGD1, and japanese curry sauce, together with onions and carrots maybe SGD5? and I can actually make 4 dishes from all that cost of ingredient. Just throw in effort and rice cost. This is why its hard for me to spend money eating at the restaurant more and more, when I can make all these at home.

Above is a super yummy pepper lemon fried fish and chips. This was inspired by fish and chip flour on sale when we were in Melbourne shopping. Why use boring plain flour when you have flavoured ones! I brought two packs back to try. The first was lemon and pepper breadcrumbs, and the second one was herbs which I've yet to use. Anyway, the above was made with snakehead fish that cost maybe SGD3.5 for the portion you see on top, fried potatoes, and ice lettuces and tomatoes dripped in balsamic vinegar and truffle oil. Yup, sounds fancy and expensive, but actually they are not. So cost of the above would probably be around SGD5 if you factor in all the fancy sauces etc. Still cheaper than hawker side western food that may charge you SGD7, and not with such good ingredient either! HA!

Lastly, this is my latest creation, KFC! Using Kentucky flour I got from Malaysia that cost less than SGD1 per box and can be used twice. Fries. and get this, my first time making coleslaw! I love coleslaw. But finally, my air fryer indirectly motivates me to learn how to make coleslaw. And these are not just any time of coleslaw, but KFC type! I google the recipe from the internet, and its so easy to make! Just salt (half a teaspoon), sugar (1/3 cup), milk (1/4 cup), mayo/buttermilk (1/4 cup), lemon/calamansi (3 table spoon),  vinegar/apple cider vinegar (2 table spoon). Mixed for at least 4 hours or more. I made mine over night. The vegetable part consist of cabbage, carrots, and lots of onions cause I love raw onions. I had these for lunch and dinner, and concluded that 1 drumstick isn't filling enough cause cooking with an air fryer makes everything healthy by default. So you get hungry faster! Lol.

Is having a air fryer a healthy option? Nope. It makes you eat more fried food, even if the fried food are of the healthier version. But it does save you money, cause you would have spend the money to eat the fried food outside your house if you have craving anyway. Plus, cooking at home does make it healthier, and you can modify the recipe however you like it. So do I love my air fryer? Yes! definitely. I have so many more recipe I want to try with it! But washing it is quite a pain. Luckily, I have a husband for that :P

Home Made Wanton Mee

Above is my picture perfect homemade wanton mee! And it was all because of my brand new air fryer! Apart from the roast pork and the noodles, everything else was homemade I used roast pork instead of char siew because I like roast pork better. And like all decent wanton mee store, mine comes with fried wanton, as well as soup wanton. 

I've always love fried wanton, and making wanton was never too troublesome for me. I got the freshly made wanton skin from the wet market instead of from the supermarket. In the wet market, it is cheaper and fresher. I make the fillings using minced pork, eggs, soya sauce and spring onions. It is always best to add minced shrimp as well. Also a lesson learned for me is, put more soya sauce to make the filling tastier so that it goes well with the noodles. 

I got my wanton noodles also from the wet market, and it was again, fresher and cheaper! As for the sauce, I just mixed soya sauce and sesame sauce to make it. It was decent enough for me. So once you have everything, just assemble your wanton noodles. I use my air fryer to air fried all the fried wanton. 

This all happened during my night shift working schedule, so I made lunch boxes out of the 3 noodle balls I got. It was super filling lunch box! With more wanton than you can ever ordered from a store! Will try to make these again some day, just to pop those wanton in my mouth. 

Air Fryer

Above is a pack of flour for frying stuff which I got from my friend Julie. She said it was awesome, i bought it with the hope of trying it one day. Little was I to know, that the one day was coming soon. After toying around with getting an air fryer for a while, and borrowing one from a relative to try it out, I decided to get one for myself after reading through forums on whether air fryer would smoke up the house as the one I borrowed did. I was pretty sure they don't, else they wouldn't be that popular, right? Well I was right! Turns out that if you don't properly clean your air fryer, its gonna smoke up your house!

Anyway my husband got me a branch new Phillip air fryer, and like most people, I started with the basic fries. Only, I wanted to have sweet potato fries. Above was the end result. Although it was editable, it was very hard and full of fiber to eat it pleasantly. Sweet potatoes are better off backed, unless you want to chew on them. A batch of potatoes will cook within 15minutes at almost 180 to 200 degrees celsius. 

The regular potatoes were nicer to cook. Above are fried chicken, using the Thai flour I mentioned earlier. I added some ketchup too. So normally if I were to buy this from the shop at the back of my house, it would cost me around SGD4. But if I make it with my air fryer, the cost price is probably only SGD1.50 or less. Cause chicken wings are SGD0.5 each, and I usually can make nuggets with them at the same time too. So cost saving wise, I think air fryer is great for indulging in all your fried food sins. 

As I learn to use the air fryer more, the output of it also improves. Above is a nicer version of fried chicken wings, but this time I added some black pepper to it to make it more fragrant. The green sauce is from Vietnam, and it's lovely, except I may have kept it too long and it kinda got rubberise thick already. 

I also tried making hot wings to go with my kimchi noodles. But at last, it wasn't really that nice. I think I used peri-peri powder which I learn about from youtube. Apparently peri-peri spices is what they use to season Nandos chicken! Maybe I'll try it again some other day, but I definitely give a thumbs up for Nandos sauce. I use it all the time for my bbq chicken. 

Some times for a full lunch, I'll make fried chicken and fries instead. Stay tune to this blog as I'll show you some of my advance wester  food creation, including a full blown KFC!

I was so obsess with my air fryer that I joint Facebook group and watch most of the youtube clips on it. Needless to say, I've also borrowed all the air frying books I can find from the library. It's surprising to learn what other people actually uses their air fryer for, or how they use tricks to get it to stay clean longer.  Stay tune as my next few post will all be about air fryer.

Jwipo (Korean: 쥐포)

Jwipo (Korean: 쥐포) is a kind of a traditional Korean pressed fish jerky sold as a street snack. Made from the filefish (or Jwichi), it is dried, flattened and seasoned. Jwipo has a subtle sweet flavor. It is traditionally served hot, heated on a burner until it curls. - Wikipedia

I bought these packet of fried fish from Korea. They cost like maybe SGD1 each? I wasn't sure what they would taste like, so I only got two. And now I regret it, cause they are so so yummy! And the reason I bought these was because one upon a time, during a flight from somewhere to somewhere, I watched a Japanese series about a lady eating at a bar, and she ordered this dish as she saw some other elderly men that looked like her father eating it. And that scene stuck in my head, and I've always wanted to try it cause they made it looked so yummy and sophisticated. 

So how you eat it was, you toast the fish over fire to make it soft. I toasted mine in a toaster oven for 5 minutes. When it heats up, the fish becomes soft, and you take it out and cut it into slices as per above. Serve them with mustard mayo. I bought the Japanese type and OMG, once you start, you can't stop! It is so yummy! I am so so sad that I only have two pieces of this, and they were both gone within 2 weekend when we had guess over. If! If! If I ever go Korea again, I'm gonna buy a whole bag of these back!

Oh yeah, they are best served with an ice cold beer. I had mine with this special Japanese brewed beer which cost like SGD14 per bottle! Expensive! But the yuzu flavoured one was awesome. I don't know where to buy them again either cause I got these (2 bottles of it) from the 2018 Beer Fest in Singapore. Sometimes these food together just creates a special moment. And when you can capture it on camera, and post them on your blog with a little capture explaining them, they become a good memory and can last forever. And that is why I love taking pictures of my food. Cause they remind me of good memories of special moments that can never, or super hard, to be repeated.

Muffin Madness

Sometimes I make muffins. Usually they are quite a disaster. But I like eating them as snacks. Usually when I follow the recipe, the muffins are more dense and flat, probably because I don't use baking powder or self raising flour or baking soda and stuff. To be honest, I can't tell those things apart. I think I only have baking powder at home for my waffle craving. So above is usually what my muffins look like, flat like a cookie, hahahaha.

Sometimes I get ambitious and throw in lots of expiring blue berries. But blue berries tend to explode in the heat.... So not a good idea.

While I was back in Malaysia in August, I bought two packages of Aunt Betty muffin, just add water or milk to make half a dozen fresh muffins! They were selling at around SGD1.2 each pack cause they were expiring in Nov. I got the chocolate chip and blue berries one each and just finished making them a few weeks back. These ready to make one are easier to make and look and taste nicer too! Above is the chocolate chip ones. The blue berries one are below, but they are made of artificial blue berries (blue coloured gummies)

My most recent bake is the coffee chocolate chip muffin as per above. These were really nice but very dense and not so sweet.  Oh yeah, all my muffins are filled with coconut cause I like the texture of it, plus orange peal cause I love the smell of it So its fiber pack! I usually have one or two for breakfast when I make them. But sometimes I can't finish them fast enough before they get moldy.

Ah yes, above is the artificial blue berry muffin, here seen being enjoyed with some weak Korean coffee.

You can also have them with tea.

Stack them up to make a pagoda muffin. These were just plain muffin and coconut and orange peal. It has a surprising light and fresh orange taste to it. I finished all these in one sitting. 

I also serve them as part of desert in a proper meal! Don't you love the above photo of my meal? Mind you, this is a weekday dinner! A full course Japanese meal set. I just love looking at this <3 p="">

Home cooked Okonomiyaki (a.k.a. Japanese Pizza)

Have you ever eaten Okonomiya before? If you've lived in Singapore before, you may have seen some badly made one selling at your local pasar malam or food fest. Trust me, it's better to make it yourself. Maybe I'm snobbish, but I seriously think that those you make at home are like 10 times better cause you can control everything about it. So above the ingredient used. I bought the flour specially from Isetan, but I read somewhere that you can make the same thing using 1 cup multi purpose flour with 1 tablespoon of dashi powder. Once I finished all my flour, I'll try that as I already got my dashi powder ready. One pack of flour cost SGD3. As compared to 6 packs of dashi powder costing SGD3 or so. I can make them 6 times! Multi purpose flour is a staple ingredient in my home anyway, for those desperate waffles and muffin moments. Oh year, you also need the Okonomiyaki sauce. I got mine at SGD2 for 200g from Toku-Tokuya. Having Japanese mayonnaise and bonito shaves also adds to the flavour. The first time I made these, I couldn't kind pork slices, so I use bacon instead. I've also tried making them with cheese sausages. It doesn't really matter what you put on it, the sauce and the cabbage are the star of this dish!

The wonderful thing about this dish is, it's really really healthy cause mine is made mainly from lots and lots of cabbage. I seriously think I won't have a problem going on a cabbage diet cause I love cabbage. I like to eat them in soup, fried with eggs, or in an okonomiya. They taste so sweet to me. So just mix the flour up with egg and cabbage and fry they like pancake with toppings of bacon or any meat. Each side is around 3 to 4 minutes, and then flip and do the same. 

Once it's done, the top photo is what it looked like. You then cover it with mayonnaise, okonomiyaki sauce, some seaweed or spring onions, and bonito flakes. The most challenging part for me so far it to flip it to make it a perfect round shape, cause sometimes the whole thing just breaks apart. But it's ok! You can assemble them back, patch it all up or just put them together and proceed to put the sauces on them when you serve them. It doesn't really matter.

Here's a successful one I made on my first try. Doesn't it look just so professional? And even though it looked like a big portion, just remember, its mainly just cabbage. I can actually eat two plates of this per sitting and still lose weight for that day. Cabbage are awesome food! Good luck trying this recipe! You can also get more variety of ideas from the link below. 

Okonomiyaki

Isetan

Toku-tokuya

Drip Coffee

As I've been blogging a lot about drip coffee lately, I thought I'll make an entry on what the instant drip coffee look like. Above is the package I received via snail mail from my friend this year. And she specifically ask me to drink it before it expire by end of the year. And since it's a French drip coffee, I decided to make Banh Mi to go with it. You can find a recipe on how to make that here. So for the drip coffee, basically you just open it and hand it inside your cup. And as I've learned making Vietnamese drip coffee, you first pour in some hot water to soak the coffee for around 10 seconds first, before pouring in the rest of the hot water to make the actual coffee. The french type drip coffee is a bit lighter. The ones I make using the Vietnamese style coffee is super thick! You could burn a hole in your stomach drinking it!

And that is why, it is always nice to have some nice toasted baguette with your coffee! The secret to making a great Vietnamese baguette is actually the pickled vegetable which I've learned to master. I am getting so good at it that I even made coleslaw for the first time a few days ago! More about that in my new entry! But isn't the above photo just lovely to look at?

As I was saying, the secret to making a great banh min, apart from the picked vegetable, is also the smelly vegetable above. Although I usually hate them in my chinese food, my banh mi is somehow not the same without them. They say that you are getting old the day you start appreciating vegetable like these! Cilantros, yes, that's what those smelly vegetables are call. Don't go without them. And last but super important is of course cheap liver paste. Without them, banh mi is just a subway sandwich. You don't even need expensive gourmet type. Just get the cheapest 2SGD one to make an authentic street side banh mi!

Here's the end product! Isn't it lovely? They say we feast with our eyes, and this is just gourmet to me! And how cool is the mini black baguette which I got from giant at around 0.75SGD each? I love making food, I love taking photograph of my food creation, and I love eating them. There is just something so satisfying about it. Its the knowledge that you made these. You created something so beautiful, so tasty, so memorable. Yup, you'll be seeing lots and lots of food porn on this blog in future as I learn to make more and more dishes. 

Coffee Letters

Since we're at our favourite coffee topic recently, I wanted to share with you a little hobby I started in 2018. It started when I receive a coffee via snail mail from my friend Pei Shi all the way from Taiwan. You can read about it here. I was so happy that anyone would send me a snail mail at this age and time that I decided to start sending her coffee and tea from everywhere I was travelling to. So far to date, I have send her 3 snail mails containing coffee, tea and sometimes snacks from all the places that I've visited. And thankfully she took photos of them before I started to do the same. So now I have photo memories of these little "care package" of delight too!

1st letter was coffee and tea from Korea. I got the coffee from the last hotel that I was staying at, and the packaging was so pretty that I decided to collect them and send them to her when I got back to Singapore. This was also the coffee that got me hooked on coffee infused water, cause the coffee was so light that it suddenly occured to me that I don't have to drink thick coffee to enjoy it! Below row are also branded Korean tea I got from a high-end hotel. It was a set of 4 actually, but I drank some of it, and a complete set was given priority to  my other ex-colleague as she was the one that introduced me to these tea. Interestingly after giving all these tea away, I was kinda sad that I didn't have many left to enjoy. But surprise surprise, my dearest colleague got me a box all for myself when she came back from Korea! I'm thinking of bringing it to my new office to drink when I need to chill.

2nd letter was from Vietnam. I collected these from the hotel that I was staying at. I actually like G7 coffee cause the aroma of it was just wonderful. It used to be my favourite instant coffee when my first Vietnamese colleague got them for me when I was working at the hospital. Whenever he makes them in the pantry, the whole office would smell of coffee! The green package are Vietnamese Jasmine/Green Tea. They are stronger than the Japanese green tea. When I'm travelling, I actually like drinking tea to unwind when I'm back in the hotel. Drinking hot tea or coffee kinda calms me down when I'm on a hectic schedule. It reminds me to relax and just breath and enjoy the aroma. Top two package are my favourite coconut snack from Vietnam. I am totally addicted to it and would buy boxes of it whenever I go on business trip. They were so light I decided to include some into the envelop to share them with my friend.

3rd and last one was from my recent trip to Melbourne Australia. I collected the granulated coffee from all the places that we stayed in, as well as some teas. I really really like the coffee here cause they have a strong burnt aroma of it, are are really really nice and thick but dissolved smoothly in hot water. I really like the consistency of it. I even made some coffee muffin using the Cafe Noir pack recently and its delightful as well! From the 3rd letter onwards, I also started using fancy papers. And I just love this one cause it's so colourful and fit the theme of coffee and tea! I had them all along, but just never had anyone to write letters to. Hmmm, maybe I should send some to my mum as well. Maybe that would surprise her! Ha! But my coffee stock is already running low....

So there you have it. Little things that are cheap or almost free, which you can share with your friends and family and doesn't cost much. The only thing that is expensive about these are probably the postage at almost SGD2.50 per envelope depending on weight. And you have to declare what are the content as well. But its definitely fun. I send them via normal mail cause even if they get lost, you don't really mind. And its nice to know when both of you are enjoying the same cuppa. You can only do these with people who enjoys tea and coffee as you do. 

Coffee Variety Pack and Other Inspirations

It's approaching the Christmas Season again as I restart my daily blogging. I saw the above ad on my Facebook feed and thought it was such a nice gift to give myself for Christmas. From time to time, one feels like pampering one self, especially when one is feeling down, emo, or depress. But although the Christmas pack looks tempting, it cost around SGD50 for 24 packs of drip coffee! That's almost SGD2 per pack/cup! More expensive than my Coffee Bean Capsule Espresso! 

Well no problem! As if the bigger force was at play, I found myself visiting the 100AM Don Don Donki store in Tanjong Pagar last Saturday. And as I was browsing through the aisle, I came across this special "Thank You" pack of UCC coffee that has a variety of drip coffee inside! Hang on Cordy, isn't that same as what you've wanted for Christmas? Minus the cute Christmasy packaging and all. And this pack only cost around SGD10 for 12 packs! That's less than 1SGD per pack, and cheaper than my Coffee Bean Capsule Espresso which is my benchmark for home DIY coffee price! So without much hesitation (except circulating the aisle one round), I decided to give myself a "Thank You" coffee treat. 

I went home kinda happy. I wanted to get myself something nice for all the stress I have been putting myself through. Maybe coffee may not calm my nerves, but I do enjoy drinking it. And recently, I've been pretty much into coffee  infused water, a lighter kind of coffee concept I got from Korea. UCC coffee is from Japan, and they don't really make the thickest espresso coffee either. So here's hoping that it will suit my palate. I went home and open up the package, and it does have 12 packs inside. But instead of 2 each of 6 variety, there were like 2 unique solo coffee which looks like they may be a bonus or premium flavour.... I didn't mind. I just wanted to try different flavour of coffee for fun. Maybe I could even consider sharing the duplicate ones with people I like.... 

So in summary, I ended up only having 7 different variety of coffee. And although my Japanese is limited, I can roughly tell that they consist of: Moca, Brazil something, Zambia something, Charcoal roasted, Colombia something, Kilimanjaro something, and Premium something.... Lol. Maybe my taste bud would do a better job and tasting them. Will probably go make a cup later to drink and eat with my Japanese Chocolate spring roll cake. Today is pampering me day!

I also decided to splur on my shopping while I was at Don Don Donki, and decided to buy this Orange Black Tea that looked so refreshing in the chiller section. It cost SGD2++, but the thought of orange black tea was just too hard to resist. I needed to pamper myself by pumping in insane amount of caffeine into my blood stream! Well, I finally opened it today after dinner to taste it, and ended up finishing the whole bottle in one sitting. It was refreshing as expected. And even though it contained sugar, it wasn't overpowering. Would definitely buy again as part of my cheapskate indulgence!

And as if all that wasn't enough, I also stopped by Tampines Hub today (11-Nov Single's Day!), and bought myself a Spinelli Cold Brew Soft Serve Ice Cream. It cost me SGD4.20, but I would go back again in future! It was delightful! Coffee taste in every lick and mouthful. Plus the cone was delicious too. I spend half an hour on my own in the shop just enjoying this alone. It was like finding yourself in a small little heaven on a lousy weekend. 

OK. I'll stop here for today. To keep the daily blogging momentum going, I need to start blogging of random stuff first before tackling all those heavy weight travelling post! Stay tune!

Ref:

Spinelli Cold Brew Soft Serve Ice Cream

Don Don Donki

UCC Coffee