apologies, misfortune cookies and a big mac

So my computer broke. I wrote this whole metaphorical love story about my dependable G5 being replaced by a spiv of a new iMac. And then I deleted it because it just wasn't funny or interesting at all. Do you ever do that? Wonder why you're having to work so hard on a few words and suddenly realise that it's because they're just entirely crap?!

Anyway, the transition hasn't been a smooth one, so I suppose I was just trying to make a joke to cover the stress. In the week between the old box failing and the new box arriving, I used a nasty little old PC netbook to keep in touch with far-distant family and read all the blogposts I follow. I wish I hadn't. It seriously messed with my eyesight and had a severe negative impact on my bloglife. The netbook wouldn't allow me to leave any comments, or even to respond to comments on my own pages; words disappearing before my eyes nine times out of ten. Apparently it's something to do with cookies, or lack thereof.

But worse was to come!

Sites began to spontaneously disappear from my dashboard, and I couldn't access other pages at all (Barefoot Crofter, thank goodness I can at last read about your lovely new piglets!). But worst of all, and perhaps due to all my perceived bad blogger etiquette, I lost a couple of followers. Which wouldn't matter, except that they were such lovely ones who always said kind things. I hope they come back...

So a quick apology, if I've failed to respond to your comment, un-followed your page, or caused you to delete mine, I'm sorry, it was unintentional. The arrival of the Big Mac means that normal service can now be resumed (fingers crossed)!

And it's Wednesday again already, and so it's Yarn Along day. With all this technical time-wasting I can't seem to be bothered making time to read The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet that I was so prejudiced against last week. I feel that this should be a sign to cut my losses and move on, but it came so highly recommended (and was an anniversary gift from 'im indoors) so I know I must persevere. My Stripe Study scarf is onto it's last stripe before the long slog of the final border. I think it's going to look great, but I'm looking forward to finishing it, as those long rows of garter stitch are quite slow towards the end. But just look at that beautiful ball of wool - there's no way this could become anything but fabulous when it's finished (which I hope will be this week).

Linking in with the lovely Yarn Alongers, who I'm hoping to engage with more fully this week!

gout: i can feel it in my bones

Following our first Random Recipe Challenge last week, we're going to try and make it a regular occurence in the Macaroon household. Dom over at Belleau Kitchen only demands once-monthly participation (see September's round up here) but we enjoyed the process, so last weekend we sat on the floor next to our recipe book shelf and debated the best way to select another random recipe, before Dom had even had the time to set another challenge (unbearable swats).

The life of an expatriate is one of half belonging. Not in the weighty philosophical sense, but literally you only have half of your belongings. When packing our shipping container 18 months ago, we only included those recipe books that we regularly use (Jamie, Nigella, Delia), plus a few that we thought that the sultry vapours of the East might inspire us to use (Easy Vietnamese and Japanese Cooking... turns out the East isn't as sultry as we anticipated and they remain unopened). Anyway, I expected that this self-selected collection of favoured books might yield a random recipe that we were already familiar with.

How wrong I was. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

To choose the book, my husband appeared with a tea towel tucked inside his glasses, a pair of oven gloves on his hands and a butter knife clenched in his clumsy fist. He then turned around three times and stabbed at the shelf. This vision was so peculiar, unprompted and out of character that I didn't even think to grab a camera, I was rendered inert and speechless.

Unsurprisingly, given the shelf inches that her books occupy, Nigella was the predictable winner with Kitchen. I insisted on using my trusty friend, the online random number generator, to pick the page number: 400. The recipe is evidence that we didn't cheat. We read it slowly and silently before I physically recoiled from the page, brain racing for any excuse to get out of this project that I had instigated. Minetta Marrow Bones. There is no way I would select this recipe over... well, anything else in her book.

I've read a lot about marrow bones in Singapore's trendiest restaurant reviews. So they must be delicious... right? But I'm hardly the target audience for those places (gently-perspiring expat with roots, unpainted toenails and clothes from Uniqlo... sorry ma'am, we don't seem to have your reservation). If bone marrow is the culinary zeitgeist, it's much too sophisticated for normo-bods like me. And I just don't think it sounds very tasty.

The image Nigella paints of her and her Jimmy Choo-wearing girlchums licking organic marrow juice from their perfumed forearms in her superstyled West London kitchen... (okay, okay, she didn't exactly say that) well it's just so much more than intimidating. It's frankly terrifying in ways that I'm helpless to explain.

So imagine my surprise on arriving - shifty and anxious - at the Swiss Butchery in Tanglin (one of the fanciest butchers I could think of) where my request for beef marrow bones was cheerfully met with directions to an entire freezer full of the things. When I, apologetically, asked if they could cut the frozen bones length-ways, a dazzling Singaporean smile and "no problem ma'am!" was the response. Dammit. I had secretly hoped that I'd be able to get out of this by virtue of not being able to find the ingredients. This certainly wasn't my usual friday supermarket run of beansprouts, noodles and Tiger beer. One blisteringly expensive sourdough rye loaf and a bottle of plonk later, and I felt I was shopping like a real tai tai.

We cooked them exactly as directed: lots of seasoning, into a hot oven for 20 minutes, more seasoning and loads of fresh herbs, and then scooped out onto garlic-rubbed sourdough toast.

While sourcing the ingredients was much more charming than I had anticipated, I have to say, the final product... well it just wasn't. My husband thought they were alright, nothing more effusive than that, but I just don't get it. The marrow had turned into hot fat jelly, and the only flavours seemed to be of the salt, pepper, thyme and parsley that we had added.

I'm not a massive fan of pure, smooth, gelatinous fat (a layer running through some deliciously marinated belly pork excepted) and combined with the red wine, this meal just felt like gout on toast.

If gout were caused by eating fat.

Which it's not.

But you get the idea. For some reason all I could think of was ruddy-faced, gouty old men sucking on bones. Not a hint of aspirational Chelsea supper club I'm afraid.

The garlic-rubbed sourdough with a few hastily roasted tomatoes and rocket leaves were, in my provincial opinion, vastly superior in every way. So, proof that I'm not the target audience for the more bleeding edge of Singapore's restaurants (as if there was ever any doubt). But I'm glad I tried this at home rather than taking the plunge at great expense in public. It means I won't feel curious to eat it again.

Our random recipe host, Dom, has now set his October challenge, pairing bloggers from around the world to select one another's random recipe. I'm thrilled to have been paired with a lady from Scotland, and can't wait to see what the randomness generates. Whatever it is, it's bound to be an improvement over gout on toast.

try it, you'll like it, it tastes exactly like...

My brother and I have both loathed mushrooms all our lives. It wasn't a childhood picky phase, to this day we genuinely cannot abide them. And I think, on balance, that anaemic fungi which grow in dark musty places are an acceptable thing to dislike. I will never make them a priority for my daughter's palate.

But I clearly remember the day that my Mum first uttered the perennial fib: "just try the mushrooms kids, you'll like them, they taste a lot like potatoes". Even my spongy, unformed brain questioned the logic of serving something-that-tastes-a-lot-like-potatoes on the same plate as actual potatoes. And of course, they tasted nothing like potatoes. They tasted exactly like the rubbery, beige, basement-dwelling rot-eaters that they are.

The line was trotted out to disguise various new or exotic foodstuffs over the years. A most memorable example being a deep-fried alligator dish which was said to "taste just like chicken". I didn't holiday abroad till I was an adult, so where the heck in the British Isles we found ourselves eating something that purported to be alligator is anyone's guess. Ironically, it probably WAS chicken.

So what is the long-term, character-building effect of repeated exposure to "trust-me-you'll-like-it"? I have concluded that it's a lasting skepticism for anything that comes with a forceful recommendation. Tell me "seriously, you'll LOVE IT!" about just about anything and watch my cynical heckles rise while I sneer a little inside.

So when about half a dozen people recommended a novel to me, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell, some of them in the most endearing way ("I thought of you as I read this, knowing how much you would enjoy it") I smiled and put it on the mental list of books I did not want to read.

I know, I can hardly believe it either. I am that contrary. And the decision was supported (in my brain) by the fact that I hadn't read the author's previous novel because it had a terrible cover. Yup, I'm also that shallow. But in my defence, sort of, Cloud Atlas really did have a rubbish cover. Now that they're making a film of it in the city where I went to university, I might have to get over myself and read it. But I'll make a brown paper cover first.

When my husband gave me a copy of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet as an anniversary present earlier this year ("from the back-cover blurb it seems exactly the kind of thing you'd like!") I smiled and put it on the actual list of actual books I would actually have to read. Secretly I stubbornly refuse to anticipate enjoying it, but acknowledge that I possibly will. The first fifty pages have been alright. At this stage my pride won't allow me any more enthusiasm than that, I'm not quite ready to be proved wrong yet.

It's Yarn Along day, so as well as books, we're talking knitting. My Stripe Study scarf is coming along well. The colours are a bit wild, but I hope they'll make more sense in the context of a relative opening a gift on a chilly British Christmas morning. About half way in the number of stitches per row has already ballooned to 200+. I think that's set to double. Very long rows aren't really my thing because, with a small child on the loose, I need to be able to stop regularly. So it's slow progress but I'm trying to use it as a lesson in enjoying the process over instant gratification.

Linking in with the lovelies at Yarn Along who will, I'm afraid, have to try and forgive me if I don't comment very often on their creations this week. I'm sorry. My beloved old mac G5 eventually gave out on me last night, after nearly seven years of flawless service. I've just about managed to create this post on a screen so small and infuriating that I'm going to shut it off and go directly to the optician. I hope normal service will resume soon. And I hope I can retrieve the last three months photos in time for the Bumbles & Light Shades of Autumn Photo Challenge for which I had been snapping away like a crazy beast. D'Oh.

the soup that broke the camel's back (and regenerated as chocolate mousse)

My husband and daughter were watching Saturday morning tv, a CBeebies cooking show that he approved of because they pulled a vegetable out of the ground. He was inspired. He and The Boss set about dowloading the recipe for lunch. I left them to it.

He muttered about the recipe not being specific enough, while simultaneously failing to read it properly. I calmly repeated the recipe and left again. He called me back to ask how much "three spring onions" was. I bit my tongue and gave him an old-fashioned look. But when, after the specified cooking time, he held a spoonful of soup out to me and asked "so is the celery cooked then?" I had had ENOUGH. I've deleted the transcript of my rant, it was simply too petulant to share.

I think I was tired. I'm certain I was hungry. But I did actually mean what I said about a grown professional man being able to make a decent fist of a pre-schooler's soup recipe without becoming such a helpless lump.

It wasn't always this way, we used to share the cooking equally, at a leisurely pace and late into the night. But as our baby became a child, we felt the conventional pressure to provide early evening family meals. Now, office hours dictate a stereotypical 1950s "man-comes-through-door-at-six-as-dinner-hits-table" scenario. So the helpless lumpen-ness, ladies and jellyspoons, is what happens when a person stops practising.

The Boss, taking control of the soup situation

Around the same time as the soup episode, my friend at Please Do Not Feed The Animals blogged about a monthly recipe challenge that she loves and I wondered if it might be our solution. If we regularly learn to cook something new together, something so random that he can't possibly assume that I know what I'm doing either, perhaps we can nip this impatient teacher/spoonfed pupil routine in the bud. Cue Dom at Belleau Kitchen and his Random Recipe Challenge.

The idea is to pick a cookbook off the shelf at random, open it to a random page, cook it, and blog about it - WITHOUT cheating and flipping through till you find something you fancy! As a slight twist this month, Dom challenged his disciples to pick a random recipe from their piles and files of notes and clippings.

This we can do. I have a bulging plastic file (written about here) that I'm in the process of rationalising. The vegetarian dishes and curries have already been winkled out, typed up and neatly filed in a shiny new folder, so they're out of the game, but 55 plastic pockets of notes, newspaper pages and scribbled scraps remain.

So how to choose randomly? Well, when playing any game, I've never been one to let fun get in the way of meticulously following the rules. So we didn't blindfold a family member, or throw a dart into the clippings pile (both of which could be considered "fun" in the conventional sense but neither are technically random... just saying). Instead I insisted we suck all the joy out of the process and select our random recipe in the most boring way humanly possible, so it was as close to being genuinely random as practicable. We used an online random number generator. Which came up with the number sixteen. It's a bottomless barrel of laughs round at ours, I tell you.

And on the sixteenth page was a hand-written recipe so full of joy and calories that my brittle, scientific soul softened a little at the memory of it: frozen chocolate mousse.

the book, the number, the page

My Mum used to make this when we were growing up, having been given the recipe by an American friend of hers. The 1980-something tatty old shred of paper with the long-forgotten stranger's red handwriting is, to this day, blue-tacked to the inside of Mum's pantry door. At the time it was the only recipe she used with American cup measures, and so was instantly baffling to us. (Do Americans only have one size of cup in the whole country? Does it not matter as long as you always use the same cup?) I must have copied it into my recipe book at some point in the dim and distant past but, other than assisting with bowl-licking duties as a kid, I've never actually made it. More importantly, I haven't eaten it for at least 20 years.

Thank you Dom, I'm loving this process already.

frozen chocolate mousse
for the crunch

• 2oz soft butter
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 tbspn flour
• 1 cup coarse chopped walnuts or pecans (we used pecans)

for the mousse

• 1.5 cups whipping cream
• 8oz good chocolate
• 6 eggs at room temp
• 2/3 cup of sugar
• 2 tspn vanilla essence

1. mix all the crunch ingredients together and press into a baking tray
2. bake for 30 minutes until dry and slightly brown (no temp given I'm afraid, we used 170C)
3. leave aside to cool
4. melt 1/4 cup of the cream with the chocolate (in a bain marie presumably)
5. whip the rest of the cream (in a separate bowl)
6. beat the egg yolks till light and then beat in the chocolate and vanilla (in yet another bowl)
7. add this mixture to the whipped cream
8. beat egg whites and sugar until stiff (seriously, I don't have a maid for all this washing up)
9. fold in the chocolate and broken up nut crunch
10. freeze

It was actually quite a tricky recipe, lots of stages and things that you have to be careful of along the way (keeping the chocolate smooth, not scrambling the egg yolks, ensuring no yolk sneaks into your whites, folding in the whites to retain maximum air etc etc). We spent a lovely relaxing evening working through this together, and doing the resulting mountain of washing up.

every mixing bowl I possess

And the end product? Two whole litres of rich, dense, chocolate ice cream with pecan crunches and a few bonus flecks of incompletely-folded marshmallowy meringue. Absolute heaven. But I repeat: two litres, so as well as addressing a few culinary equality issues, this challenge may add a good few inches to our waistlines! Maybe that'll prompt a shared interest in competitive team sports... but I bloody hope not.

Thank you once again to Dom for hosting, and Please Do Not Feed The Animals for encouraging us to take part. I thoroughly enjoy both of your blogs, commend them to others, and look forward to the next challenge!

frozen chocolate mousse

kaya toast: the jury's still out

kaya /kı-yah, ˈkʌɪjɑ/ n. : A sauce, usu. green or orange in colour, made chiefly of coconut, eggs and sugar which is often eaten with bread, used as a filling in pastries, etc.

As with my previous forays into turkish delight and marshmallow, kaya is one of those things you just buy. It's barely a foodstuff, it's just stuff. Making it doesn't really cross your mind. Marmite as opposed to marmalade, if you will.

Unless you're me.

My elegant and cosmopolitan neighbour actually laughed and said gently "you're hilarious!" when I told her I was going to try and make kaya. Not that's hilarious, but specifically you're hilarious. Not quite sure how I feel about that - d'you think she refers to me as the eccentric British woman next door? I hope not. Mind you, she did have homemade turkish delight and marshmallows forced upon her. In significant quantities.

My interest in making kaya is prompted by a book I'm reading, The Tiger in the Kitchen by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan (see description here). As with most projects, the kaya-making process kicked off with shopping. But this wasn't soul-destroying supermarket shopping. No, no, buying groceries at the Tekka Centre wet market in Little India is an altogether more sensory and satisfying experience.

First stop: the fruit and veg aisle for pandan leaves. These are used in lots of local dishes, both sweet and savoury. They have a characteristic flavour and scent, and the green colouring is used to make some violently artificial-looking desserts among other things.

When we first arrived in Singapore, someone enlightened me about the oddly pungent smell in some of the grubbier taxis: drivers pile bundles of pandan leaves on the back window ledge to deter 'roaches. Cheaper than a regular valet and some baygon traps I guess. So unfortunately I always associate the smell of pandan with the sinking feeling that I'm in an infested taxi - but I was determined to plough on regardless.

bundles of pandan leaves right at the back

Next were the coconut guys. They are always so cheerful and it's such a novelty to me to be able to buy freshly grated coconut for mere pennies - I'll take any excuse to go to their stall.

So, on to the recipe. I trawled the internet for hints and tips, and decided to loosely base my kaya on Cheryl's story about making it with her grandmother (with some added details gleaned from the web to be borne in mind).

I mixed 100g of golden caster sugar into five eggs, a cup of coconut cream (squeezed and strangled from the half kilo of freshly grated coconut - amazingly therapeutic) and 10 pandan leaves tied in a bundle. Onto the wok steamer went the bowl and... hmmm... that would appear to be it.

There followed a series of disappointments.

Firstly, nothing happened for a long time. I'd read that the tricky bit is preventing the sugar from catching and burning, but there was no chance of that happening here. While Cheryl's kaya took just 45 minutes, I was eventually ready to throw in the towel and put the whole episode down to experience after and hour and a half. It hadn't gone pandan green or sugar brown (those are the two shades of kaya that I've seen in jars), it just looked like congealed egg with some leaves floating on the top.

However, having read online that it might look like wet scrambled eggs (and that many people assume failure and throw it out at this point) I was prepared for this unappetising stage. As instructed I spooned off excess water and blitzed the cooled mixture with a wand-blender before bottling and refridgerating.

The other slightly deflating aspect was that I felt I'd broken kaya's spell. This legendary local delicacy seems to be, basically, steamed egg custard. The milk may be from a coconut, and the pandan adds a subtle flavour, but at the end of the day it's still just steamed egg custard. Mass-produced kaya has a slightly granular texture which reminds me of undercooked Scottish Tablet mixture, so I was anticipating bubbling vats of mysterious potion similar to that. Not so with homemade kaya - just soft, sweet, steamed egg custard. I felt like I'd found hidden Christmas gifts; they were okay and I still wanted to have them on the big day, but part of me wished that they were still a mystery.

But the proof of the pudding is in the eating and all that, so how would our Saturday morning gourmet kaya toast breakfast compare with the "real" thing: a lightly boiled egg or two (the whites barely set) doused with soy sauce, a white toast sandwich of butter and kaya, and some kopi or teh (super strong with condensed milk).

a commercial kaya toast set

homemade, with our beloved old-school hawker-style coffee set and melamine plates!

Well, the Guatemalan beans roasted by Papa Palheta were as delicious as coffee beans can be (we omitted the condensed milk, preferring our coffee black). The stars of the show were definitely the eggs with artisan local soy sauce from Kwong Woh Hing - these were a true revelation. And who can argue with thick white bread and real butter now and again? My kaya was smooth, soft and pale, and definitely tasted like it ought to, but I confess to missing the graininess of the mass-produced stuff.

I concede that I may still have some way to go in perfecting the art of kaya - perhaps I made it too creamy, and maybe some caramelised sugar would improve the colour. But, on the other hand, I'm the shizzle at steamed egg custard these days.

Now, onto more important matters. Ridding my apartment of eau de minicab. Otherwise I might get a reputation as that eccentric British woman with the foosty-smelling flat.

Linking in with Sweet Saturday at the Gingerbreadblog.com