Pitta Bread Pizzas

At long last! Something fresh! Something new! An update! :D So far in Brunei Hall, I haven't been cooking much. The first two weeks, I made do with their dinners, but after Puasa was over, I simply could not stomach the food anymore. Its not *bad*. Its just a tad too bland and really not my taste (too *Malay*, if you know what I mean...)

Anyway, I've actually been making myself a variety of proper lunches, since my classes are usually quite far from Brunei Hall, and the food either cannot be eaten or expensive. I made a really tasty sandwich combination of chicken, shallots, red pepper and cheese. I wanted to take a picture, but it didn't come up well, haha.

But anyway, today we ended early for once. I wanted to eat a hot meal, so I decided to hold off lunch until I got home, even though we did have an hour off for lunch in between classes. Never mind. Here's what I came up with. ;)

What you need:
2 small-ish pitta bread rounds

Topping, of your choice
Grated cheese - I used a combination of cheddar and mozarella
Ground white pepper, and a lot of it!
A bit of oil

Toppings:
For one of my toppings, I used minced chicken mixed with a bit of honey, plenty of garlic powder, a dash of soy sauce and a pinch of salt.
The other topping was just of tomato slices. :P

But really, you can use anything you want. :D

What you do:

1. Place the pitta breads on a baking tray.
2. Rub a little bit of oil over the tops, and sprinkle over your toppings of choice.
3. Sprinkle over the grated cheese. I sprinkled the topping with some black pepper before adding the cheese. Over that, I sprinkled white pepper. Ahhh, how I love my pepper. :D
4. Bake in 180 oven for about 30 minutes, or until cheese is melted and bubbling. Allow to cool slightly, before cutting into half and eating! :D

I say 180 C oven, but the oven at Brunei Hall is slightly weird, and has numbers from 0 - 11 only. I assumed that an oven would normally have up till 220 C, so that means 9 would be 180 C. I could me wrong though. Most likely, I am. :P Oh well, as long as your cheese is melted, and your toppings cooked, it doesn't matter much, really.

And no, I didn't cook the chicken before cooking the "pizza". I wanted to, but changed my mind. In the end, the chicken was cooked, even though I went overboard and put a bit too much chicken on the bread. Hehe, so all was good. :) The chicken was a bit much though, I had to admit. :P

Anyway, back to the topic on hand... how was it? Hmmm, obviously, you can do this on normal sliced bread as well, but the pitta bread lends the dish a bit of exoticness, if I do say so myself, hehe. The "pizza" was not as fluffy as normal bread, and as a result, it was quite crisp, which is rather reminiscent of thin-pan pizzas that some people like. I myself like deep-pan pizzas, but this was still acceptable. It wasn't as crunchy as some pizzas I've had. If you want it even crunchier though, you could even slice the pitta bread horizontally at the pocket, since that would make it much thinner. Or another idea is to slice it in half, but only halfway. You can then add the fillings and cheese in the resulting pocket. This would make a cross between a pizza and a kebab, I'd assume. :)

As for the toppings, they turned out really well, actually. The honey garlic chicken did taste of honey and garlic (no duh... haha), but I would've preferred more garlic, I think. One advantage of cooking it in advance would be that you can taste it in advance. :P The tomatoes were also quite okay, even though I never was a fan of fresh tomatoes. It would've been nicer if some tomato sauce or passata was spread over the base though... make the tomato flavour even stronger. But, as I said, you can use basically anything you want. Once of the suggested toppings was pure vegetable - peppers and potatoes. I wouldn't like that all that much though, so I gave it a miss. :P

So... this is it for now! :)

Quote of the day: You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I'm not hungry enough to eat six.

Quiche Lorraine

I've forgotten now who wanted the recipe for the quiche... :P Oh well, never mind. I do remember that the person wanted "Mum''s Bakery's chicken quiche", but after tasting it, I don't think I like it all that much. It was weirdly sweet, like a custard tart with chicken in it. Very ... strange. Plus, I'm not much of a "sweet" person, really.

Anyway, soon after that request, I saw this recipe for Quiche Lorraine in the pastry recipe book of Ibu's, that I've mentioned before. As you might guess, this has a French origin, although I'm not sure how authentic, this is, since the original Quiche Lorraine does not have cheese in it, or onions, for that matter. Oh well, never mind. Here we go!

What you need:
250g shortcrust pastry - (2:1 of flour to butter, as always. Refer to the chicken pie recipe to see how to make pastry)

160g onions, sliced
3 tablespoons oil

80g chicken meat, diced

80g grated Parmesan cheese

3 eggs
200g milk
150g whipping cream
20g flour
Salt and pepper, for seasoning

What you do:

1. Roll out the shortcrust pastry between 2 sheets of plastic wrap to 3-mm thickness. Line a greased 9-inch ovenproof dish with the rolled pastry. Prick the pastry with a fork and chill in the fridge for 20 minutes.
2. Line the pastry shell with foil or greaseproof paper and baking beans. Bake at 190°C for 15 minutes. Remove the foil and beans and bake for 5 more minutes. Set aside to cool.
3. Fry the onions in the oil until the onion becomes brown and soft. Set aside to cool.
4. Place the cooled onions onto the pastry shell. Place the chicken meat, then the Parmesan cheese on top.
5. Mix the rest of the ingredients until well-blended. Strain, and pour into the pastry shell.
6. Bake at 200°C for 25 minutes.

Now this is more like it! I much prefer salty dishes to sweet dishes, and this was more than salty enough. In fact, it was perhaps a bit too salty. :P I was overenthusiastic with the salt, I guess. :P Not only was the chicken too salty, the custard itself was salty. *sigh* It even prompted one of my aunts to mention the superstition that if you keep on cooking salty foods, you're going to marry soon (or something like that, something got lost in the translation from Malay, haha). Right...

Anyway, moving on... probably because of the saltiness, I liked this, haha. :P I found that there was too much onion, and that the chicken pieces were too big - and my pie dish was too shallow! Hmmm... easy enough to modify, I suppose.

One of my sisters who is supposedly a big fan of quiches said she liked this as much as she liked Mum's chicken quiches (of which she is a fan), but I suspect that she said that just to spare my feelings, haha. Not many other people touched it, although we admittedly had an excess of food at that time.

Oh well, its not like this was bad.

Just salty. :P Very salty... trust me, it was salty. Haha!

Quote of the day: Salt is what makes things taste bad when it isn't in them.

Sausage Roll

Whoa. Sorry for the long absence. I've been busy getting ready to fly off back to the UK, and then busy settling down and trying to find a decent internet connection. For now, I've decided to go to the library near my place and connecting to the internet there. At least university connections are always fast.

For the next few posts, all I have to offer are recipes that I haven't had time to write about when I was back in Brunei. I haven't cooked so far, perhaps after puasa. In the meantime, here we go!

What you need:
500g shortcrust pastry (2:1 of flour to butter, as always. Refer to the chicken pie recipe to see how to make pastry)
20g oil
40g onion, chopped

180g milk
120g white sandwich bread

1 bay leaf
1 1/2 tablespoons parsley, finely chopped
1 teaspoon sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
300g chicken fillets, minced

- Omitted the bay leaf and parsley

What you do:

1. Cook the onions in the oil until the onions become soft, then set aside to cool. Mix the milk and the bread until well blended. Mix the onions, bread +milk mixture and the rest of the ingredients until well-incorporated.
2. Roll out the shortcrust pastry between 2 sheets of plastic wrap to 2-mm thickness. Cut into a rectangle of 10x24 cm.
3. Brush the long sides with water. Place the filling in the centre and roll it up with the seam facing down.
4. Keep in the freezer for 30 minutes. Remove it from the freezer. Cut into 6-cm lengths and place it onto a greased baking pan.
5. Egg wash and bake at 200°C for 25 minutes, or until golden brown.

I found this recipe in one of Ibu's books on pastries. I've never seen it before, although she assures me that its not new. Oh well. I guess we've been overlooking it in the past. Anyway, in the book, the picture for this was gorgeous. All juicy looking, with crisp shortcrust pastry surrounding the filling. I'm not sure, exactly, why it's called a sausage roll, since there isn't a trace of sausage at all in it... But I suppose it kind of looks like one?

Anyway, Ibu has always maintained that she doesn't like rolled recipes, whether they are of cakes or of pastries. It is always fiddly to roll the shell around the filling. I had no idea of the truth of her words, until I tried making this for myself. My first attempt caused the pastry to break (shortcrust is usually quite fragile, I suppose), although by patching it up with more pastry, I managed to make it look halfway decent.

But I've already given up at that point and decided to just ask Ibu for help, hehe. What she suggested was to use a clear flat plastic bag, of the dimensions you want the pastry to be in. Then, you just place a ball of pastry in the bag and roll it flat until it fills up the plastic bag. Pretty smart. Then, you can just cut open the plastic bag and use it to help you roll the pastry around the filling.

Okay, I just realised that sounds slightly complicated, and I wish now that I took a video of the process, but oh well, never mind. Anyone who doesn't understand can always ask, yeah? ;)

Anyways, this recipe seems to be a close cousin of the more usual puff pastries that we make, only a different type of pastry is used as well as a slightly different filling. You could also replace the chicken in this recipe with beef, if you wish.

I really really liked this roll, actually. It was rather reminiscent of chicken pie, only no cheese. I shall be sure to put that in the mix next time. ;) Most other people also liked it (how could they not? The filling was really really good, if a bit too salty - but I love salt!) but some, like Hadi, found it a bit too dry for their liking. Dry food, I suppose, is especially intolerable during Puasa, when the mouth and throat is dry from no drinking.

But I, personally, really liked it and would definitely make it again ... someday. Sigh... If only it didn't have to be rolled. But perhaps the filling could be used in chicken pie instead. *drool*
Oh, how I love shortcrust pastries...

Quote of the day: The fine arts are five in number, namely: painting, sculpture, poetry, music, and architecture, the principal branch of the latter being pastry.