Easy Side Dish- Mushroom, Garlic & Butter Rice

Just another easy peasy side dish I like to make when I'm not too lazy to make another one-pot-all-in-one dinner ;)

I normally serve this "fried rice" with a simple meat dish (that night, it was lamb chops grilled with garlic, butter and herbs), love the earthy, garlicky and buttery flavors.

Recipe
- a plate of rice (not too mushy, preferably overnight rice)
- a cup of mushroom of your choice (I used shimeji, because they're cute!)
- 2 cloves of garlic, minced
- butter, salt and pepper

Saute mushrooms and garlic in butter, add rice, season, mix well and serve.

Gosh I love one-liner recipes :D

Use Campbell Soup for Easy Baked Cheesy & Creamy Rice

I have heard about using Campbell cream soup as a "cheat" cream sauce, but have yet to try it before...yesterday.

I have to thank SC for the idea, he was the one who told me to try...more than that, he was the one who picked up the canned soup and place it in my shopping cart. I was pretty excited about this dish...and let's see what we can do with a little can of Campbell soup...


Recipe
(serves two)
- 1 can of Campbell Cream & Mushroom soup (plus half can of water and half can of milk)
- 1 chicken thigh fillet, remove skin, cut meat to bite sized chunks
- 2 chicken franks, cut into 3mm thick slices (you can replace with good quality sausage, spam, ham, or omit it and use another thigh fillet)
- 1 small clove of garlic, minced
- 1 shallot, sliced thinly (can be replaced with a quarter of onion)
- 1 cup of shimeji mushrooms (you can replace with button or straw mushrooms)
- 1 cup of mixed cubed veggie (corn, carrot and green peas)
- 1 cup of shredded cheddar & mozzarella
- 1.5 cups of cooked rice
- paprika powder, salt, black pepper, dry mixed herbs (rosemary, sage, thyme), worchestershire sauce, olive oil

Saute garlic and shallot in olive oil, add mushrooms, let cook, add chicken & franks pieces, drizzle a bit of worcestershire sauce, let cook and brown a bit, add cubed veggie, season with salt, black pepper, mixed herbs, paprika and worchestershire sauce, let everything cook. In a separate sauce pot, heat up the canned soup, add water and milk, use the same seasonings to spice up the mixture, mix well, pour the cream sauce mixture to the chicken, franks, mushrooms and veggie mix, let everything combine and cook through.

You can pour this deliciousness over rice and consume if you don't need the crusty, savoury, and melted cheese on top...but if you can handle the sin...go further.


Preheat oven to 250C, prepare a oven proof dish, place some rice on the bottom, pour the creamy mixture on top of rice, top off with cheese, generously, and bake until the cheese is golden brown. You can nuke this dish too...the cheese won't be crusty, but it will melt beautifully. YUM!

Have a look...

...and I don't think I need to say anything no more ^_*

Nasi Goreng Sambal Ijo - The Fried Rice that Screwed Up My Diet

I am sure you have heard of the term "slowly but sure". It's good for something you're hoping for, such as success or achievements, but not so great for weight gain. Hehe. Plus, weight gain is normally not exactly slowly but sure, it's more like rapid and unstoppable (at least mine is).

The last few weeks when I realized that none of my pants fit, I had a crazy idea to start an extreme dieting. Skipping meals, eating almost nothing, starving myself to stupidity and the like. How silly of me to think that I'd succeed. The first day I skipped breakfast I felt pretty happy with myself, by the time I successfully had a very minimum lunch of healthy sandwiches I was pretty smug, thinking, I could totally do this. Summer swim suits, here I come!

I went home after work planning to skip dinner and attend an exercise class. Before class, I was preparing lunch boxes for the day after. Something simple. Just putting together a spicy green chilli sauce I made previously, and leftover rice. Everything was going well as planned...

....until I tasted the
Nasi Goreng Sambal Ijo (Spicy Green Chilli Fried Rice)

...and everything went downhill from there.

Recipe
(serves 4)
- 2 cups rice, cooked, refrigerated overnight
- 1/2 lbs minced meat
- 4 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
- 1/2 onion, chopped
- 8 large green chilli, chopped
- ground cumin, ground corriander seeds, salt, pepper, sugar, fish sauce, pepper, olive oil

Saute garlic, chilli and onion in hot olive oil, add ground cumin and ground corriander seeds, add rice, mix well, season with salt, pepper, sugar, fish sauce, and serve.

It might look all simple and humble, but it is fragrant and super tasty. It kinda reminds you of eating hot steamy rice with Padang restaurant's sambel ijo. Yum!

I ravenously downed at least two meals worth of the evil fried rice (super gurihhhh) - ohhhh carb! and the only exercise I could do after that was lying on my couch clicking the remote control watching some bad TV.

So much for extreme dieting. Folks, do not try this at home (the diet, not the fried rice ^_^)

Chinese Sausages & Preserved Duck Rice - Maximum Flavors, Minimum Effort

I was contemplating posting another eating spree from my Jakarta trip, but I changed my mind, fearing that I'd piss off my fellow Indonesian bloggers living overseas, who might be missing the posted food absolutely terribly (hehe joooking!). Plus, I need to get my groove back.

If I stayed off the kitchen for too long....
- the cooking skill downgrade might cause more kitchen disasters (entertainment for some of my readers, but not so much for my patrons)
- I will have less budget for fashion, as more money will be spent on dining out (NOOOO!!! I need shoes. More shoes!)
- my pricey kitchen appliances might be depressed due to lack of activity and might need to go on some kind of therapy
- my credibility in front of sc's parents will dramatically go south
- my coworkers who normally get some free baked goods will stop helping me at work...
...and my life will effectively be ruined.

Enough exaggeration.

I didn't feel like doing anything complicated. The risk of a disastrous dish is too high, and I've never been much of a gambler. Fortunately, we received some Chinese sausages and preserved duck meat from sc's mom. Oh yeah, I could do a dish with maximum flavors and it requires minimum effort.

Chinese Sausages & Preserved Duck Rice

The red ones are the regular Chinese sausages, and the darker ones are the liver sausages. That reminds me, I should put on some sunblock when going out, or I might get as wrinkly as these sausages.

If you don't eat pork, you can opt for this preserved duck meat. Once steamed, they go tender and tasty, infusing loads of flavor into your rice.


Ingredients
(serves 4)
- 2 pcs red Chinese sausages (each piece to be cut into 3 parts)
- 2 pcs dark (liver) Chinese sausages (each piece to be cut into 3 parts)
- 1/2 piece of Chinese preserved duck breast (cut into 4 pieces)
- 200ml chicken stock
- sesame oil
- a bunch of fresh corriander (chopped)
- salt, white pepper, sugar, dark soy sauce
- 2 cups of rice
- water

Pour 2 cups of rice into rice cooker, pour chicken stock, add water up to the required level as indicated on the rice cooker, drizzle some sesame oil, add a pinch of salt, white pepper, and sugar. Wash and wipe dry pieces of sausage and preserved duck meat. Place pieces of sausages vertically into the rice, place the preserved duck meat on top of the rice, and start cooking. Once the done, pour some dark soy sauce, add freshly chopped corriander and mix well (leaving some fresh corriander for garnish).

If you don't have a rice cooker, you can do it in a regular sauce pot with a lid (a non stick one would be better), or a claypot.

The rice comes out richly flavored by the sausages and meat, smoky from the dark soy, and satiny smooth from the oil. The freshly chopped corriander added the needed freshness.

Watch out, people. I am officially back. Man, it feels good!

Foodbuzz 24, 24, 24: Flavors Stacked High: A Taste of Padang in Jakarta

It's late at night, we just landed in Jakarta, totally starved. We want loads of local tasty food and we want 'em NOW. There are plenty of places which open late, meeting the demands of the-always-hungry, Jakarta's nocturnal community. Should we go for noodles? Sate? Fried rice? Ahhh, decisions...decisions...

College days nostalgia made me crave Nasi Padang. Back then, my bad habit of going to small Nasi Padang joints, ordered loads of rice, almost no meat, shamelessly requested for an obnoxious amount of the free extras such as curry sauce, green chilli sauce, and fried shallots, ignoring the shop owner's obvious angry looks, sailed me through college with minimum food expenditure, and maximum amount of shoes. Hah!


Our local companions, your average young Jakartaners who don't really call themselves foodies, although I know they do loveeee their food and won't blink an eye seeing the huge amount of food I was about to consume (as they can pretty much eat as much as me), brought us to one of Jakarta's popular nasi Padang joints at Gajah Mada Street, Restoran Garuda. It is not exactly the same dingy Nasi Padang joint I frequented in my college days, but the food is great, the people are friendly, the place is clean (so it wouldn't scare our foreign guest, sous chef) and it opens 24 hours. Yay!


Nasi Padang, a West Sumatran cuisine, is a part of Minangkabau culture. The dishes are normally tasty and spicy (that's why we could eat a lot of rice with just a few spoonfuls of sauce. haha!), flavored with loads of ingredients and spices, such as coconut milk, chilli, turmeric, and galangal. The tasty green chilli and cassava leaves are two of my favorites, a must have for every visit.

The service staff at the restaurant were super friendly. Upon the sight of my camera, they immediately gave me really cool poses with huge smiles plastered on their happy faces. This shocked the heck outta sous chef. This kind of friendliness is really rarely found in Hong Kong.

At nasi padang joints, dishes are stacked by the window display, and they are stacked on the server's arm to be carried to your table, where they will be...well, stacked. :)


Carrying a huge stack of dishes and still manage to smile? Mas (this is how we address a young gentleman in Indonesia), you're a star!


These dishes of deliciousness are stacked on your table, and you could get whichever dish you fancy, and you will only have to pay for the dishes you ate. My eyes were on that gloriously golden pieces of fish, braised in coconut milk and spices, the spicy beef jerky, the spicy fried anchovies, and the...yes. I have no self control.


We heard many horror stories where guests of honor drank straight from the bowl of water intended for hand washing. We didn't intend to brief our foreign guest (sous chef). In fact, we told him that the bowl of water was for drinking, setting him up for a night of embarrassment. Unfortunately, sous chef was no fool. He kinda smelt something fishy when he saw the people at the next table dipping their dirty hands into the bowl. Bah!


The chickens they used in local places like this are different from the ones we find in global fast food joints such as KFC. They are significantly smaller. Small enough to evoke pity from our sous chef, who felt so sorry about eating this chicken braised in spicy coconut milk. Boy, never saw him feeling sorry gnawing at some huge breasts from KFC before!


These are ayam pop. This is a relatively new dish, which I hadn't seen in my college days. I was really skeptic when I first saw those skinless, pale chicken. How could they be any good? They look kinda sad to me. But after my first try, I was hooked. The meat was absolutely tender, juicy, and very flavorful. They are cooked in coconut juice. Wow! No wonder! The spicy red chilli sauce served on the side perfected the dish.


Here comes the tiny fried chicken. Don't be fooled by the chicken' dry, overcooked appearance. They are absolutely delicious!..and those crispy bits? Heavenly!


Nothing made nasi padang tastier than eating the food with your hands. Just the way we do it. It's an art! Always using the right hand, grab a bit of rice and any dish, with your four fingers, and use your thumb to fold and shape everything in.....


...and enjoy! We don't gnaw and bite meat off our chickens. Chicken meat is supposed to be daintily ripped of their bones gently, before being savagely shoved into our mouths. Bones and fingers are to be licked clean (...or is it just my another bad habit? Perhaps! Hehe).


Peep into all the juicy goodness inside this jumbo prawn (udang galah). The sight of this made me weak. It's every bit as tasty as it looks, and the prawn's meat was gorgeously springy, simply succulent.

There was one particular dish, which I've missed as they were sold out by the time we got there. Cow's brain cooked in coconut milk and spices! Man, I miss that creamy goodness!


I ended my tasty meal with something sweet, a tall glass of broken coconut dessert. The meat of this coconut is different from others. Deliciously smashed and delightfully broken. This kind of coconut is harder to find than the normal coconuts. I was told that there are generally just one of two of them out of a whole coconut tree.

At the end of the meal, the servers would clear the dishes which were untouched, and then he will calculate what you've consumed from the remnants of the dishes you had. As we licked some of the dishes clean, our server had difficulties concluding his crime scene investigation (thanks to Mang Hemat, who gave me this brilliant CSI idea) and had to rely on us to tell what those dishes were.

I was tempted to post the aftermath pictures, but decided otherwise as the scene might scare you.

What happens to the other dishes on our table, which weren't consumed? Will they serve those to other patrons? Had the chickens we ate been touched by others?...

...let's just say...what you don't know won't hurt you. :)

Spicy Chicken and Mussels Rice - A Rice Cooker Disaster

You won't believe how many disasters have happened in my kitchen. Disaster. Disaster. Disaster. Too many ot them! This is getting too boring, even for me. Sigh. But I feel the need to share the gospel with you guys. I MUST let you feel what I felt when I took a bite of this disastrous rice dish. MUHAHAHAHAHA!

What the heck happened?

From Raw to Mushy:
My Disastrous Spicy Chicken & Mussels Rice

It all started from one word: LAZY
If you heard any of the following phrases coming out of my mouth/appearing on my blog, they generally mean one thing:
"I don't have enough time" = lazy
"I want to create a one pot wonder" = lazy
"I want to try an easier/more innovative way to do this" = lazy

Cuting a long story short, I wanted a spicy rice dish, which include chicken and seafood of some sort (I chose mussels), and planned to dump them all into my wonderful and trustworthy rice cooker.

I prepared all of the ingredients:
- 2 chicken leg fillet, skin removed, cut into bite sized chunks
- 6 pieces of large mussels, remove from shell
- 200ml chicken stock
- 3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
- 1 onion, diced
- 2 bell peppers, remove core, remove seeds, diced
- 1 small can of tomato paste
- 1 tsp cumin
- 1 tsp ground corriander seeds
- salt, pepper, sugar, chilli powder, olive oil, water
- 2 cups of rice

Here's the method that caused the disastrous rice:
Marinate chicken pieces with a bit of salt, pepper and olive oil. Pour rice grains into rice cooker, add chicken stock and water up to the required level, add everything else, mix and press "Cook" and wait until the rice cooker beeps, which means "Your delicious dinner is ready!"

Oh....I wish!

I opened the lid of my rice cooker after the beep, and I saw a beautiful looking dish. It was gloriously red, it smelt fantastic, the chicken meat looked succulent and juicy. Then I saw the grains of rice, and I knew something's wrong. They looked RAW. I took a bite. They WERE RAW!!! Uh oh! SOS! Helppp!!!

Luckily, sous chef has been distracted by Xbox 360, that bought me some more time.

I transferred half portion to a non stick pot and continue to cook it with low heat, stirring from time to time, tears dropping into the dish and probably made it tastier. The other half was left in the rice cooker, and I pressed "Cook" once more. Let's see if any of those two methods worked....

They didn't. Although I closely supervised the one cooking in the pot, the moment the rice's done, it was all mushy. Sob, it was probably because of all the tears. The other half in the rice cooker? Ditto. Sob sob. I actually love my rice rather mushy. However, this time, it is just beyond mushy. It's super mushy. Even I, the mushy rice lover, hated it. Oh gawd!

Did I throw the dish away? Nope. We still finished it. Apart from the super mushy rice, everything else tasted fantastic. Dammit. I will find another way to cook this dish.

I should be more careful in conducting my "experiments" in the name of laziness. I am hoping for less disasters this year (as none would be impossible).

Check out my other disasters here.

Mushrooms & Chicken Fried Rice with Stir Fried Snow Pea Shoots

Help! I am having a sudden crush....on mushrooms, and it is a major one!

It's weird. I don't remember loving or even liking mushrooms when I was young(er!)...I don't remember day dreaming about it...doodling the words in fancy handwritten fonts on my note book behind my first name with a bunch of hearts and arrows, surrounded with flowers and filigri...nothing!

...and BAM! Suddenly, I started to have this overwhelming feelings towards them. I love their earthy flavor and scent, their succulent flesh...I want them, I need them, I crave them! (No, I am not pregnant, I am just fat). To me, they're like the geeks in high school who suddenly went all hot and hunky. Either they have passed their awkward puberty stage, or I was suddenly into geeks. I guess it was all me.

Anyways...to love is to let go...so I need to let my mushrooms hook up with all the other hunks I fancy (yes, I am a one big ol' slut). Who is it gonna be this time? AHA! I love mushrooms, I love fried rice....but why haven't I thought of putting them together before? They embraced each other like two long lost lovers! Hmmm, I also throw some snow pea shoots on the side, as a wingman (or a third wheel, or a light bulb, or a mosquito repellent) in this rendezvous.

Mushrooms & Chicken Fried Rice with Stir Fried Snow Pea Shoots

Recipe
The Mushroom & Chicken Fried Rice (Low Iodine)
- 2 cups of rice, cooked, cooled and rest in the fridge for a few hours
- 2 cups of assorted mushrooms, roughly chopped (I used straw mushrooms, oyster mushrooms and seafood mushrooms)
- 2 chicken breasts, whacked flat, chopped into around 1x1 cm cubes, marinate with 1 tbsp corn starch, sesame oil, salt, sugar, black pepper, cumin
- 5 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
- 5 cloves of shallot, thinly sliced (or you can replace with 1 onion)
- 1 sprig of spring onion, thinly sliced
- 3 red chillies, thinly sliced
- salt (non iodized), black pepper, sugar, ground cumin, ground ginger, olive oil (for non low iodine dieters, you can replace the seasonings with soy sauce, fish sauce, and oyster sauce. My oh my! I miss them so)

Saute garlic, shallot and chilli until fragrant, add chicken cubes, add mushrooms, add rice bit by bit, give it a stir, season with salt, black pepper, sugar, ground cumin, and ground ginger, add spring onion, stir about, serve hot.

The Stir Fried Snow Pea Shoots

- 1/2 lb snow pea shoots (dao miu)
- 4 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
- 1 cm ginger, crushed
- salt (non iodized), white pepper, sugar, olive oil
Saute aromatics in hot oil, add snow pea shoots, cover and cook until wilted, season (you can use shrimp paste, fermented beancurd paste, miso, etc if you are not on low iodine diet), sprinkle some fried garlic if you want, and serve.

I am not done loving mushrooms...I will continue to hook 'em up with my other favorites. At Rita's hood, it's all love and it's allll...goood! ^_*

Mochachocolatarita's Fried Rice Extravaganza
Omelette Sushi - Teriyaki Beef Fried Rice


Indonesian Fried Rice


Japanese Roasted Eel Fried Rice


Miso Fried Rice


Red and White Fried Rice - Nasi Goreng Merah Putih

My Manila Food Adventure - The Mother of All Sore Throats

(Written by Suzette Mendoza, some pictures by Peewee Consul)

- Day 2 Lunch -
Libingan ng mga Bayani (Resting Place for Heroes)

Hotdog sandwich - An ordinary hotdog on a bun with ketchup and mayo, with red iced tea. But, hey! It's not the sandwich that counts this time- it's the view!!! And what a view it was - serene park, with well maintained lawns, well interiored trees and foliage, well aligned white marble crosses in rolling hills, the charming chapel of everlarting flowers in mosaic, the sound of the chime music every half hour, the chirping of the birds, the kiss of the gentle wind, the marble wall memorial with etched names of soldiers, the battle mosaic maps, the feel of the dewed grass underneath my feet, the view of mountains, houses, structures from yonder -

The lone hotdog becomes special with memories of heroes permeating around





- Day 2 Dinner -
Bowling at Megamall

Adobo chicken and pork with garlic rice and fried egg

I loveee how they serve fried eggs with almost anything! Hehe

and oh, the crunchy Chicharon Bulaklak

Pig intestines, boiled in spices, then deep fried til very crunchy- the boiled intestines coil in the shape of flower petals while being fried, thus the name bulaklak (filipino word for flower)

I also called these bad boys "the mother of all sore throats" :p

Its not the food again this time - but the joy, (and shame) of playing a game called bowling

Jessie and Alex feigning romance...the sweet hand holding and gazing into each other's eyes...I was jealous!


We were a bunch of proud beginners.

So what if we broke a nail or two? So what if our right thumb and arm were sore? So what if we were scoring with much help from the bouncing of the ball from the gutter protectors? We still had fun. We had a few strikes and spares now and then, we had the chance to show a few dance steps, we totally reversed the definition of a perfect throw, we totally let our imagination ran wild with the bowling balls and we totally learned that bowling is not for us. (LOL)

But hey, I think we should play again :)

Jakarta, My City of Sloth

Sloth?!!!! Gluttony, you can imagine...the city is full of deliciousness. Greed? Of course! It is a culinary hub of Indonesian treats, for freak's sake. But sloth??!!

Nasi Goreng Tek Tek (Indonesian fried rice from a street cart vendor)


Bihun Kuah Tek Tek (Wet Rice Noodles from a street cart vendor)


Martabak Asin (Fried Pancake filled with mutton and spring onion)

In Hong Kong, which is already the city of convenience, I don't consider myself as a lazy creature. Fine. I might take short cuts all the time, but I do put in some effort to get some tasty treats. In Jakarta, it's a whole different ball game. In Jakarta, namely my sister's place, you can get almost ANYTHING (including those you can't think of) delivered to your doorstep. The above and below tasty treats were all ordered, either via phone or even SMS (That's how we ordered the nasi goreng tek tek!!! How sophisticated is that?!!!) and we enjoyed them while hardly moving our azz from the couch, watching various drama series from reality TV, chick flick, to horror....while bitching about the characters in the shows and shouting unhelpful advice. LOL!

Mie Ayam Pangsit & Pangsit Goreng Aries (Indonesian Chewy Chicken Noodle with wontons and fried wontons)


Mie Ayam LCK (Indonesian Chicken Noodles). This one is super tasty, with a hint of sweet and sour



Stir Fried Kale with Sliced Beef with Brown Rice


Asem-Asem Daging with Krupuk & Perkedel Kentang (Sour Meat Soup with Cracker and Fried Potato Cake)


Nasi Padang with Gulai Otak, Sayur Nangka, Perkedel & Sambal Ijo (Padang Mixed Rice with Cow's Brain Stew, Jackfruit stew, Potato Cake & Spicy Green Chilli)


Ayam Goreng Mentega (Indonesian Chinese Fried Chicken in Salty & Sweet Butter Sauce)


and to honor the month of Ramadhan. We ordered this rich, sweet and fragrant Kolak Pisang (Banana stewed in Palm Sugar & Coconut Milk)

Yummy treats aren't the only things you can order. 24 hr junk food fix? Mineral water? Groceries? Laundry? 24 hr Massage? They are all just a phone call (or an SMS) away! You can literally live as a couch potato.

The solution to fit into your skinny jeans after such a sinful trip isn't dieting or exercising, but simply buying yourself another (bigger) pair. Just like I did ^_*