My first Singaporean cookies

I made my first batch of cookies in Singapore! And yes, I will probably continue to get excited the first time I do every very normal thing, only this time in Singapore. Anyway, the cookies were really just to have a snack for Andrew to take to work; while we were in the hotel, we bought granola bars that he ate for work-day snacks. They were good but I never like how very sweet store-bought granola bars are, so I prefer making my own for snacks.

Except then I made batch of granola on Sunday (first batch of granola in Singapore!) and used most of my newly bought (first big shopping trip for groceries in Singapore!) granola-bar-type ingredients for the actual granola. But I did have an interesting new sugar (black sugar, which seems way more exciting than brown sugar although it is in fact a similar colour to treacle sugar, muscovado sugar, and other dark brown sugars), an interesting new flour (very fine, pale yellow-ish whole-wheat flour; I’m not sure if it actually is whole-wheat), and some baking staples like eggs and baking soda (and here is another set of parentheses, just so I can say I have managed to fit five sets into one two-sentence paragraph).

So I made up some sugar-laden cookies, meaning I could just as well have bought more sugary granola bars for work snacks. But I’m glad I didn’t because, much to my surprise, the cookies made with all the new-to-me ingredients, eyeballed measurements and some unusual elements turned out to be some pretty decent peanut cookies. I’m glad I paid attention when I made them; I will definitely make them again, although this time for a treat instead of a snack.

For now, though, off to go get some more granola bar ingredients. After I sort out a little kitchen disaster I just had (first kitchen disaster in Singapore!)

Whole-wheat olive oil peanut cookies

Makes about 18

I’ve listed alternative options for things like the fine whole-wheat flour and black sugar, which should all work perfectly well. You could also substitute the peanut butter with any other nut butter, and the olive oil with vegetable oil, but then you'd have to give the cookies a new name. Add-ins could work well – chocolate chips, dried fruit, other nuts – although I liked the simplicity.

1 c fine whole-wheat flour (or use cake flour)

¼ tsp baking soda

½ tsp salt

½ c toasted sweet peanuts (another new-to-me ingredient; alternatively, use raw peanuts or very lightly salted roasted peanuts)

¼ c olive oil

¼ c peanut butter

½ c black sugar (or any other dark, moist sugar such as treacle, muscovado, demerara, etc.)

¼ c caster sugar

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 175 C and grease a cookie sheet with a little olive oil.

In a medium bowl, sift and mix flour, baking soda and salt. Make a well in the centre and set aside.

In a small bowl, whisk olive oil, peanut butter, sugars, egg and vanilla extract until well blended and frothy. Pour into the flour mixture and mix with a wooden spoon until the mixture comes together into a firm dough.

Break off slightly-larger-than-walnut-sized chunks of dough and roll them into balls. Place the balls spaced about three centimetres apart on the cookie sheet and press each ball to flatten into a disk. 

Slide the cookies into the oven and bake for 8 to 12 minutes - less if you want softer cookies, more if you'd prefer them a little crisp. Remove from the oven and cool for 5 minutes before lifting onto a wire rack to cool to room temperature.

These cookies kept well in a sealed container for one and a half days and then they were gone, so I have no further information on how long they might keep.

And now: eating AND cooking in Singapore!

Living in a hotel and being forced to eat out every night is not really a hardship, especially not when you’re doing so in Singapore where there is sure to be yet another hawker centre, food court, cafe or restaurant around every corner, all of them offering a bewildering array of dishes to choose from. But, as evidenced by this site and my former life as a caterer and chef, I like to cook. What with the crazy few days before leaving South Africa and nearly three weeks in a hotel, I hadn’t cooked a thing for about a month. The closest I came was making peanut butter and apricot jam sandwiches on the floor in our hotel room for Andrew to take to work. Peanut butter and jam sandwiches are delicious, but a three-year-old can make them with eyes closed (maybe; perhaps I should get my sister-in-law to do an experiment with my three-year-old niece). Which is to say, my daily sandwich-making hardly provided me with any sense of culinary achievement.

The walk home from the shops, along a canal

However! Buying random, unfamiliar vegetables, packages, bottles and jarred things and trying to figure out what to do with them in order to end up with an edible dinner – now that does provide me with a sense of achievement, even more so if the dinner is not just edible but actually good. We moved into our flat – called a condo here – over the weekend, and before we’d even unpacked anything, we’d been to our local grocery shop and stocked up on some familiar staples, and a whole lot of other things that seemed like they might be good and weren’t too expensive (in case they weren’t good).

Inaugural dinner, much more average than the word "inaugural" implies

After weeks of eating out we both just wanted vegetables, so I roasted a big tray, tossed it in a spicy peanut sauce (that possibly contained cuttlefish; I think I accidentally bought cuttlefish-laced chilli sauce but didn’t tell Andrew and he didn’t seem to mind) and called it dinner. It was edible, but not great; it appears Chinese green carrots and white radishes are perhaps not best when roasted (although, please do correct me if I'm wrong).

Dinner number two - much better!

But I was not discouraged, and dinner number two fared much, much better. We managed to find proper whole-wheat spaghetti, to my delight, and tossed the hot, cooked spaghetti with sautéed shiitake mushrooms, enoki mushrooms, Chinese spinach, crushed garlic, lime juice, soy sauce and olive oil. I topped the pasta with enormous toasted pumpkin seeds, and voila – dinner. So good. The kind of thing I would’ve made back in Cape Town, but using lots of local ingredients (that is, as local as things can be when not much is grown on this small island).

Biggest pumpkin seeds I've ever seen

Mushroom spaghetti with spinach and lime

Serves 3 or 4

Most of the ingredients here can be easily substituted. For example, you could use normal spaghetti, or a different shape pasta; use sunflower seeds instead of pumpkin; replace the mushrooms with any other variety of mushrooms you can find; use English spinach or rocket instead of Chinese spinach; and while the lime juice is lovely, lemon will also work. Reduce the garlic if you’re not used to too much.

150g shiitake mushrooms

180g enoki mushrooms

2 cloves garlic, crushed

Large bunch of Chinese spinach

Juice of 3 tiny limes, or 1 average lime

75g pumpkin seeds

4 tbsp olive oil

Salt

250g whole-wheat pasta

4 tbsp soy sauce

Pepper

First do your prep: slice the mushrooms, crush the garlic, cut the spinach up into bite-size pieces, squeeze the lemon juice and toast the pumpkin seeds in a hot oven till golden – watch them, they burn quickly.

Once your prep is done, place a large pot filled three-quarters of the way up with water, a tablespoon of olive oil and a teaspoon of salt over high heat to bring to the boil.

Meanwhile, place a large, heavy-bottomed pan over high heat, pour about a tablespoon of olive oil in the pan, and add the shiitake mushrooms. Sauté the mushrooms until dark golden; add the enoki mushrooms and sauté for a few more minutes (skip this step if only using larger mushrooms; the enoki mushrooms should be cooked much less since they’re so small and frail). Remove the pan from the heat and lower the heat to medium.

Your pasta water should be boiling by now – add the spaghetti.

Return the mushroom pan to the heat, adding the spinach and garlic. Sauté for a few minutes until the spinach has wilted. Scoop a few spoonfuls of pasta water into the pan and add the lime juice, soy sauce, another two tablespoons of olive oil and plenty of freshly ground black pepper. Give it a good stir and turn the heat as low as it can go.

When the pasta is cooked, drain thoroughly and add to the mushroom pan. Turn the heat up to high and toss the pasta quickly until most of the liquid has evaporated. Remove from the heat and taste – you might need to add a bit of soy sauce or salt, or some more lime juice or pepper. If you do add more liquid, return it to the heat for another minute or two; otherwise, remove from the heat and scrape into a serving dish.

Top with the toasted pumpkin seeds and serve.

Mangosteens, then and now

Eleven years ago I had my first mangosteen, and then many more over the course of the few months I spent in Malaysia. Despite some misgivings about the texture, I thought that it might be my perfect fruit – sweet, almost rich but with a great juicy, tangy, refreshing quality. I do realize that this is a ridiculous description of a fruit’s taste – sweet, tangy, rich, juicy, refreshing – all words that can be used to describe so many kinds of fruit. I think maybe I mean that it was all these things, but so much more intensely than any other fruit I’d had. Then I left Malaysia and there were no more mangosteens, and as far as I could tell, there wouldn’t be for a very long time, if ever.

When I tried to explain them to people who had never seen or tasted a mangosteen, I was a little bit at a loss. The outside was easy enough – very dark purple, the colour and also roughly the size of a ripe granadilla, but perfectly round and smooth with a stalk. When it came to describing the inside, though, I couldn’t think how. My best shot was to say that the fruit is segmented, like a citrus fruit, but with only one big seed in the biggest segment; and the segments are white. I suppose that does describe what they look like, but somehow not clearly enough.

Now, eleven years later, we are in Singapore and I have been reunited with mangosteens. We bought a net bag full last week and as soon as we were back in our hotel room, I peeled one and gave Andrew one of the segments before eating one myself; I was so excited for him to try this near-perfect fruit. Delicious, was his verdict, and “when it’s peeled it looks like a head of garlic”, he said.

Yes. Yes, it does, a much more concise description.

They are still very good, but the fruit inside the thick peel is so small, the texture still strange, and I’ve decided I don’t like the segment with the one big seed at all. I feel a little disappointed in myself that I am no longer so easily moved to rapturous declarations about fruit, but I suppose it’s natural to be more given to extremes at seventeen than at twenty-eight.

So in the end, having upheld them as my perfect fruit for eleven years, mangosteens are making me feel old and a little alienated from my former self. I must remember in the future not to have quite such high expectations for fruit.

Eating (but not yet cooking) in Singapore

So! We are in Singapore, and it is hot and wonderful. We are also in a hotel for the time being, meaning we have to eat out for most meals (how we suffer!). I am very much looking forward to moving into our flat at the start of September, and being able to cook again (albeit very basic things, since out shipment with implements only arrives in October). Once I can cook again, I suspect I will bombard this blog in delight with all my creations using new-to-me ingredients.

But until then, here are some of the most delicious things I have eaten after one week in Singapore, listed in no particular order:

1. Lor mee - thick, flat egg noodles in a dark broth with lots of goodies - pork, prawns (I think), hard-boiled egg, and more. The chilli sauce on the side was smoky and slightly sweet. I am getting better with the slippery-noodles-and-chopsticks-and-spoon technique (if anyone knows a less cumbersome term for the technique, do let me know), but still ended up with dark brown sauce splatters all over me after this meal. Worth it, though.



2. Omu yakisoba - this is actually a Japanese dish. I feel guilty eating things that are not actually very Singaporean, and yet it hasn't stopped me from eating Japanese, Korean, Thai and Vietnamese food, as you will see. Clearly I am able to push my guilt aside. Anyway, again noodles, this time cooked on a hotplate with bacon and a mysterious sauce, topped with egg, "special white sauce", delicious mysterious brown sauce and dancing fish flakes.

3. I can't remember this salad's actual Thai name. I could google it, but so can you - it's a green mango salad, with tom yum soup on the side. My stomach lining was burning for hours afterwards due to the large chunks of chilli you can see in the salad, and yet I couldn't stop myself from eating them all.

4. Chewy Juniors - custard-filled cream puffs, sometimes with toppings added as above, seem to be a Thing in Singapore, and one of the chain brands is called Chewy Juniors. Eating puffs from a chain brand is probably a very rookie-ish thing to do, but I might never be able to eat another kind, due to these having one of the best brand names ever.

5. Pad thai - again with the non-local food, and extremely well-known-in-the-West non-local food, too. Sorry. It was good.

6. And a blurry picture of a plate from a vegetarian buffet-style stall; brown rice and vegetables, so healthy! (If you choose to ignore all the delicious oil, sodium and coconut milk also contained in this meal.)

And thus concludes my Top 6, so far.

Dinner party number one

We got married.

I baked the cakes!

Wedding cake table

There was a honeymoon. Immediately followed by major flat renovations, turning our kitchen into a lovely space. 

Which was followed by the news that we’ll be moving to Singapore in August. 

Immediately followed by repeatedly having dinner parties so we can get good use out of the new flat while we slowly start saying goodbye to friends and family.

There are some rules for the dinner parties: they must involve red meat or pork sausages, wine, and dairy products (ice cream, custards, cream, cheese, anything), all things that are apparently available but insanely expensive in Singapore. Luckily it’s winter here, so the rules work with the weather. Not so much with what we’ll be wearing once we get to Singapore, but that’s a worry for another day.

This was our first dinner party menu:

Some leftover wedding bubbles (this despite earnest attempts on my part to make sure it was all drunk during the wedding reception)

Cheat’s cassoulet, meaning herby sausage, bacon and bean casserole with breadcrumbs on top

Crusty bread

Green salad

Sundaes made with sautéed apple slices, hot boozy caramel sauce and salty-sweet toasted pecan nuts

Ready to eat

I forgot to take any pictures of the food properly, other than the two badly-lit photos shown here. It's all for the best, though; cassoulet doesn’t look like much when dished up, being a mish-mosh of beans, sausage, bacon chunks and breadcrumbs. But it is delicious!

Crumbs! They weren't red in real life.

Cheat’s cassoulet

Makes about 6 servings

200g smoked lardons (I bought a big thick chunk of bacon and cut it up myself)

An onion, chopped

2 medium carrots, chopped

2 celery stalks, chopped

3 cloves garlic, crushed

8 good quality, herby pork sausages (or not pork; but why not?)

½ bottle red wine (plus more, if you like, which I do)

250ml crushed tinned tomatoes

750ml chicken stock

Few sprigs of thyme

Sprig of rosemary

A bay leaf

3 cups cooked white beans (preferably cooked at home, i.e. not from a tin)

1 medium loaf of white bread (such as baguette), stale and processed into crumbs

Preheat the oven to 160 C. Heat some butter over medium heat in a large, heavy-based cast iron dish and add the lardons, sautéing until you’ve rendered a lot of the fat. Remove the lardons with a slotted spoon, leaving all the fat in the pan, and add the onion. Saute for a few minutes, add the carrots and celery and sauté for a further ten minutes until the vegetables are all softened. Add the garlic and sauté for a further two minutes, add the wine and simmer for about five minutes. Add the tomatoes, chicken stock, thyme, rosemary and bay leaf and stir, then tip in the beans and sausages and cover the casserole with a lid or foil. 

Slide the dish into the oven. Cook the casserole for two hours, then cook uncovered for a further hour. When I remove the cover, I add more wine, but that’s optional; you can add more water or stock instead if you feel it’s getting too dry. There should be quite a lot of liquid, since the breadcrumb topping will soak up a lot of the liquid, so use your judgement adding sufficient liquid.

Remove the casserole from the oven, taste and season. I find that it doesn’t need much salt because of all the bacon, but it does need lots of freshly ground black pepper. I also add quite a big glug of red wine vinegar to brighten it up, but that’s optional. Once the seasoning is perfect, spread the breadcrumbs over the top of the casserole and return to the even for another 30-45 minutes. The breadcrumbs should be golden and crunchy on top, and soaked full of the delicious juices on the bottom.

Serve in bowls alongside sturdy bread for scooping and a green salad for palate-cleansing.