Avocado Juice

Tooooo simple.
Indonesian who read this post will be like, 'What? Just avocado juice and you need to post it in a blog??'.
Ha ha... Why not?
It is because of how simple it is, I want to share it. In most part of the world, avocado has consumed as savoury food. Some people even confuse it whether it is vegetable or fruit.
However, in Indonesia, when we think avocado, most of us probably think about juice, or other beverages. It usually consumed as a sweet drink, with addition of some sugar, syrups or condensed milk(which of course lots of sugar in it).

The avocado juice is usually just a juiced or blended avocado with some water or milk, simple syrup or sugar and ice, pour in a tall glass. Then we add condensed chocolate milk just a bit. It's smooth and creamy, and just... nom nom!

Simple.

However, I think it involve toooo much sugar in it. I want something healthier, so I simply substitute sugar/syrup to honey. I also dilute unsweetened drinking cocoa with a little hot water to substitute the condensed chocolate milk. My kids love it, and I can drink with them, no worries :)

The fun of this avocado juice is, you can have that simple juice with or without chocolate taste. Then, if you substitute honey to banana, you will have a smoothie. Then, after become smoothie, you can freeze the into ice cream! As a matter of fact, at this moment I got my smoothie in the freezer as my first attempt to make ice cream from it!

Anyway, here is the simple avocado juice :)

Avocado Juice

Ingredients:
1 ripe avocado, scoop the flesh out
1 tbsp honey
2-3 ice cubes
water or milk
1 tsp unsweetened drinking cocoa
1 tbsp hot water


Directions:
- Blend ice cubes, avocado flesh, honey until all crush.
- Start to add water or milk little by little until you got the density that you prefer. If it's very liquid it will be like juice. If you keep it a little dense it will be like smoothie (my preference).
- Pour in a tall glass.
- Dilute the cocoa with hot water until smooth. Drizzle it on the avocado juice. Add a straw and enjoy.
- Optionally, you can omit the honey and switch to one banana.
- Optionally again, you can freeze it into ice cream like this lovely blog I found: thriftydecorchick.
- Simply enjoy! :)

Sage and Onion Roasted Chicken

It started when we bought frozen ready to cook Sage and Onion Roast Chicken. It's just a package of frozen marinated and stuffed chicken that we bought from supermarket one day. It is easy because all we need is just put the chicken in oven for 1 hour and, voila! No preparation needed. My hubby love it, and would be happy if we buy it again. My kids ate it. And I...well, I think I just have to find the recipe by Google, ha ha ha! It's just curiosity. I thought, the name is sage & onion....could the ingredients be not more than sage and onion? :D

So, I found these two recipes. It's like a little bit habit of mine, that when I googled, I compare some of recipes I found, and pick up 2-3 recipes that I like. At the end, I might fuse 2 or 3 recipes, or feel happy enough with just one. This time I fuse 2 recipes. One recipe is from the Hairy Bikers, while the other one is from Lala's kitchen blog.

It's quite easy, only a little messy when stuffing and rubbing the chicken, but it's alright. It's simple, yet yummy. Most of all, cooking from the scratch is fresher, cheaper and heart pleasing :)


Here is my Sage and Onion Roasted Chicken

The chick, ready to roast

Ingredients:
1 medium whole chicken
1 egg yolk
1 slice of bread or 1/2 cup of bread crumbs
2 onion
1 clove garlic
2-3 tbsp dried sage or 4 fresh ones
salt
pepper
a pinch of freshly ground nutmeg
1 heap tbsp butter
lemon
olive oil


Directions:
- Boil onions in water just enough to cover them for about 5 minutes. Drain them. (I usually keep the water to boil potatoes that accompanied the chicken later).
- Smear chicken with lemon zest. Set aside.
- Heat up oven to 180 degree celcius.
- Process boiled onion, garlic, bread, egg yolk, butter, sage, nutmeg, salt, pepper and butter in blender or food processor until it looks like coarse mixture (not until it become paste-like).
- Stuff the stuffing inside the chicken and massage some of the stuffing on the chicken's skin.
- Rub a little oline oil on the skin.
- I sew up the opening part of the chicken to keep the stuffing in, but it's up to you.
- I usually put it in oven plastic bag before put into the oven, but it's up to you.
- Cook about 1 1/2-2 hours. I'm usually happy with 1 1/2 hours.
- Since I usually use oven plastic bag, I usually make few holes on the plastic. When the chicken almost done, I take the chicken out, take the plastic away (caution: Hot!), and roast again about 10 minutes to get the skin brownish.
- Serve with potatoes and vegetables, anyway you like.

Serve: 2 adults and 2 toddlers :)

What's Your Food Resolution?

Hi,
I know,I know that I haven't post anything for so long. I don't have any reason but...laziness.
It's December now, and I just realized that it's almost a year since we moved here. In a few weeks will be 2013.
So, what is your resolution for 2013? I don't really in to resolution thing too myself actually (and I never really keep my resolution, or remember the resolutions I've made before, ha ha!). However,resolution is a good thing to keep you in spirit in improving ourselves.
Anyway, I came across this site feedingourfamilies.org.nz and saw that they suggest us to consume meals with at least half vegetables the whole family will benefit, as the picture bellow that I took from their site.

It has 'wow'-ed me, and I think it probably good idea to implement a good portion of veggies every day. I admitted I hadn't give my family enough veggies. There's almost-always some portion of veggies on our table, but probably not good enough. Oh, and I love veggies, but I don't eat fruit well. I don't know why.

I think this portion of veggies suggestion gave me ideas of resolution: Next year I will serve more veggies and more fruits for my family, insyaAllah. I don't know how yet, but I will find a way. One of the way is probably getting the right tools.

I always thought that beee-a-tiful stand mixer like this..

or this..

(pics from here)
~ooh look at their colours *gulp*~

...is a dream kitchen utensil that I could always dreamed of, but probably will never buy it. It's really expensive!!
Now after thinking of my resolution, I don't really want those mixers anymore. I mean, I don't bake cake a lot, and I start begin to think that cakes made from too much flour, and too much sugar, and too much fat... too much whatever. I made cake mostly for my sons, and sometimes for myself. Now my dream is shifted to....JUICE EXTRACTOR! That will be great to consume fruits, don't you think? But I don't know which juice extractor to dream of. Any suggestion?

Anyway, let's hope that my resolution here become reality (amiiiiin!).

So, what is your food resolution? :)

www.homemades.co.cc has disappeared!

Oh no....
That was my first reaction when I look for www.homemades.co.cc and could not find it.
My first guess was my co.cc, which was free domain, is no longer free. So it's disappear.
The only thing I thought that could save this blog is to return to blogspot domain address. I don't know much about internet and domains...this is as far as I could understand so far. ^o^" oh man.....!
I might lose some readers after changing address, but, worry not!
Here is my NEW blog address: www.simplyhomemades.blogspot.com.

I hope reader-friends would not lost (too long), we will be in new address.
I (hopefully) don't have to change address again. Amiiiin.

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.