Snippets from MCO and bread-making ventures

Recently I seem to have acquired a new best-buddy-wannabe who texts me every day. I didn’t even give him my number; could this be a stalker? :O The texts sound like a bossy old man though.
(referring to text messages from MKN aka Majlis Keselamatan Negara)

A most upsetting thing happened during the MCO. I need a haircut. :(

Note to self (in case I forget in the faraway future): MCO stands for Movement Control Order.

And another one, even though it is not directly related to the MCO:

Since I decided to zest every orange I use, eating an orange has become such a chore.

This last one is related to a draft that I wrote earlier this month, but somehow never posted till now.

The last time I made bread, I put a bit of orange zest (the orange was hard to zest) in my wholemeal bread. It had a bit of orange scent (just a tiny bit), and the bread didn't seem adversely affected at all. So today I'm trying again with the zest of one orange (easily zested, this time) with white bread.

Coincidentally today I also made myself some chrysanthemum tea. So I got to thinking, what if I take some of those chrysanthemum petals (after being infused, not the dry ones) and put them in my bread? What if in addition to that, I replace the water in my recipe with chrysanthemum tea? Hmm...has anyone tried that before? Will it give me good bread or ruined bread? :P

After writing that, I searched up using chrysanthemum in bread. I didn't find anyone doing that, but I did find a few recipes for tea bread. They would use ground-up tea leaves instead of tea-infused water, because they said even the strongest liquid tea wouldn't give a strong-enough taste to the bread. So I gave up on the chrysanthemum-infused bread. (but now I'm thinking, what if I grind up those dried chrysanthemum flowers?)

Anyway, I liked the orange scent in my bread so much, which is why I decided to zest every orange now. The zest can be frozen for later use. As it is, today I am making another orange bread with the (defrosted) zest of two oranges! Coincidentally I also made myself some chrysanthemum tea today...and that thought of making bread with chrysanthemum had also popped into my head before I started writing this post. :P

A confused banana bread-cake

In my previous post, I mentioned making a sandwich with the crock pot chicken. Well, I did it, so here are the photos!

I had difficulty figuring out which photo I liked better. In the first one, the cheese looks better, but in the second, the bread looks better! :P

Not too long ago, I had seen a recipe for banana bread using a bread machine. I just tried it out today.

It was't really very good, but it was not too bad either.

After the quick bread cycle on my machine, the cake was not done at all. My toothpick came out coated with soggy batter. So I manually added another 20 minutes of baking time. After that, the toothpick came out clean, but the top of the cake resembled a steamed kuih rather than a baked cake. At first I thought I would be getting a pudding instead of a cake!

However, after leaving it to cool a bit and then turning it out, the top looked better. More like a real cake, I would say.

I used walnuts, since I had some on hand for my usual bread recipes.

The cake was quite dense. I don't quite understand why they called for bread flour, yet did not use any yeast. The cake was not too sweet, maybe because I had reduced the amount of sugar. Because it was not sweet, I guess it tasted more like bread. But it did not have the texture of bread. It also did not have the fluffy texture of cake... I think that the interior was more like a dense cake, but the exterior, near the crust, felt more like bread.

In any case, it is edible enough, so it shall be my breakfast for the next few days. I might toast the slices and see whether it makes it taste better!

Another thing I didn't get was why they needed to use the quick bread setting. The setting has resting time for the dough to rise, but without yeast, I don't think that is needed. Maybe their bread machine doesn't have any other settings besides bread? For mine, I could have just used a "stir" setting, followed by a "bake" one (I already know the baking time for the "quick bread" setting, because it is the setting I normally use). I thought of doing that, but decided against it because I was afraid it would make the recipe fail.

I don't think I will be making this again... unless if I substitute the baking powder with yeast to make the texture like normal bread. If I want cake, my existing banana cake recipe is better!

Extremely flavourful chicken

I recently found this crock pot honey garlic chicken dish using chicken breasts. The ingredients are really simple, so I decided to try making it. It was especially useful on these work-from-home days, because I can dump everything into the pot in the morning, and it would be ready by lunchtime.

So today I made this dish. I didn't have chilli garlic sauce, so I used chilli flakes instead (those from Domino's).

ingredients

into the pot

shredding the chicken after it's cooked

after putting the shredded chicken back into the pot

close-up (though we can't see much anyway)

I think I put too much seasoning for my small portion of chicken. The chicken tasted good when I was shredding it (of course I had to try some!), but after simmering the shredded bits in the sauce again, the taste became overpowering. It was too sweet and too salty to be eaten on its own. And I could hardly taste the garlic and the chilli.

For lunch, I had it with rice and some steamed ladies' fingers. I think it would have been good with lots of white rice, but I'm not the kind who eats a lot of rice...

At night I decided that the strong flavour had to be balanced out with something...so I made a poke"bowl".

It's not in a bowl.

after mixing

It was okay... not bad, but not too good either. I guess the chicken doesn't go too well with fresh vegetables. The recipe tells us to use steamed or stir-fried vegetables, and I believe that. But I didn't have much choice in the veggies left in my fridge!

Tomorrow the plan is to make a sandwich with the chicken... if the photo turns out well, I might post again. :P

Neighbour's dog

Neighbour's dog (two houses away) likes to bark. When I took out the rubbish, neighbour's dog was there at the slightly-open gate. Neighbour was not there. :O Luckily the dog didn't look over... ^o^'

First house-arrest-cooked meal

In my previous post, I wrote about the lam mee at Pisa Corner. After that, I decided to look up what makes a dish "lam mee". I found this recipe on Rasa Malaysia.

Turns out that it is quite similar to hokkien mee, which explains the good prawny smell from the Pisa Corner stall. Except that lam mee focuses more on the meat, while hokkien mee's focus is on the prawns. I had never thought of making hokkien mee myself, because of the chilli paste that is needed for it. However, looking at this lam mee recipe, I decided that I could give it a try, and that I would buy some pork ribs the following weekend, together with the prawns that I had already planned on buying.

But as luck would have it, on Monday we got a coronavirus scare at the office and were ordered to leave the office right before lunchtime, and to work from home till further notice. The "further notice" came as a directive to continue working from home as a self-quarantine for two weeks.

One of the foremost questions that came to mind was, what will I be eating during these two weeks? My fridge was almost empty, and the plan was to restock this weekend. Thanks to the ubiquity of delivery services, I can actually order food delivery every day. But firstly, it is rather costly, and secondly, I would get really tired of eating outside food every day.

So supermarket deliveries came to mind. I initially wanted to order Sunshine delivery, because I prefer Sunshine for their fruits' quality and cheaper price. But their fresh chicken was out of stock. (And of course I would need chicken for easily-reheatable meals!) So I went for Tesco instead. I booked my delivery slot on Tuesday, and the earliest available slot was on Thursday. I was lucky (or was I simply quick?) because my friends who tried ordering on Wednesday no longer had any available slots before Monday! The only (slight) disappointment with Tesco is that it doesn't deliver non-halal goods. Sunshine delivers wine as well, and I was planning on ordering a bottle so that I could use some in my bolognese.

Just a side note: Tesco allows us to update/cancel our order up till 11pm of the day before the delivery. So now I know, when in doubt, book the slot first, update the shopping list later!

My groceries arrived yesterday, so today (a working day) I made a simple lam mee with prawns and chicken. I boiled the soup in the morning and put it into my magic pot, so that at lunchtime I would only need to fry the egg and boil the noodles and veggies.

I actually used the prawn heads that I had from shelling my prawns, so that the soup would have a thicker prawn flavour, like the one from Pisa Corner. But the soup still tasted slightly bland...probably because I didn't use enough chicken. (I had to keep enough for the rest of the quarantine period!) But I had sambal in my fridge, so that helped with the taste.

I didn't have bean sprouts, and I wanted some veggies, so I put in a bit of leafy veggies instead. I even sliced up the stalks thinly to resemble bean sprouts :P

So this is how it looks:

I actually used angel hair pasta for the noodles.

Half-portions were left for dinner:

If you are observant, you will notice that the chicken is missing from the extra ingredients. This is because I had just fished the chicken out of the soup, and had shredded just enough for my lunch. I would shred the rest after eating!

Best lam mee I've ever tasted

On Monday I was waiting for my satay at Pisa Corner (for take-away) when I caught  whiff of prawny goodness coming from a nearby stall.

I decided it was the lam mee, because the only other candidates were Hong Kong chee cheong fun, Thai food, and gulai rice.

I'm generally not a fan of lam mee, but it smelled so good that I went back today to try it. And it tasted really good! They also didn't skimp on the "liaw"; there were two whole prawns (rather big for this kind of noodles...usually the prawns are tiny and sliced up), and lots of shredded pork and egg. By "lots", I mean that I could have more than a few pieces with every mouthful of noodles, and there were still some left at the end.

The only thing I didn't like so much was that the sambal was put directly on the noodles, instead of being in a separate packet. But the sambal tasted good too, so it wasn't such a big deal.

I lose...

Some time ago, I put my Pikachu hat (the kind with droopy ears and two arms hanging down, and when you squeeze the paws, the ears will move up) in my car, on the headrest of the driver's seat.

I thought I was the only one who would do that kind of thing, but this morning, I saw a black Myvi (or was it dark grey? Since the new Myvi doesn't come in black) with two similar Pikachu (with droopy ears, though I couldn't see whether they had arms), each covering one of its front headrests. Their Pikachu had their mouth closed though, unlike mine. And they were facing the back, instead of the front like mine is. Probably their Pikachu are for their children to look at, not for the driver! :P