Roasted Onions stuffed with masala quinoa, amaranth and caramelized Brussel sprouts

I am going through a period when I just do not feel the sparks sparkle. New dishes may come out and find their way to paper but they stop there, there is no drive into cooking them or is it perhaps the photo shoot that somehow scares me?
To create compelling pictures you need a driving idea, a theme that is going to diffuse into your pictures. Most of my works so far have been concentrated in shooting the bare food, isolating it rather than making it part of an organic context.
Treating the plated food as a sculpture, an object of beauty with its own right to shine has always attracted me but now it doesn't seem to be enough.

Sweet, Sweet Awards

Sugar; we all know this fella, don't we?
A mysterious substance able to give us pleasure; not guilt free unfortunately.
Coming in all the shades of brown, tawny to sparkling white we are used to sprinkle it on many of our food items to enhance their flavors. Present in many natural products it represents the way nature is able to store easily accessible energies; it won't come to any surprise then that it is made of just about the most abundant chemical elements present on Earth: Carbon, Oxygen and Hydrogen.
Since few years we have been coming accustomed to choose among different varieties of sugars. Being them of natural origins or artificial, the main reason driving research in this field is the delivery of guilt-free low caloric substitutes for saccharose.

If from one side we restrict our kids' sugar intake, we as society have been over-exposed to sweetness for the last century or so; the result is a sort of dependency on this chemical.
"A spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down!" sang Mary Poppins to the whining kids and that's what we tell to ourselves often and again.

Fragrant Almond Laksa with noodles, fresh herbs, Oriental garden crispy prawns and southern Italian Har Gao dumplings

Another month is passed and the Velveteers are back! This time was Pam who threw down the gauntlet challenging us on making Laksa.
I might say that this came quite at the right moment, when the increasing cold weather makes our bodies crave for warm soups. Laksa is indeed a satisfying and aromatic soup typically done in Singapore. As consequence to its origins, this doesn't really say it all. Singapore is quite a vibrant, multi-ethnic and voracious city. Its citizens, spanning the whole Asian nationalities and not only, can delight themselves on hundreds of food establishments able to answer that midnight crave for Dim Sum or to fill the emptiness left by a disappointing day. Singaporean cuisine is then a happy fusion of influences contextualised to the local produces. Fish and crustaceans are paramount among the available on high quality standard ingredients hence all the various typical way to cook and enjoy it, Chilli Crab the most famous.
Laksa is a way to enjoy more humble fishes along with the products of land.

Working around Rice Noodles

Since when I decided to avoid wheat, I started experimenting with rice noodles.

What is great about them? They do not need to "cook" just soak in warm water and since they do not leek much starch, they do not clump together if soaked in a tight environment (see glue like pasta in this same condition) you can directly soak them in their sauce!

Recently the guys from the blog Ideas in Food (aka Chef Aki Kamozawa and Chef Alexander Talbot) have translated this soaking method also to wheat pasta.
Their point of view is that, when you cook pasta you are just re-hydrating it and swelling the starch granules. Now, the hydration part does not need heat so it is possible to soak dried wheat pasta in a cold solution (for some hours actually) before cooking its starches (once soaked the cooking will take a matter of few minutes).
From here, the great new versatility of the pasta medium.

Here there are a couple of my experiments (one has already been posted extensively):

- Rice noodles in clove scented oriental soup with chicken, fava beans and peas (read past post);

It’s ShowTime!

The show went on yesterday night. Starting 4pm the ponytail was in place, the hat was on and the apron wrapped around me (do you get the tacos look?). Part of the shopping was delegated to a friend of mine (also guest for the dinner) that kindly performed it with success (only the mint was missing, no big deal compared to my forgiveness of the precision scale and small pots at home).
All started from the cookie dough: butter and brown sugar creamed together, egg in, then the roasted sesame seeds, oatmeal and flour. Once the sweet sausage was shaped, it was time to let it firm up in the fridge.
Time to prep the carrots! After peeling them (with a lefty-peeler) they were cut in a bias in chunks and braised in some butter and brown sugar.
By then it was the good time to move to the canapés and appetizers (did I tell you already that I was preparing a 4 courses dinner? actually 5...). The kalamata olives caviare was the next one on the list. Oh man, isn’t pitting a boring job?? But you get so much more taste! So pitted kalamata and fresh thyme leaves ended their journey under the blade on my sharp knife RIP.
The cookies were then ready to be shaped and baked.
To continue with the appetizer, the next ones on the list were the chocolate-cilantro rolls. So cut the big sheet of the bric dough, brush them with butter and fill them up with fresh cilantro, chocolate, red chillies and mascarpone. Roll them up brushing them with a bit more butter and voilà!
Second on the line of the appetizers were the salmon pouches. This time I needed rice paper. After having moistened it a bit (it comes in brittle hard round sheets) they were filled with diced salmon fillets, some red currants berries, mascarpone cheese and a pinch of Melange Noir from Ingo Holland. All is ready for the oven!
Once all the guests were arrived, I served the cocktails canapé: Sesame-Oatmeal Cookie with Kalamata Caviare and Strawberry.

 

Time to start putting together the main course.