Pepper-Roasted Garlic & Lemon Chicken
Yup that cavity you see at the bottom of the picture is the chicken’s umm… bottom. My apologies if this offends your sensibilities =) By the time I got this dish done I really didn’t have the wherewithal to style any pictures, see. This was the last entree I served up at the same dinner where I made the ice cream slice and apple & blueberry crumble for dessert, as well as pumpkin risotto (yes I am completely obsessed with this dish) and shabu shabu beef and pork veggie rolls.
So yes I have discovered the hard way, that wielding a DSLR after 4 hours of cooking with a stained apron around the waist and over a dozen hungry onlookers does NOT make for pretty and polite pictures! Still, this recipe of Ellie’s is much too good not to share, so you will have to believe me that the deliciousness of this chicken dish far surpasses the quality of my photos.
I love that you don’t need any sauces whatsoever - the recipe calls only for some salt, pepper, a lemon and some garlic. With these simple ingredients and a little water poured into the baking dish, the chicken comes out of the oven delightfully fragrant, tender and very moist. Genius, really.
I’d like to tell you I have some of my own spin on this recipe, but it’s so simple and excellent I really don’t have anything to add to it, so I’m not going to bother printing it here. You can pick it up at Ellie’s blog. This is going to be one of my party staples fo’ sho’. (This and the vegetable rolls, which I discovered are even better with pork than with beef…)
(On a side note, cooking whole chickens is generally awesome because you can always make use of leftovers. We had some delicious chicken porridge two days later, made using a marvellous chicken stock obtained from boiling the leftover chicken carcass and meat.)
Banana Bread – Redux
Later today I’ll be attending the Singapore Blog Awards ceremony, where they will be announcing the winners for each of the ten award categories.
It’s strange to think that mrsmultitasker.com is in the running for any kind of award at all, and it reminds me what a big difference a year makes…
A year ago, when I was only four months into blogging:
Gimme Some Dim Sum
In April I chanced upon this post on Jane’s lovely blog, about a dim sum workshop in Chinatown. I left a comment on the post, and good thing for me that I did because another lady read my comment, and later emailed me to ask if I’d be interested in joining the second run of the class. I jumped at the opportunity, so that’s where I spent a fruitful three hours of my afternoon a few Saturdays ago. (Yes I went to two baking classes in June! That’s a lot!)
Chef Cooking Studio is situated at 30A Smith Street, right smack in the hustle and bustle of Chinatown. Once you’ve huffed your way up to the second storey of the little shophouse, you are greeted by a cheerful rustic pistacchio green room – green walls, green chairs. Lots of green. When I arrived, our teacher for the day, Chef Soon, had already set up and was engaged in conversation with the students who got there even earlier than I did. The school owner and former chef at the Hyatt, Chef Keong, was busying about the kitchen.
Apple Blueberry Crumble
Blueberries are in season! Ooh yes! These little fellas used to cost $5 a punnet at the supermarket, but now they’re only half their usual price. (At least, they were last week… anybody know whether my information is outdated?)
For those who aren’t so excited about blueberries, let me give you a few reasons why you heart should be a-flutter at the thought of getting your hands on a basket of this pretty little fruit:
Thankful
Thank you darling, for 730 beautiful days together. Here’s to many more…
And to my dear faithful readers who have voted for me in the SG Blog Awards, thank you so much! Tomorrow is the last day of voting, and whatever the outcome, I just wanted to say that it has been an absolute joy and I promise there will be many posts to come…
Ice Cream Slice
(Mae & Cheryl, this post is for you!)
When I was in Australia, during the same meal where I got to try some of that awesome pumpkin risotto, I also discovered the mysterious and wonderful Ice Cream Slice.
I had never heard of Ice Cream Slice before, but a bit of googling seemed to indicate that it’s an OZ thing. The mystery of the ice cream slice is that… it doesn’t consist of ice cream, and you don’t need an ice cream maker to make it. It looks like ice cream, it feels like ice cream, it tastes like ice cream, it must be…
Malted Magic
I recently got an Amazon e-mailer alerting me to Amazon’s current best-selling cookbooks, and among them was Ree Drummond’s “The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipes from an Accidental Country Girl“.
For the less blog-obsessed, Ree is a world-renowned food blogger who gave up her corporate Californian existence to move to the middle of nowhere to begin a new and very domestic life with her cattle rancher husband (hence the “accidental”). She blogs about a whole host of activities ranging from cooking to photography to gardening (each category neatly ordered with separate tabs), but of course it is the food that draws me most.
An Artisanal Afternoon
Hah. How’s that for aliteration? (What do you mean “An” doesn’t count!?)
A week ago my beautiful friend Eileen of Artisan Sweets fame kindly conducted a baking class for the ladies in our church entitled “A Midsummer’s Tea Party”. The pastries taught were indeed tea party appropriate, but they weren’t in focus so much as the techniques involved in preparing them. And that’s what this post is mainly going to be about. (For those of you hoping for recipes, sorry!!)
Momofuku Chicken & Egg
A little while back my friend Bev sent me a NY Times article (I think it was the NY times) reviewing a new cookbook by David Chang, of Momofuku fame. Subsequently I encountered heaps of references to the book on other blogs, so… a few months ago I finally bought the book, a few weeks ago I finally started reading it, and a week ago I finally started cooking from it.
I love cookbooks that go beyond providing recipes to telling a story and teaching life lessons, and this book does just that. Peter Meehan, in his colorful unmanicured way, does a brilliant job of recounting David Chang’s rise to fame, being sure to take stock of all the collateral damage caused along the way. And tucked away into the pages of the story are educational nuggets on topics like the history of ramen. Great stuff. And makes a fun coffee table book as well.
Sweet Spring
Special update: Sweet deal from Sweet Spring for Mrs Multitasker readers!
Click here to print your discount voucher today. Hurry – offer runs till 30 Jun 2010!
I know it’s summertime (not that the seasons make much sense in Singapore), but I definitely felt a little touch of spring this afternoon when I visited Sweet Spring at AMK Hub (aka 糖水春).
I received an email from them a week ago asking if I would like to go by their outlet at AMK Hub for a food tasting session. In the email they described themselves as a dessert cum dim sum café. Dessert cum dim sum! How to say no?
