Vermicelli Salad

It was one of those scorching hot summer days...Girl felt in need of sustenance but could but bear the prospect of eating anything hot and heavy. A pantry raid revealed a packet of vermicelli squirreled away behind the pasta and egg noodles and so Vermicelli Salad was had by all for dinner that night...


Vermicelli Salad
Ingredients: (Amounts are very dependent on how many people you are wanting to feed or how hungry they are *^_^*)
Vermicelli, Cucumber, Tomatoes, Carrots, Turnip (raw), Garlic shoots/ Chives/ Spring onion...plus whatever vegetables you fancy!

Dressing Ingedients: (Make the dressing to taste)
Vinegar, Soy sauce or salt, Sugar, Sesame seed oil, Lemon juice & Chillies (last two are optional)

Boil some water and soak the vermicelli in a large bowl. While it is soaking, chop or dice or grate or slice up the vegetables however you fancy. Mix the vinegar, soy sauce and other dressing ingredients in a bowl and pour over veges. When vermicelli is soft, mix in with the veges...Eat!





Girl served the scrummily sourish salad with grilled chicken breast meat that had been coated with a salt, cumin and sesame seed oil marinade. Girl loves her George Foreman grill!

Iffy pictures!

Girl apologises to the handful of friends that may be reading this blog for the iffy pictures. All pictures on this blog are taken with Girl's 1.3megapixel camera on her cellphone and Girl cannot admit to being the world's greatest photographer either!

Saturday Lunch

Girl loves sitting out in her sunny garden with a lovely lunch. Today's lunch was quite a heavy one for a summer's day but Girl was feeling more than a little peckish. And greed did play more than a small part in the decision to make pork chop with a fresh salsa on the side.

Grilled pork chop with tomato, cucumber and avocado salsa and salad leaves.

The pork chop was coated with cumin, curry powder, salt, sugar, sesame oil and the smallest splosh of black vinegar. (Girl does not know where she picked up this penchant for adding black vinegar to her dishes...) The lovely, juicy chop was then grilled in Girl's George Foreman grill. Lovely...

While the pork chop was grilling away, Girl chopped up tomatoes, half an avocado and some cucumber into a bowl and seasoned it with lemon juice and a little salt. Yumminess!

Eureka!

As stated in a previous post, Girl googled a new recipe for yoghurt cake...and this time, Girl's efforts produced a beautifully golden loaf that had no icky, oozy insides.

(Lemon) Yoghurt Cake
Ingredients:

1/2 c plain yogurt

1 c sugar

3 eggs

1/2 cup canola or olive oil

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 1/2 cups flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

Preheat oven to 350º. Butter your cake pan well. Mix the yogurt, eggs, oil, sugar, and vanilla in a medium mixing bowl. Add the flour and baking powder and mix well. Pour into the pan, and bake for 25 minutes or until a knife comes out clean. Let it cool for 10 minutes and then turn out of the pan. Let it cool more before slicing.

(Source: What Geeks Eat)

Girl would have sploshed in some Limoncello (as usual) or squeezed in some lemon juice and grated in some lemon rind if she had had some. Oh well...there's always next time...

This morning, Girl woke up early, went to the supermarket to buy a few ingredients and came back to make chocolate puffs and chicken puffs.

Girl used a packet of defrosted puff pastry for the chocolate puffs and cut rounds out of the pastry with an old jar. Girl put two squares of chocolate in between the pastry rounds and squeezed the edges together. As usual, the puffs were baked at 180c until brown. Choice!

Innocuous looking puffs full of devilishly delish chocolate *evil chuckle*

Chicken puff recipe courtesy of Su Yin over at The Journal of a Girl who Loves to Cook. Marvellous!

Long Weekend

This weekend will be a long weekend for Girl. Wonder what I should do...

The weather's looking pretty good at the moment...looks like perfect picnic weather!

Yoghurt Cake

Girl was browing some food blogs and websites the other day and came across a recipe for Yoghurt cake from a website called Chocolate & Zucchini.com. The instructions looked pretty simple and Girl already had most of the ingredients in her cupboards, save for yoghurt. So she decided to try it...

The mixing of the wet ingredients went smoothly. Girl even managed to substitute the rum required in the recipe with a splash of Limoncello and a squeeze of lemon. However, doubts began to assaile Girl when the dry ingredients went in and the batter started looking a little thicker and doughier than expected. However, there was no help for it but to spoon the dough into two loaf tins and bake at 200c.

20 minutes later, Girl realised the importance of sticking to the exact temperature given in the recipe (180c for 30-35 minutes) as she stared at two well-browned loaves with squishy insides...ick! The two loaves were returned to the oven to be baked at 150c for awhile in the hopes of drying the insides out while not browning the crusts any further...

The cakes turned out OK...(despite the cock-up). They were light and not too sweet and most importantly, almost 100% fool-proof, now that Girl has learnt a valuable lesson about baking temperatures! This Yoghurt cake looks set to become the base recipe of many variations of cake in the future...

On a further note...Girl and Kalosha ate the two cakes up yesterday...actually Kalosha ate most of it. Girl thought the cakes were a little on the dry side (not surprising) while Kalosha thought they were OK. Kalosha suggested Girl put in carrots and sultanas into the cake in future. Bah! Philistine!

On an even further note...Girl has tried recreating the cake again and this time, had the same problem! Very brown outsides and damp inside! :( This time, Girl baked cake at 150c for longer. Maybe its not Girl's cooking abilities...maybe is recipe *frowns and rushes off to Google another recipe*

Puffing On...

Chicken Pot Pie

Ingredients: One cubed chicken breast, one potato (peeled and cubed), one sliced onion, half a bag of frozen mixed vegetables, a packet of instant soup mix (Mushroom) and a sheet of puff pastry...

Girl started out by frying the onion in oil and then adding the chicken, potato and frozen mixed vegetables to the pot. While they were cooking away, she mixed the packet of instant soup mix with some water and whisked it to ensure that all lumps were eliminated. When the chicken was cooked, she added the soup mix to the pot and mixed all the ingredients together thoroughly. Salt, soy sauce and black vinegar was added to the pot to season the mixture. When the mixture was done, Girl filled up casserole dishes with it. Puff pastry was used to cover the casserole dishes and excess pastry was trimmed away. Holes were poked in the pastry and the pies were baked for about 15-20 minutes at 180c-200c.