Posts Tagged ‘Toaster Oven’

  1. Eating My Way Through Winter: Coconut Spice Bread

    December 12, 2012 by MaryAnne

    spice bread

     

    This is going to be a new series, if I can get my act together.

     

    At the moment my act is very obviously not together, but more about that later.

    I’ve decided that the best way to deal with an unwanted winter is to ignore it entirely, to stay in bed as much as possible, and to bake as if I was in a place full of trees, fresh air and lovely white blankets of snow, rather than in a huge city where the daily pollution readings declare it Unhealthy and where it doesn’t tend to snow but it sure loves to be cold and damp.

    This obviously means I need to bake more. I need to make more warm and happy comfort foods. I need to totally regain all of the  8kg I lost doing that detox back in October. I’m nothing if not diligent. (more…)

    Category Baked Things, Eating My Way Through Winter, Uncategorized | Tags: ,,,,, | 10 Comments

  2. Stuffed Cabbage (Because it’s Cabbage Season)

    November 26, 2012 by MaryAnne

    cabbage rolls

    The wind is just howling out there. Last night, I was kept up until the uncivilized hours by the noise of it just whipping around the building, slamming against the balcony that juts out, catching on the corner. Being on the 16th floor is loud. I had no idea before we moved here. I’d always been a first or second (or 5th, at most) kind of gal.

    Anyway, it’s still noisy this morning and I’m tired and it’s Monday.

    It’s also grey and grim and cold, as is to be expected here at this time of year.  I really should get a stock photo for this, to put on every post between now and next April. (more…)

    Category Baked Things, Soupy Stewy Things, Spicy Things, Uncategorized | Tags: ,,,,,, | 5 Comments

  3. Spicy, buttery rearranged cheese biscuits

    November 23, 2012 by MaryAnne

    And then there were (eventually) none. I started out with 27...

    Apparently I’ve been on hiatus.

     

    I popped by here yesterday to update my plug-ins and noticed I hadn’t done anything in two whole months. You’d think I was starving to death or something.

    Which I was, for a while.

    After we came back from a gluttonous week in Hong Kong in early October, I sentenced myself to a 30 day detox, cutting out everything that was fun in the universe: no grains, no dairy, no sweeteners (not even honey), no starchy veggies, no nothing. I lived on veggies… and veggies and tuna and coffee and grilled chicken enlivened by the spice rub I brought back from Morocco.

    Somehow I survived.

    I didn’t do much inspired cooking though. Certainly nothing worth noting here.

    Oh, hey, look, it’s another freaking tuna salad!  I can’t wait to document it for posterity!

    Oh, no, wait. Never mind.

    Anyway, I’m back. I’ve dusted off the oven and prepped myself mentally to regain the 6 or 7 kilos I lost over the past 2 months. After all, it’s winter now and I need to be ready for  the long, unpleasant season of hibernation. Shanghai is bad at winter.

    See?

     

    Today’s forecast: dire, with a chance of grim extending to the weekend. Highs of meh, with a projected low of get me the hell out of here.

    (more…)

    Category Baked Things, Milky Cheesy Things, Uncategorized | Tags: ,,,,, | 4 Comments

  4. Killing My Crock Pot Softly With Yeast Breads

    September 26, 2012 by MaryAnne

    It's remarkably hefty, that bread.

     

    I’m not, I admit, one of those pretty food writers. I’m not talking about me and my bad hair and naked face and un-manicured nails, mind you- I’m talking about my food styling abilities, or lack thereof.

     

    I’m also not good at pretending that things turned out okay.  Like that time I made those Suzhou hockey pucks. Or the biryani that was a bit, well, stodgier than anticipated.  Or the crackers that weren’t quite as crackery as hoped. As long as it’s on the high end of edible, I’ll post it, looks be damned.

     

    Look, irregularly lumpy scones!

     

    Which is why I’m writing about my Great Crockpot Bread Experiment.

    Which, well, didn’t go quite as planned. (more…)

    Category Baked Things, Uncategorized | Tags: ,,,, | 4 Comments

  5. Awesome Nanjing Klepto-Banana Bread (and Pudding)

    September 25, 2012 by MaryAnne

    banana loaf

    I’m a bad food blogger.

    While I’ve been blathering away over yonder about mops and Chinese demolition sites, I’ve been neglecting to talk with y’all about food. Because I have been cooking, believe it or not. And baking. And blowing up the kitchen. Daily!

    I just didn’t have the time or energy to take the pictures and blog about it.

    Since we got back from Morocco, I’ve spent nearly every weekend being shipped off to 2nd and 3rd tier cities around the East coast of China for work (in addition to my Monday-Friday job, so yeah, hello exhaustion).

    The last thing I felt like doing in my rare free time was uploading photos of mashed bananas.

    This recipe is a two-parter: banana bread and banana bread pudding.

     

    The first one was sent to me in an email by my mother back in August, when I was having a supremely bad week (I forget why, but if it necessitated an email containing my childhood favourite banana bread, it must have been fairly rough). It’s from our Harrowsmith cookbook, which is well thumbed and streaked with batter.  They have really good oatmeal cookies too, for the record.

     The second was to use up the aforementioned banana bread that I couldn’t actually finish (Doug doesn’t like banana bread) and it was starting to go stale. I decided to attempt to use semi stale banana bread in a bog-standard bread pudding recipe. It worked. Yay!

    The bananas used in the recipe were nicked from my hotel room in Nanjing, where I had been shipped off to for two weekends in a row. There are only so many complimentary bananas that a gal can eat, especially when she’s not actually a fan of fruit. If they left me a plate full of cucumbers and peppers, I might be more appreciative. (more…)

    Category Baked Things, Milky Cheesy Things, Sweet Things, Uncategorized | Tags: ,, | 13 Comments

  6. Made in Jiānádà: Suzhou Porky Mooncakes

    August 31, 2012 by MaryAnne

    20120703_0820

    Hello. I’ve been away for a while, haven’t I?

    It’s been a very hot,  busy summer, much of it nowhere near a kitchen to call my own.

    We were in Morocco for a month, which was lovely in spite of the fact that it was 46 degrees in the shade AND Ramadan for most of the time we were there. Whoops.

    Anyway. I’ve been back in Shanghai for nearly three weeks now and have yet to dust off the oven and check to see if it even still works. Poor thing. I’ve made chili and tacos and a ton of wok tortillas, but those aren’t new things so I can’t exactly re-write posts for them just for the sake of it.

    This one… this is one I made back in Canada just before I left, but never posted.

    Why?

    Because I royally screwed it up.  Kind of. I made Suzhou pork hockey pucks.

    You know, the Canadian interpretation. Like, say, chop suey or bison fried rice.

    Apparently my skillful light touch and intuitive cooking skills don’t apply to pastry.

    I love Suzhou mooncakes. In China, however, it isn’t worth the energy to actually make them at home because they are so good, so fresh and so cheap here.

    For the past two mornings, on my long, hot trek out to the Entry-Exit Bureau in deepest, darkest Pudong to renew my residence permit, I’ve stopped at a tiny stand at the bottom of our street to buy a little brown bag containing exactly two mooncakes, still hot and flakey and filled with lovely, juicy, umami seasoned ground pork, fresh from the oven. 6 kuai (under a buck) for a very solid breakfast.

    I was too busy eating them to take pictures, but below is one I took a few weeks ago when I was actually in Suzhou. See the little red stamp on the ones below? They stamp their mooncakes, yes. Much more low key than all the fiddly crimping and dough-engraving that goes on with the classical lotus paste and duck egg filled Cantonese style ones that are exchanged (and then re-gifted and re-gifted, like fruitcake) during the mid-autumn festival (coming very soon). (more…)

    Category Baked Things, Improbable Things, Made in Jianada, Uncategorized | Tags: ,,,,,, | 5 Comments

  7. Lavash crackers qui rit (and crockpot hummus)

    May 21, 2012 by MaryAnne

    IMG_1213

    Oh. Hello. You might remember me from such diverse posts as Xinjiang Noodle Dough Tacos and Xinjiang Noodle Dough Pierogies.  I’ve been slightly out of commission recently, what with suddenly having 5 jobs and all.

    I must say, it sure is a lot easier to cook when 1. you’re actually at home (I’ve been either in Hangzhou or down in Xinzhuang and Qibao in deepest, darkest South Shanghai for much of the past month) and 2. not up to your ears in new and scary work projects with terrifying deadlines.

    For the past few weeks, we’ve been living on crock pot soup, take away pizza, and neighbourhood Hunan restaurant yummies.  My drafts folder here doubled in size, full of links and titles but no actual finished product. No time.  Also, no energy.

    Today, for the first day in yonks, I didn’t have to go somewhere immediately to do something workish (that would be scheduled for this afternoon). I cleaned the flat, drank 2 pots of coffee, and made lavash crackers and hummus. By hand. Which is still cramped. (more…)

    Category Baked Things, Uncategorized | Tags: ,,,,, | 11 Comments

  8. Tandoori Chicken Wraps (plutôt à la chinoise)

    April 18, 2012 by MaryAnne

    IMG_6726

    Spring has sprung! Shanghai is currently alternating between gorgeous, sunny, warm days and, well, the usual grim and drizzly murkiness that seems to be its default mood. I, however, have been feeling remarkably sane (highly unusual) and have been quite busy with lots of little cooking projects this week. Last night we had fajitas (but with spicy sauteed chicken), this afternoon I made a massive new batch of roasted garlic oil,  and tonight…we had something I hadn’t made in years: tandoori chicken.

    Or rather, toaster oven chicken in a style approximating tandoori chicken. With lots of peppers to go with. Lots.

    Yesterday, Doug hit the jackpot whilst picking up dinner veggies at the wet market on Taiyuan lu and came home with the biggest bag full of red, green and yellow bell peppers ever. It’s not pepper season here. Capsicum related foodstuffs of the fresh sort are thin on the ground right now. Bell peppers are like hens’ teeth. Now the crisper in our fridge is stuffed to the gills with the suckers.

    And my god but they are magnificent! I cut one of each colour open for last night’s fajitas and he could smell them from the living room. The jus (if you can call it that) from the raw red pepper was a lovely deep red that stained the counter top. These were crazy fresh.

    Peppers! Oh, and onion. But look, peppers!

    I haven’t figured out yet what I’ll do with the other half dozen still in the fridge. I’m sure I’ll think of something. Roasted, perhaps? Try my hand at a Turkish biber salcasi? It’s all very exciting. (more…)

    Category Improbable Things, Spicy Things, Uncategorized | Tags: ,,,,,, | 9 Comments

  9. The Infamous Hangzhou Hotel Apple Crisp

    April 10, 2012 by MaryAnne

    A fine collection of hotel apples

    Things are afoot. Now that spring has suddenly sprung here in Shanghai, many of the winter worries that had been taxing my brain are starting to resolve themselves. I won’t go into them in great detail here- that’s what my other blog is for- but I wanted to note them because they represent a huge load off my mind.

    Living where we do makes some things a lot more complicated. Take my under-employment, for example. One of the reasons why I started this blog was because I suddenly had a lot more free time when my original job kind of…um, changed last June. Luckily, my company kept me legally employed under my original contract. I still work, but less than before and with more flexible hours. You may not realize how amazing and rare this is.

    To live here, you need to be legal here; to be legal here, you need a full time job that is able to sponsor you (or a Chinese spouse); to have a full time job frequently means working your ass off for a middling salary at a place that leaves you feeling miserable… just so you can legally be where you live. Taking a break is complicated; going part time or freelancing are nearly impossible; changing careers entirely is not even an option, as you need to prove you have at least 2 years’ experience to be sponsored. I was given the gift of one year’s worth of flexibility. That year is just about up.

    As well, to live here generally means renting- unless you’re married to a local, which makes buying more feasible if you can actually afford the insane housing prices. The rental market here is not in favour of the renter, nor is it in favour of foreigners. Our lease expires at the end of May and our landlord of two years (who is lovely–a rarity here) was planning to sell the flat over the summer.

    Thus, as you can see, I was facing a mad scramble not only to find a new job to be able to stay here legally beyond summer, but also had to start looking for an affordable flat in a decent neighbourhood that hopefully wasn’t a dozen steps down aesthetically from our current one. Rental prices here have been increasing 20% each year, and our current flat was already at the top of our budget. I was very stressed.

    Last week, two amazing things happened: our landlord changed his mind and said we could have the flat another year, and I was unexpectedly headhunted for a rather promising job for the new school year.  Also, the sun finally came out.

    Spring has sprung, the skyscrapers is riz

    I could finally exhale. (more…)

    Category Baked Things, Sweet Things, Uncategorized | Tags: ,, | 9 Comments

  10. Icebox Haw Cookies Saved for a Rainy/Crappy Day

    March 12, 2012 by MaryAnne

    Bedtime tea and cookies, artfully posed

    I’m not, as Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes once insisted, having the time of my life.  Aside from the absence of Patrick Swayze, things here are a bit topsy turvy.

    We just got word that our landlord will be selling the flat in June so the hunt for our fourth flat in three years must begin soon if we want to find anything decent. I’m not in the mood to move. In fact, the cold greyness of March is insisting that I stay inside and drink tea and eat cupcakes. Alas, I have work to do outside and there are no cupcakes to be found. Hibernation must wait.

    After moping around the flat today, wrapped up in thick sweaters and felted watermelon slippers, swearing at the spinning rainbow wheel of death on my laptop (the Great Firewall has kicked it up a notch and the internet was practically non existant, with no proxy ports connecting), I decided I needed comforting.

    However, I didn’t want to make a whole cake or a big batch of anything because I’d just have to eat it all. That wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted…just one or two. Of whatever. But you can’t bake a batch of, say, three cookies. It just doesn’t work.

    Unless, of course, you regress to childhood and remember the sort of cookies that grandmothers baked. You know, the kind that the freaking Pillsbury Doughboy co-opted and corporatized. Icebox cookies. Freezer cookies. The thaw-n-slice cookies.

    You make a batch, divide it into dough logs, wrap them up individually and freeze them for later. When you need a micro batch of cookies, you just take out a log, let it thaw 15 minutes or so, slice them and bake them. Easy peasy. (more…)

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    Category Baked Things, Sweet Things, Uncategorized | Tags: ,,,, | 12 Comments

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