A Better Butter

You may be wondering why you have not heard from me in such a long time (or you may not) and the answer is: Cheese! I’ve been making it and it takes time, especially if you are making butter and sausages as well. It’s all this churning, curdling, pressing and stuffing that gets into the

How to Fry Fish

A good restaurant should serve you a beautifully fried fillet of fish with crisp, golden skin and mouthwateringly juicy flesh. It should be so delicious just on its own that you hesitate before you add any of the accompanying sauces or vegetables to your fork. Frying a fillet of fish is not actually very difficult,

Quetschefluert – Luxembourg Plum Tart

I have been fiddling with my tart base dough for a few months now and I think I have at last got what I want. I have the good old high end French recipe and the easy to roll Luxembourg one, but then the other day, I got the measurement for the sugar very wrong

Brown Butter, Sage & Cheese Omelette

The star in this recipe is not the cheese, but the sage and brown butter. Looking at the picture of my omelette, you might think it will be far too oily, but trust me, it’s not. This is another post in “The Runny Egg” Series, so our omlette will obviously be of the runny sort.

Le Quatre Quarts

The four quarter cake is the most simple of all cakes and almost every other cake is a variation on these ingredients and proportions. Quatre Quarts (ka-tre kar) is French for four quarters, i.e. a quarter kilo butter, a quarter kilo sugar, a quarter kilo flour and four eggs. I couldn’t figure out why four

Homemade Pork Lard

Why make your own lard? Because the commercially available one here in Malaysia is mostly terrible and expensive and you don’t get all that wonderful crackling with it either! Our prime objective is to make lard to cook with, but a very welcome by-product is obviously the just mentioned pork crackling. I like to leave

Not a Japanese Potato Salad

I thought I had to point this out. Possibly because the only potato salad one is likely to order in any restaurant here in KL is a Potato Salada, which really is more like mashed potatoes with Japanese Kewpie mayo thrown in for good measure. Don’t get me wrong; Japanese potato salad is a very

Mayonnaise

The very first thing you need to do is to throw that jar of mayonnaise away. Yeah, it’s not bad, but it doesn’t taste anything like a real mayonnaise. I have never understood why anyone would buy mayo in a jar, when it can be made in 5 minutes with a few ingredients most people

A Simple Tomato Sauce

There is no such thing as a “real” Italian tomato sauce. Unless you define it as any tomato sauce made in Italy or by Italians, which of course means that I don’t stand a chance in hell. I find all this emphasis on something being “real” mostly a waste of time and space. It is

A Good Egg

How to Fry an Egg One of the great pleasures in life is a properly runny egg for breakfast, at least in my books. Whether poached, boiled, fried or scrambled, I like them all as long as they are runny. Apologies to those of you who like their eggs firm – I’ll never understand you