The Ramen Story - Making it at home

I took on the experiment of making ramen from scratch at home not on a mission to create the perfect bowl but to try to see how difficult it was even to make a half-decent version.

I first got this idea when I picked up the book by Ivan Orkin, the chef behind the legendary Ivan Ramen (first in Tokyo, then New York City). In the past I always thought ramen is nothing more than a bowl of broth made with pork bones, slices of charsiu and noodles, but I was fascinated by the complexity of Chef Ivan's recipe of no less than a dozen different ingredients that went in, each requiring separate set of processes to prepare. This is why I decided to try on a simplified version as an one-off project in my own kitchen. I meant to start during the Chinese New Year break but at the end I didn't start until one week after.

Dinner for Two (Part 2) - Coq au Vin Blanc

Continuing with the dinner I prepared on Valentine's Day after the first course of a "modified ravioli" it's a more classic main course dish of Coq au Vin. I wanted to do this dish partly because I got some white wines sitting on the shelf that I need to get rid of - those bottles that are proper enough to drink but I would rather use it for cooking instead. And I wanted to make a chicken dish - something I felt like I haven't done for a while. And this would work well with the Champagne I intended to open. So the Coq au Vin Blanc seems like a natural conclusion based on that chain of thoughts.

Dinner for Two (Part 1) - Rice Paper Ravioli

Bouquet of 99 roses. Candlelit Dinner. Those are not really our thing. At least not on February 14. Not when restaurants were baiting on customers with "special menu" charging twice the normal price; not when pretty much everyone is doing the same thing.

Instead, this year I decided to cook a simple dinner at home on Valentine's Day. I realized it's been a while since I cooked a slighly more sophisticated dinner just for us two so it's good to stay in, opening up one of the bottles we kept in the wine fridge to clear up some much needed space, and just chill.

Cooking at Home: Making of an "Artisan" Dinner

I have been experimenting with some new dishes lately, and we have some of our friends come over one Saturday night to try them out.

We started off with an amuse bouche of white chocolate "truffle" with foie gras filling. We had something similar in a few places before (namely Amber of Hong Kong and more recently, at Yukawatan in Japan's Kuruizawa) so I was curious to see whether this can be replicated at home. Turned out it's more difficult than I thought in terms of archieving an uniform coating of chocolate on the foie gras cube, but at least it did taste decent. Something we can explore further.

Food Experiment - 40-second sponge cake

Friends who came to my place for dinner knew I love doing food experiments with them being the guinea pigs - some of them got the better of those experiments, though most are not so lucky. But the one I did last weekend turned out to be quite decent - more decent than I expected.

I got this recipe idea from a book I flipped through which talked about molecular gastronomy. While most of the recipes inside required use of obscure ingredients or funky equipment, this one caught my eye because it sounded easy to make and no special equipment needed other than a cream siphon, which I considered as a piece of ordinary kitchen equipment - in fact I got 2 at home. Anyway it's called 40-second sponge cake, as it only took 40 second of cooking time, in a microwave. It actually came from a recipe from the El Bulli menu a few years ago - how cool is that. Now let me show you how I did it.