20 things worth knowing about beer

Stumbled upon this site and the author did a very good job to make beer so informative that I am compelled to share it with the rest of you guys. A sneaky peak of what you about to see:


The rest is over here: To the site

Bacon Pasta

Bacon is one of the favourite things I love to cook with. It just auto-magically makes anything taste good. Bacon sandwich, bacon salad, roast chicken with bacon, and the list goes on... Here is a simple dish that I like to cook if I am running short of time but still need a good tasty meal. All you need is lots of bacons (prefer smoked bacon), pasta, two cans of chopped tomatoes and few cloves of garlic.

First, heat up two pots. Fill one of them with salt water and let it to boil. Once the other pot is hot enough, dizzle a bit of olive oil and fry those bacons till they are slightly crispy:


Once the bacons are crispy, throw in some finely chopped garlics. Fry it for a while before you add in the chopped tomatoes. Let it simmers. By this time, the pot filled with salt water will be boiling. Add in the pasta:


Stir the pasta and sauce occasionally to prevent them from sticking to the pot. Once the pasta is about right, drain them and put them aside. The sauce should be thicken by then, if not, just wait another 5-10 mins. Season the sauce with salt and pepper when it is ready. Mix the pasta into the sauce and serve it grated parmesan and a bit of oregano:


If do it right, all the prep + cooking will take around 30-35mins. Probably 4-5 servings depending on the amount of pasta you put in.

Beer Can Chicken

Shawn and I have been talking about this idea for a while now (inspired by various posts on the internet at that time). We thought of giving it a try this summer. The principle is kind of easy, I think it is best to show it in the picture:


Yupe, there where the beer can goes :) and we made sure we used the best beer can we had - Carlsberg Export. If Carlsberg did a beer can chicken, it would be something like this. Oh ya, one more thing , you need to open the can, drink half of the can , and poke holes on the top half of the can. This could spell disaster in your oven if you used an unopen can.

We put some marination under the chicken skin. This way it will make the meat tastier. Once it is done, just pop it into the oven:


This is picture of me trying to justify why a beer can should be up the chicken's arse:


Here is the result:


I cannot remember much of the details of the chicken now. From what can recall, the chicken was beautifully roasted - every part of the skin was golden brown. The meat, hmm, did not taste like beer. It is definitely something I will be doing again for christmas, probably a beer keg turkey :)

What happen if you eat lot of wasabi peas in one go?

This pic tells it all:


Happy birthday, yeng yee... purposely keep this for your birthday >:)

Project Eden - 17th Week

I have moved all of the chili plants out from the Aerogarden, after a growing concern from the upper management with my green activity (they were thinking that I was growing something illegal in the office). I even had the director came over and looked at the leaves of all the plants. Probably he was looking for some fresh supply :)

Anyway, with the help of my colleague, we moved everything to pot now:


The jalepeno plant is growing nicely bearing three fruits:


A few more days, these chilies will be ready for consumption :)

Project Eden - 15th week

It is spring time in UK now, and the chili plants have grown rapidly. It is a jungle of chili plants right now...


I got my first two chilis:


This is another variant of it, but hard to bear fruit without pollination from the bees...


I need to find a way of getting all these flowers pollinated to have chilis

Coffee Chicken

Coffee is one of the most widely consumed beverages in the world today, and yet, it is hardly used in cooking. Is it that bad to eat it. If so, how bad can it be? Well, there is one way to find out...

Roast some fresh coffee bean:


Marinate the chicken with coffee bean, salt, cumin and paprika. Wrap it up and pop into the oven:



After 20 mins in 250 degree temperature oven, glazes it with some honey. Pop back into the oven for 2 mins:



Serve:

Coffee chicken done! :)

Despite all the efforts and coffee, it still tastes like chicken :) The chicken breast has the smell of smoky, barbecue coffee. The sauce is sweet with a hint of bitterness like espresso, but with savoury taste. It feels like having your main meal and after-meal espresso at the same time. It is weird, but it is somehow rather pleasing, especially when the caffeine kicks in :)

Project Eden - 9th week

Should have updated this long time ago, when I got back from Malaysia. Well, with lots of things happening in UK (survives the retrenchment exercise, tons of work etc), it is hard to write blog nowadays.. Despite all the bad news, the chili plants are striving under the good care of my colleague, Caroline when I was in Malaysia. Here is how it looks like:

Bacon-wrapped Asparagus

After having not posted in monkey-years, I just realized how tricky it is to use Blogger's Post Editor especially when it comes to arranging the photos.

Anyway, moving back to the topic at hand... I needed a quick dinner after a long day's work and the only fastfood that I could find in the fridge was frozen beef pie. That wasn't too bad but I decided to supplement my microwave dinner with some fresh food. Lo and behold, I found asparagus, bacon and lemon in the fridge too.


I vaguely remember seeing a dish prepared by Jamie Oliver that used these ingredients plus a clove of garlic. It's really simple. Leave the bacon uncut while finely dicing the garlic. Get some lemon zest by grating the lemon and wash the asparagus.


Wrap about 3-4 asparagus sticks in a bacon. I actually had more asparagus than bacon so I wrapped 5-6 asparagus instead, giving me two bunches. That wasn't such a bad idea considering how greedy I was but the bacon could barely stay on. On a hindsight, I should have secured the bacon and asparagus together with some toothpicks.



Pour some olive oil over the everything and sprinkle the lemon zest and finely diced garlic on them. Chuck the tray into a preheated oven and wait for about 5 minutes before turning it over. Leave it for another 5 minutes or so and it is ready to serve.



Tadaa!! Doesn't look too bad, does it? Apple for desert. Simple yet filling. Have fun!