Rie Saito

This is lovely I love them. We normally have them in a cold winter but I eat them all year around. It’s perfect for snack or lunch. If you rapped individually and freeze them, microwave to quick snack any time. Believe me or not, this is better than the those you can get it from the Chinese shops.

Ingredients:

Directions:

1. put dried shiitake mushrooms in a bowl add 200ml hot water and leave it until mushroom is totally soaked and softened. Finely chopped onion and fly them until golden brown then leave them to cool.
2. Making buns; Pour hot water into milk (should be lukewarm) then add sugar and yeast, mix well to activate yeast. Put flours, salt, baking powder in a large bowl pour into 1. knead the dough until its smooth then add lard and knead well once again. Put the dough in a bowl cover it with dump cloth or wrap and leave it in a warm place until dough become double the size.
3.  While dough is rising make filling. Squeezed excess water of shiitake mushrooms and finely chopped. Grated pinch of ginger. Put all the filling ingredients into a large bowl and mix them well. divide filling into 8 balls.

4.punch the dough to release the gas and divide into 8 pieces then roll into a small ball. Cover and rest the dough for 10min.

5. Roll it out and flatten the dough with rolling pin into 10cm circles. Place filling in a center of the dough and gather all the edges in the top centre to cover the filling and close the dough. Cut grease proof paper in 10 square cm and place the bun. Cover and leave them in a warm place for 30min.

6. Steam the buns for 15min and ready to serve.

This is orange flavoured vanilla cheese cake. It’s very easy to make and lovely.  I didn’t have a vanilla pod, so I used vanilla extract instead also used lemon juice instead of lemon zest but it still worked. He used cherry comport on top of the cake but you can be without it or even try different fruit. I put some blackberry sauce which picked from my garden and made myself. He said this American syle cheese cake is on the menu in The Fifteen Trattoria.

This is great meal to cook for your guest and family. It’s easy, quick, nutritious and looks fantastic!
Great thing is about this dish is you don’t need to major ingredients, you can even add or take away ingredients as you cook to create your own version. Amount of ingredients give you is a rough idea.

cooking time: 1hour 20min.
serves 4 people

Ingredients:

Directions:

1. Cut the chicken into 2 inch pieces. Finely chopped garlic, onion, Tomatos and bell pepper. Small diced bacon and chorizo.

2. Season the chicken with salt and pepper anddusted with flour.  Heat the olive oil in paella dish or pan. Add the chicken and fly until golden brown. Also cook the prawns and squids for a couple of minute. Take them out on a plate and cover with a foil.

3. Infuse chicken stock with safron.

4. Stair the chorizo and  pancetta (bacon) in the same pan until brown and crispy. Add garlic, onion and bell pepper until soft. Then add the shells and cook them in wine. Take out the shells and add the rice and stair. Now add chicken, papprika and chicken stock, stair it well heat in high temprature until it started to bubble, then turn down and leave to cook  on medium heat for 10min.

5. Add the peas, prawn,squid, shell cover the top and cook for further 10 min.

6. Lastofall, scatter the chopped parsley leaves and lemon wages and serve immediately.

Kids just love pizza.
They even love to make one themselves. It’s great kids entertainment! Get messy and have a fun.
It taste good and kids　loved it but the dough disappointed me. I used BBC food recipe, or did I do wrong?
I made pizza dough few times. Once I made in Japan it came out great, but then here it seems to come out in different consistency even it made from the same recipe (how disappointed). Is it water that makes difference? (Japan has soft water and Uk is hard water) or the flour makes difference? (yes of course but texture change too?) humm..
I love to find out and mostly want make nice stretchy thin crispy pizza dough just like Italians make.
How can I do that? Does anyone know the trusting recipe?
Trying out few dozens of dough recipes might help…
I will definatly do again.

I am really keen to make my own version of buns now so get my gear going.
I discover that using milk for dough makes mild cake like taste so I used half milk half hot water to make lukewarm liquid for yeast to be active.
Unfortunately this time I rest dough too long after wrapped the stuffing and flattened…..
Last time pork and veg stuffing needed more taste, adding oyster sauce gives sweetness and richness of the flavour.
The stuffing was success! I have got the flavour I want and just like ones that selling in a shop in Japan.
But I fancy making different flavour also so I made sweet bean too.
This was pretty easy. I just bought ready made sweet bean added with grind black sesame. It was great.
I’ll adjust the dough ingredients and hopefully the recipeis up soon.

It was while ago I had his book – Cook with Jamie: My Guide to Making You a Better Cook
I tried this Roast leg of lamb recipe from his book.
It looked great and certainly serves 5 of us all.
It’s quite simple and easy can’t go wrong (unless you burn the food…).
I liked the sweet and sour tomato sauce goes well with lamb if you have children, you can exclude the chili (that’s what I did).
You should serve the lamb at the table as it is that’s absolutely gorgeous!
you can impress your friends and families.
If you are board with same roast dinner, why not try this?

We were fancy Italian or rather, we wanted quick meal.
so we went a supermarket to have a look at fresh pasta section.
Shall we have a something different… gnocchi? why not.
Gnocchi with pest in it that’s sounds nice. We had extra green pest too.
Ohhh,it was lovely! since then, we tried several different ones but I quite liked Asda one.
It goes well with meat or fish as main meal but you can have on its own.
You can get them cheap in any major supermarkets however, if you have a time and can make gnocchi and green pest yourself that’s even better but it takes 10min to get your dinner ready why not have easy lovely meal – that’s great!

Those are my kids favourite.  In frozen or freash, you can get them in almost any chinese shops. Just steam them 10 to 15min, ready to eat.  It’s great quick snack or meal and helps busy mum like me.

There are many choices of flavour, you can have sweet and savoury. I purchased cha-sui (sweet pork). It was a pack of 6 pieces for about £2.50. not cheap.. also taste wasn’t as good as I thought. I thought I can do better than those. so I decided to make my own.

First of all was to find reliable recipes and copy how other people do (but I always do slightly differently anyway, I like experimenting) I decided to do savoury pork. It turns out good but needs few things changing, buns texture and flavour to get it just right! but i think its better than ones in a shop.

My second attempt coming soon.

I have been trying to find out about this lovely Italian dessert called cannoli which my boyfriend had it in Sicily back in few years ago.  He loved it and he even doesn’t like cakes! We were looking for it in London to see if we could buy it around here but couldn’t find any.. So I decided to try my own without tasting any of those. His taste memory was vague which wasn’t helpful. Anyway, I looked at abut 10 recipes and picked two simple recipe for my first attempt. It was quite easy and nice but I will try bit more sugar in it next time and I need Cannoli tubes for shaping the cake. I’ll make my version complete ans post it soon.