Due to the current rainy season, the Penang Waterfall Garden or Botanical Garden really lives up to its name of having a waterfall. Usually, during the dry season, the river dried up and you may wonder why it is call Waterfall Garden when you cannot find waterfall.
The water is clean (or at least it looks sparkling clean) so my hubby takes the two younger kids there for a quick dip in the evenings.
So, after the dip, we sometimes dropped by the Craft Batik factory for fresh fruit juice and roti canai.
Craft Batik has a section where you can see the skilled batik painters turn plain, white clothes into these Malaysian beauties. I am fascinated with their skills. Craft Batik is located before the main entrance of Botanical Garden.
There is an old Malay man selling roti canai outside the factory. The price is a bit more expensive than other stalls but we like his roti canai. I love the fish curry that comes with the roti canai.
I found a fruit stall just outside the Botanical Garden selling this nuts. Or is it beans? In Hokkien, we call it ‘ang moh tor tau’ or ‘mat salleh nuts’. Not sure what’s the name of it but it is not often found nowadays. Long time ago, there were lots of stalls selling the kacang kuda and this beans but lately, this type of ang mor tor tau is rare.
The roti canai man also sells this karipap. He put the karipap on his roti canai pan to heat it up and it is delicious. Crispy on the outside and the hot curry potato inside plus the sourish, pickled onions.
This site is updated with new recipes and foods every day. So, subscribe to Best Recipe RSS feed now so that you don't miss out anything. Thanks for visiting and enjoy!
My son and his KDU college mates are busy baking sponge cake and decorating them. They are first year students and going to have their exam soon. So, I snitched one small cake to try decorating it with whipped cream and give to my little boy. My eldest son uses either Baker Mix from Anchor or Lactofil whipping cream which is rather easy to whisk as they are non-diary based.
However, I thought I could achieve the same firm frosting with whipping cream, which is 35% full fat milk. My son warned me that if I over beat them, the whipping will turn into butter and milk. So, I dare not beat too much and ended up with too watery cream. Then, I pop the bowl into the freezer but it soon melted again. Doh.
However, the cream is awfully delicious and sinfully rich. I prefer it over the Lactofil as there is not ‘chemical’ smell or taste to it.
The cake looks decent in photo but is actually a mess with dripping cream.
What I found online is to use a metal bowl which is very cold. Whip the cream and icing sugar (but I had used castor instead).
Does anyone have a favourite cake decorating site? I want to learn all those cutey cupcakes frosting. I heard there are various types like sugar frosting, butter cream and etc. In our hot weather, I guess some of them are not possible to achieve, right?
Do you have a cupcake or cream cake blogpost to share? Please, please, please, I am so eager to play around with all those colourful sprinkles.
If you can read Bahasa Malaysia, do go over to Malaysiakini and read about melamine and cyanuric acid that can cause health problems when added into milk, vegetables and meat.
“Orang ramai hanya tahu tentang melamin, tiada sesiapapun bercakap tentang asid sianurik.
“Sebenarnya asid sianuriklah menjadi punca tersirat masalah keracunan makanan yang membunuh kanak-kanak di China,” kata timbalan dekan Fakulti Perubatan Universiti Malaya, Dr Mustafa Ali Mohd kepada Bernama.
According to the report, milk producers have added water to the milk and then, mask the protein content with melamine and cyanuric acid.
“Kehadiran melamin dalam susu adalah untuk menambahkan kandungan protein, tetapi hasil kajian kami menunjukkan susu turut mengandungi asid sianurik yang boleh menyebabkan sakit buah pinggang.
“Susu yang baik ada nutrien yang tinggi, apabila pengeluar susu
mencampurkkan air dalam susu semata-mata untuk mengaut keuntungan, mereka akan memasukkan melamin bagi mengimbangkan tahap nutrien agar tidak dikesan oleh pembeli.
“Penggunaan melamin ada tujuannya (menambahkan protein) tapi kami tidak faham kenapa asid sianurik dicampurkan dalam susu segar,” katanya.
According to wikipedia :
when cyanuric acid is administered together with melamine (which by itself is another low-toxicity substance), they may form extremely insoluble crystals,[10] leading to formation of kidney stones and potentially causing kidney failure and death — as evidenced in dogs and cats during the 2007 pet food contamination and in children during the 2008 Chinese milk scandal cases.
Homemade pasta is really easy to do if you have a pasta maker at home. Pasta machine is rather cheap and according to my last post dated 2005, I bought it for only RM55. The machine is still spanking new as all the steel rollers of the pasta machine does not rust. I have a recipe for egg pasta in the previous post on pasta maker and ravioli recipe.
I am using Jamie Oliver fresh egg pasta recipe and this recipe calls for 600 grams soft flour and 6 eggs. Just these two ingredients and nothing else. According to Jamie Oliver, he said to use tipo 00 flour which Jamie explained as “this is a very finely sieved flour which is normally used for making egg pasta or cakes. In Italy it’s called farina di grano tenero, which means tender or soft flour.” Previously, I used bread flour or ’strong flour’. The difference is the gluten content. Strong flour has higher gluten content while soft flour has lower. Actually, one can make pasta with either type of flour.
Anyone can make homemade pasta. Just mix the 600 grams flour with 6 eggs (or you can half the quantity) and keep kneading, punching, slapping, whacking, rolling the dough till it becomes smooth balls. It takes a lot of muscles to knead till you get a smooth dough but it is good exercise for the upper arms. To make it easier to handle, divide the dough into smaller portions.
I watched TV while doing the kneading. My 12 years old boy love to mess with dough, much like Playdoh. So, he helped as well. Incidentally, my son who was at college was learning to make fresh pasta in KDU!
Jamie Oliver recommended to wrap the smoothen balls of dough with cling wrap and keep it in the fridge for one hour. I am not sure why but he said kneading action will cause the gluten to make the pasta springy and al dente so I guess the process is to make the pasta firmer.
If there are more pairs of hands to make pasta, it is easier and more fun. My younger kids get all excited when I agree to do fresh pasta because they love the mess.
We get a big batch of fresh pasta. I made both fettucine and spaghettini. The process of getting them are :
1) Take a small ball of dough, put it through the biggest setting (no. 7) on the pasta machine.
2) You will get a flatten piece of oblong dough.
3) Reduce the thickness by 2 number, i.e. no. 7 > no. 5
4) Further make it thinner to no. 3
5) By now, you have a very long, thin strip of pasta. Use plenty of flour to keep them from sticking.
6) For fettucine, I roll it to no. 1 thinness and then, put it through the broad cutter to get fettucine.
7) For spaghettini, I use no. 2 and put it through the thin cutter.
That looks like a lot of instructions but you actually just go by feel. My 12 years old boy is an expert now.
I boil the pasta in boiling water and then, dunk them in tepid water before transferring over to the carbonara sauce I made with cream. Oooh..it is the best fettucine carbonara ever.
The cost of making a 600 grams pasta is only about RM5. I used the more expensive Omega 3 eggs as I like the orangey colour. Flour only costs about RM2.30. I think the quantity of pasta is enough for 8 adults. The taste of the pasta is really lovely as it has the eggy richness. Dried pasta do not have eggs.
So, want to try making pasta at home? Jamie Oliver said, (I know I am parroting him like he is god) in Italy, they do not even use a machine. The Italian mamas use a rolling pin to roll the dough and then, cut them finely.
Mud crabs or crabs which live in mud have menacing claws. Those claws are so strong, it may even fracture your finger if they manage to pinch you. So, don’t mess with the little crustaceans. I got a video here which shows how we kill a crab.
My hubby stabbed a chopstick right into the ‘heart’ of the crab. Poor crab, in its haste to escape death, even broke off its own claw in trying to escape from the raffia string tied to it. Actually, it is a very cruel thing to do to the poor creature. But heck, God says He created all the creatures on earth, in the water and in the air for our consumption, right? Hahaha. Moreover, it is kinder than throw the poor crabs into a pot of hot, boiling water or hot oven, no?
The video wasn’t intended for Youtube and certainly not on my blog. But since it is rather descriptive, might as well share it.
We bought live mud crabs for RM32/kg. To know if the crab is fresh, find those which stared back at you in the eyes. The baby above even hiss when we went near it.
Put them in running water and give it a good brush. Do not take off the strings used to tie them or else you will have to chase after these crabs as they can run away.
With a quick stab, the crab is dead. Before you remove the string, be sure it is really dead. Sometimes, the claws will jerk even when the crab is dead. So pitiful, right? Remove the ‘flap’ near the body, chopped off the legs and any parts that you find messy. We left the crab intact as we wanted to bake them.
Rub some butter and coarse sea salt and bake the crabs at high heat. It takes about 20 minutes to cook through.
The crab is full of roe which is the orangey eggs. All feelings of compassion for poor creatures being stabbed to death are forgotten once I tore open the shell and saviour the sweet flesh of the crab. Amen. May the poor crabs rest in peace in me. Burp.
