Cuisine & Culture the Chinese Family Way
Loyd Grossman has recently introduced a limited edition new flavour – Mint Masala sauce into their great selection of sauces. This sauce is inspired by vibrant Indian mint ‘pudina’. It has a fresh and light fragrance.
We have received a jar of Mint Masala sauce along with a Tikka Masala sauce, rice, naan bread, Balti dish and a recipe card.
OXO Good Grips is setting us yet another interesting blogger challenge! This time around they are challenging us to do a winter warmer recipe. I had so many ideas running through my mind like cooking Fish Head curry, Tom Yum soup, chicken stew and many more. Then I thought to myself that I like baking and making my own pastry. Recently, I had learnt how to make Choux pastry. So I am very keen to learn how to make a nice pastry for a pie and make creamy chicken pie. It is one of those simple but delicious foods that is ideal for this recent inclement weather.
I have regularly seen many sun catcher craft linkys on our weekly Tuesday Tutorials. So when I saw the recipe for stained glass window cookies (Christmas Cookies book from Parragon), I couldn’t wait to bake them!
The stained glass, made by boiled sweets, looks absolutely gorgeous but crushing boiled sweets is not very easy at all! I tried using a mallet, rolling pin and a knife! Also after baking the crushed sweets, it seems to reduce to nothing that I had to keep adding more sweets into the holes of the cookies.
These cookies are quite sweet and taste lovely. If you prefer less sweet, do reduce the amount of caster sugar.
Last week, I invited friends over to play Anki DRIVE and after playing, we all settled down for a nice glass of wine from Frontera (click to check out my Vibrant Chicken in Creamy Wine Sauce recipe and Rich Mushroom Wine Sauce), my homemade olive bread made with Oi1 olive oil and a hamper of cheese that I won from Connage Cheese.
I have always wanted to make meringue as they only require a couple of ingredients and should be easy but I’ve always been put off by the long baking time. Now that the children are at school, I feel like I have the time to tackle it.
This is another recipe inspired from The Secret of Cookies by Gu Huixue but I have altered the recipe slightly. This is a very light Almond Meringue Cookies with a lovely light crunch.
This is a blogger challenge with Frontera Wines.
This is my second recipe for my challenge. This recipe is to use as a sauce to drizzle onto any meat. Merlot is a rich dry dark fruits wine. This wine is soft and smooth with a 12.5% alcohol content. It is great to eat with pasta, cheeses, meat and chicken.
If you have not heard of Frontera before, in fact they are the world’s best-selling Chilean wine brand. The brand has refreshed the look and feel with its redesigned packaging. Now each bottle’s label has a fun and visual story all about the heritage of the wine, the poetry is told through the traditional Chilean method of ‘Lira Popular’ portraying the innovative spirit of Frontera.
On their redesigned packaging, the label on the Merlot bottle has the following:
It was a little blackbird
That gave me my name
Mirlo they called it
Beautiful and dark
Two things we share
Along with a joyful song
Grapes with magical roots
This is a blogger challenge with Frontera Wines.
Using wines for cooking is not something we tend to do as it’s more of a leisure drink for us. Last weekend, I opened a bottle of Frontera Sauvignon Blanc along with the Merlot (see my next post – rich mushroom wine sauce) to make a delicious dinner while enjoying the rest of the wines watching Strictly Come Dancing!
I must admit, I was not aware of Frontera before but in fact, they are the world’s best-selling Chilean wine brand. The brand has refreshed the look and feel with its redesigned packaging. Now each bottle label has a fun and visual story all about the heritage of the wine, the poetry is told through the traditional Chilean method of ‘Lira Popular’ portraying the innovative spirit of Frontera.
Lira Popular is a collection of printed popular Chilean literature, defined as the entire set of printed poetry sheets in tenths produced in Chile, since the mid-nineteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth. I think the labels look fantastic! The Frontera range is available at stockists nationwide RRP £5.99 and the range includes Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Grigio and the newly launched Cabernet Sauvignon Blush.
On their redesigned packaging, the label on the Sauvignon Blanc bottle has the following:
My name is French;
I am a traveller by nature but Chilean at heart.
Don’t be fooled by my youth;
it’s the secret of my freshness and flavour.
I have always loved to drink Milo since young. For any of you unfamiliar with Milo, it is a tastier, chocolatey version of Ovaltine. Since coming to the UK, I do miss drinking cold Milo and Milo Dinosaur (a Singaporean drink – cold Milo with undissolved Milo powdered). So I decided to bake a cookie out of Milo. It was a great success! All my family members love it! You can get Milo in most Asian supermarkets like Wing Yip or you can also try the world food aisle of Asda. Strangely, depending where you buy it from, it can taste different depending where it was imported from. We prefer the South Africa import over Malaysia. So this is my Milo Almond Cookies!
We were thrilled to take part in #OXOHerbsAndMore Kitchen Magician project to try out OXO’s new range of Herbs & More flavours as well as using their recipe magic cards! OXO Herbs & More are all about the perfect pairings of herbs and flavour reductions, conveniently sealed into little pots for freshness to add to your family meals.
We have received five different products: lemon & thyme, rosemary & red wine, roast garlic & parsley, tarragon & chive and rosemary & thyme.
The Sugar-Free Kitchen is a simple cookbook with recipes that drives towards eating a cleaner, healthier diet. It offers a range of exciting recipes to help reduce or eliminate sugar from your diet while still being tasty and delicious.
The cookbook is also very informative. It explains how both refined and natural sugar affects the body, how it has snuck into our food, the health benefits of eating more quality protein, wholefoods and good fats and much more.
It has certainly enlightened me. I was always very curious about the alternatives for sugar for diabetics. Both my parents suffered from diabetes which I will likely inherit in future. So I should watch my intake of sugar especially as I love sugary food!
The book will be released on 3rd November 2014 and is published by Parragon Books Ltd. The book is paperback containing about 128 pages. It comes with six chapters: introduction, breakfasts, lunch & snacks, mains, desserts & baking and index. It is easy to navigate through the book for recipe ideas. Each recipe comes with clear instructions, beautiful photos and nutritional information per serving (calories, fat, saturated fat, carbohydrate, sugars, salt, fibre and protein).
This winter, Kikkoman is challenging bloggers to create an innovative, tasty ‘one pot’ or ‘one pan’ recipe using Kikkoman’s famed naturally brewed soy sauce. Kikkoman Soy Sauce is much more than a stir fry or sushi sauce. It is also a fantastic universal seasoning for all kinds of dishes like soup or roasted chicken or soya sauce chicken. Kikkoman is made with four pure ingredients – soybeans, wheat, salt and water. It is slowly brewed for several months.
This post is an entry for #AngelDelightMoments Linky Challenge.
Angel Delight is a tasty and quick instant dessert that has been whipped up by families since 1967. They come in two different ranges: classic and no added sugar. The six classic flavours are Banana, Butterscotch, Chocolate, Raspberry, Bubblegum and Strawberry. The three no added sugar variants are Strawberry, Butterscotch and Chocolate.
Halloween is coming soon. Have you thought of what you are going to bake? If not, why not try baking these Zombie fingers. I am not a professional baker, but just an enthusiastic amateur baker. I believe you could bake better fingers than me. This is a recipe from Patsie Cheong, One Day One Dish book which I bought while in Singapore. I have altered the recipe slightly to suit the Halloween theme.
This is a recipe from One Day One Dish book by SeaShore publishers which I bought when we were in Singapore. In the book, the recipe is called Chocolate Rice Sprinkle but instead I replaced the chocolate rice with Hundreds and Thousands.
Cat’s Tongue Cookies is another recipe from The Secret of Cookies by Gu Huixue. I totally love this book my friend bought for me in Singapore! One of the ingredients is cake flour which I replaced with plain flour.
