Chinese New Year this year falls on Monday, 23 January. Around Chinese New Year there are lots of gatherings, visits to friend and relatives to exchange wishes for the new year and eat! The Chinese love a bit of symbolism, so a lot of the things we eat during the new year have a special, generally auspicious meaning. You will find a lot of sweet treats offered during the new year as they symbolize a rich and sweet start to the new year.
So here is a sweet festive treat to welcome in the year of the Dragon in 2012 – Chinese Walnut Cookies.
Chinese walnut cookies are a popular treat and it’s something that I like to bake for Chinese New Year as walnuts symbolise happiness of the entire family. Walnuts are also considered a symbol of intellectuality as their shape resembles a brain. Walnuts are rich in omega-3 fatty acids, which are an essential nutrient for the human brain. Anyone who has grown up in an Asian family knows how much emphasis is placed on education and producing smart kids. So not only do you get a rich and aromatic cookie from the large amount of egg yolks and walnuts included in the cookie dough, you also score two symbolism brownie points.
Do you think walnuts look like brains?
Chinese Walnut Cookies
Ingredients
• 150g shortening (grated to make easier to cream)
• 50g butter
• 150g caster sugar
• pinch of salt
• 4 egg yolks
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 300g plain flour
• ½ teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 tablespoon cornflour
• 1 tablespoon milk powder
• 250g walnuts (lightly toasted in the oven for 7-10 minutes until aromatic – 200g crushed and 50g kept whole)
• egg wash (1 egg yolk mixed with 1 teaspoon of water)
Tip: I grate vegetable shortening to make it easier to cream.
Method
Sift the flour with cornflour, milk powder, salt, baking soda and baking powder together in a bowl.
Use an electric beater to cream shortening with butter and sugar until fluffy. Add in 4 eggs yolks and cream till smooth. Fold in sifted flour mixture, then add in 200g crushed walnuts and mix together well until it comes together and forms a dough.
Roll tablespoons of the dough into a ball and press lightly to form 1 ½ inch discs and place onto a baking tray lined with greaseproof paper (if the dough is too soft to roll into balls, chill in fridge for 10-15 minutes to make the dough easier to work with). Press into each cookie a piece of walnut. Brush some egg wash on top of each cookie.
Bake in a preheated oven at 180C for around 15 minutes, or until golden brown.
A few weeks ago, my friend invited me over to her new place for dinner. She told me that she would be serving gnocchi. My initial thought was awesome, I love eating gnocchi. Then I thought, you crazy woman, how is she going to make gnocchi after work considering the amount of time it takes? She made spinach and ricotta gnocchi. I watched her prepare it, rolling and shaping the pieces of gnocchi, and it looked quite simple and didn’t take long at all. It was totally doable as an after work dinner.
So I tried making spinach and ricotta gnocchi at home, and I found it much easier to make then potato gnocchi. Making spinach and ricotta gnocchi is less time consuming as there isn’t as much prep required for the ingredients – there is no cooking, peeling and mashing of potatoes. There are many little aspects to consider when making potato gnocchi such as the variety of potato used which should be starchy and old so that it has a lower water content, and it’s important that the potatoes are not overcooked as it will absorb too much water and require more flour to make it stick together, resulting in a heavier outcome which goes against what a gnocchi should be. With spinach and ricotta gnocchi, you just have to mix all the ingredients until it comes together, unlike potato gnocchi, where you are required to gently knead until it forms a dough and stress about not overworking the dough.
I combined all the ingredients for the spinach and ricotta gnocchi dough and rolled out half of it to cook for dinner one night and refrigerated the leftovers to cook the next night (I put all the leftovers in a smaller bowl and covered the surface tightly with glad wrap, so that the glad wrap rests directly on the surface of the dough). So from my experience, if you want something that can be quickly prepared for dinner, it is ok to make the spinach and ricotta gnocchi dough before work in the morning (it doesn’t take too long to mix together the ingredients) or the night before. The dough can be refrigerated hours ahead until ready to cook.
Eating spinach and ricotta gnocchi is like eating spinach and ricotta filled ravioli but without the pasta around it. I love the depth of flavour that spinach and ricotta gnocchi have compared to potato ones and it is also lighter in texture.
I enjoy eating gnocchi that has been lightly pan fried so that the exterior is slightly crisp and golden brown, while the interior is light and fluffy. So I fried the gnocchi and served it with a simple, rich and savoury brown butter and sage sauce.
• ~300g fresh spinach
• 500g fresh firm ricotta
• 80g parmesan
• 75g plain flour
• 2 egg yolks, lightly whisked
• pinch of salt and pepper, gratings of fresh nutmeg
• 250g punnet of cherry tomatoes
• 3-4 tablespoons butter
• 8-10 fresh sage leaves
• garnish with shredded fresh basil
Method
Preheat oven to 200C. Line a baking tray with greaseproof paper. Place the cherry tomatoes on the tray and roast for around 20 minutes until they start to collapse.
Remove the excess moisture from the ricotta by putting the ricotta in a cheese cloth/muslin cloth and wringing out the liquid from it.
Prepare the spinach by discarding any wilted, bruised leaves and trimming away all the stems. Soak and drain the spinach in several changes of water to clean. Blanch the spinach in a pot of boiling salted water until it is tender (30-60 seconds) and refresh under cold running water. Drain the spinach and as soon as it is cool enough to handle, gently squeeze it to remove all the water out of the spinach. Coarsely chop the spinach and set aside.
Spinach
Ricotta
Place the spinach, ricotta, parmesan, flour, egg yolks and a pinch of salt, pepper and nutmeg to taste in a bowl, and mix together until well combined.
Cover the bowl with glad wrap and refrigerate the mixture for 30-60 minutes.
Lightly flour work surface and divide the gnocchi dough into 4 portions. Roll each portion into a 2 cm log and using a lightly floured knife, cut the logs into 2-3 cm pieces and dust with flour (you can prepare the gnocchi pieces ahead of time, placed on a tray with greaseproof paper, cover with glad wrap and refrigerate until ready to cook).
Drop the gnocchi in a large pot of salted boiling water and cook for around 3-4 minutes or until it rises to the surface. Using a slotted spoon, remove the gnocchi and transfer onto a plate lined with paper towels.
Make brown butter and sage sauce – Add butter to a frying pan and turn on the heat to medium, melt the butter until it has browned slightly. Add in the sage leaves and cook until they are crisp (this will only take a few seconds). Add in gnocchi (a batch at a time so that the pan is not overcrowded) and cook for 2-3 minutes, turning until the outside is golden brown. Transfer the gnocchi onto a plate lined with paper towels.
To serve – Arrange pieces of gnocchi on a plate, spoon over some brown butter sauce and a few crisp sage leaves over the top. Add a few roasted cherry tomatoes to the plate and garnish with bits of shredded basil.
You can see me stuffing my face with banana bread in this video of the Beaufort Street Festival at 1:41-1:46
I started this blog as a way to record and share the recipes that I cooked. This blog has become my own online cookbook. A lot of the posts are of recipes that I have learnt from my mum and dad. The more I cook, the more value I place in knowing how to cook the food that I grew up with because it’s an important part of who I am, and as I cook, I am learning more about my culture. I hope that when my younger brother and younger sister have grown up and move out of home, this blog will be a useful resource for them, and when I have children of my own one day and for future generations of my family, they will have a place to learn about and cook our family’s food.
Here are some of my favourite family recipes from my past year of blogging –
One of my most popular posts that I really enjoyed writing was my survey of the best banh mi in Perth. At the end of last year, my friends and I decided to get together for an almond croissant taste test and consumed 6 almond croissants one Saturday morning (such taste tests are not for the faint hearted).
Over the past year I have also met and become friends with a lot of Perth bloggers especially during the month of March when Eat Drink Perth was on. I met up with some food bloggers for the first time to take on the What the Pho? pho eating competition and I organised my first tweet up to get together some of Perth’s food blogging community for Amuse Project Mayhem.
I also traveled to South East Asia in September/October last year and I’m still working through my travel posts. So far I have written on Bangkok, Ayutthaya and Luang Prabang, I’ve still got some posts on Vietnam to go.
Now I begin my third year of blogging in 2012….the year of the Apocalypse (21.12.2012)…
So unless you have been living under a rock, I’m sure you have heard that this year is the end of the world as we know it. Many great prophets, religious scriptures, and scientific evidence point to a possible apocalyptic event happening this year.
Mayan Calendar
The main theory being that the Mayan calender ends on 21.12.2012, which marks the end of cycle of creation that has spanned over approximately 5,125 solar years.
The end of the Mayan calendar is also supposed to coincide with a galactic alignment, in which the Sun will align with the center of the Milky Way galaxy for the first time in about 26,000 years. Some predict that this galactic alignment has the potential to create a shift in the Earth's poles and cause a series of disastrous environmental events.
Do you think it’s a coincidence that the Mayan calendar ends on the day the Earth is to be in exact alignment with the Sun and the center of the Milky Way galaxy?
Another theory is that an asteroid or another planet (Nibiru or Planet X) will collide with Earth.
Is this what Planet X looks like?
But don’t be too alarmed, remember the Y2K panic? Well that ended up being a whole lot of nothing! Who knows what will really happen on 21.12.2012? I guess we will just have to wait and see ….
…and maybe we can take some advice from Public Enemy “Don’t believe the hype”
My blog is called Blue Apocalypse, derived from the metal band Tool, (read the About Me section if you want to know more about how I came up with my name) and as a result I get a lot of apocalypse related keyword searches like what to eat in an apocalypse, apocalypse food, apocalypse cooking, apocalypse spice, apocalypse desserts etc. Unfortunately for people looking on my blog expecting some advice on what to eat in an apocalypse, I don’t have any. But this is about to change. I think that it will be a fun challenge to do some posts on the subject that people may mistake my blog to be about. So funnily enough, my chosen blog name which is completely unrelated to cooking and just a name that I used as an internet alias when I was younger has become an impetus for some new blog entries. As well as all the usual stuff that I like blogging about (recipes, reviews, travels, eating experiences etc.), I will be writing a series of apocalypse posts covering apocalypse related cooking/apocalypse inspired recipes. This will be an interesting project for me and I look forward to researching and learning more about the apocalypse and presenting to you my findings. I am also open to any suggestions, please comment below if you have any apocalypse food ideas or can recommend some apocalypse related reading material.
Here’s what I have so far.
Thanks to all the readers of my blog, my twitter followers @blueapocalypse and people who are fans of Food Endeavours of the Blue Apocalypse on Facebook. As time goes by I find myself putting more and more time into this blog, it’s nice to know that something that means a lot to me is also meaningful for other people :)
Now, let’s eat some cake.
I found this picture of me which I thought was fitting for this post as it looks like I am about 2 years old and eating cake. Well I think I am eating cake, this is debatable, I will accept any reasonable conspiracy theories as to what might be on the plate.
What would a Blue Apocalypse cake look like?
What about this?
Blue Apocalypse Cake
Ingredients
(The basis of this cake is a butterscotch almond cake from Taste, I adapted it for a 20cm round cake tin)
• 185g butter, softened
• 270g self raising flour
• 165g brown sugar
• 3 eggs
• 3 tablespoons honey
• 200ml milk
• 70g almond meal
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• red and blue food colouring
Method
Preheat oven to 160°C. Line a 20cm round cake tin with greaseproof paper.
Place butter, flour, sugar, eggs, honey, milk and almond meal in a bowl. Using an electric mixer, beat on low for 1 minute or until just combined. Beat on high for 3 minutes or until mixture is pale and thick.
Then divide the cake batter among three separate bowls. Add a few drops of red food colouring into one bowl and blue food colouring into another bowl, mix until the colour is incorporated into the batter (add more food colouring is desired to get right shade of colour). Leave one bowl of batter plain.
Place alternate spoonfuls of the 3 mixtures into the prepared cake tin, tapping the base of the tin on a flat surface to settle the mixture. Use a chopstick (knife or fork) to gently swirl the batters together to create a marble effect (don’t overmix the batter). Tap the base of the pan on a flat surface to smooth the surface and eliminate any air bubbles before placing in the oven.
Bake for 45-50 minutes or until a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean. Stand cake in pan for 10 minutes. Transfer to a wire rack to cool.
A cake needs icing to complete it so I made a really simple chocolate buttercream icing. Beat 55g of softened butter until light and creamy. Then add in a cup or more of sifted icing sugar, 2-3 tablespoons of cocoa powder, 1-2 tablespoons of milk and beat until fluffy and you get desired taste and consistency.
With the icing, I wanted to create the surface of a planet, so I used a small palette knife to whack the icing on and make some rough patterns.
Is my icing job convincing for Planet X or just a hatchet icing job?
Thit Heo Kho Trung is one of my favourite home cooked dishes. What makes a dish a home cooked dish? When I eat out at Vietnamese restaurants with my parents, I would note that a lot of the dishes I love to eat and I always have at home are not on the menu. I ask my mum why [insert name of dish here] was not on the menu and she would tell me that everyone knows how to cook that dish at home, so it’s not something that people would order when they eat out. So this is how I define a home cooked dish – a dish that people often cook at home so you won’t find it in restaurants, otherwise restaurants would be competing with every mum’s recipe and you know who would win out of that right?
Thit Heo Kho Trung is one of those home cooked dishes that you will rarely find on restaurant menus but every Vietnamese family cooks it and would have their own recipe for it. I can see why Thit Heo Kho Trung would be a popular home cooked dish. My mum comes from a family of nine children and this would be a perfect one pot meat for such a big family – a large amount of pork and eggs are simmered in coconut juice, soy sauce and fish sauce, and served with bowls of rice. A really simple dish to cook that produces a delicious result with sweetness coming from the coconut juice, saltiness from the soy sauce and savouriness from the fish sauce.
When I cook a dish I am always intrigued by how other people cook it, and I will scan cookbooks and the internet for recipes to see how the way my mum cooks it compares with others. I’ve seen other ingredients added to this dish such as shallots and garlic, and other spices such as star anise or five spice. Some recipes do not use any soy sauce and only use fish sauce. Some recipes prepare a caramelized sauce made up of water and sugar first to cook the pork and eggs in. My mum’s recipe is relatively simple and uses few ingredients.
When I came across the Ravenous Couples recipe for Thi Heo Kho Trung, I saw that they had turned Thi Heo Kho Trung into a David Chang/Momofuku inspired steamed pork bun dish. It was one of those ‘damn, I wish I’d thought of that first’ moments. Encapsulating the pork inside steamed buns is a perfect way of eating this dish as the sweetness of the steamed buns complements the coconut enriched pork which has been cooked until it’s melt in your mouth tender, plus you have a tasty sticky sweet savoury sauce to go over the top of the pork, and you can add a slice of egg if desired. I haven’t eaten ‘the’ Momofuku steamed pork buns before which contains brined and roasted pork belly but I think that this could possible be better?!
Here’s my mum’s Vietnamese braised pork and eggs (Thit Heo Kho Trung) that I have turned into my own take on Momofuku inspired steamed pork buns.
I used a pressure cooker to cook the pork and included the process for cooking with a pressure cooker and a pot over the stove.
Ingredients
• 1 kg pork belly, chopped into 2-3cm cubes
• ~ 3 cups of coconut juice (from 2 young coconuts)
• 5 small red chillies, deseeded
• 6 whole hard boiled eggs, shelled
• fish sauce (2 ½ tablespoons)
• light soy sauce (1 ½ tablespoons)
• dark soy sauce (2 tablespoons)
• salt to taste
To make Momofuku style buns – buy steamed buns from Asian supermarket, cucumber and coriander.
Young coconut
I do not shy away from the layers of fat in pork belly, fat is what makes food taste good!
Method
Par-boil the pork – put the pork pieces into a pot of boiling water and simmer for 1-2 minutes until partially cooked. Rinse pork under cold running water and drain well.
Add the coconut juice, chillies and 1 ½ tablespoon of fish sauce into a pot/pressure cooker and bring to a simmer. Then add in the pieces of pork.
(1) Bring to a boil and then simmer on low heat for around an hour, stirring occassionally or pressure cook for 10 minutes.
(2) Then add in 1 ½ tablespoons of light soy sauce, 2 tablespoons dark soy sauce and 1 tablespoon fish sauce. Simmer on low heat for another hour, stirring occassionally or pressure cook for 10 minutes.
(3) Test the flavour and adjust with fish sauce or sugar if required and add in a pinch of salt to balance. Add in the hard boiled eggs and simmer for another 30-45 minutes to flavour the eggs and for the sauce to reduce.
Note: I pressure cooked this dish for a total of 20 minutes, divided into two 10 minute periods. The last step of cooking does not require pressure cooking.
I bought premade steam buns from Emma’s Seafood Asian grocery on the corner of Newcastle and William street in Northbridge. You can make them from scratch using this recipe.
To make Momofuku inspired buns – Steam buns according to packet instructions. Add in pieces of pork (slice the pork in half if too thick), a slice of egg, spoon over the egg and pork some sauce and then top with thin julienned pieces of cucumber and coriander.
You can also just eat the pork and egg with steamed rice.
