The Wifey's Corner

March 5, 2016

Mi Ayam Jamur

Mi ayam jamur is another very common dish served in Indonesia. You can find numerous street vendors selling dish, mainly in gerobak style (going around in a cart). There are also a lot of restaurants that are specializing in this noodle dish. It is basically egg noodle with chicken and mushroom topping, then you have a bowl of clear broth as a side, sometimes it may come with dumplings or meat balls. Is is essentially a typical meal that can be found probably in every island of Indonesia – note that I said “probably” because I have never been to every single island of Indonesia 🙂 Each area might have a different variation of bakmi (noodle), adapted to suit local cultures, taste preference or produces. For example in my hometown, the topping used in the bakmi is pork with various shredded chicken and crab pieces or even crab claws for extra special; the taste is more towards savory.

I suddenly had a craving for mi ayam jamur so we made this on the weekend. It tasted really good, shame we didn’t have the crispy wonton to go with it, it would have been perfect 🙂 But nonetheless, it is a good satisfying meal.

I don’t use any measurement while cooking for this, but here are the ingredients I used:

egg noodle, either fresh or dried
chicken fillet, cut into small cubes
mushroom (tinned straw mushroom, button mushroom, or even fresh ones)
soy sauce
sweet soy sauce (kecap manis)
fish sauce
sesame oil
garlic
thinly sliced green onion (daun bawang)
salt, sugar and pepper to taste
oil
green vegetable (ie. bak choy, choy sum, or even kailan) – blanched
Optional: dumpling and meatball for broth; crispy wonton

Marinate the chicken pieces with soy sauce and salt and pepper – let it aside for at least 30 minutes

Stir fry chopped garlic and green onion until fragrant, then toss in the marinated chicken pieces. Add more sweet soy sauce and season well to your taste preference, it should be sweet with a hint of savory. Then add in the mushroom, stir until all is well cooked. Feel free to add some water if it is too dry – the sauce will add more flavor to the noodle.

Prepare the egg noodle as per package instructions.

Seasoning for the noodle: generous amount of sesame oil, soy sauce, and fish sauce. Toss the noodle with the seasoning making sure it is distributed evenly.

Serve the noodle in a bowl, place some chicken mushroom mixture on top of the noodle. Then garnish with blanched vegetables and crispy wonton. As a side. serve a small bowl of broth with dumplings and/or meatballs.

Ready to enjoy! 🙂

February 29, 2016February 28, 2016

Bear Wannabe (ᵔᴥᵔ) Pull Apart Bread

In the recent months, there have been so many videos on pull apart bread in Youtube. And the way it shows, it seems really easy to decorate those bread with animal or cartoon character faces – there is bear, cat, Winnie the pooh, keroppi, and many more. It looks so cute and fun for everyone to enjoy.

Thinking that it would be as easy as those videos show, I had my first attempt on making bear version. It turned out not so easy and simple at all. Decorating is difficult! Or maybe it is just me not having much of art talent at all that finds it so challenging. And to make those ears stick in the right place is not easy, as they expand, they will just glide off from its original intended location. The combination of bad shapes and terrible chocolate decorating result in bear wannabe instead of cute bears (ᵔᴥᵔ)

I use the Kitchen Aid mixer to do the mixing and kneading for this bread, and it did a great job. I don’t need to manually knead the dough at all. But, we all agree that the tangzhong version is so so much better. This recipe results in a soft bread while it is warm only, then it will get harder and dryer as it gets cold. The trick would be to warm it up on the microwave for few seconds, but even so, it will not be as fluffy as the tangzhong version. Anyway, this is the bread recipe I used on this batch:

250 bread flour
Mix together and set aside: 1 teaspoon yeast + 1 teaspoon sugar + 150 ml warm milk
1 egg
1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
30 gram butter at room temperature
Filling: anything to your liking (chocolate rices, choc chips, cheese, etc)

Add all the ingredients, except butter in mixing bowl.

Using dough hook to mix all ingredients until it forms a ball then add in the butter. Knead until the dough is smooth and elastic.

Let is rest for about 1 hour in a warm place until it doubles in size.

Divide the dough into 9 equal portions. For each portion, take out a small part to shape as the ears. Flatten the dough, fill with your preferred filling, close and shape as a ball, place in a square baking pan of 20 x 20 cm. Make a 2 small balls for the ears and attach to the top sides of the big ball. Continue for the rest of the dough portions.

Let the dough rest again for about 30 minutes.

Gently brush the top of the bread rolls with egg wash then bake in preheated oven at 180C for about 20 minutes.

Once it is cooked, take out of oven and spread with butter generously on the surface and side of the bread.

Enjoy while it is warm! 😀

pull apart bread — Badly shaped bears (~_^)

February 28, 2016

Egg white Rolled Cake

I love Asian patisseries with their cute and fluffy cakes, they are usually spongy (which I love most) and at the same time very fluffy soft. Also, they usually have “Asian” flavors, such as taro, matcha green tea, even durian 😛 But one day we tried the Korean patisserie and there were slices of white rolled cake that really drew my eyes. So the cake itself is all white, without any hint of yellow whatsoever, and then it was filled with vanilla cream. So of course I tried it, it was nice! Spongy texture, was not as delicate as cake with a lot of egg yolks, then the creamy vanilla whipped cream – all adds up to a one delicious dessert.

I have not made any rolled cake since my first attempt at rolled cake here which was satisfactory according to The Wifey’s Corner Team aka Mr Hubby and myself 😀 But after making this moist cake and these rich cheesy cookies, I have saved up a small bag of egg whites. Whilst I can and have used them for cooking, there are still some left and sitting in the fridge for couple weeks now. So then I remembered that white rolled cake I had a while ago and I looked up the recipe for it.

I followed the recipe from a Youtube channel here. The recipe is easily followed and use only the typical stuffs in the pantry. The ingredients are as follows:

40 grams flour, sifted
20 grams milk powder, sifted
40 cc milk
30 cc vegetable oil
120 grams egg white (from about 4 eggs)
45 grams sugar
For whipped cream: 140 grams thickened cream, 15 grams sugar, 15 grams sweetened condensed milk

Mix together milk and vegetable oil in a bowl.

Then add in the sifted flour and milk powder to the bowl, mix well with a whisk balloon.

On separate bowl, beat the egg white until foamy then gradually add the sugar a little at a time while mixing until it becomes glossy and hard meringue stage.

Add 1/3 portion of the meringue to the flour mixture, and fold to combine well with a spatula. Be gentle on this, so that we don’t lose all the air in the meringue. Once it is all combined, add more meringue and fold again, repeat this step for the rest of the meringue.

Pour the batter to a lined rolled cake pan (27 x 27 cm), smooth the surface with spatula. Tab the bottom of the pan to release trapped air bubbles.

Bake on preheated oven at 170C for about 12 minutes

Once cooked, release the cake from baking pan, flip the cake to another clean sheet of baking paper and gently peel off the baking paper that stuck to the bottom and side of the cake. Let aside to cool to room temperature. Meanwhile waiting for the cake to cool, you can prepare the whipped cream filling. I omit sugar and sweet condensed milk this time and instead mixed in 1-2 tablespoon of Nutella. Also, I have just a bit of thickened cream left, therefore my filling is not as thick one showed in the video.

Once it the cake is cooled, spread the whipped cream generously on the surface of the cake and leave some space at the of the cake. Roll it away then wrap with a clean baking paper, secure each end to hold its shape and refrigerate. Best enjoyed straight from the fridge 🙂

February 25, 2016July 12, 2016

Baked Ayam Betutu

Ayam betutu is one of the famous traditional Balinese chicken dish, packs with spices, flavors, and most of all heat from the chilies! Surely it is a dish that we just have to have whenever we visit Bali and the one that make us miss Bali. There is this famous restaurant chain that serves “so-called” best ayam betutu in Bali, Ayam Betutu Gilimanuk with its Petruk trademark logo 🙂 A very very yummy ayam betutu indeed, their steamed version are super-duper spicy. I have cried my eyes out eating this at the restaurant (non air-conditioned) during a hot afternoon and yet I am loving it!

Now back in Sydney, it is kind of difficult to find one and I have never really thought of making it myself either considering the amount of spices used and possibly high skill of cooking technique maybe. Then on one day I stumbled onto a YouTube video by Dapur Dina, the way she explains step-by-step process very clear has inspired me to try it myself as well. Another reason is because I have bought 1 kg pack of frozen banana leaves and turned out 1 kg is a lot!

So here we go, this is the recipe that I got from Dapur Dina and combined with few other sources. Actually, this is the second time I made this so I tweaked the recipe a little bit and instead of using whole chicken, hubby kindly chopped it to 8 pieces 🙂 Because I don’t use whole chicken, I just lay the kale on the base of the pan hoping it will still be able to catch of the juices from the chicken and it did! I will try just steam it next time and hopefully it will be similar to the steamed version at Ayam Betutu Gilimanuk, with plenty of hot and spicy sauce.

What you need:

Banana leaves
1 whole chicken, rubbed with 1 tablespoon of lemon juice then set aide
5 pieces of lime leaves (daun jeruk purut)
2 pieces of bay leaves (daun salam)
1 bunch of kale leaves, blanched with boiling water for 1 minute, then let it drained
oil
salt, sugar and pepper to taste

Blend these ingredients:

3 shallots (bawang merah)
5 garlic cloves (bawang putih)
10 candle nuts (kemiri)
3 lemongrass stalks, cut to slices (sereh)
2 red chilies (cabe merah besar)
5 bird eye chilies, feel free to add more or less to your taste (cabe rawit)
1 tsp ground nutmeg (pala)
1.5 tsp ground ginger (jahe)
1.5 tsp ground coriander seed (ketumbar)
1.5 tsp ground galangal root (lengkuas)
1 tsp shrimp paste (terasi)
1 tsp lemon juice

First of all, blend all the spices with two tablespoon of oil.

After it became a smooth paste, fry with medium heat with 4 tablespoon of oil, lime leaves and bay leaves. Keep stirring while frying the blended marinate mixture. I added about 2 teaspoons salt, 1 teaspoon sugar and a lot of pepper, but please adjust to your taste. Keep frying until the mixture is thoroughly cooked, the fragrant will be stronger as it cooks and the oil will separate from the blended mixture. Then set aside to cool to room temperature.

Add about 1/2 of the marinate paste to kale leaves and mix well.

If using whole chicken, stuff the marinated kale leaves to the cavity of the chicken. If using chicken pieces, lay the kale leaves on the base of your pan on top of the banana leaves.

Rub the remaining marinate paste to all the chicken and place on top of the banana leaves or the kale leaves. Cover with banana leaves.

Steam for 90 minutes over medium to high heat, then bake in the preheated oven at 180C for another 60 minutes. For chicken pieces, I can cut down the baking time to 45 minutes and everything is beautifully cooked.

February 21, 2016

Es Campur aka Indonesian Fruit Punch

Es campur is something we always long for on those scorching hot and humid days, and last weekend just happened to be that kind of days. Therefore we stocked up on various tinned fruits and sweet condensed milk to make our es campur concoction 🙂 It is basically various fruits served on shaved ice with condensed milk and/or extra syrup.

It is a very common dessert to be found in Indonesia, so common that you can find them from street vendors to restaurants, who of course serve them in more fancy ways. There was one street vendor located just outside our high school building and he sells a very nice es campur. He has the ordinary es campur and you can also opt for an extra orange juice to the es campur for extra kick of citrusy freshness, very yummy and refreshing.

Since we don’t have the ice shaving machine, I will just use iced water instead of shaved ice so it is kind of soupy. The fruits mix used in my es campur is fairly seasonal, whatever I can find in store, but I always try to have avocado, coconut meat and jackfruit in my es campur. And let’s not forget the grass jelly (in Indonesia, we use cincau) – this time I used green jelly instead of the normal black herbal jelly. Then topped with generous drizzle of sweet condensed milk, which in this occasion I also use some chocolate flavored condensed milk – yummm (っ˘ڡ˘ς)

And the final product is a big batch of sweet yummy and refreshing dessert. This can last for couple days while kept on the fridge. Es campur is one thing that never ever absent from our kitchen during summer every year 🙂 Although, I think next time we make this dessert again, we might want to substitute the iced water to iced coconut water for extra hydration and minerals benefit, right?