Lemon & Tomato Snapper

Allow me to introduce you to the fastest (20 minutes, no joke), easiest, most forgiving, fancy-looking weeknight meal. Ever. In the last 45 minutes I:
-Arrived home
-Said hi to Nugget (most time-intensive item on this list) and Isaiah
-Changed out of my work clothes, washed my hands
-Made this meal
-Ate it
-Cleaned the kitchen
-Made tea and ate one (okay fine, two) pieces of chocolate
-Sat down to write this post

I got the inspiration for this fish from a recipe a friend posted on Facebook a long time ago. Now, the awkward thing is I don’t remember who that friend was or which chef the original recipe belongs to, so I can’t credit either my friend or the original recipe. I tried googling “tomato lemon garlic fish” but I couldn’t find what I remember of the original recipe. All this to say, disclaimer: this may or may not be an accidentally stolen recipe.

Carrot Ginger Soup

Does anyone remember that episode of The Magic School bus when Arnold turned orange and no one could figure out why until they realised that he had eaten too many Sea Weedies with beta carotene? Eating this soup always reminds me of that, because it’s 99% carrots and not much else. When I was a kid, turning orange seemed pretty cool. Now, I associate orange with someone extremely unpleasant and would like to avoid that as much as possible.

All that to say, this soup is light, fresh, gingery and nothing at all like Mr Trump, but beware of eating too much of it.

Wild Salmon Burgers

Growing up in Seattle, I was spoiled with an abundance of gorgeous, high-quality, sustainable Alaskan salmon. Sockeye is my favorite. I never tasted farmed or Atlantic salmon until college, and to this day the creamy, fatty flesh of farmed salmon still puts me off. Not to mention the environmental and health hazards of farmed salmon (I’ll get into that another day). Unfortunately, finding wild salmon at a reasonable price in Singapore is no easy feat. I’ve tried to devise many ways of importing salmon myself – purchasing sockeye fillets in Seattle, freezing them in vacuum-packed bags packed with dry ice, and checking them in on our flights back to Singapore – but it all just seemed like too much work and too risky given there are no direct flights between Singapore and Seattle.

Last June when we were at my favorite place on earth (aka Costco), I saw a package of canned wild salmon and threw it into my shopping cart on a whim (this happens a lot at Costco). The cans flew 8,000 miles back with us and sat in my pantry in Singapore for months until I had a moment of genius and made these burgers.

Not to toot my own horn, but these burgers are amazing. I guarantee they are better than any salmon burger you’ve had at a restaurant (which is actually a pretty low bar – why are restaurant salmon burgers universally awful?). And they are the perfect lazy weeknight meal as the patties only take about 10 minutes to come together and under 10 to cook. That’s my kind of meal! In celebration, I’ve started a new tag called “30 minute meals” which, as the name suggests, are meals that take 30 or fewer minutes to come together.

Shall we get started?

Korean Seafood Pancake (Haemul Pajeon)

My friend Anna came over two Saturdays ago to teach me how to make Korean seafood pancakes – my favorite Korean dish. The idea was for her to teach me how to make them, since she’s Korean, so when she arrived I let her take the lead. But I’m incapable of fully trusting others in the kitchen so inside I was thinking this as I watched her-

Doesn’t the batter look too thick?
Why are you cutting the spring onions so small?
Shouldn’t we add more peppers?

But possibly for the first time in my life, I managed to hold my tongue.

The result was perfect, yet for some absurd reason (re: trust issues) I still felt like I should try it with my amendments. So later that week I made Korean pancakes again, the way I thought they should be made based on zero evidence or experience, and…

They were terrible!!!

The moral of the story is: when making Korean food, listen to your Korean friend.

Vegetarian Bolognese

Before I stopped eating meat, spaghetti bolognese was a weekly staple in our house. Once I stopped eating meat, I stopped making bolognese. Sorry if that last sentence was obvious.

I never intended to make a vegetarian copy-cat of bolognese because I don’t believe in being vegetarian if all you want to do is eat non-meat things that taste just like meat.

So why this vegetarian bolognese? It was entirely the result of Isaiah, who was leafing through one of my vegetarian cookbooks out of some vague curiosity and stopped at a photo of vegetarian bolognese, declaring, “GOOD!” That was his not-so-subtle way of saying, ‘this vegetarian deal is nice and all for you but why am I being punished and deprived of bolognese after being nothing but a kind, patient, and supportive husband?’. Isaiah is all of those things and more, so I came up with this recipe out of the goodness of my heart. It is an adaption of this recipe with many amendments because following instructions is not my forte.

This vegetarian bolognese is savoury, deep, and complex. No, it does not taste like beef. It tastes better. You willl shovel it into your mouth. If you have kids in the house who refuse to touch vegetables even with a ten foot pole, make this. They won’t even know there are vegetables in it.

Kale, Broccolini & Caramelized Onion Pizza

PIZZA!

I could eat pizza everyday. Sometimes I eat so much pizza that I make myself sick. Something about that ooey-gooey-melty-cheesy topping over a soft-chewy-crispy crust just makes my life.

In this post I will show you how to:
1) Make pizza dough from scratch – it’s easy
2) Make pizza sauce from scratch – a child could do it
3) Bake a crispy-crust pizza without a gajillion pound baking stone in my small, uneven Singaporean fail oven/microwave

Thai Red Curry

Otherwise known as Ang Mo Thai Red Curry.
Otherwise known as NOT authentic Thai Red Curry.
Otherwise known as All The Veggies in Your Fridge Curry.

Once upon a time I lived in rural Thailand with an amazing host family and taught English at a local public school. I learned a bit of Thai, ate a lot of Thai food, and got bitten by approximately ten thousand mosquitoes.

Some things I learned:
1) Thai kids are the stinkin cutest
2) Papaya salad (my favorite food in the whole entire world) is most delicious when it is pounded in a mortar and pestle attached to a moto at the side of a dirt road with so many chillis it makes you cry tears of happiness and pain
3) Thai food in rural Thailand is very different from Thai food at a Thai restaurant in Seattle

Now, I won’t get into what is authentic and what isn’t authentic, because firstly, I have no idea, and secondly, people can cook whatever they want however they’d like. But this recipe includes two spoonfuls of peanut butter (trust me on this one), which I am 99.9999% positive they do not do in Thailand OR in Thai restaurants around the world, and an absurd amount of vegetables that don’t even grow in Thailand.

Hence the name: Ang Mo Thai Red Curry.

Here’s how you make it.

Tajarin: Egg Yolk Pasta (with Tomato Sauce)

Last month, Isaiah and I spent 2 days in the Barolo wine region of northwest Italy. We stayed a gorgeous little hotel called La Villa and drank so much wine that I couldn’t really even look at wine when we returned to Singapore. There were a lot of favorites on this trip – amazing food, wine, sun-drenched vineyards, wine, total quiet – but my favorite part was a private cooking class we took with the head chef at La Villa. Isaiah joined mostly to humor me, but turned all eyes and ears when he heard we were making homemade pasta. Pasta is his absolute favorite food. The very next day, we went to a market in Beaulieu-sur-Mer and purchased a pasta machine.

I’ll start off by saying that I am in no way a pasta expert, but I learned that pasta is a very regional dish and there are many variations to how you make it depending on what part of Italy you’re from. In Piedmont, they make a very egg-yolk heavy pasta called tajarin. That scored a lot of bonus points from Isaiah, who has for years been trying to convince me for that pasta is ‘healthy’.

Sure. You guys can decide for yourself.

The accompanying sauce starts with a huge amount of good quality extra virgin olive oil (luckily evoo is good for you, right? Kind of in the same way pasta is). In goes minced garlic and shallots (or onions) cooked on low for 10-15 minutes, before jarred passata and peeled whole tomatoes are added. Salt, sugar. Simmer for as long as you have time for. That’s it. It sounds simple, and it is, but the flavour is rich and complex, so good you would have never guessed it was only 5 ingredients. Make this basic tomato sauce, coupled with tajarin, your Saturday night staple.

Measure 250g of flour onto your work bench and create a well in the middle. Separate the egg yolks from the whites (save the whites for an egg white omelette or scramble) and add the yolks + 1 whole egg to the well. If you buy high quality, cage-free eggs (I buy freedom eggs from Cold Storage), the yolks will be a gorgeous deep orange, and the eventual colour of your pasta will be much deeper.

Pull flour into the egg mixture (this part will get messy but don’t worry – it will quickly come together) until you get a messy dryish ‘ball’ of dough that barely holds together. Stop adding flour at this point. Knead the dough for 5-10 minutes. The dough will be tough so if you’re a weakling like me, you may want to recruit assistance from your buff husband for this part. If you don’t have a buff husband, don’t despair. Just throw your entire body weight against the dough as many times as you can until your arms turn to jelly and then give up. So long as your end result looks somewhat like the ball of dough on the rightmost picture above, you’ll be fine. This pasta is very forgiving (aaand all pasta experts around the world roll in their graves. Hey, I started this post by saying I am in no way a pasta expert! The end result is good enough for plebeian me).

Cover the dough with saran wrap and pop it in the fridge for at least 15 minutes.

When ready, remove the dough from the fridge and divide into 4 pieces. Flour your work surface. Assemble and secure your pasta machine. Flatten the first piece of dough with your palm and run it through the widest setting. Keep on going until you get to the narrowest setting, running the dough through 2-3 times at each setting. Once you’ve got a thin sheet of pasta, cut it in half with a knife and run the half sheet through your spaghetti cutter. Lightly flour the strands, place on a tea towel, cover to keep from drying, and repeat with the remaining 3 balls of dough.

(If you don’t have a pasta maker, go buy one. We got ours for 20 euros. Theoretically you could roll the dough out and cut by hand, but I feel like that would take a lot of effort.)

Keep going until you get four gorgeous piles of homemade pasta. A serious work of art. I could look at this photo all day. Beautiful.

At this point you just chuck the pasta into boiling salted water, let it cook for 3-5 minutes, fish it out, and serve it however you’d like.

Moving onto the only tomato sauce recipe you’ll ever need to know, because it is seriously that delicious.

Here’s the ingredients: passata, EVOO, whole peeled tomatoes, shallots, and garlic (+ salt and sugar, not pictured). Passata is an unseasoned Italian tomato puree that you can find on the bottom shelf of the tinned tomato section of Cold Storage.

Finely mince the shallots and garlic.

In a heavy pan (I’m using enameled cast iron), heat 1/2 cup of extra virgin olive oil and add the onions and garlic. Your house will soon smell delicious. Cook on low for 5-10 minutes until the garlic and onion is golden, add the passata, chopped whole tomatoes, sugar and salt. Stir to combine as best as you can – at first the oil will be stubborn and refuse to marry the tomato sauce. But like any relationship, patience and persistence will win out and the oil and tomato sauce will combine to create one whole that is greater than the sum of its two halves.

Continue to cook on low for as long as you have the patience for. The longer you cook the sauce, the richer, thicker, and more delicious it will get.

Here’s the printable recipe.

Fish Tacos with Red Cabbage Slaw

Crispy pan-fried snapper, tangy slaw, homemade corn tortillas. Could anything be better on a sunny day? Luckily (or maybe not so lucky) for us, it’s always warm and sunny in Singapore, so every day is a good day for fish tacos.

Have you ever wondered why red cabbage is called red when it’s actually purple? I have wondered this often, and I don’t have an answer. It’s one of those mysteries of life you’ll have to ask Jesus when you get to heaven.

Homemade flour and corn tortillas (recipe to come) are so worth it. I used to be intimidated by grains. Besides rice or quinoa in a rice cooker, I never tried making tortillas or bread until fairly recently. Then I realised how simple and how much tastier (and cheaper) they are if you make them at home. I haven’t bought bread or tortillas since.

Enjoy this recipe. It’s a favorite of ours.

-2Ns