Olive Oil Rolls

If you've ever been to the far east you'll know people tend to like their breads light and fluffy as opposed to the hard-crusted loaves favoured by westerners. I like a bit of both. There are occasions where only one will do. Crusty bread has its deserved spot next to a nice warm bowl of soup. Most HK restaurants serve butter rolls with soup and as nice as they are they can never beat a crusty roll in my eyes. It's all about the contrast of textures...

Today I have are recipe for a olive oil roll. I like browsing through Japanese websites to find recipes and this is adapted from a recipe I found on Cookpad. Cookpad is a website where users submit their own recipes and other users can in turn upload photos of how their dishes/baked goods turn out. It's a clever idea of filtering out the bad recipes. As this is a Japanese-inspired bread it is of course a soft textured bread - great for a lunch roll (or for dunking in soup if that is your preference).

This recipe makes 10 medium sized rolls.
Ingredients:
540g white bread flour
60g rye bread flour
350ml warm water
50g soft brown sugar
12g fast action dried yeast
6g salt
60ml olive oil (I've used a light olive oil but obviously you can use extra virgin if you want a much stronger taste)
1 egg, for glazing

Method:

1. Put all ingredients, except the egg, into a bowl and combine.
2. Knead for about 10mins until the dough is smooth and elastic. The dough is wetter than previous recipes I've posted but it will form into a nice ball eventually so be patient.
3. Leave to rise until doubled in size.
4. Turn the dough out onto a floured work surface and divide the dough into 10 balls. You may need a good dusting of flour when shaping each roll as the dough is very soft.
5. Leave to prove until doubled in size.
6. Lightly beat the egg and brush a thin coating over each roll.
7. Bake in a 220C/200C fan oven for 20mins.

The egg glaze gives the rolls an extra glossy sheen, like its been hit by a spotlight.

-Aubergine

Most Unhealthy Lunch Ever?

Good Afternoon!!

This isn't a recipe post, I just wanted to share what I ate for lunch, look away now if you are health conscious!

A GIANT burger!

This lunch consisted of:

• Homemade Bread
• Homemade Thai Green Curry Flavoured Beef Burgers
• Beetroot
• Egg Whites (I maybe poured like 3?!) You will see why in my next post why I had just egg whites left over!)
• Emmental Cheese

And that's it! Well, apart from the lashings of ketchup on top as well. Yummy!

Satsuma-imo.

Fusion Food Fajita

Well, now that the weather has cooled considerably here, there's no better way to warm yourself up than by eating something spicy!

This recipe I'm going to share with you guys is a bit of an odd one, you might be thinking "what is this?!" but trust me, it actually works out ok!

This was purely experimental, we decided that lunch was going to be fajitas and during the process of making it, there was no sauce!!!!! The decision was then made to use some soy sauce and some mushroom soy sauce and the lunch was a success! Here is how the asian/mexican fajita combination was born:

What you will need:

Some Enoki mushrooms - one of my fave types of mushrooms, especially since I'm allergic to the bog standard Button mushroom.

I also used some celery because that was one of the vegetables we had left over:

Other ingredients include:

• Salami - the one we had contained fennel seeds in. I used about 100g
• Jalapenos - I used red Jalapenos, add according to how spicy you want it to be.
• One Onion
• Soy Sauce - to personal taste
• Mushroom Soy Sauce
• Cheese of your choice
• 4 Tortillas

1. First sweat the celery and onions in a frying pan until soft. (I didn't add any oil because there will be plenty from the salami).
2. Add the Enoki mushrooms, Salami and Jalapenos. Fry until mushrooms have softened.

    3. Add in the Soy Sauce and Mushroom Soy Sauce. I used about a tablespoon of it. Fry off until sauce has reduced.

    4. Divide this onto four tortillas that have been placed on a baking tray. Top with the cheese and bake in the oven until the cheese has melted.

     5. Once melted, roll up your tortilla and enjoy!! Simple food right?

Satsuma-imo.

Abergavenny Food Festival Part 2

Onto the next part of our adventure to the Abergavenny Food Festival!

Here's a shot of what it looked like inside the Market Hall,  it was really crowded in here as the day wore on, too many people and not enough space!

There were book signings inside as well from famous chefs. Here is Chef and Baker Richard Bertinet signing. Aubergine is a total fan girl and even had her picture taken with him! Oh Aubergine....:P [What can I say? He made my day (#＾＿＾#) I was gutted when his show sold out but everything turned out alright in the end!]

 Here's evidence of his signature!

The great thing about food festivals, is that you get to try different foods that you can't possibly make yourself. For our lunch we went to a Jamaican Stall because we have never tried Jamaican food before.

Aubergine had the Curried Goat and Rice:

While I just had the Jerk Chicken, I was only supposed to get 3 pieces as advertised on the price board but I got 4 pieces! The lady at the stall must have liked me haha :P

 Both were delicious and not that spicy, I'd definitely eat these again :) [Yup, yup very delicious. Couldn't finish the rice but I tried my best]

We booked to watch a demonstration by Malaysian Chef Norman Musa and we had about 1.5 hrs to kill so we sat down to rest our poor feet! We ended up snacking on these super yummy truffles we bought earlier.

Nothing better than some good quality chocolate right? [I only tried the brandy one but luckily wasn't too overpowering, otherwise would have been drunk for the food demo...]

Inside the Priory Centre for the demonstration, we were greeted with some snacks and a really posh looking table!

 I didn't take a picture of Chef Norman Musa, not quite sure why.....We got to try some of the food he made and it was good! We were a little shocked by how much oil was used for one of the dishes tho! Our arteries.......[Norman's posted some photos on his facebook and you can spot us in one of the photos if you squint really hard]

So what else did we buy then?

You cannot go back to Wales and not buy Welsh Cakes, if we were good, we would've made some ourselves! Well, looking at the package, we thought because the flavours were unusual, we would buy some. Each pack cost £3.50 for six and we bought Cranberry and Pecan flavour. Unfortunately, we didn't like these, super dry and not much flavour, for that price we expected a lot more. Oh well, at least we tried it. [The best is still the brand we can get in the local supermarket back home. The ones sold at the usual Abergavenny Saturday marker are pretty good too - maybe we should do a Welsh Cake feature in future.]

We also bought a loaf from one of the stalls, this one was surprisingly heavy when we received it! [A spelt and honey loaf - if Richard Bertinet had a stall there I would have bought my bread from there instead!!]

Next what did we buy from Trealy Farm?

Why Salami and Pepperoni of course!

I can't exactly remember which ones we bought, but I do know that one contained fennel, one had spicy peppercorns in and one had venison and something else in..... My memory is like a fish.....

Remember that pie I said we bought in our last post? Well, we've already eaten it so I can show you pictures of what it looked inside.

This was jam packed with meat so I guess we got what we paid for! £7 for a pie is expensive but this was worth it. The only thing I would mention tho was that we both found it a little too salty for our taste. Other than that it was good. We especially liked that the pastry wasn't thick like other pies.

So that was our little trip to the Abergavenny Food Festival! We shall be going again next year! [Definitely!]

Did any of you guys go? What did you think?

Unintentional advertising of Sony :P [It's a good phone...]

Satsuma-imo [featuring Aubergine!]

Abergavenny Food Festival Part 1

Hooray for Food Festival and one back in our native Wales as well. Me and Aubergine went and we literally spent 8 hrs wandering and eating our way around the whole festival! The Abergavenny Food Festival  runs over two days and we decided to go on Saturday 15th September and lucky we did, because today it was raining in good ole Wales!

There are two parts to this because there are a few pictures and we didn't want to bombard you with them in one post!

We were sent these paper bracelets to wear while we wander around. These were not made for people with small wrists, we had to be careful that they didn't drop off!
    

We went quite early in the morning thinking there would be lots of people, but luckily it was less crowded when I took these pictures:

Lots of yummy food stalls!

Mmmmm Bacon *drools*

Mmmm Burgers *drools*

Mmmm Raw Chocolate Pie....

Guess who we saw checking out some pies:

None other than Chefs Otto Lenghi and Sami Tamimi, Aubergine had to take a paparazzi style shot so we only got the back of them（ ＴДＴ）

Here's what they were looking at:

Lots of tasty pies, we ended up buying the Wild Deer Pie after standing there deciding for ages. We paid £7 for it, which is pricy for a pie! I'll show you more pictures in the next post!

And guess what? We found a Churros stand! I'd always wanted to try Churros and never managed to get round to making some myself so I was pleased to find this. The downside? It cost £3.50 for FOUR Churros, so yeah, it was a little expensive. At least now, I can say I've tried it and it was tasty!

Sorry, My greedy hands were already reaching for one when this pic was taken :P

We also found a stand that sold Bubble Tea. They sell Bubble Tea from their van and travel all over! We've had Bubble Tea in Hong Kong and love it, so I wanted to try this to see how it compared. You can find out more information about them here.

Aubergine had a warm Peach and Jasmine Green Tea Drink. Looks delicious right?

While I went for Taro (I LOVE Taro), Soya Milk, Jasmine Green Tea Bubble Tea. This was yummy but I wish I went for black tea because the Jasmine flavoured overpowered everything else! Other than that it was yummy! I wished they made a small size tho because both me and Aubergine were full after drinking these!

So before I finish this post, let me leave you a picture of the remains of Abergavenny Castle.

Look out for part two coming soon!

Satsuma-imo.

Wholemeal Twisted Bread with Pumpkin & Fennel Seed

Hello, Aubergine here. I'm sorry I've been MIA recently. My notebook died about 2 weeks ago and I only got it back from repairs this weekend. Luckily I still had my smartphone to get my internet fix but blogging would have been impossible especially at the the rate I type on a smartphone!

So, recently I've been following Lorraine's Fast, Fresh and Easy Food TV series and in one of the episodes she made a Twister Bread which looked amazing. I took the twisting idea and applied it to a basic bread recipe I had lying around.

The only reasons I didn't use the original recipe were one, I didn't want to eat another white bread for the 3rd week running and two, because it's a bread for my work lunch. My colleagues tend to interrupt me during my lunch break and talking with poppy seeds stuck in my teeth just wouldn't be professional (or attractive)!!

This is how my bread turned out:

OK...my bread doesn't look as nice as Lorraine's as I was a little reserved with the twisting - next time I'll go all out and twist until I can't twist 'no more'.

Ingredients
500g wholemeal bread flour
325ml warm water
10g salt
2tsp honey
4g dried fast action yeast
handful of pumpkin seeds
1tsp fennel seeds

Method

1. Put all the ingredients, except the seeds, into a bowl and combine to form a dough.
2. Knead the dough until smooth and elastic and leave to rise until double in size.
3. After the 1st rise, turn the dough onto a lightly floured work surface and use a rolling pin to roll the dough to a rectangle to about 1cm thickness.
4. Sprinkle over the seeds and use a knife to cut the dough up into 6 strips.
5. Twist each strip a few times and stack them together.
6. Twist the whole thing again and combine into a ring. Leave to rise again until doubled in size.
7. Bake for 30 mins at 220C/200C fan or until the bottom of the bread sounds hollow.

Hopefully I've described the method good enough but if that fails then the link I've provided also has a video so you can see from the master how it's supposed to be done! Enjoy!

-Aubergine

Chinese Wedding Dinner

So all of us (minus Negi) went to our cousins wedding dinner last week. If you are chinese, you will probably know this as "Bai Jao", whereby members of both families comes together to celebrate the marriage. It's also an excuse to eat loads!

Here are just some pictures of the food we had:

Roast Pig

Prawns and Sugarsnap Peas on a basket of deep fried yam

Lobster

Mushrooms and Abalone?

Roast Duck with Yam coated in breadcrumbs

Various puffs

Red Bean Tong Sui with Mochi

There were a few more dishes but I forgot to take a picture before everyone started eating! My fave dishes were the Roast Pig and the Duck and Yam, absolutely delicious!

What's everyone's favourite dish?

Satsuma-imo.