it's been Wan week...

For the uninitiated, Chef Wan is the TV food king round our neck of the woods. Always cheerful, exuberant and energetic, Malaysian and other South-East Asian dishes are clearly his defining passion. If you're an eagle-eyed Rick Stein fan, you might remember Chef Wan from a hilarious cooking lesson in the Far Eastern Odyssey series, in which I think I remember Rick Stein describing him as "Malaysia's Delia and Jamie combined", or something to that effect.

I got a set of mini Chef Wan cookbooks for Christmas so when Dom, our gracious Random Recipe host, challenged us to cook something randomly from our newest cookbooks I immediately began salivating over all the exotic possibilities: asam chicken, beef rendang, mutton curry... chickity China the Chinese chicken, have a drumstick and your brain stops tickin' (sorry, can NOT get that song out of my head, and now you won't be able to either).

Alas, it was not to be. We randomly picked Spiced Pumpkin Muffins, and one Wan week into the New Year, me and The Boss whiled away a rainy Singapore afternoon making them. And I must say, they're very delicious and a lot like carrot cake, as you might imagine (but not in the least like a Singaporean carrot cake which is a very different kettle of ill-chosen metaphors altogether). You roast and mash the pumpkin before making something very similar to a basic (Western) carrot cake batter and throw in the pumpkin and half a cup of chopped walnuts at the end. Simples. But perhaps not as simple as an actual carrot cake.

Now I'm off to drool over the photos of curries and fried food on the other pages to decide what to make next.

this was taken on a plain white countertop, but it looks all cool and superimposed!
i'm starting to love the flash on my camera, after giving it a really hard time for ages