It felt strangely satisfying to be smelling onions on my fingers and crockery clanging again after quite a while.  Well, this monster called Work has been preventing me from getting any serious cooking done; apart from throwing ingredients between bread.  This time round, the dish in question is French Onion Soup.  Why French onion soup? Because PY wanted French onion soup; which is as good a reason as any these days.  Plus, we tried the french onions soups at Vivocity's The Mussel Guys and Phin's Steakhouse at Tampines Mall which were just drab.  So I brought out my trusty Cook's Illustrated Best Recipes - yes, the one where every receipe for the dishes featured have been tested and evaluated by America's Test Kitchen.  So essentially, its a 'How to make the perfect ..." type of cookbook.  I decided to make French onion soup from scratch starting with a good'ole fashion beef stock.

Beef stocks are funny things: why is it that Maggi or Knorr stock cubes have lots of flavous except beef?  Or why is it that instant noodles usually have chicken seasoning rather than beef?  Well, according to Cook's Illustrated, weight for weight, chicken releases more flavour from its meat, bones and skin into liquid than beef does.  Hence, to obtain some serious beef stock, a whole lot of meat is required.  And precisely lots of meat is what is required for the rich beef stock recipe found in the Best Recipes book.

Here's the recipe:

1-2 tablespoons vegetable oil

6 pounds beef shank, meat cut from bones in large chunks or 4 pounds chuck and 2 pounds small marrow bones

1 large onion, halved

0.5 cup dry red wine

1 litre boiling water

0.5 teaspoons salt

-Heat 1 tablespoon oil in a large stockpot over medium-high heat.  Brow meat and oniion on all sides.  Don't overcrowd and add more oil if necessary.

-Remove contents and add the wine and reduce till a brown syrup.  Return the meat and bones.  Reduce heat and sweat the meat and onions until a thick brown intensely flavoured liquid is formed, about 20mins.

-Increase the heat to medium high, add water and salt and let simmer, partially ocvered for 1.5 to 2 hours.  Then strain the contents and tada! 2 litres of ones of the best beef stock ever.  The patient people at America's Test Kitchen found that the traditional method of roasting vegetables for stocks did not really add much flavour; a simple onion did the trick.

 And for the soup:

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

5 medium red onions (3 pounds).  Sliced thin.

2 litres beef stock from above

0.25 cup dry red wine

2 sprigs fresh parsley

1 bay leaf

1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar

Ground black pepper

Salt

-Melt butter in a large tockpot over medium-high heat.  Add the onions and a sprinkle of salt and stir the onions until thoroughly caramelised to a brown syrup.  30 to 35 mins

-Stir in the beef stock, red wine, parsley, thyme and bay leaf.  Loosen the bits at the bottom.

-Simmer to blend the flavours.  About 20mins.  Then discard the herbs (except onions). Stir in the vinegar and adjust the taste with salt and pepper.

For the top crusts

1 baguette, cut into 1cm slices

4.5 ounces swiss cheese, sliced.

3 ounces Asiago cheese, freshly grated (about 1.5 cups)

-Adjust an oven rack to the upper-middle position; heat the broiler.  Set heat-safe bowls or crocks on a baking sheet.  fill each with about 1.5 cups soup.  Top each bowl with 2 bread slices and then the Swiss and Asiago cheeses.  

-Broil till browned and bubbly, about 10mins.

The book also states that you can replace the beef stock (if you have no time to tediously make some
) with off-the-shelf 6 cups of low-sodium chix broth and 1.75 cups of low sodium beef broth.  No doubt about it, the combination of cheeses was found to be the best by the test kitchen.  And red onions gave the best flavour too.

What I did below was to put the bread and the cheese in to a soup pot and just baked the whole thing as I didn't have oven safe bowls.  I used a single layer of country bread, Swiss Emmental (not the same as Swiss cheese!) and mozarella as Asiago was impossible to find.  One mistake I had made was to let too much water evaporate (too focused on getting a nice, rich stock) that I ended up with a cross between a soup and a stew.  Don't be afraid to add water to your beef stock or onion soup.

So with the leftover meat from making the beef stock, I made some sandwiches from the leftover bread.  I shredded the meat, topped it with some gherkins and dijonnaise and, of course, any leftover cheese and voila! there you have it, a full course meal fro ma few simple ingredients.  But all of these took quite a lot of time though, two plus hours, if you're not an experienced cook.  But then good food, good fun, nothing really more I can ask for!

Adrian invited us to his place a few weeks back for a grill-steak and wine dinner.  So, like as if not enough arrows fly at work, I got arrowed to do a carb dish.  Ok, it was a bit of a self-arrow also since I hadn't cooked anything for something and had been surviving too much on subway sandwiches and SAF food.  So I went for something earthy, nothing too flashy or complicated - potato salad.  Besides, PY likes to eat the red potato salad at Kenny Roger's for some reason.  I, for once, never really had good potato salad and I'm not a real fan of potatoes anyway.  But I thought nice creamy spuds would go well with a wonderful slab of blue-rare chargrilled steak.  So we hopped over to Carrefour during the weekend and got the items below:

My FAVOURITE recipe site is allrecipes.com .  Not only is it easy to remember but it is a review-based site so at least you can be assured someone tried it out before you (unless of course you're brave enough to attempt an unrated recipe for a flourless choclate cake with caramelised raspberries or something like that).  One tip is to always read the review comments because the really experienced home-cooks will give very good advice and tips on improving the recipe.  So from allrecipes, I got the following red potato salad submitted by Susan Martin.  I liked this recipe because of its simplicity, the rest of the submitted recipes had too much distractions like boiled egg, mustard and fancy cheeses. 

4 servings

-7 medium red potatoes, cooked and cubed 

-60ml sour cream

-60ml mayonnaise

-30g shredded cheddar

-20g chopped red onion

-3 X bacon strips, cooked and crumbled

-2g chopped chives

-Salt and pepper to taste

Red potatoes can be found at Cold Storage and The Marketplace and they're not cheap  but since this is the core of the dish, you probably might not want to stint on quality.  I prefer to leave the skins on for my salad.  One thing ot note when cooking the bacon, pan fry with oil till dark brown and remove quickly, this will prevent it from turning charred.  The bacon will continue to cook once out of the pan and will harden enough for it to crumble.

Well, this being a salad, I obviously didn't stick rigidly to the recipe.  One tip from reviewers was to use twice the amount of bacon (which I did).  I also used a bit more sour cream to give it a creamier taste without it being too muar.  And of course, you can be as generous with the cheese as you want.  Some reviews suggested using parika and garlic powder to spice up the dish.  But I thought using good ground black pepper and good sea salt (adding a nice bit of salty crunch) was much sufficient.  

This potato salad will go great with all kinds of meats especially at BBQs.  Try it and tell me!

I haven't blogged for some time due to a variety of reasons, not one of the least being that I haven't really gone out to eat much interesting stuff lately.  It has been a lot of same old same old recently due to work and financial constraints.  So I thought I might as well save the writing for something truly amazing.  And yes, something pretty interesting did turn up eventually - a nice navigational deployment to Qingdao, China to attend the PLA-Navy's 60th Anniversary Fleet Review.  And yes, that meant five of us including three of my courses-mates depicted above - Josephine, Neville and Pravin (trying to shake the salt water out of his ears) - plus MAJ Sylvan our course instructor, we piled into 1 X frigate and sailed up and up and up and up which got colder and wetter and foggier.  But finally, after enduring not so few hours of bad sea state (something like in the mural in the above picture) ... 

We suddenly found ourselves in Qingdao, No。55 Nanjing lu (南京路), drenched, stinky-socked, in this place called De Heng Roasted Duck Shop, 德恒烤鸭店.  Ok, it wasn't really a 'shop', more like a traditional Beijing kind of restaurant set in a building that had the facade of a Shaolin temple, complete with a couple of the usual stone lions guarding the entrance.  So you enter and you're instantly greeted by rows and rows upon counters of plastic food (yes, the kind you usually find outside a japanese restaurant) and tanks of fresh seafood.  And just to put things into context, we were ravenous.  We arrived in Qingdao, the supposed Marseille of the East, famed for its fine weather, seafood beaches and European architecture, in dense fog and slow, never-ending, rain.  Plus we had only six night hours to squeeze whatever touristy stuff out of the city before jetting back home the next day.  So we just hopped into a cab, rattled off a few street names recommended to us, and somehow found ourselves at Nanjing lu, which ironically, wasn't really our final destination at all.

But anyhow, let's proceed on to the food and i'll fill in the details as we go along:

The first dish was actually a rather pleasant surprise.  We had chosen a few prawns from the tanks and asked for some recommendations.  So the waitresses rattled off something incomprehensible and we just nodded in agreement.  So tada, we have here stir-fried gingko nut, papaya and prawn.  It was a nice combination I felt.  The prawns especially, was unlike any prawn I've eaten, they were pale-white when cooked and tasted somewhat exquisite, almost like crystal prawns.  And the prawns went well with the gingko and papaya for some strange reason.  Sliced onions added the familiar taste to this dish.  I think this dish is a very typical north-east China dish, or what some might know as Shandong cuisine or 鲁菜 lu cai.  It is usually characterised by light flavours and soups.  So in this dish and a few others below, you don't find the typical ginger, oyster sauce and dark soy sauce (Our Singaporean cuisine ... derived largely from Cantonese and Teochew influences) 

Next came another specimen from the tanks - octopus or what the Chinese call 八带.  Once again, very nicely stir-fried Shandong-style, with leeks, spring onions and black fungus.  Because these are live-caught, the meat was just awesome.  It had the crunch and bite you would never find in the typical Japanese restaurant in London or Singapore.  Also, I'm quite intrigued that they used orchids as garnishes which are pretty expensive and something you might expect at a more posh restaurant than this.

And then came the bomb, the Buddha Jumps Over the Wall aka 佛跳墙, fo tiao qiang.  I've never tried this dish, although so famous, before Qingdao.  I've always been regaled by accounts of the culinary treasures thrown into this veritable stew and I was about to find out!  So in it are quail eggs, white fungus, shark's fin, abalone, scallops, turtle and lots of other seafood cartilege I couldn't identify!  To be eaten with vinegar.  Beside the fo tiao qiang, is the famous Sichuan 麻辣 mala hotpot of tofu and pork slices - made from lots of oil, fried chillies and Sichuan peppercorns.

On the left was my personal special dish because the rest weren't too keen on poking around in a spiky bowl - sea urchin steamed with egg.  It was quite tasty and the texture was slightly rougher than your average steamed egg or 水蛋 you find at the chap chye peng stall.  But I enjoyed the addition of a slight bit of soya sauce and sesame oil.  On the right is the fo tiao qiang stew.

Here is something quite commendable: 翡翠虾饺 or crystal skin prawn dumplings.  It had a good bit of chinese chives inside which I quite enjoyed.  Although the skin was a little thick, there were good amounts of well-seasoned pork and prawn meat inside.  But truth be told, after all the china food scares, I was a little apprehensive about ordering stuff with blended unseen ingredients.

One of the freshest fish you can find, from the temperate waters of Qingdao, to the fish tanks, to the chopping board, guts pulled out, scales scrapped and into the steamer.  This 海铺黄鱼 came steamed in what we might know as Hong Kong style, with soya sauce, a bit of sesame oil, springs onions and ginger.  I think it is a species of grouper. By golly, once you taste the fish here, you might even turn your nose up at Ah Yat's live seafood.  This is a classic example of extremely fresh food cooked simply.

The second fish we ordered is what they called 斑加吉鱼.  I've never come across anything like this and I think its a type of flounder.  The cooking style here is what they called 清蒸 or plain steaming.  The sauce is actually thickish and has a mild flavour of fish stock.  The fish meat texture takes some getting use to though, a little bit tough but not as tough as shark's meat.  There was plenty of meat on this bugger.  But I think I enjoyed the first fish more though.

And then finally came The Duck.  We had to order this the very moment we stepped into the restaurant as the waitresses told us that it would take about an hour to prepare the duck.  So we have all heard of the famous Peking Duck.  And I was about to try it first-hand as close proximity to Beijing as I will ever be.  So this dude carves the duck most expertly - first he carves five little slivers of skin from the rear of the duck, near the bishop's nose.  You can see the five pieces of skin in the picture above.  Then from the same area, he cuts out five pieces of the tenderest meat.  So each of us was served with one piece of skin and one piece of meat each.  As explained by our waiter, you eat the skin dipped in salt and the meat dipped in plum sauce.  Certainly made for interested dining.

And then the rest of the duck is carved up and eaten with gusto with the traditional flour pancakes, spring onions, cucumbers and peking duck sauce.  I also liked picking at the duck head (I have this Anthony Bourdain-esque tendency to eat the strangest and most perky flavoured things), going especially for the tongue and eyes.

After serving us the duck proper, the waiter asked us how we wanted the bones cooked.  For those not familiar, this is the usual practice for Peking Duck.  The meat and skin are carved out and served while the remnants are taken back into the kitchen and prepared into another dish.  Once again, in vain attempt to introduce the style we wanted our duck remants prepared, the waiter rattled off some machine gun mandarin which we couldn't catch so we nodded our heads obediently and smiled in agreement.  And tada! out came this quirky mess.  It was kind of dubious at first, compounded by the fact that you could see the odd wingtip and neck sticking out here and there.  But I just took a bite and ooh! heaven - waht they did was to cook the remnant duck pieces in spiced salt and flour and deep-fried the whole batch.  It was truly amazing and ended the meal with quite a bang. 

I studied the Qing dynasty, its fall and the resulting "one hundred years of colonialism" while I was nerding around in LSE.  Reports of how the Empress Dowager Cixi and all the confucian gentry corrupted and squandered country and riches were pretty well-documented.  In culinary terms, this can be embodied in the famous 满汉全席 or the Manch-Han (Han Chinese were and still is the dominant ethnic group in China) Imperial Feast.  This gastronimic orgy usually consists of over three hundred dishes, held in six banquets over three days.  So after our Qingdao dinner, I thought I had unconsciously gone through a mini imperial banquet ... maybe incomplete due only to the absence of roasted bear paw with tiger penis tartare or braised monkey brains in superior whale semen broth.

And the best thing, you wouldn't believe the price we paid per person for all of of the above, a measly, beggarly, thievely, S$35 per person.  That wouldn't even get you a half-decent buffet at the Ritz.

Finally as an encore, as if all of that gorging was not enough, we headed to Beer Street, Pi Jiu Jie, for a drink.  Just to mximise the last hour of our remaining time.  You CANNOT go to Qingdao without having some Tsingtao beer.  On the way in to the port, we were talking to the harbour pilot who told us, at all costs, to try Tsingtao beer from No. 1 Factory.  Why? Because it is only at that factory that the beer is brewed with spring waters from Laoshan, 崂山, the Taoist-revered mountain, the birthplace of Taoism.  And then of course, for the liver-killers, there is the little business of Gaoliang, 高梁, the famous Chinese and Korean liquor, a clear distilled liquid made from Sorghum, responsible for many a drunken stupor.  This Red Star Kaoliang featured here is, quite fortunately, only 53% proof so that Pravin and Sylvan's cigarettes did not result in a catastrophic explosion.  But STILL, the 53% was burning, you could feel the warmth sliding down your oesophagus and killing your stomach cells on the way down and then the permeating stuff entering your head.  Jo, very wisely here, carries her handphone.

So that about ends our short night in China.  What a pity.  We got to see a lot more on the way to airport and on the flight though.  But probably I'll tell you guys more in due time.  Suffice to say, I was surprised that we were treated very cordially and friendly by all the locals, even with our Chinese-looking faces but screwed up Chinese vocabulary and weird Singapiorean accent.  And the streets and toilets were clean, they were almost spotless I must say.  And their buildings were neat and tidy and modern.  All of these ,no doubt, legacies of the 2008 Olympics which Qingdao hosted together with Beijing.  Oh and did I mention the *almost* SIA-like service and food on China Eastern airlines?  Make no mistake about it, Old Lee was right when he indignantly insisted we learn more mandarin - The Chinese are building up one big-ass empire of their own. 

The drive, determination and ambition are unmistakable.

For us commonfolk, BLU Restaurant is not something that instantly pops into mind when one mentions European/French fine-dining. But it may ring a bell in certain circles given that the fact that it has received top awards from Wine and Dine and Singapore Tatler. Rather surprising was the fact that BLU has garnered a pretty impressive at www.hungrygowhere.com where one reviewer gushed that "Be prepared to be wowed by the weird and the wonderful, to have your palates tickled and teased, but at the end of the day still walk out of the restaurant and feel like you’ve had a pretty good damn meal.". 

More impressive still is the resume of its chef de cuisine, a one Kevin Cherkas, who has worked in three-michellin starred restaurants such as El Bulli and Arzak.   Thus, he comes from the school of 'progressive cooking' with strong influences of molecular gastronomy - think carrot foam, bacon ice cream and sous vide cooking. The highly-acclaimed Cherkas came over from Shangri-La Kuala Lumpur (well done!) to Singapore a few months ago to helm the kitchen at BLU.  A pretty long way to come given his Canadian roots.  In the world of fine dining, a restaurant is defined by the stature of its chef as much as it is by its owner and location.

The service at BLU was excellent, even by fine dining standards.  Waiters make small talk, crack (funny) jokes and are generally attentive.  Decor and atmosphere wise, above average.  There were numerous tables with good view from the 26th storey of the Western part of Singapore.  Cutlery and crockery were of good quality and creatively designed.  I liked that they used tiny stone tiles as a bread plate.  The furniture and panelling though could do with some revamp I felt - a little too tacky and they did not convey a sense of class.  With respect to value for money, well, I paid $400 (ouch!) for everything below plus two glasses of wines (a quarter of the cost!).  Consiering that the food could be customised, I thought it was of decent value.

Without much ado, with a 2006 New Zealand pinot noir on hand, we move on to the food.  There is no menu at this restaurant.  People get to choose what they want to eat.  They can opt for an appetiser, a main and then dessert or they just want mains or they want a starter and five desserts.  But normal people usually do the $139++ six course experience menu.  Cherkas comes to your table and asks what you like or don't like - mainly general items such as beef, fish or foie gras.  No, I doubt you can tell him you want white flour and cai por and expect some haute cuisine chwee kway.  So PY's favourites like escargot, beef and foie gras seemed pretty appropriate for the occasion.  

We start with dessert today for a change.  Our last dish for the night was a plant.  Serious man.  Here it is:

I think they had this plastic 'love' tree custom made.  You might be forgiven in thinking that the brown branches and trunks were chocolate but unfortunately they aren't.  The edible parts are the soil (crushed choc covered coffee beans), the two little green leaves (white choc with green colouring) and the pink blossoms (candy floss).  It was a nice surprise and I was just hooked on popping the coffee beans into my mouth.  Sure beats Super 3-in-1 coffee mix.

One of the highlights for the night was this dessert called "Breakfast" which was recommended by Cherkas:

This is definitely not your typical dessert.  It is served on two pieces of acrylic tiles with a piece of paper in between.  Printed on this sheet of paper is the bacon, beans, sausages and toast you see.  The piece de resistance then is the egg in the centre.  It is a pretty big piece, about twice the size of your regular chicken egg.  So the yolk is made of mango puree encased in an algin-membrane globule.  The whites are made from light coconut cream and the shell of hardened coconut fat.  In the egg and underneath it (to prop it up) is passion fruit sorbet.  It was a refreshing dish, and good given that we had some heavy dishes beforehand.  The amazing thing was the yolk, it gives you the "Wow, how did they do this" feeling and is a very classic technique of El Bulli called spherification where the mango puree is dropped into an algin-water mix to allow a membrane to form.  Even the mango puree's texture was perfect to resemble the physical characteristics of egg yolk.

Before this was what was my favourite dish and one of the most delicious things man must have ever created:

This was a nameless wagyu beef tenderloin Mexican style.  The brown sauce is spicy chocolate and the accompaniment is crispy potatoes in Japanese mayonnaise.  The powdery stuff you see is dehydrated coconut and the lump of red stuff at the top is a very yummy jalapeno chilli sauce.  The yellow thingies are corn polenta.  The potatoes were really amazing - crisp and heavenly with the mayonnaise.  The jalapenos were delectable too.  Yet, what definitely steals the show is the rare cooked wagyu beef.  The meat is nothing like what I've ever tasted and to describe the taste would be a challenge.  Imagine tasting countryside, meadows and farm - beef in its pure essence without the basic beefy smell.  The meat was nicely charred on the outside which gave it some crisp, probably done with a cooking torch.  One drawback of this dish was that it was slightly over complicated and the myriad of flavours did not really meld together.

Before this, was a very yummy sorbet to cleanse the palate:

This was a simple yet delightful amuse bouche (literally means to delight the mouth) between the courses.  It is simply yoghurt with a grape sorbet.  The grape you see there tastes 'spicy' because it has been carbonated.  How? Beats me.  A quick google search reveals this.  Some nifty equipment needed most definitely.

And yet another course, we have:

After all that post modern dishes, we have here a relatively unexciting pan fried foie gras entier.  But no less delicious, the trick is to cook to perfect the little morsel of fat.  A slight twist was the topping of Sichuan peppercorns.  Accompanying this were a cherry reduction and poached cherries together with crushed pistachios.  The last time I had foie gras was eons ago in France, probably in 2007.

Keeping to the creative theme, another wow dish was this parsnip puree with escargot:

Each escargot comes accompanied with a soft coconut meringue and the leaves you see are swiss chards (I think).  The branches are made of parsnip puree and topped with crushed almonds and bread crumbs.  Eating this was almost magical.  I was quite intrigued with the choice of parsnip, it complemented the taste of the cooked snails pretty well.

And finally, our appetiser:

A brie de meaux with a pieces of black truffle in the middle - the kind of thing Abramovich and the Sultan of Brunei eat as snacks.  This dish didn't exactly blow us off our feet and probably the chef wanted to build the dinner into a crescendo starting from a low base.  I felt the pattern thing to be a little unncessary and would have preferred a bit of toast or fruit instead.  The little black blobs and the pattern are balsamic vinegar jus and jelly together with dehydrated coconut.  I mopped everything up with bread and it was yum yum yummy.  Luckily brie is one of PY's favourite cheeses (she doesn't fancy blue cheese) - I couldn't afford to screw up the evening because before this was PY's 'main course':

And to make sure she couldn't say anything but "yes" I got a pair of diamond earrings from Soo Kee's solitaire collection.  So I popped the question, hopefully for the first and last time in my life, using diamonds, a piece of mango cut into an "M" and a piece of watermelon cut into an "E".  In case you were wondering, these were the same two acrylic plates used in the "breakfast" dessert.  So the "Will you marry ?" was drawn onto a piece of paper and placed in between.  I had contacted Cherkas a few days beforehand and he had very willingly obliged to make this evening extra special.  (Incidently, Cherkas told us that he himself had proposed to his beau in Langkawi and was getting married in June!)  For good measure, I told him it was best I get the whole thing over with right from the start otherwise I'd have nothing but butterflies in my stomach the entire night.

In case you're wondering, PY said yes :)

In case you're wondering, what I was served with while the above was served to PY:

 Food 8, Service 9, Atmosphere 7, Value for money 7

BLU Restaurant

I am sbsolutely and positively sure that I'm the only person on the face of the Earth to post online in a food blog the picture of the galley of the Fearless-class patrol vessel (PV) of the Singapore Navy.  And yes, with a Man Utd clock to go with it too.  So what do you do when onboard the PV? Other than keeping the Singapore straits safe and secure so that everyone can swim at Siloso beach, play imported PSPs from Japan and sleep peacefully at night.  You can sleep, you can watch Little Nonya or you can, be crazy, and help the poor chef cook.

Ahoy! And welcome to a day in the life of a PV chef onboard RSS RESILIENCE.  You might have remembered my long ago entry on the LST (aka big big ship) chef.  But the life of a PV chef is somewhat different.  First of all, he works in space no bigger than your average toilet.  Secondly, he needs to cook for more than 30 people onboard.  Thirdly, there is only ONE chef.  And lastly, once in a while, he gets smartass officers like me who try to sneak in on his territory.  But Kang Wei, the featured chef below is the jolly sort who doesn't really mind.  No, he's not trying to say he needs a pair of kitchen scissors.  What he means is that two in the kitchen equals c.r.a.m.p.e.d.

But anyhow, I joined him for one of the days during one of our sailings to whip up some dinner for the crew.  The best thing was that I got to plan the menu (and didn't need to wash the dishes :)))) So below, we roasted some pork marinated with salt and pepper and sliced them.  Then we made some apple sauce using sliced apples and some honey and dried rosemary.  And combined the two.  Tada, one dish done.

Following that,  we got out some frozen prawns, peeled them and roasted them.  Then I mixed some raw chopped garlic with a generous serving of melted hot butter, threw in some chopped chinese parsley and then made our very own prawn salad.  Oh yes, don't forget to squeeze in a generous amounts of lime or lemon juice.  We used calamansi below.

And before we knew it, we had a bit of bad sea state.  No doubt chasing away some pirates.  So our photo for Kang Wei's wonderful roasted chicken got a bit screwed.  But I can tell you that his secret marinate included worcester sauce and honey.  All sold out!

And finally we ended with some staple.  Cooked some rice with a few tablespoons of turmeric powder.  Then cooked tomato puree over low heat till nice and thick.  Spooned in the sauce together with fried cashes and fried shallots.  Voila! Tomato rice on the high seas.

So typing this blog entry was the easy part.  We actually toiled for three hours in a 1m by 3m little space to produce all that food.  A nice little workout no doubt.  After that, it was back to bridge to keep watch with my box of yummy dinner.  But what I find most liberating about cooking onboard? You are not constrained by cost only by availability.  Usually the twin evils of cost and availability wreaks havoc on the aspiring gourmet chef but here you can use the food liberally.  Of course, until you load more rations, some particular types of rations will run out.  Chief among these are eggs which are highly prized commodities.  So let's say you want to cook chicken soup with vegetables, you open the fridge, see a few chickens, well, you can use all of them if you like.  So the soups are usually delicious onboard - in a big roaring pot with two whole chickens flavouring the broth. 

So there, another taste of navy life for you, the land lubbers out there.