Sep 15, 2010

Brocolli in Garlic and Olive Oil

This one is a great side dish and very very easy to make. Aside from the brocolli, this involves 4 ingredients only...garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper. The ingredients will bring out the natural flavor of the vegetable.

I served this last night together with the tempura.

Here's the recipe;

Ingredients

1 medium head brocolli, cut and sliced in florettes
5 cloves garlic
5 tbsps olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste

Instruction
1. Wash the brocolli thoroughly. I've got a tip from my mom that to make sure that the vegetables will be bug-free, you can soak the vegetable in water with a tablespoon of vinegar for 10 minutes. After that, wash again with running water.
2. Cut the brocolli in small florettes.

fresh brocolli florettes
3. Heat the pan, add the olive oil and garlic.
4. Add the brocolli, stir fry until you reach the desired doneness of the vegetable. I like mine to be half cooked.

5. Season with salt and pepper.

Serve hot!!!

Easy Tempura

We bought shrimps (...again! we really love shrimps) and instead of cooking the buttered shrimps and the ginataan hipon, I tried the tempura.

Tempura is deepfried dish of vegetables or seafoods. To make them crispy, each will be dipped in batter - a mixture of water, egg, flour and salt,  before deep frying. What makes the tempura delicious is the dipping sauce. The original dipping sauce includes dashi and mirin, but since Japanese stores are nowhere to be found in my area, my Nora Daza cookbook saved my day!

If you want to maintain the crispiness of the tempura, try rolling them in japanese breadcrumbs, called panko. That's what I did and it really did make the tempura more crispy.

So here's the recipe, try it!

Ingredients
For the tempura
15 pcs shrimps (suahe type)
salt and pepper

Batter
3/4 cup flour
3/4 cup water
1 egg
salt and pepper to taste

1 cup of panko for coating the shrimps

Procedure
Shrimp
1. Shell, devein and wash the shrimps. I butterfly cut the shrimps by making a slit at the back. Do not take off the tails. Season with salt and pepper, then prepare the batter.

deveined and butterfly-ed shrimps 

2. For the batter, combine all the ingredients and mix well.

Batter

3. Heat oil in the frying pan or deep fryer. The shrimps must be submerged in hot oil to achieve an even golden brown crust. Aside from that, we want soft and juicy shrimps and if you have insufficient oil, tendency is to have a longer cooking time resulting to dry and tough shrimps.

Anyway, once the cooking oil is hot, cooked the tempura until golden brown.

4. To remove the excess oil, place them in a kitchen paper towel.

Dipping Sauce
Ingredients
1 cup hot water
1 chicken boullion cube
2 tbsps soy sauce
1 tsp grated ginger
2 tbsps grated radish

Just mix everything and that's it!!

Hope you'll like it!

Sep 8, 2010

Blogging thru iPod touch

Yay! I can update my blog thru iPod! I am testing if its working! i cannot upload picture with the lite version though!