Star Fruit Upside down cake

    My mom periodically sends me these wonderful fruits called star fruits which grow abundantly in her backyard garden. While some of them are eaten , most of the times they just rot in my fruit basket and seriously I hate to see that. So this time around I googled star fruit recipes and it came up with some interesting ones, one of which was the  Star Fruit Upside Down Cake. 

Star fruit also know as Carambola, is a native of Philippines, Indonesia , India and Sri lanka.

Carambolas are rich in anti oxidants, vitamin A , vitamin C and potassium. The fruit in cross-section is a five point star and hence the name Star fruit.

Star-Fruit Upside Down Cake :

Ingredients : 

 
3 to 4 star fruit, sliced
1/4 cup butter, melted
2/3 cup dark brown sugar
Juice of 2 Florida passion fruit / Orange
1/2 cup butter, softened
1 cup sugar
2  eggs
1 1/2 cups cake flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
pinch of salt
1/2 cup  milk
1 tsp. each of vanilla and almond extract

P.S : If using orange juice use orange essence instead
  
Preheat oven to 350 F / 150 C.
Arrange sliced starfruit in bottom of a greased 9 inch cake pan as close together as possible.You can also place cherries in between the spaces to give an added effect.
Mix together 1/4 cup butter, brown sugar and passion fruit/ orange juice and pour into pan, turning so mixture covers bottom. Set aside.
Cream together 1/2 cup of butter and sugar. Add eggs, one at a time, beat well.
Mix together dry ingredients. Add flour mixture, alternately with milk, to butter mixture. Stir in vanilla and almond extracts. Pour into prepared cake pan.
 Bake for approximately 30 minutes or until cake pulls away form sides of pan.
Let cool for five minutes before inverting onto serving plate.

A Bizarre chinese food Adventure

China was one country my husband and I always wanted to visit. Although it was my first trip and my husbands second, he hadnt prepared me enough for the food-wise cultural shock I was to receive. When our china trip was being planned, I happened to catch one of my favorite shows on travel network of Bizarre foods in Guangzhou, China which happened to be the place we were visiting. I recorded it and hoped we would go to all those places and eat the bizarre food. What I hadnt prepared myself for was the extensity of the bizarreness in reality that was existing there.And what an adventure it was. We walked the streets and the little aisles, visited food courts, sat in restaurants and street stalls and witnessed the stangest of foods and ate what was edible...though most of it was not for the faint of heart. Many a times , our chickentarian friends travelling with us , would almost throw up seeing us eat or just looking at the food itself. The menus in restaurants were filled with dishes like pigs liver, trotter, intestine, guts, frogs, snakes, oxtail etc.

Dried Snakes, Centipedes, Slugs and Snails

Not a spare part was left uneaten. There's no wasting any parts for the chinese and thats the way we liked it. Although I would never eat intestine and guts for goodness sakes.

Hongkong was a typical cosmopolitan place. Given its touristy nature, finding any kind of food here was easy. A one hour ferry ride from Hongkong took us to Macau which was definitely a hot spot for food. Since the early 16th century, it has been ruled by Portugese traders and was handed over to the People's Republic of China in the late 90's. The cuisine in Macua has a portugese influence to it. We visited one Portugese restaurant and all the dishes had a distinct portugese flair along with their chinese counterpart.

Oxtail Curry

Pork Chops With Portugese Sauce

Portugese Egg Tarts

Macau is very famous for its portugese egg tarts made of flour, eggs, margarine and milk, best eaten when it is hot. It is a very popular snack and is served in most bakeries.

After our visit in Hongkong and Macau we landed in Shenzhen, the chinese territory and believe it or not, we went tex-mex. Mainly because our wary friends were so smitten by the chinese food in hongkong for three days that tex-mex was a welcome sight for them. Not so for us, although it didnt turn out to be bad afterall.

Guangzhou was the turning point in our trip. We got to see so much of real stuff. Its amazing how countries differ with their culture, style, language and food. Its what separates us and makes us who we are. Coming back to reality, Guangzhou is a food lovers paradise. I love Dim sum. Back in the US, they only serve Dim sums for lunch. Apparently not in china. There it is mainly served on the streets and mostly for breakfast. Most restaurants we visited had a menu for dimsum and we had to order it off the menu, unlike in the US where they bring dimsum to you in different carts pushed by waiters.

Breakfast consisted of steaming soups, Barbeque pork buns, steamed rice dumplings, pastries filled with egg yolk (yuck!!!) and a lot of other fancy stuff. It was left to us to pick what we wanted and hoping it would be good. We spent most of our time scanning for street stalls or shacks to eat our breakfast and lunch. These eateries truly produce some amazing and authentic fare fit for hungry travellers like us who craved for food beyond imagination.

Evenings also consisted of street side food. We walked through streets where vendors were selling their dried snakes, centipedes, snails , snakes and fish. We walked through small aisles where groups of people played games on the road, blissfully unaware of the time or day. We visited a place called jade market where there were hundreds of stalls each consisting different kind of food, dedicated to different palates. Some had eye-catching chicken, shrimp, lobsters,octopus on skewers roasting while others had scorpions, snails, snakes and centipedes for snacks. Some had steaming soups and noodles so applealing while others had things that would literally make you throw up. Yet it was all a part of the game, a part of discovering the country, its cuisine, its variety and its way of life.

We soaked in the culture, the streets, filled with people constantly nibbling on these nick nacks every couple of hours , their ability to be active and healthy, and enjoy their life, blissfully ignorant of the tourists in awe of their cuisine and lifestyle. Despite language being a big barrier for most foreigners the people in China are friendly, helpful, efficient and amazing. We might want to learn a thing or two from them !!!

Pork vindaloo

Vindaloo is originally a goan dish, introduced by the portugese . From what I have researched about this mouth watering dish is that it takes after two main ingredients - vinho which means wine or wine vinegar and alhos which is garlic. Over a period of time, vindaloo had taken in different forms and ingredients in each household with the use of red chilles, lime juice, potatoes and so on. Although my mother is a Manglorean, I never learnt this dish from her since she never made pork at home. Maybe it was partly because my dad never ate pork. So it was totally ironic that I had to learn this from my mother-in-law who is a Tamilian.According to me, this is her version of a Tamil style of vindaloo since she adds mustard seeds .It is simple to make, tasty and is best served with white bread.

1 lb - Pork Butt (Cut into 1.5 inch cubes)
2 - Medium Sized Onions
2 - Medium Sized Tomatoes
5-6 - Garlic (Peeled)
2 Tbsp- Vinegar
1 Tsp - Mustard Seeds
5-6 - Curry Leaves
4-5 - Red Chillies( Depending on the level of spiciness)
1 Tsp - Cumin
1 Tsp - Turmeric Powder
Salt to taste

Grind the onions, garlic, cumin and the red chillies in a blender and keep aside.

Grind the tomatoes separately and keep aside.

In a pan or pressure cooker, add one teaspoon oil .When it is hot, add the mustard seeds, wait for the splutter and then add the curry leaves and the ground mixture. Saute the ground mixture well until it becomes brown and forms a thick consistency.

Add the pureed tomatoes, saute well and then add the pork pieces. Add turmeric powder and salt to taste and cook/pressure cook the pork until well done. Once cooked, you should see the pork fat on the top of the curry. Let it boil until it becomes thick of a gravy consistency. Add 2 tbsp of vinegar, remove from heat and serve hot with rice or white bread.

Manchow Soup

What a roller-coaster ride it has been the last couple of months. From our hectic trip to India, to getting back to California , to our desperate house-hunting process to finally settling down in an apartment had taken an extreme toll on me. I didn't , however, find that perfect kitchen of my dreams that I so wanted to cook in, but the fact that my apartment kitchen was overlooking the greenest of the golf courses was inspiring enough to create and appease our appetites and to satisfy my blog-craving or so I thought.
What I hadn't braced myself for was my totally mobile 12 month old who was constantly behind me and tugging my legs every time I got in the kitchen to cook, and what seemed like a perfectly simple task of cooking became seemingly impossible. So I decided to hold back on my blogging and feeding the family blah blah, and get onto better things, like spending quality time with my daughter. So most of our meals were made ahead when time permitted and frozen or I had to think of dishes I could do in a jiffy while she was taking her blissful nap.But sometimes its oh-so
nice to indulge in something new and nice once in while and today my hands were itching to do - The Manchow Soup - considering the fact that I had all the ingredients right there in my fridge.
I fell in love with this soup on one of my visits to India about 2 years back . I had this in a restaurant called Peking and I absolutely loved it.I was surprised that during all my life in India , I had never tasted this one. Well, I had to have this recipe and of course there's always google. I have made this a couple of times and the dish itself is so wholesome, it can be considered a meal in itself.

The Manchow Soup



1 cup cooked chicken pieces
4 cups chicken stock
1 tsp ginger-finely chopped
1 tsp garlic-finely chopped
1 tsp green chilies-finely chopped
1 tbsp coriander leaves-finely chopped
2 tbsp cabbage-finely chopped
2 tbsp capsicum-finely chopped
2 tbsp mushrooms-finely chopped
2 spring onions-finely chopped
2 tbsp French beans-finely chopped
2 tbsp carrots-finely chopped
1 tsp pepper
1 tbsp Soy sauce
4 tbsp cornflour mixed with 1 cup water
2 stems of spring onion
2 tbsp oil
salt as required


In a pan, stir fry the chopped ginger, garlic, coriander leaves and green chilies for about 2 minutes.
Add all the chopped vegetables and stir fry for about 3 minutes . Add pepper and salt as desired.
Add the shredded and cooked chicken to the vegetable mixture and saute well.
Add the chicken stock and the soy sauce .Meanwhile, in a small wok, heat up about 1/2 cup oil. When hot, fry the dried noodles , remove immediately, drain on a paper towel and keep aside. When the soup boils, reduce the heat and add the cornflour dissolved with water or chicken stock and stir constantly till it thickens to a soup consistency .
Remove from heat and garnish with crispy fried noodles. Serve immediately.

Mutton Pepper chops

Moving is always a very stressful and hard decision. Ours was by choice . I missed California and the excitement out there and hence our decision. So here I was packing and getting ready for the big move, all excited until it dawned on me how much I was going to miss this quiet and dainty little town, with its laid back life that I have grown to enjoy. I was definitely going to miss waking up to the sound of the birds and the lush greenery that surrounded me. When you initially move to a new place, you hate it, then when the days go by you start to like it and then when you finally leave , you realize that you love it . So ends my love story with Cary, NC. For now, my kitchen is swiped clean, all the things neatly packed and labelled and stored in the garage for the big move. I am left with a packet of frozen chops and just enough utensils and ingredients to make it thru for the next few days. This is probably the last dish that is cooked in my NC kitchen and the last blog for quite some time until I find another kitchen to put my culinary skills to use.

Ingredients :

1 lb Mutton Chops
2 Onions ( Chopped)

1/2 " Piece Ginger

7-8 Garlic cloves

3 Tsp Pepper Corns
2 Tomatoes

1 Tsp Jeera

Curry Leaves

Coriander

1 Potatoes Sliced

1/2 Sliced Onions

1 Sliced Tomato

Grind together pepper, jeera, ginger and garlic. In a pressure cooker, add oil and saute the onions and curry leaves until the onions become a golden brown. Add the ground masala, saute for a couple more minutes and add the chopped tomatos. When the oil starts surfacing, add the mutton chops and cook for up to 3 whistles or for about 30 minutes on medium heat. When cooked, open the cooked and let the water (if there is) dry out.

Meanwhile, slice the potatoes to 1" thick and add oil in a shallow pan and fry them golden on both

sides.

Add this to the mutton chops, add the sliced onions and tomatoes before serving. Garnish with chopped coriander.Serve hot with rice or roti.

Pantry Raid III

It was time for the pantry again and this time it was -- Sweet corn chicken soup : The favorite in any Indian chinese restaurant. I havent come across anyone who doesnt like sweet corn chicken soup. This is the ultimate comfort food for either a cold day, a rainy day or a hot summer day. It is " the" chicken soup for the soul....!

Sweet Corn Chicken Soup

Found in my Pantry :

1. Canned Sweet Corn Cream Style


2. Canned Whole Corn Kernels


3. Cornflour


4. Chicken Stock

Ingredients :

1 Can Sweet Corn Cream style
1 Can Whole Corn Kernels
2 Tbsp Corn flour
5 Cups Chicken Stock
1 Cup Cooked and Shredded Chicken
1 Cup Water
2 Sprigs Green Onion
1 Egg
Salt and Pepper to taste

Add the chicken stock , sweet corn cream style and whole corn kernels in a big dish and set it on the stove. When it boils, add the cooked chicken and let it simmer gently for about 5-10 minutes. Meanwhile, in a cup of water, dissolve the 2 Tbsp of Corn flour. Add this slowly to the soup . If you think that the soup needs to be more thicker , add some more corn flour. Once the soup reaches its desired consistency, beat one egg in a bowl and add this slowly to the soup while still stirring the soup with your other hand. Add salt and pepper to taste and garnish with sliced green onions. Serve hot.

I like it best with the sriracha hot sauce available at the asian stores here.