Pancake Day

Pancake day a.k.a. Shrove Tuesday, a day to eat pancake.

Normally, people will make pancakes at home and add any toppings that they like.

Today, we decided to go to a pancake cafe in town, called the pancake house.

Never seen so many people out on a Tuesday evening eating pancakes in a cafe!

Nicely decorated pancakes (which is a little pricey) in a pretty little pancake cafe. There could be no better dessert. Yum Yum!

Banana and Nutella chocolate

Banana and Peanut Butter

Coq au vin

Coq au vin - a 'French braise of chicken cooked in red wine'.

deliciousmagazine

 My food adventure has brought me to French cuisine this time! A very classic and simple dish but very delicious and full of flavour!

*Another recipe extracted from deliciousmagazine by Hermione Norris.

Ingredients

 Even though this dish involved a lot of ingredients, herbs and seasonings, it is rather easy to make.

Red wine

I selected this Australian red wine for its sweet and fruity taste.

Pot of chicken and various items

Each ingredients were carefully handled. First the chicken was jointed then coated with seasoned flour before frying in olive oil and butter. Then strips of bacon were fried in the same frying pan until crisp, after which a clove of crushed garlic was added. Peeled whole shallots were fried until brown before adding the mushrooms to fry until soft. All these ingredients were added succesively into a big pot.

Herbs

Once the ingredients were added into the big pot, red wine, homemade chicken stock, tomato paste, sprigs of thyme and bay leaves were added.

Shimmering

 The casserole was brought to boil then allowed to shimmer for about an hour until the chicken was cooked through and tender.

Coq au vin

HHHmmmmmm.........
The wonderful and sweet aroma of the wine, herbs and chicken filled the kitchen.

Coq au vin (2)

A nice and thick sauce from the reduced red wine and chicken stock. The chicken was tender and juicy and had absorbed all the flavours of the sauce. All the wonderful flavours from the fried bacon, sweetness of shallots, garlic, sourness and sweetness of tomato paste, herby bay leaves and thyme, and also the fruity punch from the red wine. All these flavour leaves a lingering taste in your mouth with each mouthful!

Served with rice

Lots of sauce served with rice, so delicious that it leaves us wanting more rice to go with it!

A Lazy Weekend Menu

Here comes the end of the week. After a week-long of hard work, nothing is better than a heart-warming, mouth-watering, home-cooked meal!

Does a nice home-cooked meal always mean lots of toiling in the kitchen? The answer is...........most certainly NOT!

After shifting through my new issue of 'deliciousmagazine' and tagging a few recipes that I like, I decided to cook this simple dish on the weekend.

Nigella's lazy weekend menu - Roast Duck Legs with Potatoes.

deliciousmagazine

Ingredients

Searing Duck skin side down

Ready for the oven

Roast duck leg with potatoes

Searing the duck skin-side down not only leaves a very crispy skin and lock the juices inside the duck meat, but also brings out the natural fat/oil from the duck which leaves a very lovely aroma and flavour to the dish.

Potatoes diced into even 2cm cubes were arranged around the seared duck legs in a hot roasting pan. A few sprigs of thyme were spread over the duck and potatoes which were then seasoned with sea salt and pepper before putting into a pre-heated oven.

As the dish was cooking in the oven, the aroma from the thyme, the fat from the duck and the roasting potatoes filled the entire house!

Two hours later, we get a very tender duck with extremely crackling skin and absolutely crispy potatoes! Of course, some boiled mix-vegetable to provide our daily 5-portion of fruit & veg.

5 minutes to prepare and 2 hours in the oven - easy to cook with very little hassle producing a yummylicious weekend meal!


Honey Dew Melon with Sago

Recipe from a blog that I follow.

Ingredients

Honey Dew Melon

Honey Dew Melon with Sago

After a nice warm meal, it is always very refreshing to have a nice cool dessert.

A delicious dessert made from fresh fruit and coconut milk then cooled in the fridge is just heavenly. The sweetness of the melon juice and sugar syrup is so soothing and the milkiness of fragrant coconut milk is just amazing. The boiled sago adds another dimension of texture to this lovely dessert, making it thicker.

Served cold, this dessert --> yummylicious!