Monthly Archives: November 2007

 Cinnamon ice cream with vanilla & cinnamon swirl sugar cookies. All homemade.

Now that’s a great looking dessert!

In other news, I made my own butter today, and it’s delicious!

Dec. 20: work a half day. Flight leaves 5:30pm. Fly to Bankok

Dec. 23, afternoon: Fly from Bangkok to Delhi

Jan. 1/2 (overnight flight): Fly from Delhi to Bangkok

Jan 2, morning: Fly from Bangkok to Incheon.

The total including taxes is a bit more than 1 mil won. With the cost of the tourist visa, it comes to 1,150,000ish won.

So it turns out that I was wrong about the vacation thing. But I didn’t find out until *after* I found some great flights which would have me leave here on the 20th and go to Bangkok, then go on the 23rd to Delhi, back to Bangkok on the 1st of January, and back in Seoul by 4:30pm on the 2nd. So now I’m trying to at least get those three extra days as unpaid vacation. I think that I can do it. Hey, between a choice of paying about 300k won more for a flight or losing less than 300k won in pay and getting an extra three days vacation, guess which one I’m going to choose?

In additional  travel plans, I’m going to go to the dance in Daegu, which has been pushed back to December 8th. A couple of dancers from Seoul are going and they’ve offered to help me out getting there. I’m still planning to go to China during lunar new year, but it’ll probably be pared down to a 5 day trip.

I’ve also decided to eat more lunches (if not all of them!) at home instead of the cafeteria. Not like my place isn’t just as far as the cafeteria is (nice to live close by!). My food is better, and I can make what I like. The cafeteria food’s been getting worse.  I’ll have one of my coworkers tell me in advance if it looks like it will be a good meal. There are a few things they have that I like, most notably their tofu.

Finally, I made some cookies. I’m disappointed by the slightly oily aftertaste of these, which I am blaming on running out of all my good butter and having to use crappy Korean butter. I have to go on a shopping trip across town to get some more good stuff. I’m going to buy a lot and store it in the freezer to avoid these issues of constantly having to go across town.  But they look beautiful,and they don’t taste *bad*, I just get disappointed easily with cookies that don’t taste perfect.

I won’t post the recipe cause I think I could find a better one. It’s basically a sugar cookie, but then I divided the dough in half, added extra vanilla to the first half, and a bunch of cinnamon to the second. I rolled them out, stacked them, rolled them into a log, and cut them for swirly sugar cookies. Here you go!

They would rock. Also, it would be funny.

Gregory: Alternates between being very active in class and being extremely quiet, almost lost in space. Strangely fascinated by my arm hair.

All the girls in the apple class: They’re such close friends, it’s like one blob of girls rather than 7 seperate ones. None of them stand out from any of the others, so I genuinely have no clue what to write for them. I can’t write the same thing 7 times, so here’s one comment for all of them. They know some English, but don’t speak anything in English without prompting. They converse in Korean in class, when the activity allows them to.

Carl/Jonathan/James/Eric: Stop changing the damn kid’s English name. I’m as confused as he is!

Hehe.. well, actually most of the kids are really good. I can’t think of any comments I would write but can’t except the three above. But writing the girls’ evaluations will still be tricky. How to say the same thing seven different ways? I mean, one or two I could handle..

I have more paid vacation time than I thought I did.

I thought the 5 business days off I have off in Dec were part of the 10 paid vacation days in my contract (yes, if I could change one thing, I’d have more vacation days). Turns out they’re not.

I bet this will make trying to find a good flight to India way easier. Also, it will give me a longer vacation. I’m planning to use three days to increase my time in India (So about 2 whole weeks total), and two days to increase my time off during lunar new year (to give me a total of 9 days to go to China with).

That’s right, I completed my first challenge this month. Some of you may even have tasted it without knowing that it was this month’s challenge. I kept my secret. Now I finally get to share!

It’s not the 26th yet everywhere yet, but within the next day, I imagine you’ll see all the people at the blogroll post their masterpieces as well.

And the challenge was… potato bread!

The full recipe is here on Tanna’s blog. Thanks to Tanna from My Kitchen in Half Cups for hosting this month’s challenge!

I’ve only ever made Challah bread before, so I was excited to try something new. It worked!

I was warned that the dough would be very soft and sticky, but I had no problems with it. I didn’t worry about a blob of dough attacking my kitchen as I heard some did.😉

Focaccia (basil, rosemary, potato, garlic, sprinkled black pepper, brushed with olive oil):

Sesame breadsticks (brushed with sesame oil, sprinkled with sesame seeds & twisted):

Large loaf (brushed with olive oil):

The focaccia was done the day I made the dough. Then Jay texted me asking if I wanted to go out swing dancing, so I put the rest of the dough in the fridge and finished it the next morning (breadsticks and the loaf). It came out well, and the others who tried it agreed.

In fact it was so good, that I had to try it again. I made it a second time for the dinner party. This time, inspired by other DBers’ challenges, I made the loaf a cheese-swirled loaf, and made some rolls and more focaccia as well. Here’re some pictures of the second batch.

The best thing is that before I was a very occasional bread baker, but I can see that this recipe will not only get me to try making bread more often, but get me to try different recipes. I think I might attempt a sourdough bread next…

So this recipe not only made some great bread, but it also helped to keep me a daring baker always.

In other news the Daring Baker thing rocks, and so 1. I will be participating in future challenges, and 2. You should too!

Don’t forget to go check out the other breads. I imagine they’ll be posted at various times throughout the day.

I made homemade ice cream!

I argue that I am still on time for this blogging event, hosted by Ice Cream Ireland. It’s still Sunday somewhere!

So the story behind this goes back to that last dinner party. In order to make the apple tart, I needed cream. Well here, it’s not so simple as walking to the nearest dep. Nope. I’d have to go to at least something as big as an Emart or GSmart or Lottemart. The grocery stores I generally pass by did not have any. But I wasn’t going by Emart or GSmart, and so when Angela said she was going to Costco and asked me if I wanted to go, I said yes. They did have cream, and it was only 5000 won or so, if I remember correctly. BUT it was two cartons of 1000 mL. Yes, two litres of cream. Oy!

So then I made the tart and everything was good, but what to do with the extra cream? I asked around for suggestions, and one Daring Baker suggested I make ice cream. I’d never tried before, but hey, first time for everything. And then I noticed that there was actually a food blogging event related to ice cream.

Ice cream Ireland is going to be making a cookbook with ice cream recipes. And he needed testers to try making the recipes. Testers even get a mention/thank you in the cookbook and could win a copy of the book! Sweet.

He had a list of recipes that needed testing, and I decided to make one from that list (honey cardamom ice cream), and one of his other ice cream recipes that was not on the list (cinnamon ice cream).

I started with the honey cardamom ice cream. The recipe is here.

I just noticed that it’s no longer on the list of ice creams in the original post… ah, well. If it’s not useful, at least it was delicious.

The recipe called for 2 tbp (10g) cardamom. For light powdery things (salt, baking soda, whatever), I’m used to thinking of 5g as a teaspoon and 15g as a tablespoon, so I thought that it might be two teaspoons of cardamom. Turns out that it really is two tablespoons. So much for my stupid reasoning. I was going to do it by weight just in case, but I was lazy, and had a teaspoon measure, so I put in two heaping teaspoons. I tasted it and was prepared to add more, but.. it tasted quite cardamommy, and I liked it, so rather than go for an even stronger flavour I just left it. Next time I try, I’ll try with two tablespoons. But it’s perfectly fine with two teaspoons.

Anyway, I followed the recipe as it was written otherwise. I wish there were some useful thing I could say, but really, it worked perfectly well. For the custard stage, I had no thermometer to check the temperature, but it’s not the first time I’ve made custard, so I just went about it as I would normally. Usually when mixing the sugar and eggs with the milk, I add a bit of milk to the egg mixture and then mix it and add it in to the rest of the milk, but the method of adding the milk to the egg mixture in a steady stream worked perfectly well too. It was a thinner custard than I was used to making, so at some point, I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be thicker, but it seemed ready, so I continued on.

I made the recipe in the morning, and so just let it stay in the fridge about 6 hrs or so where it called for leaving it there overnight, and then took it out and continued. The only other place in the whole recipe where I did something that was not mentioned was near the end.. once it was put in the freezer and was firming up, after about three and a half hours, I went back to stir it, and then again two hours after that. I have no ice cream maker, so it was just in a bowl, and I’d heard that you need to stir ice cream when you’re making it to prevent it from crystalizing. I don’t know if it’s true, but I heard it more than once, so I just went ahead and did it. This morning I checked, and it firmed up wonderfully. It’s delicious!

The cinnamon ice cream (recipe here) was much the same.

I had no cinnamon sticks, so I followed the suggestion of adding a half teaspoon of ground cinnamon instead. Where the recipe calls for the cinamon stick to be put back in if a stronger flavour is desired, I added in another 1/4 tsp of cinnamon, maybe a bit more.

Again, when it came to freezing it, I stirred it a couple of times, once every few hours or so, and then left it overnight in the freezer. When I woke up, it was perfect!

The cinnamon ice cream is firmer than the honey cardamom, but both are a really good texture.

Conclusion: Ice cream making = success!

I’ll add pictures later.

Honey Cardamom Ice Cream:

Cinnamon ice cream: