Oats so good for you

In search of a half-healthy yet tasty oatmeal cookie recipe. This particular attempt was a result of a modified epicurious recipe for oatmeal cookie sandwiches with nectarine ice cream¹. I made one minor but critical change: the addition of lots of orange zest as well as a teaspoon of orange oil. And to (my) half of the mix (next photo), a good handful of dried cranberries were added. I think the cranberry and orange additions made it something more than the plain oatmeal cookie P was craving, but it sustained our interest better for the whole course of the week.

One satisfied customer:

¹ My interest at the time didn't quite extend to nectarine ice cream, but it's definitely one way to modify store-bought plain ice cream. Bereft of our very handy ice cream maker here, our sad attempts to make tea sorbet and coffee ice cream have been somewhat rough and icy. Stirring in roasted fruit may be one way to jazz things up without buying yet another 110V piece of equipment we can't take home.

Mexican1 chocolate and almond cake

Another epicurious recipe: Mexican Chocolate and Almond Cake.

Made modifications to the serving idea since I was taking this to someone else's house for Cinco de Mayo: replaced sauce and cream with a simple chocolate ganache (1/3cup cream boiled and poured over 2/3 to 1 cup of chopped-up chocolate). There wasn't quite enough time to let it all set (2-3h would have been better), but the slightly gooey ganache still worked out ok. The orange slices were difficult to slice through though. Need to find a way to slice the garnishing without totally destroying the cake.

¹ Not claiming that this is a Mexical cake; epicurious named it as such. To be more accurate, the flavours are inspired by spiced mexican hot chocolate.

A week of washoku

Some time ago, we realised that we were somewhat cheating at dinner time. While not limited to spagbog, tikka masala or sausage n chips, our cooking was not exactly exciting. Cue the LA Times Book Festival, where Kinokuniya had a stand, and where the top book in the stack above reminded me that Japanese food is not that difficult to prepare, given some practice and preparedness as far as ingredients went. Cue the pulling out of the three other books and much scratching of heads over the ingredient lists. Some of the times we cheated and bought prepared simmered dishes and pickles to supplement the meal, bringing up the dish total to the preferred 5. But some other times, we even "pickled" our own, and were pleasantly surprised we didn't muck it all up.

In no particular order, the results: