Canapes on Ritz crackers. Same idea as last year, but this time I had to learn a lesson. Since I didn’t feel like going through all the agonies again, I bought a small jar of chicken liver paste at the store. And I hated its taste! Never again… Also, I learned that I like smoked salmon better with rice rather than with crackers. (You’ll see what I made with leftover smoked salmon soon.) The mentaiko paste, which sounded so tempting when I read about it on the net, turned out to be too salty for me, so I mixed it with tofu-avocado dip later. Well, I’ll know better next year.
Shrimp & avocado salad and vegetable sticks. The celery sticks were good with tofu-avocado dip, but I liked them with mentaiko paste, too.
Now, this was something new this year -- Key West Chicken. The recipe is here. There was only one chicken breast in my fridge, so I HAD TO make this dish successfully if I didn’t want to have a Christmas dinner without a main dish. I read the recipe reviews more carefully than usual, and I was glad that I did, because that saved my chicken from being too salty. I doubled the amount of lime juice and honey (but not soy sauce), marinated the chicken for 6 hours, and had a success (I wouldn’t say a great success, but it was pretty good.)
My cookies this year: Gingerbread people, thumbprint cookies with cherry jam and one of my staples, matcha cookies.
But what I liked the best was this: Sablés au Citron à la Fleur de Sel… something I cannot even pronounce. ;P I wanted something with citrus flavor to balance out the flavors of other cookies, and this recipe looked ideal especially now that I have the famous Fleur de Sel. (Thanks, LPC!!) :D You know, the recipe is from Chocolate and Zucchini, and chika of She Who Eats tried it out and loved it. How could this fail? And the result was, of course -- GREAT!
These Christmas tree cookies were just something I whipped up. I mixed the leftover matcha cookie dough with plain cookie dough to make “marble” dough. With the icing, don’t they look like snow-covered forest? (BTW, what do you call these tiny silver bits? Argent?)
I baked two kinds of cakes for my Christmas dinner this year -- fruitcake and orange pound cake. The fruitcake wasn’t bad, but I didn't notice as much rum flavor as I had expected. I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that the rum I used was a leftover from a long time ago. The orange pound cake was my last-minute addition: I just added grated orange rind and orange curacao to whatever pound cake recipe I found on the net. It made a good contrast with the fruitcake, I think, both color-wise and taste-wise.
Now, again, it’s that time of the year for us to come together for a good cause and have fun! :) Menu for Hope – a world-wide, annual fundraising campaign by foodbloggers – is taking place again this year, this time to raise funds to support the United Nations World Food Programme. As we did last year, interested readers can buy online raffle tickets for the (food- or wine-related) prizes donated by foodbloggers all over the world. Each raffle ticket costs $US10. For more details of this year’s Menu for Hope campaign, visit these sites:
Wash strawberries, remove stems and pat dry with paper towel. Cover each strawberry with shiro-an (20 to 30 g each), stem-side down. Leave the tip of strawberries uncovered like this. It will show nice red color through the rice-cake skin.
In a microwavable bowl, mix rice flour and water and knead well. (It may be easier to mix the flour and water in a plastic bag and knead, so that the mixture does not stick to your hands while kneading, then empty the bag into a microwavable bowl.) Often daifuku/dumpling recipes say that the dough should feel like your ear lobe, but microwave method requires more water, so don’t worry if your mixture turns out very soft. Cover with plastic wrap, not too tight so that steam can escape, and microwave for 4 to 5 minutes (with 500 W microwave). It may be better to take out the dough after 2 minutes, stir well, cover with plastic wrap again and microwave 2 more minutes.
With my microwave, 4 minutes in total seemed enough. If your dough looks a little yellowish and plastic-like when it comes out of the microwave, it is overdone. (Photo: dough that just came out of microwave)
Stir well (with a wet pestle, if available) until the dough is glossy, soft and elastic, as in this photo. A strong arm helps a lot here.
* I updated this part. This is easier and safer. Using a wet wooden spatula (or something similar), scrape out the hot dough onto a flat surface heavily floured with corn/potato starch. Let it spread flat and, while it is warm, cut into desired number of pieces with a dough cutter or something, also dusted with corn/potato starch. Dry your hands, dust well with the starch and shape each piece into a ball.
Flatten and stretch each of the small balls of dough into a thin disk, and wrap a strawberry-bean paste ball wit it. (Place the tip of the strawberry in the center of the disk.) Pinch the edges tight to seal. (Flour fingers well so that the rice cake won't stick, but try not to get much flour on the edges to be sealed together.) The sealed part should be the bottom of the daifuku. Shape into a ball.
Heat sweetened white bean paste in a pot over a VERY low heat, stirring vigorously. It’ll turn soft first then somewhat come together, maybe in 4 to 5 minutes?? The paste is done if it does not stick to the skin when you touch it with the back of your hand. * I do not recommend using microwave for this procedure, because once you overdo it, there’s no way to fix it. Plus, you’ll need to use a pot later to heat the dough again anyway, so it'll be easier to start with a pot.
In a microwavable bowl, mix rice flour, water and sugar. Cover with plastic wrap and microwave for apx. 30 seconds. (When I want to make whighter nerikiri dough, I reduce the amount of water a little and stir small amount of egg white into the water before adding it to the bowl.)
Stir well until it turns white, glossy and elastic. This is called gyuhi, which is practically similar to the daifuku skin.
Take 20 g of the gyuhi made as above and add to the bean-paste. Keep stirring vigorously over VERY low heat (for 3 to 4 minutes??) until the dough becomes a little softer and more elastic than the bean paste, but not sticking to your fingers.
After the dough cools, keep it wrapped in plastic wrap to prevent it from drying up.
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Make small balls of shiroan (the yellowish one in the photo), pink-colored nerikiri dough and white nerikiri dough. Wrap an with pink dough. Then wrap the pink dough with thin white dough.
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The pink color should vaguely show through the white skin. Make incisions using knife, fork, spoons, etc. so that the pink color would show in the cuts. My hunch is that something made of wood may be better than metallic utensils.
Make incisions. I used the flat wooden pick that will be included in my wagashi-making kit.
And if you didn’t like what you made, just put everything together and, using plastic wrap like this, squeeze it into a small chestnut or onion shaped ball with an interesting color mixture. ;)
