Tomato Soup

I have been struggling to continue my project to find natural food colouring as in this post. I was probably focused to much in cakes, while food colouring is actually can be used in many type of food, like soups.

Last night was the second time I cooked tomato soup. I found the simplest and easiest recipe here and got idea of how to make the tomato soup looks naturally red. Unfortunately I forgot from which site was the idea came from. I will re-post again if I could find it.
Update: I found the site again! Here it is, give it a visit: homecooksrecipe.com

Wouldn't it wonderful if you can have good RED tomato soup? If we use canned tomato paste or sauce, you might will get that hot red colour. However, I want to cook as close as natural food, and canned tomato could probably has artificial food colouring, right?

So, here is the key; Beet Root. Just a slice of beet root, and everything is good. I used about the size of ice cream's scoop or maybe two tablespoon of beet.

I did used one tablespoon of tomato paste to follow the original recipe. One tablespoon did not really change the colour to red. Beet root does. You can use any tomato soup recipe and put a slice beet root to it make natural red.

By the way, I looooove this soup because it means I could continue the natural colouring project. Beet root officially a natural food colouring! I'll update the natural colouring post right now.

So, here is the recipe that I made.

Tomato Soup

Ingredients:
1kg ripe tomatoes
1 medium onion
1 small carrot
1 celery stick
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tablespoon of tomato purée
a slice of beet root
a good pinch of sugar
2 bay leaves
some ground black pepper (I use black and white pepper)
1.2 litres hot stock (I just made it from water and a piece of chicken :p)

Directions:
- Dice all of the vegetables including the onion.
- Heat up oil on the pan.
- Throw in the diced onion, carrot and celery stick. Stir until soften.
- Put in the tomato purée, stir well.
- Get the diced tomatoes in the pan, stir again.
- Season it with salt, sugar, black pepper and bay leaves.
- Let it cook for a while until the tomatoes a bit shrink.
- Pour in the stock, but save a bit to help blend the beet root in blender.
- Put the lid on and stir occasionally until they are soft and juicy.
- Take the lid off and fish out the bay leaves.
- I waited a little bit more to let the vegetables a bit cooler.
- Meanwhile, blend the beet root and a bit of stock until smooth.
- Pour in cooked tomato into blended beet root and blend altogether until smooth.
- Put it back to the pan and you can taste it and add more seasoning if necessary.

My New-Old Kitchen

Hi there,
sorry for loooooong un-posting this blog. In my Facebook I did mention that my little family and I just moved to our new rental home. I hope it could be a good excuse, ha ha! Okay, that's just one part of the excuses, other part is just lazy, and the other part is just there are other things I prefer to do rather than blogging. Sorry.

We just moved to this very old house, compare to the previous one. But to compare to the previous one again, I love this one better. Why? because we don't live under the landlord's floor anymore, haha! I mean, even though our landlord was nice, freedom is nicer :p

Alhamdulillah we now live in stand alone house with cheaper weekly rent payment. Now, as the first and third reasons I mentioned above, I am quite occupied with setting up our home. This is very old house, which probably fit into retro category. I'm not sure what year is this house was built. I like vintage and retro thing in designs and interior, as long as it's not too overwhelmed. I'm still trying to work things up with the littlest budget.

Most of the rooms are simple and plain, although I'm not so crazy about the doors' panels. Unfortunately, kitchen is the most problem for my eye sight. The cabinets' doors, oh! They might look a bit better in photos, but for me they're too far from pretty (sorry, House!). The material looks cheap (sorry again). I really don't mean to whine, but if I can do something better to fix this, I really would.

I've been thinking of some choices to make. I was thinking about taking off some of the cabinets' doors or attaching the doors with contact paper or wall paper or even fabric. Unfortunately, my husband was not really into these ideas. So, now I'm still thinking. Anyone has any idea? Do help me if you do. Otherwise, I should just live with it.

Look at the pictures, I think it's from the 70s, what do you think? 60s maybe?

I haven't really set up the kitchen actually. I just put everything inside the cabinet to avoid messy look from the outside.

But look at the inside.

Still UN-organized.

Well, at least I still got this $1 2nd metal bookshelf I bought from Trademe.

Trademe.co.nz is an auction website in NZ. Anyone can sell and buy anything with auction system here. I looove Trademe, I found lots of things here, either it's new or 2nd stuffs. We found this house also from Trademe. Car, bike, dining table, sewing machine, and more, and more ^^!

Anyway, still thinking about my kitchen and other rooms. So, sorry for my absence.
I will post a recipe after this one up.

Salaam!

Gulai Ayam

Hi!
Few days ago my hubby said, "Could you make Gulai Ayam like the one Padang restaurants sell?".
"I could try", I said. "Okay", he said.

So, there I was browsing internet again, and let my hubby pointed out pictures of Gulai Ayam in the Google search page, "This one", he said. "Okay"

Anyway, here it is the gulai I made yesterday. It wasn't really like the one in the Padang restaurants, but it's nice to have them anyway. The kids, they didn't know there's chilli in it, like it too. After they finished the meal I told them there was chilli in it.

Oh, by the way, the milk and water in this recipe below is just approximate.

Overall, it's so good to see Indonesian warming food in this winter ^^!

Gulai Ayam

Ingredients:
1 kg chicken
about 1 cup coconut milk
about 1 cup water
1 stack lemongrass, whacked
1 turmeric leaf (I omitted it because I didn't have it)
4 kaffir lime leaves, tear a bit
salt

Spices, grind altogether:
3 hot chilli (I tossed out the seeds and used 3 chilli to be kids friendly. You can add more and include the seeds to make it hotter)
5 shallot
5 garlic
Ginger, about thumb size
Turmeric, about thumb size (I used 1 heap teaspoon of ground turmeric)
1 tbsp coriander seeds
4 candlenut
Galangal, about thumb size
1/2 tsp ground white pepper

Directions:
- Heat cooking oil in a pan with medium heat.
- Stir in the ground spices and cook until done and fragrant
- Add in lemongrass, turmeric leaf, kaffir lime leaves and chicken.
- Cook just a brief until the chicken change colour.
- Pour in water and coconut milk.
- Add salt.
- Cook until the chicken done.
- Enjoy with warm freshly cooked white rice.

Coco-Raisin Chocolate Chip Cookies

Hmm.. I don't really know what to call this cookies. I made this just because I have too many raisin in my kitchen's closet. My youngest looooves raisins and sultanas, while my eldest could almost throw up if he forced to eat them.

So I was thinking how can I make something with sultana that everyone can eat it? How should I 'camouflage' it? Aha! I thought. How about chocolate chips? Their colours is about the same as raisin. But then, how could I disguise the raisins' texture? If it's in a bread or cake, my eldest might notice it. Besides, my right hand is still in injury, I think it's because handling mouse too much. It's not a joke (even though that means I was in computer too much which is might be silly), my husband said many people got hands injury when they're using computer mouse too much. So anyway, that means I can not knead bread dough. I've tried once, it made my hand more aching and my bread gone baddddd. Then I thought cookies will be saver to hide raisins.

I made the cookies based on the previous chocolate chip I made before. I substitute half of the chocolate chips with raisins, and substitute almond with coconut. Still without any synthetic food additives.

Here's the responses of my beloved little men while they were eating it:
My eldest son came to me while he was munching the cookies and said: Bunda(Mum), did you put chocolate in it?
Me: yes.
Few minutes later, my youngest chased me to the kitchen, munching cookies and said: Bunda, did you put raisin in it?
Me: yes.
Me: (silently giggled)

The point is, my husband and I always try avoiding lie to the kids. So this is not a lie, I answered every my kids' question honestly. Anything that they don't ask, I don't answer, he he.

By the way, I really don't know what to call this cookies. Sorry if the name gets too long then :)
Anyway, here's the recipe:


Coco-Raisin Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients:
1 cup wholemeal wheat flour
1⁄2 cup brown sugar
1⁄4 tsp salt
1⁄3 cup oil
1 egg
1⁄4 cup chocolate chips
1/4 cup raising, diced
1/4 cup dried coconut shred

Directions:
- Mix with spoon flour, chocolate chips, raisins and coconut.
- In another bowl mix with electric mixer egg, oil, sugar and salt until thick and the consistency resemble to mayonnaise.
- Add the flour mix into the egg mix. Fold with spatula, just until all wet.
- If the dough seems too wet, put the dough in the fridge at about 15 minutes, while we heat up the oven to 170C.
- Line a cookie tin with a baking paper.
- With two teaspoons make a ball of dough and put onto the the tin. You can press the dough a little with your finger to make it wider if you like.
- Bake about 10 minutes.
- Take out from the oven and let it cool. The first time they took out from the oven they might seems a bit soft, but after cooled it will be harden a bit. It will be chewy inside and crunchy on top.

Homemade ChocoCashew Spread

Do you ever buy something in a jar and thought, hmm this thing seems very easy if we make it by ourselves at home, rather then bought it in the supermarket.

Well, that's what I thought about nutella. I tought this could be probably contains hazelnut and chocolate, that's it. I believe home made is better because we are the one who put ingredients in our food. While store-brought food, well, we don't really know what did they put in store-bought foods. They probably using preservatives, and who know how much and what kind of sugar they put in it, right?

Then I found that many home made nutella recipes do not use chocolate, instead they use cocoa powder. Hmm, interesting. Even better, I thought. I also found that some of them using honey, with more less sugar. This getting better and better, I thought!

So, I made this yesterday, not using hazelnut but using roasted cashew. I bought non-salted cashew from bulk food alley. I used the blender to grind and blend the ingredients, it is quite smooth, but not too smooth. If you see the pictures you still can see it a bit gritty. But, for me it's not a big deal. I actually love the result.

The true tester is the family, of course. My husband thought it was a bit too salty. But, I thought it taste okay, if you get used to peanut butter. Then, the next test was to the kids. My eldest straightly recognize that the jar is not the regular chocolate jar. Of course, I re-used the marmalade jar.

After he tasted it, he said he likes it. Alhamdulillaaahhh... I know that everything-chocolate is good to him, ha ha. As my youngest woke up, I didn't worry at all, he can eat almost anything.

Then my conclusion is that I will make again after this one is finish, probably with less salt.
Not to mention that it saves money too ;)

ChocoChasew Spread

ingredients:
1 cup of roasted cashews
5 tbsp milk
6 tbsp honey
2 tbsp canola oil
2 tbsp cocoa powder
3 tbsp hot water
1/4 tsp salt or less

Directions:
- Make paste from cocoa powder and hot water. Set aside.
- Grind cashew, salt, and milk until smooth.
- Add oil and honey, blend well.
- Add cocoa paste and blend well. If it's too hard for your blender to blend all, you might want to continue stirring with spoon.
- Move into a jar, close tight and put in the fridge.
- Enjoy it with anything!

Do you...

Hi, how many of you trim off the fat from your chicken before cooking it? I do :p They look yucky..

This picture of just ONE chicken thigh. Look how many fats in it.

Kitchen's downs

Nobody's perfect, right? I know.
It's been few weeks I've been failed in making cakes, and few kind of food too. I don't know why, any of my experiments didn't come out with any satisfaction. It probably unconsciously got in my mind, therefore about a couple weeks ago I dreamt that I made cake and my grandma and my mom(both of them had passed away) ate it. I don't think this dream has any specific meaning. I was just happy to see them in my dream; my grandma, my mom and my cake :)
Since that dream my experiments STILL not getting any better. Maybe this is what they called as 'baking blues'. Apparently it's the acute one. Usually people having this kind of blues but still can make cakes. In my case, I can't even make cake right!
Well, I never really expect my kitchen experiment to be always perfectly success, now my little family. So I just let things flow. However, it's been few weeks, I got bored looking at ugly cakes and wasted flour and eggs...and butter.. and milk.. Arrrgh!
I know I don't have to make everything, but I don't like to see my kids eating too much store-bought ready meals too.
Oh dear, I even begin too lazy to type a post.
For the sake of my sons, cooking blues please go awaaaayyyyyy!!