Anyway, it doesn’t mean that when my blogging stop, my cooking halts too. I always say I am a foodie first, then trailing far behind, a photographer and then a blogger. Here’s a duo of my effort in the past months. In case you are wondering why deep-fried themes seem to cluster together, it’s called oil recycling.
I made a second attempt at fish and chips with some appreciable improvements. Instead of depending on an oil thermometer, I winged the oil temperature and did not too badly. I got the blanching of the fries spot on but I think my deep frying temperature was a tad too high. Still, I suspect that it’s not completely because of the temperature that my fries turned out more brunette than blond. I think that the residual sugar in the potato is browning prematurely. Perhaps they needed a more thorough rinsing. For the fish, I used the same batter but this time I employed the Japanese tempura trick of sprinkling more batter on the fish after dropping it in the oil.
The next preparation is unabashedly lifted from the menu of the Parisian 3-star restaurant Ledoyen. I read about it on Gastroville and Food Snob and even though it’s simple prawn ball, I am strangely attracted to it. And boy, when I tried to replicate it, I found that there’s nothing simple about it at all. First, I tried substituting the pastry with shredded wanton skins. Fail. Next, I used spring roll sheets. It was passable, but only just. I finally gave in and used phyllo pastry and shredded it filament thin. Success! The filling was a whole tiger prawn as well as some minced prawns to give it shape.
Though impressive looking, I found these prawns inferior in taste and texture to smaller deep sea prawns. It is ‘garnished’ with a grilled half of another prawn. The saucing component was what perplexed me. I thought it was some sort of foam that’s not accessible to a home kitchen until I chanced across La Recette du Jour with its recipe for a Lemon and Olive Oil Mousse dessert. Obviously I couldn’t replicate exactly the recipe but only draw inspiration to come up with a savoury version of it. With all 3 elements in hand, the constellations aligned and there you have it, a 3-star dish.
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