Potato Broccoli Casserole

This comforting food is best served while still warm. You’ll taste a creamy sauce and a melted cheese. Yumm!

What will you need in your kitchen?

1. Potato –> 1 kg. Washed, steamed, peeled, cut into bite size
2. Broccoli –> cut into bite size, soak in boiling water
3. Cheddar cheese –> grated
4. Gouda cheese –> thinly sliced
5. Milk –> 200 mL
6. Butter –> 1 tbsp
7. Corn starch –> 1 tbsp
8. Salt and pepper to taste

Here’s how to:

1. Preheat oven at medium heat
2. Arrange potato and broccoli in the ramekins
3. Melt butter then add milk and cheddar cheese. Mix well. Don’t forget to add salt and pepper.
4. Dissolve corn starch with 2 tbsp water then pour into the milk mixture.
5. Pour the milk mixture into the ramekins
6. Put one slice of gouda cheese for each ramekin
7. Bake until the milk bubbling
8. Serve while warm

Note:

If you don’t have ramekins, you may just use any casserole dish

Handmade Chicken Meatball Soup

The trick to cook it in the quick manner is by having the supermarket (or traditional market) minced chicken meat. Because if you don’t have it in hand, you’ll need to mince it yourself. It is easy if you have food processor or mincer but if no then you’ll have a good muscle exercise.

So what we should have in the kitchen are:

1. Minced chicken meat –> 100 gr can make around 12 balls
2. Carrots
3. Potatoes
4. Fried onion
5. Garlic –> 2 or 3 cloves is sufficient
6. Spring onion
7. 1/4 large yellow/white onion
8. Salt & pepper

And then the cooking steps:

1. While boiling carrots in the pan, prepare the garlic+onion+spring onion (all coarsely chopped) and the potatoes
2. Take 1 tbsp of chopped spring onion then mix well with the chicken meat. Add a pinch of salt and pepper.
3. Create balls from the meat by using one hand. It’ll be a bit messy, so maybe you wanna use the disposable gloves.
4. Put the chopped ingredients (garlic, et al.) and fried onion after the water is boiled. Then you can also boil the balls now. Don’t forget to add salt and pepper.
5. Last, after all the chicken balls turns white and floating, let the potatoes join. Cook until all the veggies well done. You can adjust the salt n pepper to your taste. Garnish with fried onion.

Tips:

• Hygiene is first. Never forget to wash your hands with soap after handling raw meat.
• You may want to cut the carrots with round cutting, to make it cooked faster.

Soto Ayam

Soto ayam, or clear yellow chicken soup is a well known dish from Indonesia. It’s becoming more convenient now since there’s a lot options of ready-to-use pasta for it, just like I use this time.

Things to prepare:

1. Chicken (you can cut into parts, or have it bite sized)
2. Soto ayam ready-to-use paste (because I want the quick way)
3. Lemon grass (one would be enough)
4. Kaffir lime leaves
5. Indonesian bay leaf (or any other types of bay leaf)
6. Chinese celery
7. Salt
8. Ground white pepper

Optional items:

1. Hard boiled egg
2. Mung bean vermicelli a.k.a sohun or you can also use bee-hoon (soak in hot water)
3. Fried potato wedges
4. Lime

Japanese Curry Rice

This dish is featured as one of the posts on kimoechan. As mentioned there, we won’t use any curry block here. Instead, we’ll prepare the curry using our own (or let’s say my version) curry paste. We’ll call the paste as the roux, which is actually a mixture of butter and flour. I got the inspiration to prepare the roux from this site.

So, are you ready to make your own curry rice? Here’s the list of things you’ll need to prepare:

For the roux

1. Butter (I won’t suggest to use margarine. However, if you have your own preference, it’s all up to you).
2. Wheat flour
3. Salt
4. Curry powder
5. Grounded white pepper

For the soup

1. Cooking oil
2. Onion (yellow or white) –> prepare 2 types of cutting: fine slice and wedge cut
3. Carrots –> cut into rolling cut
4. Chicken (or beef, or none if you like the vegetarian style) –> bite sized cut
5. Water
6. Potatoes –> bite sized cup
7. Salt

For the rice

I bet you know how to prepare white rice 😉

Then how to mix all the ingredients?

1. First thing you need to prepare is the soup. This will save much time because you need to cook the veggies until they’re well cooked.
2. Heat the oil in the pan then simmer the finely sliced (or chopped) onion and let the colour turns brown. Here, it’s called as caramelised the onion.
3. Put the carrots in the pan. Add water, and cook while preparing the chicken.
4. Add the chicken and a pinch of salt. Add the potatoes and the rest of onion.
5. While waiting the veggies to be well cooked, let’s prepare the roux in other pan. Melt butter, mix well with flour, pepper, and salt until the mixture turns brown.
6. Add curry powder to the mixture, mix well.
7. After the veggies done, add the roux to the soup and stir slowly (don’t mash the potatoes). Adjust the curry taste level, salt, and the thickness (adding more flour) of the soup accordingly.
8. Serve with rice.

Tips:

• Prepare the vegetables first then chicken is the last. In this way, you won’t contaminate the veggies with soap residue. Hygiene is first. Never forget to wash your hands with soap after handling raw meat.
• Placing the lid cover while stewing the vegetables will fasten the cooking time.
• Adding grated apple or pear to the mixture is a common thing in cooking Japanese curry to add some sweet taste, but I just don’t use it here. You can add it if you want. I add sweet soy sauce if I want extra sweetness.