Rie Saito » life style

Play dough

admin — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:44:39 +0000

Kids love making things. Making models, mold shapes, pretend to cook, decorates or just roll and squeeze them. It is a great toy get their hands on and let the imagination grow!
You can buy them in a shop but you can make your own in 5 min with things in a cupboard. It is easy and cheap!
Just handed over it to kids with few tools and now you can watch them have a fun.

Ingredients:

Plain flour
1cup
Salt
1/2 cup
Cream of tartar
1 tbsp
Oil
1 tbsp
Boiling water
1 cup
Food colouring

Method:

Put all the ingredients in a bowl and add the boiling water. Stir well until its all together and firm.

After kids play, put the dough in a tight sealed container to put away.

Halloween

admin — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 23:27:16 +0000

Jack O'lantern sushi

Famous Halloween character jack o’lantern face usually curved on pumpkin, I made them with sushi.
I used smoke salmon and nori(seaweed) for pumpkin with face and green beans for stalk.
It’s fun snack or looks good as party food. Rather having too much sweets on this day, I tried something different and it’s tasted as good as it looked.

spooky biscuit

These are made of cracers with cream cheese on top and decorated with seaweeds. It’s quick to make and works! It doesn’t cost much to make fun on the table.

Jamie’s vanilla cheese cake

admin — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:51:07 +0000

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.

Pizza!

admin — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 21:33:22 +0000

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.

Second attempt of chinese steam buns

admin — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 21:41:21 +0000

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.

Jamie’s Lamb

admin — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 22:07:49 +0000

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?

Gnocchi　with green pesto

admin — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 21:01:55 +0000

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!

My first chinese steam buns

admin — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 22:38:13 +0000

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.

Trying new dessert

admin — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 20:49:18 +0000

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.