POLL!

SUP!

I've put a new poll on the Noob Connoisseur

Favourite form of potato.

I know that most of my friends love potatoes.

French fries of course.

What about you?

Do you like your potatoes mashed, fried, roasted, baked or boiled?

~

Feel free to give suggestions to anything that I should try

or anything that I should cook?

Macarons: Green Tea | Chocolate

My apologies. :) It's been a long month since I've last posted, but a combination of exams, Christmas and the beginning of holidays have put me out of blogging.

I've been 'experimenting' with macarons and so far I've ticked off chocolate, green tea and lemon.

Note that macaroons are meringue-like cookies usually made from coconut,

whereas macarons are the french biscuits made of almond meal, which usually have a filling inside.

Recipes can be found all over the internet for countless flavours.

From bakeries and patisseries, macarons cost around $2.20 each

So its much cheaper to make them yourself.

Above: Green Tea Filling

Below: Chocolate Filling

For both fillings I made a ganache, which is a fancy term for melting chocolate with boiling cream. The melted mixture is then cooled and sets to a spread-able consistency.

The chocolate filling is simply made of dark chocolate and cream.

The green tea filling is made of white chocolate and cream. Green tea powder is then added to this mixture.

Green tea powder or matcha is quite rare now and can only be found in a few specialty stores. If you require some, I can buy it for you. It's $6.50 for 100 grams.

Macaron Batter

For the green tea macaron, I just added a teaspoon of vanilla extract or essence to a basic batter of almond meal, egg whites and loads of sugar.

The chocolate macaron followed the same recipe, except that an additional 25 grams of cocoa powder was added.

Tips

1. Don't bother buying piping bags. Simply use a snap-lock plastic bag.

Get all the batter in and cut a medium-sized hole (about 1.5cm diameter)

2. The batter should flow like lava. Otherwise it won't bake properly.

3. Incorporate the dry ingredients into the egg whites and use quick swift movements with a spatula to mix them together. Stop straight after streaks of egg white disappear and if you over-mix the macarons won't rise properly.

4. When you've piped all the macarons make sure you rap the baking sheet on the kitchen bench a few times. This gives the macaron a footing to rise from and gets rid of any large air bubbles.

Despite the cracks, the macarons turned out alright. A nice and crispy outer shell and a chewy inside. I still haven't found the perfect amount of time and the perfect temperature to bake them at. But, it varies from oven to oven.

I've found that the higher the baking tray is put in the oven, the more cracked it gets.

Trial and error. Trial and error.

MY CRACKED MACARONS. :)

They tasted really nice.

Of course, make sure you cool the biscuits before you add in the filling.

Macarons are great as a gift.

Nom Nom Nom

-WB

Ajisen Ramen

Ajisen Ramen

Located at 130 Bourke Street, Melbourne VIC 3000

Getting there, simple catch a train to Parliament Station and it's a 5-10 minute walk from there.

Date: Friday, 12th November

Cuisine: Japanese

Catching up with Shannon over dinner, we decided to go to Ajisen Ramen.

We've both been there 4 or 5 times.

Here's Shannon!! :D

It's a nice, warm place - the furniture and setting is sort of like modern meets Japanese traditional.

Entree- Gyoza, which is like a Japanese Dumpling with dipping sauce.

Quite average, the filling is nothing special - pork mince and a bit of ginger and spring onion

The chewy Gyoza skin should have been more crisp - it was pan fried

The dipping sauce was nice- balancing sweet, sour and salty.

$7.00

Main- I had the Hiyashi Chuuka, which is a Japanese Cold Noodle.

It was nice, the noodles were of a good texture- they had a bit of bite to them

The vegetables worked well with the dish.. and there was a lump of horseradish ==' (which is like wasabi) and I thought it was tofu. My mouth burned.

There wasn't enough of the meat, though the noodle dressing was nice - sweet, sour and salty, with a bit of chilli.

$10.00

Shannon had the Sashimi Bento- which comprised of slices of raw salmon, rice, seaweed salad, fruit, salad and a chicken skewer. Looked quite nice.

$13.50

Dessert- Black sesame icecream for me and Green Tea Icecream for Shannon

Strong Sesame flavour, quite creamy, but it still can't top Green Tea Icecream. Presentation was nice and simple.

$4.00/Each

Drink- Green Tea Spider.

It was rather strange. It was a scoop of green tea icecream in lemonade.

The lemonade was flat- not fizzy and the green tea gave it a weird powdery-ness.

$4.50

Lemon and Lime Bitters for Shannon - $4.00

Next time, I'd definitely stick to the ramen, bento boxes, seaweed salad and yakitori (the delicious chicken skewer)

Cost: $47 - Relatively Cheap

Worth a visit :)

Photography

Writing, cooking and now presenting: photography.

I really am quite a noob at photography, only started a few days ago.

So, bear with me

I'm using my dad's old camera - FujiFilm FinePix S6500

and I'm slowly getting used to it.

My camera has a dial on it with letters S, A, M and a whole lot of icons.

Being the noob I am, I had to get out the manual and read about them.

Auto- This one was in red and basically sets everything for you, such as focus, brightness, contrast and all those other factors.

Auto would be used for ordinary photography and it's the easiest and simplest mode

(S) Shutter Priority- This mode makes everything automatic except for the shutter speed.

A fast shutter speed would be used for freezing something in motion (eg: a sprinter)

and a slow shutter speed would be used to create movement in the photo (ever seen those photos that are created with sparklers)

In my camera, the faster the shutter speed (such as 1/4000 sec) the darker the photograph, as less light is captured.

(A) Aperture Priority- Another automatic mode, this changes the focus

A large aperture (which has a small number) results in the subject being clear, but the area in front and behind it being out of focus and blurred. Photographers use this to draw the viewers attention to the subject.

A small aperture (which has a large number) results in both the subject and the areas around it being in focus and this would be used in photographs of landscapes or even family photos

(M) Manual- As the name suggests, this is the mode where you control all the factors, such as shutter speed, aperture and various other functions.

Well, that's a part of the basics and there's also a vital rule to follow.

The Rule of Thirds.

Basically this is just dividing a photograph into thirds (much like a noughts&crosses or tic-tac-toe grid)

Where the lines intersect are the strongest focal points and the lines themselves are the second strongest focal points.

Photo Editing

There are a lot of programs that edit photos, online there are websites such as Picnik or Fotofunia and of course, everyone knows about Photoshop.

Apparently photoshops costs a lot, so I downloaded a trial version of a program similar to photoshop and it's called Serif PhotoPlus Starter Edition

With it you can change lighting, exposure, remove blemishes, crop photos, add effects or fix any mistakes you may have made whilst taking the photo.

A few days ago, I went for a walk around my suburb with my family and took a few photos

I've also added effects on them. Enjoy :P

I used 'CrossProcessing' on the photograph above- see how it compares to the original below.

I used 'Boost' on this photo and it makes all the colours in the photo much more vibrant

Above, I used 'Focal Black and White' and this makes everything black and white, except for a small area called the focal point. This effect makes things stand out.

With these two photos, I used vingette (above) and matte (below). The two effects are quite similar except that vingette makes the edge of the photo darker, whereas matte makes it lighter.

I used 'Sepia' on the photography above, with a little bit of fade to show green.

Above I used the picnik effect 'HDR-ish), which gives the photograph an interesting... almost grainy effect

Above, I used 'Holgarish' which makes the photograph black and white and makes the contrast between the white and black even greater.

Japanese Snacks お菓子

Snacks! or Okashi in Japanese..Ahh.. Where would life be without them?
There are so many types..chips, crackers, confectionery, chocolate, icecream, instant noodles, or for the healthier people, fruits, vegie, cheeses.

I live in a suburb close to one of the biggest asian shopping centres in Melbourne: Box Hill :P
The good thing is that there are many food stores and restaurants.
There are milk bar-style stores that stock up with loads of cheap snacks.

Here are a few epic japanese snacks:




Hello Panda

Hello Panda is small hollow panda-shaped biscuit filled with various flavours of cream. Such flavours include milk, strawberry or chocolate. The filling just melts in your mouth :)





Pocky (ポッキー)

Surely you've heard of this one.
If not, its a biscuit stick dipped in common flavours such as chocolate, almond, strawberry and dark chocolate. However, a whole range of other flavours are available, though only in Japan. These include milk, mousse, green tea, honey, banana and coconut. Its also available in peanut butter in the US- the Americans seem to love their peanut butter.. :|

Pocky is named after the sound it makes when bitten on.





Mochi 餅

Mochi is probably my favourite Japanese snack. The outside is made of glutinous rice flour, which gives it a really nice chewy texture and the inside is filled with pastes of green tea, red bean, sesame, taro and peanut butter. I have to admit, peanut butter is my favourite mochi.

There is also mochi icecream, where the outside skin of glutinous rice is very thin. The inside is filled with various icecreams.





Green Tea Drumstick

Another cool invention of the Japanese. It's really nice.
Put simply, its like a regular drumstick, except the icecream used is green tea, as the name suggests.
Very few asian stores have it, so ask me if you want to try it :)
However, the cone can sometimes be soggy- perhaps from a long flight from Asian manufacturers.




Hokkaido Milk Icecream

This is just icecream without any flavours added, from the region of Hokkaido in Japan. However the milk has a sweetness and.. addictive quality normal vanilla icecream simply does not have.

It's worth a try, I bought it from breadtop for about $3.

This will probably be one of my last posts until the start of holidays.
So, take care :D

WB.

Okonomiyaki お好み焼き

When I say that to people, the common response is. O.o
Economy-what??
Hopefully, by the end of this post, you'll know what it's all about.

Okonomiyaki is made of a batter (of flour and water), eggs, shredded cabbage and panko/normal bread crumbs. A variety of toppings are also added to it, such as bacon, spring onion, vegetables, cheese and seafood. These ingredients are cooked on a hot plate or pan in the form of a savoury pancake. It is also served with okonomiyaki sauce (or BBQ sauce if you're desperate) and japanese mayonnaise (or regular mayonnaise, though this is often too acidic).

The word is made up of two parts:
Okonomi (お好み), which means 'what you like' or 'what you want'
Yaki (焼き), which means grilled- mentioned in the 'Teriyaki' post

This is my attempt at Okonomiyaki, or commonly referred to as 'Osaka soul food':




Ingredients are flour, water, bread crumbs, cabbage, eggs, bacon, spring onion, BBQ sauce and Japanese mayonnaise.





To prep these ingredients:
Mix 2 cups of flour and 1.5 cups of water, making sure no lumps are present
Chop 500g Cabbage into strips
Chop about 2 stalks of spring onion
Chop 3-4 rashers of bacon into short thick strips
Measure out 2/3 cup of bread crumbs





Then, get a separate bowl and add in a quarter of the cabbage, bread crumbs, eggs and batter.
In a small pan, heat up a little bit of oil.
Empty the contents of the separate bowl and flatten the mix.
Sprinkle over bacon and spring onion.
Cook for about 6 minutes on each side until golden-brown and until all the batter is cooked.
Repeat another 3 times.

Serve with streaks of BBQ sauce and mayonnaise. Sprinkle over some toasted sesame seeds and strips of 'Nori' (dried seaweed).





However, as its might be a new thing to you, it's best to try it first as I did.
I bought this Okonomiyaki from the food court in a nearby shopping centre for about $6-. Taste it and see how close you can get to replicating it!




Good Luck :)
WB.

Teriyaki 照り焼き

Teriyaki: a food that almost everyone knows is associated with Japanese cuisine

Put simply, teriyaki is the process of grilling foods in a sweet soy sauce marinade, known as 'Tare' in Japanese. Note that teriyaki is a cooking technique, not a food.

The word teriyaki is made up of two parts: Teri (照り) and Yaki (焼き)
Teri, a noun, refers to the shine created by the sugar content in the sweet soy sauce marinade.
Yaki, however, is a verb and describes the cooking process of grilling.

Although meats and poultry such as chicken, lamb, beef pork would be commonly used for teriyaki here in Australia, Japan mainly uses fish for teriyaki.

Of course, I had a go myself:





Tare (the marinade) is made simply of soy sauce, mirin (refer to my Japanese Condiments post) and extra sugar.
In this case, I used chicken thigh fillet, skin off. Chicken thigh fillet is known for being much more tender and because it is smaller, it cooks faster than chicken breast fillet as well.
Normally, the minced ginger is added on top of the teriyaki chicken when it is served. I don't like the strong taste of ginger, so I add some into the marinade.





All you need to do is mix:
3 Tablespoons of Mirin
4 Tablespoons of Soy Sauce
2 Tablespoons of Sugar
0.5 Tablespoons of Minced Ginger

Then, using a fork, poke the chicken many times so that the marinade seeps into the flesh.





After that, mix the marinade and the chicken together. Cover with glad-wrap and refrigerate for at least 15 minutes, though the best flavour is achieved when it is marinated overnight.




To cook:
Brown one side on a medium heat (the sugar in the marinade will caramelize, turning the chicken a darker colour)
Cook the other side on low heat, until both sides are similar colours.
Then, pour over remaining marinade and put the lid on, in a way steaming the chicken.
Finally, remove the lid and let the sauce thicken.

Usually teriyaki chicken would be served with toasted sesame seeds sprinkled over with rice and perhaps some vegetables. However, I've left out the rice.




The recipe that I followed made too much marinade and as a result, I had some left over. What I did with it was make fried rice.
Fried rice is a great way to use left overs. I had left over mince and vegies. All I did was scramble an egg, add in rice, mince and vegies and finally the marinade. To serve, I added peanuts and sesame seeds.

Deliciously easy :)
WB.

Time

There one was a little boy, who wished time would go faster.
"FASTER! FASTER! FASTER!" He cried.

His parents advised him that one day he would think otherwise.

The little boy thought about driving, being able to be 'cool' or even move out- away from his annoying parents. The little boy never showed anyone affection.
Again he stubbornly cried "FASTER!"

One day, a great magician appeared at his door.
"I've heard that you have a request to make; may I ask?" the great magician inquired.

The little boy, stuck at 5 years of age, excitedly screamed "Time! Faster!"

The great magician questioned "Are you sure?"

The little boy nodded and the great magician replied with a gentle smile
"Very well."

Zap. Buzz. Boom.
"The effects are irreversible" were the parting words of the great magician.

The selfish little boy squealed in delight, as he watched the clock race- faster and faster, as he wished.

The little boy's parents were confronted by a question
"What does irreversible mean?"
"Irreversible means that you can't go back to where you were before."
"Oh...Good."

Time whirred on for the little boy. Within the blink of an eye, he was out of college. Working. He was successful and had a beautiful wife, though he still never showed affection.

Suddenly, after another rushed working day, two policemen came knocking at his door.
"We're here to announce the sad passing of your own... mother and father... in a tragic accident."

The not-so-little boy burst into tears, regretting the little time he had spent with his own parents. He cried and cried, by the time he had stopped it was already dawn.

The little boy was still present, living inside a 40 year-old man's life. He yearned for his childhood again, the nurturing love of his parents. Alas, this could not be. "You can't go back to where you were before". He recalled the words of his mother.

Not long, his beloved wife had aged dramatically and faced serious health problems. Although doctors claimed that she could live no more than two months, the little boy knew that it would be over in a matter of seconds.

Now, he was 80, facing death himself. The little boy was not ready. Would a 5 year old boy ever be ready for death?

As he lay at his deathbed, a flashback of his compressed life brought him regret and shame. He had still never shown affection, not even to his own wife or daughter. Tears welled up in his eyes, as his own daughter, now 50, asked her daddy what was wrong.

He struggled to breathe and watched his heart rate drop lower and lower, into the hands of death. He mustered all his strength and uttered

"I love you..."

Japanese Condiments~

I'm intrigued by Japanese Cuisine at the moment.
It seems to be absolutely delicious, yet some-what healthy!
Yes, I'm becoming health-crazy :)

It's like a glossary, explaining all those different condiments
Although some of these condiments seem unhealthy, they are eaten in SMALL amounts.



Japanese Mayonnaise

Made from regular mayonnaise, rice vinegar and small amounts of MSG

Found at supermarkets, asian grocers in soft plastic squeeze bottles
(As pictured above)

Can be used in salads, with chicken, Okonomiyaki, Takoyaki or sometimes even on pizza~!



Mirin 味醂
Made of a Rice Wine (Alcohol Cont: 14%) and Sugar (50%)

There are three types of Mirin:
Hon Mirin (Contains Alc.)
Shio Mirin (Contains Alc +1.5% Salt, to avoid alc. tax)
Shin Mirin/Mirin-fu Chomiryo (Contains Under 1% alc. But has the same flavour)

Found at supermarkets, asian grocers in plastic/glass bottons
(As pictured above)

Usually used in Teriyaki sauce and to erase the unpleasant fishi-ness from boiled and grilled fish.




Rice Vinegar 米酢

Made from fermented rice , sometimes with sake, salt and sugar.
Rice vinegar tastes much more milder and sweeter than normal vinegar and appears a pale yellow colour

It's found anywhere- supermarkets, asian grocers.

It's used in salad dressings, as well as in the process of sushi rice.
The rice vinegar gives sushi rice a balanced sweet-sour taste and it also makes the sushi rice shiny.



Soy Sauce 醤油(shoyu)

Made from fermented soybeans with water and salt.
There are many, many different varieties of Japanese soy sauce.

Compared to Chinese soy sauces, Japanese versions often use wheat, giving it a sweeter taste.

INTERESTING:
Soy sauce in Japan, is sold in different grades depending on amount of nitrogen.
Hyojun (標準): Standard grade (More than 1.2% Nitrogen)
Jokyu (上級): Upper grade, (More than 1.35% Nitrogen)
Tokkyu (特級): Special grade, (More than 1.5% Nitrogen)

It's used in most savoury dishes, usually as a seasoning - much like how we'd use salt.




Wasabi 山葵

Genuine wasabi is made from the roots of the wasabi plant.
This root is usually grated on a 'Shark Skin Wasabi Grater'

It can be bought from most stores, usually in small tubes.
However, most products that claim to be 'wasabi' are in actual fact made of grated horseradish and green food colouring...
Apparently, true wasabi tastes quite different.

Wasabi is widely known for being eaten as a condiment with sushi or sashimi




Karashi 芥子

Karashi is a type of Japanese mustard.

It can be found in asian grocers, and comes in powder form or paste (usually in tubes)

Karashi is usually used as a seasoning, condiment or sauce, much like how Western Cuisine utilizes mustard.




Nori 海苔

Nori is the Japanese term for dried seaweed.
It is made from shredding and rack drying seaweed.
Did you know that the seaweed industry earns over $2 Billion US Dollars a year!?

Nori can be found at supermarkets and asian grocers.

This type of seaweed is used to wrap sushi or nigiri, or as a garnish for many rice, noodle, soup dishes.



Katsuobushi 鰹節

Katsuobushi (also known as Bonito Flakes) is a dried, fermented and smoked skipjack tuna.
These blocks of fish are usually shaved into.. thin shavings by a traditional wooden ... shaver, known as Katsuobushi Kezuriki

These shavings are most likely found at asian grocers

Katsuobushi appears a wooden brown colour.
It is primarily used as a garnish and when placed on a hot dish, the steam makes the flakes seem to 'dance.'




Rayu ラー油 (or La-yu)

Rayu is a Japanese chilli-infused vegetable oil.

The oil has a reddish tinge to it and usually contains various other ingredients to enhance the flavour of rayu.

I assume that this would be found at asian grocers and would be used as a seasoning or condiment on any dish.



Furikake 振り掛け

Furikake is a condiment made out of dried,ground fish, sesame seeds, chopped seaweed, sugar and salt.

Again, I believe this can only be found at asian grocers.

The condiment is bright and colourful and is usually used as a seasoning/condiment on various dishes- depending on personal taste.


Well, that's my extensive list of Japanese condiments.
So if you ever go to Japanese restaurant and see a weird looking bottle or jar, you'll be able to think back to this. :)

Any more to add?
WB.