Cooking the past two months!

I was just looking at the past entries tagged "kitchenette" and it seems like I haven't posted a lot of the food that we've been making in the past two months..... what a shame that I didn't share them with you! Here they are, prepare to be BLASTED WITH FOOD!

I've always LOVED sausage rolls! The first time I had them were at my friend Anisha's house! It got me hooked! They are the best finger food! So when Anne wanted to make them for a barbecue I was immediately excited!

Here are some step by step photos.....

Step 1: make your own italian sausage..... or well most recipes just tell you to go and buy italian sausages and then just remove the casing, but I wanted to make my own, so I just used ground pork and seasoned it with a variety of italian herbs - parsely, thyme, ground clove (go easy on this, we could really taste this when we tried the sausage rolls at the end), pepper, salt, onion, garlic, paprika, red chilli pepper flakes, oregano, etc etc.... just whatever you can find in your pantry.... =P do this a few hours before you are making the sausage rolls so that there's time for it to blend.... but I think even if you do it right before that's ok....

Step 2: pre-heat your oven to 400F

Step 3: roll out your store-bought puff pastry..... we were too lazy and short on time to make our own..... if you want to make your own, then you need to make it the night before or at least 6 hours ahead of time..... so just go and buy it!

Step 4: cut the pastry into rectangles, line the middle of each pastry sheet with the sausage filling, brush with egg wash, roll over and seal

Step 5: cut the long roll into small bite size and then brush with egg wash so that they come out of the oven golden brown

VOILA!

We of course had to try them out and they were addictive! Although we could really taste the clove, so we made a note to let you know not be put so much in and be really careful! I don't measure when I season things, I usually just put in as much of whatever flavour/herbs as I like..... Enjoy!

And then we attempted to make Cha Siu Chan Bao.... that didn't really turn out like how we wanted it to, but they still looked great! hahahaha

Step 1: Make the dough, let it sit covered with a wet cloth, in a warm place (we put ours in the oven cuz we were in a hurry....lol... really) and then make the filling: using cha siu (cubed), chopped onion and a bit of hoisin sauce - EASY!

Step 2: After the dough has rested for 3-4 hours (that's a long time, we only waited for 2... the dough is supposed to have tripled in size... ours like it hadn't even doubled.....) take it out and knead it quickly, just to get it easy to work with... if you knead too long or too much then all the air escapes

Step 3: Start wrapping the fillings, just make a ball with a piece of the dough and then flatten it, put filling in the middle and pull sides up to cover


Step 4: place buns on a lined tray and bake.... now here's another problem, for some reason when I was copying down the recipe I didn't copy down what temp to set the oven to and how long to bake the buns for..... silly me!

Step 5: oh and brush with egg wash again for that golden colour..... we did this halfway through our first batch cuz we forgot.... again it wasn't written in the instructions.... =P

The buns are not supposed to leak.... it just shows that we are not stingy with our fillings! hehehe

So here they are! The finished product, looks good, right?
They were a little hard... a little like stale bread... but they still tasted good, the filling saved it! =D

Corso Italia 2009

Corso Italia is an Italian Festival that happens annually in Toronto, it's kind of small as it happens on a strip of road.... I was drawn to it because I saw tv footage of italian food sold on the street! Pastas, sandwiches, pizza! yummmmmm!!!!

However getting there and actually seeing the real thing was a totally different story..... not only was there no Italian food on the street, but all other cultural cuisines were there! And there wasn't much to do there except eat! I was expecting Italian opera, Italian cultural shows, selling Italian deli meat, gelato etc etc.... NONE! NADA! ZILCH!

So I wasn't too inspired to take photos either.... it all felt kind of forced..... But we did have the best corn of the summer! It was sweet and juicy! We finished ours so fast (as we were sooooo hungry by the time we got to the festival), we just totally devoured it, so no photo of that....

But we did try a mexican food stall, they had some interesting things....

We had roast pork and chicken skewers and potato omlete, which was essentially mashed potato cake....... and then we decided to try this dessert, well I think it was a dessert, that was this huge banana, I think it's called planter banana (?) and it had some cheese on it I think.... it was weird..... didn't particularly enjoy it... but the meat and potato and salad was good.... =)

In the end we did buy prosciutto which I'm going to make Spaghetti Carbonara with.... YUM!

And we saw some bands and performances... it was nice to see people getting up to dance =)

First Wedding of SUMMER 2009

Woo Hoo! Summer is here, finally.... actually it's July and the temperature is still yo-yo-ing up and down the thermometer...... so I can only say some is here some days.... but fortunately on the 4th the weather was perfect! Sunny but breezey!

So let's see I have some photos from the florist and the wedding to post.... let's get started....

The floral arrangements for this wedding was super simple, the bride had contacted us pretty late, I think just a couple weeks before her wedding, and well she wasn't picky about her flowers so she just gave us the green light to go and do whatever we wanted! hahahahaha....

Venue: Archeo (Italian restaurant in the Distillery District)
Colour: Simple with green as the accent (as she had a green sash on her dress)

What we ended up doing is simple vases with a stem of dendrobium orchids and a floating conical candle.....

We experienced a problem with the tables... which I think was the restaurant's event coordinator's fault!!!!!

They had vintage mahogany square tables, and for each table that night, they had to put together four tables to form one... however the tables were different heights and some were not even flat, they may have been slightly slanted!!!!! Nightmare for us! As the event coordinator had suggested to the bride to use mirrors in order for the vase to stand a flat surface.... uggghhhhh how does that happen?

I had to stuff torn pieces of cardboard under each mirror, and there were TONS of them under each mirror! It was also noticeable!

However, we had to do what we had to do, I tried to use table cloth to cover it as best I can, but there were some that just could not be covered. Had I known this, I would definitely have recommended using lower arrangements in various heights for each table. I would have also liked to use a more garden, vintage, outdoor-sy type of arrangement as the restaurant was all about oak beams and wood and country-side..... so here's what I would recommend...

Something like this in the middle of her tables in varying heights, possibly the flowers from the top photo will go better than roses...

Another thing is that the floral arrangements were super hard to take photos of ..... they looked very sparse and also the colour was quite bland and all the wood and shadowed walls didn't help very much... but I did take some photos....

This arrangement was a little more interesting and much more visible...

I love the weird and wacky branches sticking out in whichever direction they like

I also like how you can see the small cocktail area, if I can call it that..... in the background

And then I wanted to take some photos of those ever fragile-looking orchids, but in fact they are only deceptively fragile-looking..... hehehehe....

More posts coming soon -
an Italian Festival in Toronto and some food photos from home cooking.....