Now you know those "beetroot" pastas you get from supermarket are possibly just using artificial food colouring! The colour of these home-made beetroot pastas look totally different, in term of colour, from those supermarket one! These pastas have a lovely red colour with bits of real beetroot in it. It has an earthy and sweet scent too!

For these pasta, I mixed 120g strong bread flour with one egg and 2 generous tablespoonful of minced fresh beetroot. (add a tablespoon of oil in the mincing process). You will need more flour to achieve a smooth and non-sticky dough in the kneading stage. It is all about experiment. I air-dried them over night to get this authentic dry pasta look! VERY brittle, so handle with extra care!

I can not wait to cook them and see how they will look hydrated and mingling with some lovely sauce..(not sure what sauce yet!)

UPDATE:
All gone now...the pastas look lovely once cooked. Such pretty rose-red colour. I thought the pasta should be served in very simple fragranced oil. So I gently fried some garlic chives in olive oil, and then add some carrot and prawns. Boil the pasta in boiling water for max 2 minutes then mix them to the sauce...

YUM and this is the colours of the coming Summer time...!

I was thinking this morning, it must be very pretty if I can use beetroot to make some coloured pasta! The result is rather exciting. Indeed, I made some beautiful red pasta..(it will be revealed tomorrow!)

So I used the left-over beetroot pasta dough to make these "papadum". They are equally pretty. Such an exciting colour on the plate..

I was wondering what can these beetroot "papadum" go with....maybe goat's cheese and chilli and tomatoes condiment?! YUMMMM...Together they tasted really nice...the slight earthiness of the beetroot works well with the goat's cheese. The saltiness and creaminess of the cheese complement perfectly with the sweetness and spiciness of the chilli and tomatoes condiment! 

How boring can it be when a plate of food lack of colours!

How interesting!! Exactly the same ingredient as the parsley pasta, but I manage to make a totally different kind of food with Asian flavours! And I found a different use of the left-over pasta dough! Simply divide the pasta dough into small balls and roll them out as a round "papadum" dish. Gently fry them until crisp and lightly coloured in a lightly oiled pan 

Serves with the minced lamb sauce and chilli and tomato condiment. YUM!

For the home-made chilli and tomato condiment: I used the followings: (make 1 jar)

1. 2 Large tomatoes (roughly chopped with skin and seeds)
2. 4 Large red chillies (roughly chopped with seeds)
3. Juice of 1 lime
4. 1/2 cup jam sugar (or just normal sugar)
5. A handful of finely chopped coriander leaves
6. A handful of roughly chopped coriander stalks

In a pan, cook the chopped tomatoes, chillies, lime juice and coriander stalks until soften and mashy. Add the sugar and cook until the sauce thickened. Remove from the heat and stir in the chopped coriander leaves and pour the mixture to a sterile jam jar and close the lid immediately and store it away until later. Done! 

This week's colour is GREEN!  Really! There are so many natural ways to colour your food. I wanted to make some really green pasta, my initial straight forward green ingredient for the pasta was spinach. However, I wanted to use a plant that not only provide the colour but also add flavour to the pasta. 

I tried using coriander, but the result was not as expected. Lovely flavour, but it was not as refine and the coriander seemed to be a bit too "juicy" for the pasta making! So for my second attempt, I used parsley as the green ingredient.
It worked well, but not as fragrant as the coriander.

For the pasta, I mix 1 egg and 2 generous tablespoonful of the finely minced parsley (stalks and leaves) with 110g plain flour. Combine all ingredients well with a fork. When the dough come together (a bit sticky initially), knead with your hands and add more flour (one handful at a time) until the dough is smooth and elastic. 

Divide the dough into many smaller balls (if using rolling pin) or if you have a pasta machine (lucky you!) then you can just rolled them through the machine as you would normally do! Once done, cut the thin pasta sheet into smaller strands, and set aside to let it dry for a little while. 

I thought  the parsley in the pasta should complement well with minced lamb, so I made some simple minced lamb sauce to go with the pasta. Once you have prepared the sauce, cook the pasta in boiling water for 2 or 3 minutes and drain. Add the pasta to the lamb sauce and coat the pasta throughly.

Serves hot with finely chopped red chilli as garnish. Beautiful!

I think this might be the most well-known Chinese takeaway dish (other than the egg fried rice, sweet and sour pork and peking duck rolls) for westerners! I think they often go to the same dishes every time they have Chinese takeaway! Usually the lemon chicken you ordered from the takeaway, the meat often very slippery. It feels like the meat had been soaked in some kind of softening chemicals for a long time!

This is my attempt for this popular dish. It is really quite simple to make! In half an hour, you can serve this to your family!

Ingredients: 

1. 4 Chicken thighs (Remove the bone and cut into large chunks)
2. 1 Zest of lemon
3. 1 Egg
4. Salt and pepper (to taste)
5. 1 tbsp soy sauce
6. 1 tbsp oyster sauce
7. 1 tsp smoked paprika
   
8. Few generous tbsp corn flour (to be adjusted accordingly)
9. 1 Carrot (shredded)
10. Enough oil for deep frying
11. 1 Juice of lemon
    
12. 1 tbsp sugar

In a large bowl, marinate the chicken chunks with the zest of lemon, soy sauce, oyster sauce, egg, corn flour, salt and pepper. Set aside for 10 minutes or longer. (The thick corn flour mixture should coat the chicken chunks nicely)

In another plate, mix more corn flour and paprika together.

Use a deep pot (or deep fryer) pre-heating the oil until it is ready for cooking. Dip each chicken chunks to the flour and paprika mixture and deep fry the chicken until cooked (golden brown) and drain the oil. Set aside. Then arrange the chicken pieces on top of the carrot.

To make the lemon sauce. Add the lemon juice and sugar in the pan. Gently dissolve the sugar in low heat. Mix 1 tsp of corn flour and some water together. Add it to the lemon juice to thicken the sauce. 

Just before serving, pour the lemon sauce over the chicken pieces...done!

Really love the colour of these red cabbage rice. The deep purple colour really complement nicely the orange-y pork curry. 

To make the red cabbage rice, simply add generous amount of the sliced red cabbages into the half cooked rice then let them cook until the rice are ready to serve.

I think we should introduce more natural colourings on our plates. Such a lovely colour combinations...It will really excite our appetite and encourage us to eat the variety of food!

Enough of playing with food today! I am very full from eating and tasting too much!

YUM YUM YUM!

My bread making addiction is not going away. I scarified my sleep to make bread all night last night...with a few naps here and there through out the process! This is one of the things I really enjoy doing and it keeps me going...

I really enjoyed reading Emmanuel Hadjiandreou's "How to make bread". One of his recipes using beer to replace the water as an biding agent. I thought, if we can use milk, water or beer as a binding agent in bread making..surely (why not) using other liquids such as orange juice (or may be not?) would be ok too! I thought the orange juice would give the bread some orange-y flavour! It is a crazy idea worth trying, for fun!

This orange juice bread is just your usual simple wholemeal bread, instead of using of water, I used orange juice as a replacement. Warm the juice a little before pouring it to the dried yeast. 

For some reasons, the dough rises very slowly for this bread. It took at least 8 hours to get the dough to rise to its double in volume. (Perhaps my flat is a bit colder than normal household!) The end result is a bread with a little sour note from the orange juice. Unfortunately, It doesn't have the orange flavour I was hoping for. It tastes a bit like a sourdough bread actually! 

This pear cider bread is inspired by Emmanuel Hadjiandreou's "Beer Bread". Instead of nettle ale in the recipe book, I thought I prefer the smell of the pear cider! I used wholemeal flour instead of malthouse flour and skipped the flour sifting process (a bit lazy), and arranged the doughs into different configuration! Other than that, I followed his recipe to the letter. 

The end result...the bread has ONLY VERY subtle scent of the pear cider (maybe beer would produce stronger flavour?). but it is a good bread nonetheless! Now I have to think what I can do with this breads!

NOTE: I do not get any commissions from him to promote or review his book (unfortunately!). I think it is a good bread making book to have on your shelf! 

My bread making addiction is back again! I have been making, or may be more about playing, with different ingredients and processes of bread making. I thought, If one can use beetroot in bread, why can I not use other root vegetables like parsnip to replace the beetroot?! I love the sweet scented freshly grated parsnip. It infuses the bread with very subtle scent of parsnip.

Same process and ingredients as the beetroot bread, but I replaced the 160g beetroot with 200g of parsnip. But I think I might have got the parsnip proportion slight wrong in this bread. It seemed a little too moist for the bread, but may be that contribute to the softness of the bread. Lovely crisp bread skin though!

Great for savoury dishes...but also good with sweet jams...