Silver Case

Asked Ling to mix up some dough today to be ready when I got home from work.  She let it double in size and then stuck it in the refrigerator.

The good news was that it seemed to develop some very nice gluten, tossing it was like tossing a wet bath towel. It held together.

The bad news?  It was whole grain flour.  When Ling told me, I assumed it was a brownish wheat flour.  Well it was a brownish wheat flour with a cup of mixed birdseed and sunflower seeds mixed it.  Yuck. It just looked wrong.

Truth be told they were soft seeds so I couldn’t detect them in the crust much.

The pizza came out true and I was somewhat satisfied with it.  The main problem is that the crust isn’t crispy though.  One of Ling’s mom’s friends was over.  She said pizzarias oil the pan and this makes it crispy.  Maybe maybe not, but that will the nex thing I try. There may be a delay though…the joy of eating pizza four nights out of five is beginning to wane.

Funny dinner. Ling’s mom and her mom’s friend were over.  I invited them to have a slice.  This lady’s husband is really loaded, giant house in Bukit Timah, kids are surgeons and lawyers and things. High-flyer Singapore family.  The lady is a kick. Back in the 1970’s the kids liked Pizza and things.  This lady cooked but didn’t know the secrets of how to make the stuff well. (No google back then…imagine the horror)  So what did she do?  Started working at these places for a week, learnt their recipes and methods and then would quit.   She worked at something like a half-dozen different restaurants for a week or a two before she’d move on to it.  She practiced her espionage carefully, too, making sure to change her id card address to her mother’s house, a much less fashionable address, not driving to the job, etc.  She seemed to get quite a kick out of the story as much as actually learning their secrets.

The most interesting secret to me is that Rocky’s pizza (a Singapore pizzaria I haven’t been to in years) uses “Flying Fish” brand flour, which is actually a really cheap, poor-persons flour from the market. Apparently, though, it has really high gluten, so it makes great pizza dough. Ling’s next mission is to get me some kilograms of that.

In a hurry to print a position report out today.  Paper tray (of course) empty.  In trying to refill it, I drop it on the floor, where it makes a tremendous racket and a part flies off.

I picked up the part and see it’s some sort of spring-loaded hinged-feeder-finger that keeps paper snug and square inside the tray.

I put it back on to what looked correct, but the printer complained and said something was jammed.  I tried again. Same problem.  I looked at how a similiar model HP was setup and replicated that.  Secretary looks at me and asks if she should call “Technology” (the drones in the back room).  I explained how useless they were and went back to tinkering it.  I could not make the stupid thing work.

By now I’m irritated, I just want the stupid report I was trying to print. So I totally removed the finger thing and let it print. It worked.

Secretary looks at me, “you got it to work?!” and I just said “yeah, I removed its tonsils, and tossed this rather large plastic bit on her desk.

Luke’s classmate had a birthday party on sunday.    I met an Italian guy.  My first question was how to keep tomato seeds from getting into the passata (rip the watery, seedy, useless cores out first, or use a food mill).  Continuing our conversation I found out he worked for a submarine cabling company.  We discussed this interesting field for quite a while.

Until he told me otherwise, I assumed his cabling was for telecommunications. No, turns out lately his projects have been laying thick copper power cable undersea, generally from cheap areas of production to high demand areas (Tasmania [hydropower] to Melbourne, for example).

What surpised me was when he made some comment like, “the voltage is about the same as the main trunklines  running around a country, except, of course, it’s DC.”

“DC?” I asked incredulously. Everyone knows DC power can’t travel more than a few blocks — didn’t we all study George Westinghouse versus Thomas Edison?

Then he pointed out that the earth burying the cables acted, I guess, as a giant dialectric. The cable, in practice, was a giant capacitor.  Pretty interesting. I may have some technical details wrong, but that was the gist of it.

I made pizza again monday.  It was the best yet. Its success came  from patience. Resting overnight in the refrigerator, sitting out, giving the dough time.   I was stupid about prepping the dough for tossing, so it came out in a weird heart-like shape, but it otherwise tasted good.  I used that metal pizza pan Mom sent me and that helped its crustiness.

So I made another round of pizza dough, this time trying the technique of letting the dough rise overnight in the refrigerator.

This is the second time I’ve tried this technique and the second time I say, “it totally fucking sucks.”  The yeast doesn’t rise enough and the gluten never develops into a nice texture.   The pizza dough had a texture similar to a cross between a nasty country biscuit and white bread.  Fucking foul.

On top of that, I accidentally tossed a tablespoon (20ml) of salt into the flour rather than a teaspoon (5ml).  I thought I fished out enough of the salt from the flour, but no no no.  Now imagine a cross between a nasty country biscuit, white bread, and a salty brine.

Ling reports that Luke has ceased allowing others to bully him.  Today before class he was playing with a toy.  Another boy came and tried to pull it away from him. Luke pulled it back, but the other boy prevailed and wrested it free.  Responding,  Luke forgot the toy and went straight in for a bodily assault on the boy.  Luke was extremely mad when Ling interupted his attempted battery and she resports that he was sore at everyone for the next thirty minutes. hahaha

A while ago I tried to work toward  making ideal pizza.   I didn’t get that far.  Recently I watched an Alton Brown episode on pizza.  He advocated mixing the dough for fifteen minutes and then letting it rise for 24 hours in a refrigerator.  (Well, in that recipe. Apparently he’s published some other, different, recipes for pizza too).

I tried to follow his recipe today and it sucked.  His proportions made really really sticky dough. It needed way more flour than he called for.  Unfortunately I never got it floured enough and so I eventually just tossed it out as shit.

I was irritated by this because I had already prepared a nice tomato red sauce for it.  Following his cue, I made a standard soffrito of onion and celery and carrot, but then broiled it with the tomatoes, while I reduced the canned juice with some sherry, sugar, and spices into a thick syrup.   It makes a really nice sauce, I must admit.  Next time I’ll play with a roasting pan to try to make more carmelization.  Today’s preperation was too wet for much.

Anyway, I was pissed by this failure and brooding that I’d have to wait another round or more of twenty-four hours before I could try some more.  Then I stumbled onto a site I’ve seen before, The Ridiculously Thorough Guide to Making Your Own Pizza.  He talks about making a crust in approximately forty minutes.  I felt like giving this a shot.

I blended his recipe and alton brown’s.  I was low on flour, so i used the rest of the bread flour I had, and topped it off with mostly wheat flour (which should have some decent gluten content).   I used the alton brown technique of mixing it for 15 minutes to encourage gluten formation.  Once again the recipe made a too-wet dough, so i had to supplement with more flour.  The recipe said this would make enough dough for “two big pizzas” so I divided the dough into four.

Rather than a tedious blow-by-blow, what did I learn?

• Seems like lots and lots of rest for the dough makes a huge difference. The dough becomes much more plastic and elastic.  It turns out to be a painfully long time from start to finish to make the pizza.
• I need to work more on getting a thinner edge, I tied up too much dough around the edges, consequently the center could tend to thin.
• Keep the oven on max heat to cook the pizzas.  I forgot that last time I proved the metal pizza tray makes a crisper crust than the pizza stone.
• Maximize the gluten. Next time I will use “bread machine” flour, as it has the highest gluten content.  I’ll also mix it plenty long, and schedule nice long rests for it.  This ought to enable me to get closer to being able to toss the things so that they’re nicer and more uniform.

The sauce tasted very good, as did the mix of jack/mozarella/cheddar.   I cut thin slices of real pepperoni I bought in Sydney. It was nice.

For some retarded reason I am not allowed to embed this youtube video, but you can go watch it for yourself and watch them race full-size remote-controlled cars round a quarry. It’s worth the click.

Playing at the construction site

Originally uploaded by karavshin.

It was all me and Luke today. I woke up (sort of late) and Luke was already dressed and fed. I tossed him in my car and left Ling at home to finish renovating his room. First stop, a haircut for him at バーバー ミナミ (Barber Minami) a Japanese men’s barber. He sat on my lap while the lady cut his hair. He always sits very still and looks very serious while it happens.

Afterward it was to Meidi-ya where I bought him a cone of mango gelato and bought myself many liters of sake and umeshu for our Temaki/Okonomiyaki party.

Finally we took a side-detour to pick up my green single-origin beans from Spinelli’s, but they weren’t delivered yet. Will have to wait till next week for them.

Spent some time chasing him around the house (he acts like a lunatic) and then we left to go drive around neighborhoods looking for a place to buy a house. Let him cool his heels at a giant playground and then came home for the balance of the day.

He is really nuts and 100%. I don’t know how Ling manages to do this day-in-day-out.

Pretty cool name explorer

Bought all the ingredients for authentic Okonomiyaki at Meidi-Ya today and we tried it for dinner. It came out quite well I think. Putting on the right otafuku brown sauce and some japanese mayo definitely goes a long way to making it taste ‘right’.

I followed a recipe of:

1) pour on batter mixture

2) cook uncovered for 3 minutes.

3) add any toppings (like bacon or mochi) and cover

4) cook for another five minutes

5) flip, re-cover, and cook for another five minutes

6) cover with otafuku, ao nori, bonito flakes, and mayonnaise

• Remarks? More batter, less cabbage, otherwise it is a too-loosely bonded coleslaw.
• Don’t try to make massive okonomiyakis, they are too hard to flip.
• Cook on the lower end of medium heat. If it’s not browned sufficiently, add two minutes to a phase time.
• If you add sakura ebi (tiny, dried prawns) grind them up before you use them, otherwise you get too many stray antennae and things in your mouth while eating, and it feels like you’re eating grasshopper pie.
• Kim-Chi Okonomiyaky? Yes, but add a lot of kimchi and replace the cabbage on a 1:1 basis.
• If in doubt, lower heat, don’t rush it.

If you are curious how it looks, there are endless okonomiyaki videos on youtube.

I am looking forward to picking up real estate when the rent finally comes due.  One of the things I enjoy day-dreaming about is the kitchen.

Ling and I have always enjoyed eating at the counters of restaurants.  Tonight we sat at a counter while eating “Taiwanese food prepared in the Japanese Style” and I admired the dark counter.  I pointed out how we could have a shorter version in our own house, but that, much like this restaurant, it looked like it could easily become the “strange shelf in the kitchen with piles of shit on it.”

Then I had an idea.  There should be some big red buttons on the wall facing the counter.  When it’s time to eat, you press the button, and the counter folds up from being flush from the wall.  After one hour since the last button-press, the table folds down again.  That way if you put shit on the counter and ignore it, the house will dump the crap on the floor and force you to keep the counter free and clear.

Have  been nursing a terrible hangover all day.  The only solution is to drink lots of water, but for some reason water tastes really, really bad to me when I’ve got a hangover, so it’s quite a vicious cycle.  I tried to sneak around the problem by making an ice drink (it’s really hot here today).  I was sort of lazy, sort of stupid.  I peeled the hide off of three oranges and two grapefruits and liquidified them with my hand-blender, pith and all, and then mixed that broth with a big bucket of shaved ice.   It was absolutely horrendous, there was a peel-like bitterness that I could not escape.  I tried to add sugar and all that resulted was a bad drink that tasted like peel + undissolved table sugar.  Then I poured ‘passion fruit’ syrup from my aborted Hurricanes at the Crayfish Boil.  That also just added more to the sweet note, but the bitter/peel note was undiminished.  Ling liked it, but I poured mine down the drain.

Ling was telling me about their visit to one of our friends who has a 1yo girl.  While they played Luke hit her on the head with a toy hammer, so she cried.  He didn’t really know how to respond (this often happens when he does things impulsively [he is 21 months after all]) and sort of stood there sheepishly, distressed by Alissa crying and wondering what Ling and Alissa’s mom would do.  The poor little guy doesn’t have a lot of tools in his emotional response toolbox, so he used that one that normally gets the best response from us:  he started tap dancing and making a hopeful smile.

There are a pile of Japanese restaurants at Robertson Quay. We went there tonight and ate a restaurant (forgot the name) that serves “Taiwanese Food in Japanese Style.”  Best dishes were a crab/bamboo/vegetable omelette.  Their gyoza was ok, though not teriffic.  Had Dan Dan Mein which was pretty darn good.  Ordered a taiwanese spring onion omelette which I thought was horrible (like an old, tough, oily prata) but for some reason Ling LOVED it.   Briefly, i guess I’m not making this sound like such a great restaurant, but we actually did enjoy it and would go back.

Popped next door to ‘The Chocolate Factory’ and had a cake and a coffee.  The chocolate candy room had some really beautiful candies on display.  The place was really busy though (9pm on  a Saturday night) and the French  chocolatier looked… umm…. prickly, so we figured we’d come back some other day to pick over the chocolate selection.

Tomorrow I am doing a test-run of okonomiyaki recipes.  Didn’t realize that the batter-binder uses not only flour, but a starchy stick Chinese yam.  I’ve found a lot of good recipes and guides, so I think i have a fighting chance of making some on-spec okonomiyaki.

What else?  Still hovering around 76.8kg.  I didn’t go light the last few days (yakitori last night) and haven’t been running, plus I fell behind on my Japanese.  Doing some catch-up tuition with なおこせんせい　(my teacher, Naoko) and my membership at the hote health club next door start imminently, so i can swim at lunch time.
A bunch of travel coming up.  Hong Kong and Dubai the final weekend of this month.  Japan in mid-April i think.  Next weekend hosting a small party to finish off the last of our three frozen hokkaido tarabakani king crabs. That will be bittersweet.  The Okonomiyaki party is mid-April.  Around April 30th will probably host a deep-friend turkey as three of us have birthdays on April 29 or 30.

Living off Toby’s Estate beans I brought back from Sydney.  The Espresso Rico is their best espresso blend by far.  I spilled some of a ristretto yesterday, and it was almost black as lacquer. Really good, chocolaty stuff, perfect for milk-based espresso drinks.  I need to get some green beans to play with in my iRoast2 after I use up my current stock of beans.

Okonomiyaki Temaki Party Invitation

Originally uploaded by karavshin.

Decided to have a temaki (handroll) party next month. They’re fun, you provide lots of nice fish, sushi rice, furikake, and sake, and then everyone rolls their own handrolls (temaki).

But some of the people I wanted to invite don’t eat sushi, so I had to figure out something else to include.

Okonomiyaki (sort of an omelette-cum-pancake) is another great communal food that people can prepare at electric skillets on the group table.

Plus plenty of Beer, Sake, Plum Wine. I think I’ll skip the Shochu, it’s too gross.

A grilled squid stuffed with tomato, onion, and ginger (skillfully cooked, almost fork tender - excepting the crunchy, crackly tentacles - and very smoky), served with a soy and vinegar-based sawasan (dipping sauce),

I would like to try this and I would be curious to try to make it. It’s a rural phillipines dish without a name. Might be a bit of a challenge.

My maid is Filipino.  I just asked her about it. She didn’t know the dish specifically but seemed to realize the vinegar-based marinade you’d use on the squid.  I guess the remaining problem is figuring out how to bbq a squid. I don’t have bbq facilities here.

Luke can watch the tiny flash movie that plays on the side of the lego website over and over and over.  In fact this morning he woke up, ran into my room, and climbed up on my chair and demanded to see it.

He’s starting to figure out that it works on my laptop, too, not just my desktop.

His favorite part is the little man squeaking “jump!” during the rapunzel-like segment of the movie. He laughs every single time it happens.

Luke is in super-freak mode.  Even managed to exasperate Ee (first maternal aunt) this morning.  I had three coffees at breakfast, so I think it’s going to be a long afternoon waiting around Sydney airport.

For my tastes, no pizza satisfies like Pizza Pub of Clarion.    The most common failure is the crust (too thin like a cracker, or something repulsively pillowy and billuous).

Tonight’s pizzas at Nick’s were well on their way to being really good.  Just the right medium thickness, yet crispy.  I noticed the pizza boy running a tool like looked like a lawn aerator vigorously over all the crusts, perhaps that’s why.
The toppings were pretty good.  The mushrooms were the best. The pepperoni was small diameter, would have liked that to be larger gauge.  The cheese, which they brag about being, “low fat,” shouldn’t be — the pizza could have used a more muscular cheese.

The single best improvement?  If I eat there again I’ll request extra sauce.  It simply needed
more. It tasted good when I’d hit a patch of it.  The other improvement?  Provide ice with pitchers of soft drinks. Yuck.
Funny thing was that the 20yo store had the same homey independent feel that Pizza Pub has.  Including a strange semi-roof of brown shingles helping separate the kitchen from the dining.

The only questionable thing I saw was the owner quarrelling with a table of ugly women about a messed-up order. They insisted they had ordered one thing, and the waiter heard something else, and said he’d repeated their order as he heard it.  The owner was stepping in and giving the, “why would the waiter repeat your order and you not correct him?” sorts of lines. By the time he capitulated, “well then what, do you want me to make you a new pie?” the damage was long since done. I don’t know what the point of bickering over $3 of ingredients with customers was. Whatever… not my problem.

Anyway, the place has good pizza.  Order extra sauce.

Open 7 days from 5pm

9416 2276

374 Pacific Highway

Lindfield 2070

It’s exactly what it claims to be. Their ice cream (gelateriaadfaskdfm whatever they want to call it) is really good.

Understand that I am not an ice-cream enthusiast in any way. For me to have eaten two orders of ice cream there says something! I had something called ‘kinder’ which was white chocolate and gnutella. It was probably the creamiest ice cream I’ve ever eaten in my life. The sweetness level was perfect and the texture of ribbons of gnutella in it made it a real treat. My second order was a cone of screaming Blood Orange. It had a fantastic color and a really punchy, powerful taste. Maybe a bit exhausting after a while, in fact, but still, good.

Espresso Bar? Well, yeah, they run lavazza beans. I had an espresso. It was fine.

362 Pacific Highway

Lindfield NSW 2070

9416-2275

I’ve given my Fujita kayak some heavy abuse recently and when I get back to Singapore I think it’s time to do some restoration and repair to it.

• All the fittings are totally salt-encrusted from so much immersion and rolling. It needs a serious cleaning
• One front sub-structure #2, there is a metal receptor bolted on that connects to an Inner Stringer.  The nut worked its way off and now all I have left is the bolt. I need to find a nut with the right size to reattach this permanently.
• I need to add padding to the some of the stringers to tighten my fit into the canoe. Sometimes I sit a bit sloppy in the cockpit and am not locked in very well.
• The Keepers footbraces are loosening up after some especially vigorous roll-attempts, I was popping the foot pegs off the rails. This sucks.  I am hoping that by re-tightening the rails everything will fit together more strongly.
• Check hull.  It’s got a lot of nasty scrapes on it, but I don’t think there are any serious breeches.
• Consider varnishing some of the more abused sections of wood pieces on the boat.  Through negligence and violence I’ve managed to bash up various parts of the boat and I am a bit concerned that over time the moisture will ruin the marine plywood.

My kayaking lessons this week were held at Rose Bay.  On Thursday we went early, in order to have breakfast before my 11am lesson.  Bernasconi’s was well-reviewed in one of my cafe guides so we tried that.

Overall impression?  Fairly large, well-run, busy cafe.  No magic, but also no complaints.

Ling ordered field mushrooms and spinach on thick toast that tasted fantastic.  I think it was  a combination of many types of mushrooms plus a lot of garlic that gave it such good flavor.  Her drink was atrocious, turned out to be a glob of ice cream floating in enormously sweet cocoa milk. She hated it.

I don’t remember my coffees at all, which means they were neither fantastic nor horrible, just fine.  I think it was a long black to go along with my scrambled eggs/toast sort of meal.

I’ve found that most cafes in Sydney can manufacture a coffee that you’d have to at least give an “above average” mark to.  Also, they seem to have dialed in what good toast is:  big thick, crusty slices.

I wouldn’t go out of my way to come here, but if I was in the area, and wanted a cafe lunch or breakfast, this would be a top-three candidate.
23 Plumer Road

Rose Bay, NSW 2029

Phone (02) 9327 5717

On the advice of a Japanese friend of my sister-in-law, we visited this family-style, family-run Japanese restaurant near Darling Harbour, after taking Luke to the Sydney Aquarium.

It looks shabby, like a bad and greasy Chinese restaurant selling “economical rice” to hobo’s. But it only looks old and tired because it’s old and established, run by a Japanese couple, the Oka’s, for many years. It turned out to be very tasty. Half the customers were Japanese, which was also a good clue.
I order Katsu Curry and Ling called a salmon/avocado maki. In a restaurant that looked like this, I thought hers was a brave choice, but she said it turned out to be really good, especially against the standard of other “family” Japanese restaurants we’ve eaten at. My katsu curry was good, the gravy looked rough and from scratch, and had good seasoning. The rice tasted good, too, as if it had been cooked in mineral water.

We ended up calling another dish we saw several people eating, tempura soft-shelled crab. This tempura is not light-colored in the Edo-style, it’s more old fashioned which is darker. Tasted good, no hint of grease-logging, and was sprinkled with a nice, crisp dressing and served on some salad.

My biggest regret? Not ordering the kara-age (deep fried chicken). I saw numerous people call the dish, it’s clearly good. The chicken looked mouth-watering. It was served (oddly) on a bed of penne-like pasta, then sprayed down in a light matrix of Japanese mayonaise. Not exactly healthy-looking, but must taste fantastic.

51 Druitt St, Sydney

Phone (02) 9283 0606

Hail Caesar

Originally uploaded by karavshin.

I’ve uploaded a few new photos to Flickr. I have a severely retarded internet connection right now. Bandwidth is ok, but all sorts of common ports seem to be blocked etc. I have no mood to fix it right now, sitting indian-style on a stupid carpet.

Had my last rolling session of the trip today.  Everything worked together better today, I managed to roll it out once or twice, but it’s still not burnt in yet. It annoys me, but on the other hand, my bracing is a lot stronger now and I can lean the boat quite substantially, so I am even less likely to flip it anyway.

Only problem is that I am not sure how to continue learning this back in Singapore.  Practicing it by myself is pretty tough (exhausting to continually be wet-exiting the boat and having to get back in).  I may be able to get ling to help me with some assists, but she won’t see where I am going wrong.  I am hesistant to even bother trying to find an instructor in Singapore.  I detest instruction as taught in Singapore.  It’s almost always bad.

I didn’t have any energy left by the end of the day anyhow, so glad to have stopped. As I’m sitting here typing this, I’m tired, I’ve got a giant bruise on my hip, and I feel vaguely dizzy/post-seasick.  (I must have spun upside down at least fifty times today doing various exercises). I’m also damn hungry, so I am going out to eat some korean next door.  Hopefully it is good.