Still cooking, making a mess. Slight improvements.
February 17th, 2009 by boon
Char Siu revisited
To date, I have put my hands to claypot dishes, braises, sautés, grills… I’ve recently revisited char-siu again, and it seems to be okay. I’m still not sure which cut of pork is best. I tried tenderloin the last time, and that got burnt into a fish shape, and this time I tried regular ham steak, with a bit of fatty streaks at the top. The fatty streaks make it taste yummy, but they don’t make the corners crust like I want them to because the fat melts away from the meat too easily.
Anyway, I have more ham steak leftover and I’ve decided to put them to grill later. I was thinking of getting some crunchy greens like french beans or peas, but I realized I still have carrots, mushrooms, onions and leeks, which should go well with the steak. All that combination of veggies made me think of a stew or braised ham, but I ran out of aluminium foil and didn’t want to dirty the oven than it already is.
Claypot Chicken Rice
I bought a medium sized claypot because I wanted to cook more authentic asian dishes. It’s big enough to make claypot chicken rice for two people, and so that’s what I did. I can’t remember where I got the recipe from, and usually I just sample a few recipes at a time and adapt it to my needs. Some recommend stir-frying the chicken first. Some gave the recipes that didn’t need the claypot. Some cooked the rice first.
In the end, I just went with the cook-rice-in-claypot-dump-marinated-chicken-later approach. It took quite awhile – I was wary of letting the claypot crack on the electric stove. Thankfully, it didn’t, but man – 45 minutes for claypot chicken rice? I admit it was on 3 most of the time.
Google is still my best resource for recipes. I claim to keyword search everything, but I keep thinking that there should be some way of keeping track of all that besides my delicious bookmarks. My engineer mind is running wild again.
Masters Thesis and Microsoft Research
That being said, I now have some direction as to where my Masters thesis is going. I will be working with Microsoft Research at Cambridge to study how people search for images. While most work along those lines have gone into how to make machines more effective in finding images, my thesis will focus on more social and behavioral aspects about how people search for images on a day to day basis. So now, I am getting to grips with sociology and ethnography, and there’s tons of reading to do.
I’m really looking forward to it – it will be observing people rather than keyboard and computers. It’s a nice departure after a decade of tech-talk and ritualistic paradigms of engineering supremacy. I’m welcoming this paradigm shift, on my way towards thinking more about design than systems.
More food in London
The days of snow has departed. It’s been raining sporadically over the past few days. But we were blessed with a clear day on valentines, when LL and I went to eat Italian at Il Convivio near Sloan Square. They were having a lunch deal but I couldn’t resist ordering the prosecco which was absolutely brilliant, and some sides like the deep fried zucchini. The cappucino was a bit small, though the biscotti was the best I’ve ever tasted. Why does Starbucks and all the other high street coffee shops sell biscotti that hurt your teeth? This I don’t understand.
It’s the first day of my reading week, where I have no classes but am supposed to catch up on my reading. Tomorrow a bunch of us are taking a break and heading out to grab some swiss fondue at a restaurant that has cow bell shows and yodelling.
Mexican is our backup plan in case the cows go mad.