Monday, July 05, 2010

Yummy

A weak attempt at food blogging -- which is to say, I want to show off what I did for dinner over the weekend. It doesn't look anything as food porn as Chubby Hubby though. But then again, he's a pro.



We usually have a packet of frozen roti prata (Singaporean Indian pancake, usually eaten with curry) as a staple in the freezer, and one day, instead of heating a prata in a non-stick pan on the stove top as I usually do, I stuck one in the oven because I had it going for something else. To my surprise, the flat pancake crisped up and puffed up into layers like flaky pastry.

That sparked off ideas of what to do with prata, mostly along the lines of using it as an easy pastry substitute. It's more restrictive than pastry because you are restricted to working with a circle of frozen dough which you can't roll or manipulate. But it is a lot more convenient, and doesn't involve getting out the rolling pin and pastry board. And I thought pre-made pastry was already convenient. This beat even that.

The easiest thing to make was a sausage roll, I simply rolled a prata round a sausage and popped it in the oven. Last week, prata became the pastry topping for a chicken pot pie. That worked out quite well and it was dead easy because you could just place the circular prata over the pie dish and fold it down over the edge.

Then I got adventurous. Prata became the dough for a pasty. It was an ugly-looking pasty, because unlike malleable dough, I couldn't pinch the pancake neatly into a decorative plait where I sealed the ends, let alone decorate it Martha Stewart-like with pastry appliques on top. But hey, looks doesn't matter because once you cut into it, it will just crumble away into flakes anyway, and it tastes just as good.





Oh, that dish in the corner, it was a vegetable soup.

4 comments:

MGW said...

The dog's breakfast may have been quite tasty -- but the looks of it are mostly off-putting to a Westerner. Luie says, "You crazy, Ma! I'd wolf that down in a second." However, the fake pastry substitute -- NOW that I wish I could buy in our mid-western stores. The soup and sandwich look fantastic! M

The Cat's Whiskers said...

Mmmm ... yummy ... in my next life, can I come back as your dog?

The Cat's Whiskers said...

Don't tell me - the soup was the dog's dinner, right?

Mmmm .... prata. That was very ingenious. I've seen it being sold here and never rated it (how can frozen be better than the freshly-made hawker centre version, right?). Now I know what I can do with the bit left in the freezer.

The Cat's Whiskers said...

Forgot to add ... the problem with food blogs is that the person doing the blogging doesn't really get to enjoy the meal. When some colleagues and I went out recently to a posh restaurant, someone said that he'd seen a whole table whip out their mobile phones and other cameras to take photos as soon as their meals were served so they could put it on their blogs. It's become not so much about the meal as the occasion and the one-upmanship of blogs.