No-Frills Recipes ... cooking, baking & excerpts on travel

The orange flavour of these muffins comes from the zest in the batter and the brushing of fresh orange juice once they exit from the oven.  They are moist and crunchy, best eaten on the day they're made.  Good for breakfast, tea or as a snack anytime of the day!

M y three musketeers bought me a 'Baking' book by Carla Bardi for Mother's Day which will come in handy when I need some inspiration thinking of what to bake or cook.  I was lazing around flipping through the pages and I sat up when I spotted this interesting recipe.  It is a cookie recipe that has smashed bananas as one of the ingredients.  Bananas in a cookie?  Other than cakes, I've never tried making cookies with bananas and I was very eager to try.  So, here it is .........

My mum was very good at cooking this porky dish and it was one of my dad's favourite.  Whenever she cooked this dish she must add in more rice in the rice pot as my siblings would always  have second helpings of rice.  Reason being that this gravy certainly goes down well with plain white rice.

A ctually, this is supposed to be Matcha Green tea bun with red bean filling but since the green tea colour is not so distinct, I opt to name this as 'Red Bean Bun'.  On the bright side, although the colour is pale and hardly noticeable there's a tinge of green tea flavour and aroma.  I couldn't add in more than the 2 tsp of green tea powder as that was all I had left.  Nevertheless, these buns remained soft even after two days.

B elimbing  ~   Averrhoa Bilimbi   is a greenish, mini fruit which has a very sour taste and can be eaten raw with some sambal belacan, a shrimp paste chilli dip, used in curries or cooked like how I did.  I remember this tree in my grandma's backyard long, long ago and she used to cook this with some onions, preserved bean paste, some red or green chillies and bits of fried pork fat aka as 'chee yau char' in Cantonese.  As a kid, I used to pluck this from the ever flourishing tree and just taste it and gosh, it's awfully sour!  Read more of this  Belimbing from Wiki ......

I was wondering how best to make use of some hazelnut meal languishing in my fridge when I stumbled upon this recipe.  This recipe is rather easy to put together with a few simple ingredients that are easily available.  The texture is moist, almost similar to pound cake with a tinge of  nutty flavour, light and yum!

These spare ribs are not barbecued but just cooked in a wok, then grilled slightly to attain some singed edges which I'm sure that many of you would like to sink their teeth in.  These are succulent tasty ribs, lip-smackingly good!