Food In The Time Of COVID-19

Miss K has been super stressed and busy recently so when I saw Su young-sshi's honey mayo tteokbokki, I knew it will be sure to cheer her up. You know you have reached the crowning glory of your short, brief and uninspiring culinary career when Miss K says that your tteokbokki is better than anything store bought and she will have it any other day.

@suyoung_ryu is my favourite celebrity chef on @funstaurant_kbs as his recipes are so easy to follow and makes use of simple everyday ingredients. He is also super funny and inspires me to cook for Miss K more often in the future.

Tteokbokki is a relatively simple dish but you need to put in some extra effort to elevate it to the next level. In his recipe, Chef Ryu recommends that you cook the spring onions, the tteok, the cocktail sausages and prawns separately so that they will be perfect taste-wise on their own and even better together. He also recommends that the oil from the spring onion be used to give the dish the extra oomph and aromatic notes.

To prepare the crabstick garnish, I had to shred crab sticks into strips before deep-frying them for the extra bit of crunch to contrast with the soft chewy tteok.

Last but not least, Chef Ryu recommends finishing the dish with a honey-mayonnaise sauce which can be used as a dip or drizzled over the dish. This, for me, is the key to this dish.

It is not doing my waistline no good but this rich, creamy concoction balanced the slightly salty and spicy gochujang sauce (which is usually used for tteokboki) and is just perfect for this dish.

The essence of Chef Ryu's dish is his use of contrasting textures (the crispy deep fried crabstick and the soft chewy tteok) and flavours (the salty and spicy gochujang and the sweet rich creamy honey mayo sauces) that elevates this dish to the next level.

어남선생, 고맙습니다. We really loved your tteokbokki!

The key to a good plate of char kway teow is imho wokhei.

You can elevate a plate of ckt with the use of fancy ingredients such as crayfish, tiger prawns or iberico pork lard. But it is undoubtedly wokhei which binds together the myriad of flavours in this humble yet complex dish.

Miss K and I were hosted to a ckt lunch recently by one of her Malaysian friends. Maybe I should try my hand at this too one day!

We decided to try something new when we spotted some razor clams on sale a couple of weeks ago at the @songfishsg at Northpoint.

I am not too sure what is the difference between razor clams and bamboo clams but the best way to eat them is of course steamed with sauteed garlic and soy sauce. Work in progress as the mother figures out how long they should be left in the steamer but still yums!

Cooking a steak is never easy because you can't really see what's going on inside. That's why @anovaculinary makes life easy for noobcooks like me by making it so easy to achieve the red-pink medium rare consistency in our steaks.

I will usually finish the steak off in a pan. But a grill torch will work just as well except that the caramelised layer tends to be a lot thinner.

Last but not least, the steak is paired with some pommes aligot. In terms of flavours, it was great (seasoning the water with garlic works wonders!) but I didn't manage to get the stretch factor even though I added loads of mozzarella cheese. Anybody has any idea on what cheese can be used?

I mentioned to a friend previously that we are big fans of Hiap Joo Bakery's banana cake which is located across the causeway. She kindly baked us one to sate our craving.

We like how her banana cake has a firm and dense texture and moist. The best way to have it is to toast it a little so that the crust is crunchy and the cake warm and with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on the side. Total bliss.

Overly Cheezy is a newly opened heartland pizzeria which specialises in Japanese-Italian fusion pizzas.

You can therefore expect pizzas such as the Nerve-wrecking wasabi ocean pizza and the Hokkaido Teri-chiki pizza. At $33 for 2 large pizzas, it is good value though it would have been more enjoyable with a little more ingredients.

What makes their handmade thin crust pizza unique is their 5-cheese recipe compose of gruyere, mozeralla, emmental, parmesan orange and cheddar. I am no cheese connoisseur but I do enjoy them. It is definitely not Overly Cheezy as their pizzas are savoury without being too rich.

You can hear the collective dismay when @mcdsg was shut down island-wide over the circuit-breaker.

There was one man who stood up for McFans in Singapore and made it his personal crusade to find similar replacements. The ricecookerman as he is known, discovered a brand of nuggets which is "98% similar" in terms of smell, taste and shape. He also sent on to discover suitable replacements for fries and chicken sausage patties.

Though he was unable to find a suitable replacement for Fillet-o-Fish, he did say that AA fish patty tasted good. I decided to let my own tastebuds decide.

It is no Fillet-o-Fish for sure in terms of taste and kinda on the small side. I like that real juicy and succulent fish was used but like many other fans I think a cod fish fillet will be closer to the fabled Fillet-o-Fish!

The eagle-eyed Mother managed to snag a bargain from the seafood stall at out wet market recently as they were trying to clear their crabs before closing time.

We therefore got to enjoy chilli crabs using the paste from @primataste. It is really awesome on its own, over rice or with some deep fried mantous. Miss K really enjoyed the treat!

Galbi-jjim is one of the less heralded dish in Korean cuisine and one of my favourite. It is traditionally eaten during chuseok. It is regarded as an atas (or high class) dish as it is usually made from the centre part of ribs from a calf and therefore more expensive than other cuts of beef in Korea.

It is not a common dish in most Korean restaurants in Singapore so we decided to try making our own. The beef short ribs is also not available in most markets and supermarkets so I had to make a trip to Tekka Market. The short ribs have to be marinated for 24 hours (or at least overnight) in a fruit-based marinade to ensure that it is soft, tender and fall off the bone good.

The marinated short ribs is then cooked in the marinade with potatoes, carrots and mushrooms. The gravy is awesome paired with rice and the beef is just melt in the mouth goodness.

It is a tedious dish to make but you can always make more and keep a portion for later in the week! I think it may be time for me to invest in a pressure cooker haha.

We bought some dangmyeon (당면 or sweet potato noodles) recently from @ask.frozenco recently and decided to try making a less heralded Korean dish called Jjimdak.

Jjimdak (찜닭) literally means "steamed chicken" in Korean. The most famous variant is the Andong Jjimdak which is made with chicken and various vegetables marinated in a ganjang (Korean soya bean sauce) based sauce.

It is a popular dish amongst students and office workers because it is relatively cheap in Korea and highly nutritious dish due to the high protein content from the chicken, and various vitamins provided by the vegetables in the dish. Depending on the vegetables and ingredients used, you get a slightly different jjimdak each time round but most jjimdak are sweet and savoury from the natural sweetness of the vegetables and the salt from the ganjang.

Jjimdak is a great dish with dangmyeon which soaks up the braising sauce. If you are still hungry, the leftover sauce is also perfect over rice as well.

Jjimdak is a really simple dish and I highly recommend you check it out at home too!

Inspired by Fun-staurant's @fuxtom & @leeyuri007, I decided to get my hands dirty and make us some manbosha (or 面包虾).

Smashing and mincing prawns is rather therapeutic. The minced prawns is then mixed with minced pork, diced shitake mushrooms and green chilli to make it more flavourful and give it a mild spicy kick. An egg yolk is finally added to bind the mixture together.

The prawn filling is squeezed into a ball and placed between two quarters of sliced bread. It is then deep fried golden brown.

I love that the prawn-based filling is sweet, juicy and tender. There is a nice contrast in texture with the crispy airy bread.

We enjoyed this immensely. Its such a simple recipe and yet so tasty!

The ohmygawd steak (aka the tomahawk steak).