Sally’s Kitchen & Stuff

Each of us come from different backgrounds of cuisine. For me, it’s traditional Chinese food. Not your Chinatown cooking, mind you, but steamed vegetables served with oyster sauce, minced fish in egg pockets, and so on. Good Chinese home cooking that you really can’t get anywhere else.

Fortunately, I also grew up with a grandmother whose idea of traditional cooking deviates pretty much everyday. Sometimes, things taste amazing. Like the time when she basted chicken with Coca Cola. And the mararoni with shitake mushrooms, beansprouts, and cooked in chicken broth. At other times, her creativity knew no bounds: guacamole made with strawberries and sugar, lemon chicken that tastes somewhat like chewing on plastic, deviled eggs that tasted downright evil. But hey, she tried. And when it didn’t work, she would substitute ingredients until it tastes good.

There are people who follow recipes to the letter, and there are those who are willing to experiment to see what might work better than the "right" stuff. I grew up with the best of the latter, and I feel the better for it.

So next time you pick up that recipe book, go right ahead: add tabasco sauce in soy sauce. Mix wasabi into your salad dressing. Make cream of tuna soup. Hey, one day you might get to write your recipe book.

You can find it in Asian markets. They look like small potatoes, dark brown, with horizontal crossing lighter lines. The flesh is purple and starchy with a distinctive sweet taste. The leaves are often used to wrap sticky rice and such (no, they’re not "lotus" leaf. It’s actually taro leaf) with pork and duck egg.

What nobody EVER tells you is that the taro is dangerous. When eaten raw it has the effect of a bee sting on a person who’s alleric to beestings - your tongue swell, your face itch, and in some people the effect is exaggerated as to cause suffocations. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. When you’re cooking taro, PLEASE make sure it is cooked all the way through.

Taro Rice Pudding
3/4 Cup tapioca pearls - the small kind sold in little bags in China town
6 Cups water
1 Can coconut MILK (shake the can. The kind that sounds watery will not do. You want the kind that’s already mixed, not the ones with juice on the bottom and oil on top.)
2 Taro
1 Cup of sugar or more to taste
1 pinch of salt

Instructions
Steam taro until a fork goes right to the middle with little resistance. Peel and dice. Soak in a mixture of 1 cup water, 1/2 cup sugar, and coconut milk.

Cook tapioca pearls in water on boil with a pinch of salt, stirring constantly. If you don’t stir it, it will not only stick to the pot’s bottom, it’ll stick to one another and form a lumpy mess. When the white dots in the middles of the pearls start turning transparent, add sugar and keep stirring. If it’s getting too thick, add another cup of water. When a wooden spoon is inserted, it should come out with a transparent sticky liquid on the spoon along with a few pearls.

Stir in taro mixture, and serve either immediately hot or chilled overnight in the fridge.

Pre-mixed seasonings are often much more expensive than plain old pepper - so unless you’re obssessed about Montreal Steak Spice (as one ex just throws it on everything) and don’t know how to replicate it, you can mix your own with common plain spices.

Cook’s Theasaurus Spice Mixes of the world - illustrated, with some off-site links. You really can’t go wrong if you look at this one.
About.com’s Seasoning Mixes

Bonus: You can make your own gift basket of mixed spices.

Thanks to my last landlady, the 90 year old Wonderwoman, I’ve learned how to clean the bathroom without scrubbing.

Regular laundry detergent can be used to clean any ceramic/metal surfaces. It contains both soap and mild bleach - get the cheapest powder detergent you can find and stash it under the bathroom counter. Add one scoop to the bathtub, half a scoop to the sink, and half a scoop to the toilet. You can even use it on the floor around the toilet. Fill the sink and the bath halfway and let it soak for 45 minutes and up. Then just empty the sink (rinse it), empty the bath (take a shower!), and flush the toilet. If there’s anything left of the dirt, it should wipe off. Works on both metal and ceramic, and should be gentle enough - if it’s good enough for your clothes, it’s good enough for your tiles!

The same trick works with the walls in the bathroom as well. Just spritz a mixture of laundry detergent and water on, leave on for 15 mintues, and wipe/rinse. All those commercials about "scrubbing" the bathroom be damned: I haven’t scrubbed anything in ages!

President’s Choice Creamy Seafood Sauce.

It’s slightly tangy, has whole peppercorns in it, and goes perfect in scrambled eggs, alfredo sauce, served over dinner pastries. It also adds mucho calories, so I do hope you’re not on a diet.

The bf’s been complaining about the redness on his hands from our harsh (ahahahahaha very funny) Toronto winter. I’ve got the perfect cure - something I’ve done since I was a lttle gal - Udder cream and rubber gloves.

Get yourself a bottle of Udder Cream. Rub liberally on your hands, slip on a pair of cotton gloves, then put good ole’ yellow rubber gloves on top. Secure with elastic bands. Proceed to do a huge load of dishes with warm to hot water. The heat from the water will help the cream penetrate the skin, and guarantees milky smooth skin in 20 minutes. Who needs paraffin wax when you can just do the dishes?

It’s a restaurant.

It’s a family restaurant.

It serves chicken. To make things more exciting, they added ribs, and a few salads.

It’s a restaurant with a menu so limited it might as well have been FASTFOOD.

I really don’t understand why people go there. The chicken is quite blend, the spices are not spices - they’re just salty. The gravy (chalet sauce) is too tangy for chicken, and the smoky gravy (served with dark meat) tastes like Chinese chicken drink (gai jing) with flour. The meat is consistently overcooked, the ribs way too small, the salads often overly acidic (that’s what happens if youd don’t DRY your greens properly before tossing in dressing, btw) and the coffee dreadful.

Stu loves the place. The question isn’t whether they serve bad food - it’s not bad. It’s just bland. The service is splotchy, sometimes good, sometimes horrible. Yesterday it was on the level that the waitress consistently forgot about spoons, cutlery, and butter.  What’s good about bland? What’s there to like?

I made this last night. Leftovers are also good in a cold chicken sandwich - just add lettuce. I made this in a roasting pan, but ideally, it should be baked in a lasagna dish. You can add any spices you want in the flour mix. It just has to WORK. That means no cloves.

To tell you the truth, anything that works on a pizza could work in this dish. Just mix whatever you want to add in the pasta sauce - mushrooms, peppers, pineapple, bacon…enchovies. Take your pick. I probably dropped in a near 1/5 of a bottle of tabasco sauce, and it still wasn’t spicy enough.

Ingredients
16 boneless, skinless chicken thighs
1 CUP shredded mozzarella cheese
1 CUP store bought tomato based pasta sauce
1/2 Cup oil (optional: peanut oil)

3 CUPS of flour (optional: whole wheat)
2 TBSP BBQ seasoning powder
1 TBSP salt
1 TBSP dried basil
1 TSP Coriander, marsala powder, paprika, sage, etc. (optional: really, just throw in whatever you like)
1/3 of a tin of Pringles in Sour Cream & Onion flavour, crushed (optional)
Tabasco sauce
2 Eggs and 2 TBSP water

Instructions
Heat the pan on medium, add half the oil. Preheat oven to 400.

Put 1 Cup of flour in the first bowl.  Whip the eggs, water, and tabasco sauce in the 2nd bowl. Combine 2 Cups of flour, all dried spices, and the chips, in the 3rd bowl.

Dip chicken, 1 piece at a time, in bowl 1, 2, then 3. Try to keep one hand dry, one hand wet to prevent clumping.

Fry chicken on both sides, until the flour mixture is set, but the chicken is NOT cooked through. You’re only frying it to keep the flour ON the chicken. Change the oil halfway through.

If using a roasting pan, line with tin foil. If using a ceramic baking dish, just dump the chicken in. Put 8 pieces along the bottom, layer with 1/2 cup of pasta sauce, then sprinkle with 1/2 the cheese. Repeat with a second layer. Put a lid on, and bake for 25 minutes. After 25 minutes, open the lid and let it bake for another 10 minutes while the cheese browns a bit.

Feeds 8. Serve with brown rice and salad.

And he roars into life.

And that, is what I made for the bf for Valentine’s Day. Shh… don’t tell him. I had enough of a hard time hiding the fact that I was making this in our living/dining/kitchen room.

To stay within the theme, here’s Panasonic’s page of papercraft appliances. They’re squarish and a piece of cake to put together, and look quite cute on the dish cupboard.