Condensed Milk Lemon Slice

Label on the tin!

Lemon slice!  It used up a whole tin of condensed milk, and I had the rest of the ingredients at home.  Perfect! (Although after I made this lemon slice, I realised that Nigella's blondie recipe in Kitchen also uses a whole tin of condensed milk. And I've wanted to make that one for ages!  D'oh!)

Anyhoo, this one is a bit different from the standard Aussie lemon slice.  It's a shortbready base, covered with a sweet and densely creamy lemon topping. 

In progress!

You start by mixing 1.5 cups plain flour with 1/2 cup icing sugar and 150g melted butter.  Press it into a tray (I used a 20 x 30cm foil tray - I bought some recently because Nigella has a zillion recipes using foil trays in Kitchen.)...

Shortbread base

... and bake for 15 mins in a 180C oven, until golden!

Baked shortbread base

For the topping, you mix a 400gm can of condensed milk, 1 egg, 1 tbs grated lemon rind, 1/2 cup lemon juice, 2 tbs plain flour and 1 tsp baking powder.

Condensed Milk Lemon Filling

Pour it over the shortbread base...

Condensed Milk Lemon Filling

...and bake for 25-30 minutes, or until set.

Condensed Milk Lemon Slice

The recipe says to let it cool in the pan and refrigerate, before eating it.  Y'all know I wasn't gonna do that, haha.  I prised out the slice while it was still warm, dusted it with icing sugar, and sliced it into squares.  On a side note, the foil tray worked really well!  The base was crispy all the way through and there was no greasing or lining required.  (On an environmental note, the trays are recyclable and no detergent is needed to clean them, yay!)

Condensed Milk Lemon Slice

As you can imagine, it was very sweet, so was best enjoyed in small slices with a cup of tea or coffee.  Although there was something very compulsive about it... with its rich, caramelly filling, and crispy base, I found it hard to stop at just one piece!

Condensed Milk Lemon Slice
Recipe from the back of the condensed milk tin in 2010, rewritten in my own words

Ingredients
For the base
1 + 1/2 cup plain flour
1/2 cup icing sugar
150 grams butter, melted and allowed to cool
For the topping
1 x 400 gram tin sweetened condensed milk
1 egg
1 tablespoon grated lemon zest
1/2 cup lemon juice
2 tablespoons plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder

Method
Preheat the oven to 180C.
Grease and line a 20 x 30 cm lamington tray. (Alternatively use a foil tray, no need to line or grease).
For the base, stir together the plain flour, icing sugar, and butter.
Press this mixture evenly into the prepared tray. Bake for 15 minutes, or until golden.
For the topping, whisk together the sweetened condensed milk, egg, lemon zest, lemon juice, plain flour and baking powder until smoothly combined.
Pour the topping over the base (you don't need to wait for the base to cool completely). Return the tray to the oven and cook for 25-30 minutes, or until set.
Allow to cool completely, then refrigerate. Cut into small squares to serve.
Makes 24 squares, depending on how big you cut them

Have you made this recipe? Leave a comment below! Tag me on Instagram @sarahcooksblog and hashtag #sarahcooksblog

Look what I found at the Asian grocer!!!!!!!!!

Inside door of our bar fridge. Yes, I drink coke zero, and I'll thank you not to judge!

It's finally here! My beloved Boss Coffee Rainbow Mountain Blend!! (You may remember it from my '07 trip to Japan, where it came out of vending machines WARM!) Saw it at a Korean grocery today, and had to snap up 6 cans. What an impulse buy. At $3.79 a pop they are expensive, more expensive than my morning latte, but I just couldn't resist. And they look so much cooler than the red bulls/V's that my co-workers drink.

Yee Sang Family Toss

Happy New Year! I hope everyone's celebrations have been super-fun! In a super-lucky coincidence for us Aussies, Chinese New Year fell on Australia Day this year. You know what that means... long weekend! Wahoo!

We always have our family reunion dinner on Chinese New Year's eve, and it's very important that the whole family sits down together for this special dinner.

Chinese New Year is all about tradition, and you'll see that this year's menu was pretty much the same as 07, 06 and 05. I realise now that I didn't do a blog post for last year's dinner, but, well, the food was the same. Last year I did all the cooking myself, but this year I'm very happy to say we had the whole family at home to celebrate and do the preparations together.


Chinese New Year's Eve Reunion Dinner

Yee Sang - Chinese New Year salad containing jellyfish and raw veggies
Kiam Chye Th'ng - Soup with salted vegetables, duck and pork
Loh Bak - finely chopped belly pork, spiced, wrapped in soy-bean skin and deep-fried to crispy perfection
Chicken Curry Kapitan - coconut-milk based chicken curry

You can see that we have pretty typical Penang nyonya-type food. We don't normally do Yee Sang, but lots of my brother's Hong Kong friends eat it, and he thought it would be a nice idea for us to try it. Apparently Yee Sang is a pain in the arse to make, because you have to grate up all the vegetables into tiny tiny slivers. We got ours out of a packet. It feels very Chinese to be having this at new year's, but to be honest I'm not sure if most of the Chinese have Yee Sang, or if it's just certain groups.

At any rate, I find use of the term "the Chinese" to be a gross oversimplification - reductive and patronising. (Yes, that's right Kylie Kwong, BBC Good Food magazine article, I'm looking at you...). Over one billion individuals live in China itself, not to mention the estimated 40,000,000 overseas Chinese (a group to which I proudly belong). All I feel qualified to talk about the family's traditions of my family, that my parents inherited from their families in Malaysia. How on earth would you reduce the New Year traditions of such a massive and diverse group of people to a short, lite-reading article?

Ok, rant over, back to the Yee Sang.


Basically you place all the ingredients on a plate, then the family stands up and tosses the salad together with their chopsticks. Apparently the higher you toss, the higher your luck for the new year. It's good fun. I didn't really like the taste, and found the sauce a bit strong, but my brother's girlfriend loves it. I'm guessing it's an acquired taste.

Loh Bak! Yummm....

The Kiam Chye Th'ng...

And the chicken curry! It's a bit more yellow than normal, I think I went overboard with the turmeric, hehe.

We don't really do New Year's desserts, although there'll always be tee kuih (sweet sticky glutinous rice cake thingo, comes in a big fat disc with a red and gold lucky label on the top) and some kuih bahulu (sweet dry sponge cake biscuity things) around the house. We'd usually have yam cookies too, but we're trying not to go OTT with the unhealthy food, haha.

What we did have after dinner was a small sip of something special...

Always important to have a little gold, in the hope for prosperity in the year ahead.

GONG XI FA CAI!!!!

Welcome to post number 2 in my "3 Dinners" series. This week's theme is pasta! Quick, versatile, economical. All boxes ticked!

Pappardelle with Zucchini, Sultanas and Pine Nuts

This pasta dish, from Nigella's Forever Summer, is one of my staple dinners. It's exceedingly simple, if a little time consuming, as it takes 45 minutes for the zucchini to cook down to the requisite mushiness. You don't need to stand there stirring it the whole time, but I don't like to leave a pot on the stove unsupervised, so I'd stay in the kitchen, checking my email or cleaning up or whatever.

Just slowly cook some sliced zucchini and garlic in a bit of oil, until soft and mushy, then add marsala-soaked sultanas and toasted pine nuts. Toss the whole lot through cooked pappardelle with some parmesan and parsley. Ta-dah! I used Passion Pasta's wholemeal spelt pappardelle, which was toothsome and satisfying, but not heavy. Nigella was right - 250g of pappardelle does seem like a small amount, but it was enough for a light meal for 4 people.


Spaghetti with Bacon, Garlic and Parsley

Too easy. This pasta is my way of bulking up the classic spaghetti aglio olio, another favourite of mine, and I pretty much always have the ingredients for it on hand. I keep bacon in the freezer, a parsley plant in the garden, parmesan cheese in the fridge, and pasta in the pantry. Making this pasta is simply a matter of frying bacon pieces and garlic in olive oil, then tossing through the cooked spaghetti, parmesan cheese and parsley. I see in this photo I used a mixture of regular spaghetti and the remnants of a packet of spelt spaghetti, but whatever spaghetti you prefer would do the job.


Mini-Penne Rigate mit Sahne, Erbsen und Schinken


I love these little mini-penne rigate! How cute are they? I must admit I was drawn to the German writing on the back of the packet. It came with a recipe (in German) for mini-penne rigate with parmigiano reggiano sauce and ham. As far as my abysmal command of the German language would allow me, I figured out that the sauce is made from cooking milk with cheese, which you then add to the cooked pasta, with some chopped herbs and cooked peas. I tried it a few weeks ago, but wasn't too impressed. Some weeks later, however, I found success with a similar recipe in Nigella's Feast. Nigella's pasta is a lot more simple; her "pasta with ham, peas and cream" is just that. Cooked and ready to go in less than 10 minutes, and wonderfully tasty.


As a bonus, making this recipe enabled me to use up a half-finished tub of cream I had in the fridge, which surely would have died a mouldy death, had this recipe not saved it.

Welcome to a new series of posts where I share 3 meals I've made each week. In theory it'd be from the previous week, in practice, the meals could be from months and months ago. The idea is twofold: to get through my massive backlog of food photos, and to share ideas for meals that are interesting and varied, but still manageable for a busy (and keen) cook.

This week's theme is Japanese.


Sake Simmered Chicken with Mushrooms and Miso-grilled Vegetables
I found these recipes in a 2005 (!) issue of Delicious magazine. It was their "healthy" issue, and I picked it up off the floor of my room when I running late for work and could not bear the thought of reading the MX again. Lucky I did, because it was full of great recipes! These ones are from Jill Dupleix's column. The recipes are pretty easy, if a bit fiddly. I think you could do them on a weeknight after work, if you were organised, but I made them on a lazy weekend evening. (To be honest, that night my brother suggested buying KFC - and believe me I was tempted - but I thought better of it and decided to make something healthy).

For the above veggies, you blanch them in hot water, drain them, then coat them in a mixture of miso/sugar/soy/mirin/sake, and grill them. For the chicken, you poach chicken breasts with shiitake mushrooms in a mixture of soy/mirin/sake/sugar and stock, then slice them and serve them on rice, with some wilted spinach and finely shredded carrots. Jill's recipe include enoki mushrooms also, but our local shops did not oblige.

I was very pleased with these recipes, and thought the poaching technique was a great way to add flavour without fat. I'd definitely like to make this again.


Grilled fish, Jamie Oliver's Broccoli, Miso Soup

The grilled fish in question was this toroaji I got at Fuji-mart a while back with my friend Markii. I can't remember exactly what fish it is (mackeral, perhaps?), but it is smoked and salted, and available in the freezer section. Markii enjoyed this fish while he was living in Japan, and it is apparently quite popular with Fuji-mart's customers. All you need to do to it is defrost and grill it.
The recipe for the veggies below, come from Jamie's Cook with Jamie, and is one of my favourite ways to make plain green veggies more interesting. They are served with little fried slivers of garlic, toasted sesame seeds, and a dressing made of soy sauce, sesame oil, ginger and lime juice. Oishi~~i!

Miso soup. Instant. Also from Fuji-mart. Also good.
I enjoyed this meal overall, although I did find the fish very salty, so we only needed to eat a small amount to be full. Those above two pieces were more than enough for myself and my parents.


Japanese Beef Curry

I adore Japanese curry. As a Malaysian, I know that Japanese curry isn't actually hot, and therefore not a "real" curry, but I still love it. Beef curry, katsu curry (deep fried pork cutlet covered in curry sauce), or nasu karee (eggplant curry!) My host mother in Fukuoka made it for me back in '99 because she knew I love eggplants. And, because she knew I love hot food, she made it 3 times as hot as it normally is. I loved it! But I felt really, really sorry for my kawaisou host sisters who gasped like crazy, fanning their mouths and downing their water like nobody's business. Gomen-ne!

Any Asian grocery store should stock Japanese curry mix. Don't feel bad about using a packet, that's the way it's done in homes all over Japan. You just cook it with beef pieces, potatoes, carrots, and (I think) a bit of water.

Now, I didn't actually make this curry, my brother's girlfriend Su made it. (Arigatou Su, you are suupa~ kuuru!) But, I think it makes a great quick dinner, which is why I'm sharing it with y'all.

The leftovers froze really well, and made a great workday lunch.

If you liked Croissant in a Can, you'll love Breakfast in a Box!

The classic, with Speck and eggs.

Bauern Früstück, (literally "Farmer's Breakfast"), consists of fried potato slices, bacon, and eggs. I'm not sure if German farmers actually eat it for breakfast, but the image of a big ol' Bavarian farmer (possibly wearing lederhosen or a funky green hat), up at the crack of dawn, tucking into a big plate of Bauern Früstück, is an appealing image, even if it is a caricature.

I would tend to think of such a dish as a hangover cure, or a quick and treaty supper, rather than a daily breakfast. (I certainly hope so; I can't imagine a Bauern Früstück being a daily breakfast for anyone who wants to live past 50).

In that brightly coloured box, there is a foil package, containing the uncooked breakfast. All you gotta do is fry it in a pan until golden brown and heated through. It doesn't look very attractive when you first squelch it out of the packet and drop it onto the waiting pan...

... but turns a nice golden colour once fried.


A big plate of this, beer, TV. Contentment.

"Croissant in a Can" was one of my most ecstatic discoveries whilst in Germany this year. Originally from France, bake it right in your own home!

As you can see, the instructions couldn't be simpler.

Ziehen, plopp, drehen, ausrollen, trennen, rollen, backen!
(Pull, pop, twist, roll out, split, roll up, bake!)

1. Ziehen the tab on the can, then plopp it open!
2. Drehen the can to get the dough out.

3. Ausrollen the dough, and trennen it along the perforations.

4. Rollen the pieces into croissant shapes.

We filled half of them with Zartbitterschokolade.
5. Backen the croissants at 180C for 10-15 minutes.

Impressively fluffy! They're so quick to make, and fill the kitchen with a lovely aroma first thing in the morning. They were a little bit smaller and dryer than patisserie-bought croissants, but I loved them all the same.

In Nigella Express, Nigella has a similar recipe for chocolate croissants made with puff pastry, which I think would make a worthy substitute now that I'm back in Australia where, sadly, we have no croissant-in-a-can.

Me with canned Café au lait.

Sarah does not function without caffeine. This makes things hard when I'm overseas, far away from my favourite cafes, and separated from my private stash of ground coffee and plunger. (Am I the only one who's noticed how crap and expensive the coffee is outside of Melbourne and Italy?)

The solution? Funky Japanese Vending machines!

Every other street corner in Japan has vending machines, selling a massive variety of hot and cold drinks, including soup and alcohol. And they're cheap! ¥110 for a tasty canned coffee totally beats ¥500 or whatever it is for a latte of variable quality at Starbucks or any other cafe.

Here's a tip - on a cold winter morning, popping a couple of warm coffee cans into your pockets will totally keep you warm as you walk to the station.

Sarah with coffee of choice - Boss brand Rainbow Mountain Blend. It's advertised by Academy Award® winner Tommy Lee Jones, so you know it's gotta be good. Click here for the awesome TV commercial.

Vending machine selling film and disposable cameras.

The following photo is of an awesome coffee/tea vending machine in Nikko train station. This one sells cups, not cans. The red ones are for hot drinks, and the blue ones on the left are cold.

And here it is in action. Ta-dah!

Glico Brand Chicken Rice flavour sachet. ¥100, Daiso 100 Yen shop, Harajuku, Tokyo.

The coolest shop in the world is, without a doubt, the Daiso 100 Yen Shop. Daniel, my brother and fellow Japan-o-phile, you can keep your Bathing Apes, your Evisu Jeans and your Shibuya 109s, the Daiso 100 Yen Shop is the place for me. There are big ones in Nara, Harajuku, Ueno, the Rox building in Asakusa, and pretty much all over Japan. You can buy everything there, for a mere 100 yen! Especially exciting are the range of household and cooking products - flavour sachets, soft drinks, cake boxes, muffin papers, foil trays, tempura drainers, tongs, measuring cups, green plastic grass-shaped liners for your bentohs and more! You can imagine how much I love this store, and the ridiculous amounts I purchased over 3 weeks in Japan. (The cost of shipping everything home far outweighed the cost of the items themselves, but now is not the time to worry about that).

Now, the chicken rice. I didn't send that home, but instead brought it to Germany with me. Despite the name, it doesn't have any discernible 'chicken' in it, just chicken flavour. It's good. The first time we had Japanese chicken rice was at Cafe Do Pearl, a tiny little cafe in Ise. Ise is a small, quiet town, home to Japan's most sacred Shinto site and architectural wonder - the Ise-jingu. It houses the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu, and is rebuilt from scratch every 20 years, don't you know.

Cafe Do Pearl's Chicken Rice. We were surprised by the lack of chicken pieces, but impressed with the taste.

Cafe do Pearl's interior. It seems to be a one-woman show, and I assume that the proprietress lives upstairs.

Meanwhile, back at das ranch, we made up that Glico Chicken Rice for dinner last night, having had some leftover cooked rice.

You start by frying an egg in some butter or oil, then stirring in the cooked rice. Once the rice and egg are mixed together, you throw in the powder sachet, and stir some more.
Next is the sauce sachet.

Then stir until all is thoroughly mixed and heated through. It wasn't quite as moist or intensely flavoured as the one at Cafe do Pearl, but still good. It was very quick, and comforting without being stodgy or artery-clogging.


Why isn't packet food in Australia this good?