Goodbye Philippines!

Jerome-- We had a few more days in the Philippines after our expedition with Tao. We spent most of our time in El Nido relaxing, kayaking, and meeting up with friends from the boat.

Sunset view from our hotel in El Nido

Dinner on the beach with friends from Tao: Mikael, Johanna, Jennie and James.

Kayaking to an island near El Nido

We took a 5:30 AM  bus from El Nido to Sebang.  Sebang is home to the Underground River, a UNESCO world heritage site.  It was pretty interesting, but I was a bit disappointed at how regimented the tour was... Boats continuously bring groups of 10 guests at a time for a 30 minute / 1.5 km tour of the cave. The guides have named some of the rock formations based on faint resemblances ("this one looks like corn, that one looks like a cucumber...").  Overall it just seemed like a very long way to go for such a short visit.  I did enjoy the monkeys and monitor lizards that hang around outside the cave though!  One monkey snatched someone's iphone and brought it up a tree!  After snapping a picture with it, it dropped the phone, and I believe someone caught it.

Entrance to the underground river

Bats nesting on the roof of the cave

Monkey munching on a flower.

Monitor lizard and monkies hanging out by a puddle

Monitor lizard

Monkey with the phone can be seen in the center oh this photo.

And that was it for the Philippines!  We boarded a plane the next day from Puerto Princesa to Kota Kinabalu, on the eastern Malaysian side of Borneo!

Our tiny plane to Kota Kinabalu

Overall, we really enjoyed our time in the Philippines.  Everyone seemed very happy and we never felt like anyone ever tried to take advantage of us because we were tourists.  Getting around was easy and most people spoke at least a little English.  Even with a full month in the Philippines I feel like we only scratched the surface of what the Philippines has to offer.  We'd love to return some day... And with direct flights from San Fransisco to Manila, hopefully it'll be sooner rather than later!

Chocolate Mousse!

A few weeks ago our good friends Ann and Eugene came to visit us. We decided it was a good occasion for a feast, and decided to make Beef Wellington as it had been a while! However since we've posted making it twice already. We decided to also try Chocolate Mousse and talk about that instead!


Here we are about to enjoy our Beef Wellington! After that we were having too much fun, and so I forgot to take any more pictures unfortunately...

For the Mousse we based it off of an Alton Brown Recipe.

You start with some chocolate chips (12oz)

Then you add 3oz of Espresso

Then you add a splash of rum!

Then make a double boiler and melt it together along with 4 tbsp of butter

Stop  as soon as it's all melty, and let it cool down.

Meanwhile, you need to add 1/4 cup of whipping cream to a teaspoon of gelatin and let it sit for 10 minutes. Kind of like proofing yeast. Once the chocolate mixture is cool, stir these together.

Then whip up 1.5 cups of whipping cream until it has peaks. 

Then fold it into the chocolate mixture carefully so it stays light and fluffy. 

We thought it'd be fun to make in individual cups and had these neat ones we got in Italy on our honeymoon that were just the right size for a serving. 

We topped them off with blackberries and we all enjoyed it thoroughly.

The one thing we'd change next time is to put less coffee in it. We weren't sure if we'd over done it, or if it was supposed to be like that, but it was definitely more chocolate coffee mousse than chocolate. But otherwise, the texture was really nice, and it set well and everything. It was quite easy and quick, and I'm definitely interesting it making it again!  It was a nice end to our tasty dinner and our evening of fun and friends!! 

Baguette #1, Beef Box #2, Fish Box #3 - Triple Threat!

Last Sunday we had a very busy day of cooking. It all started with our third fish box. Fillets of Chilipepper Rock cod - which after much searching turns out is also know as Red Snapper. Much easier to find recipes for this! Jerome found a recipe for Veracruz style. We wanted to have bread to go with it, so I volunteered to make baguettes. Since we were already cooking up a storm and had our latest beef box on hand, we decided to make a big pot of chili to eat during the week. Get ready for a busy blog post!

  

To begin with I measured out the baguette ingredients - Flour, Salt and Yeast - on our handy dandy scale - accurate to 3 decimal places! You can find the recipe here, it's nice and easy! 

Made a well, added the water and mixed it all up. Leave it to rise for an hour or so. 

Meanwhile Jerome assembled all his ingredients for his fish sauce. The recipe calls for onion, garlic, bay leaves, parsley, oregano, olives, capers and finally raisins. 

We weren't convinced, but all the reviews said to be sure not to skip the raisins, so we went along with it.

 

Everything gets simmered up ahead of time and set aside so that the raisins will have time to absorb all the flavours. Don't forget to add the capers!

 

Here's the bread before and after the rising.

I kneaded it a bit more and then formed it into two loaves. Turns out I didn't make them long and skinny enough so next time I think I'll make 4 smaller ones. 

 

Our veggies were bathed in sunlight drying while all the rest of this was going on! 

Here they are after being chopped up and turned into the base for our chili!

Jerome put both the ground meat and the steak from our meat box into it, as well as some of the chorizo he made in his sausage class. In addition there were a variety of beans and chili powders of all sorts that we found at the mexican grocery store next door. 

Here you can see my not very baguettishly shaped baguettes. 

They got popped into the oven regardles!!

You can see a pan of water underneath the baking sheet. 

Apparently this helps your crust get nice and brown and crunchy. 

While the bread was baking we prepared the fish. The red snapper was quite read and very different than our sablefish. This time there was no skin, but still some bones. We received this shipment while I was away and so had frozen it. As a result it was one big frozen lump so we decided to cook it all and have guests!

You put a bit of the Veracruz mixture below so the fish won't stick to the pan and then lay the fish on top and then cover with the remaining sauce. Then you throw it in the oven from which you've just removed your bread and cook it about 15 minutes - or until it flakes (we cooked it just slightly too long I think).

The bread turned out very nicely despite it's odd shape. 

We pan fried some squash with olive oil and chili flakes as another vegetable. 

The final product doesn't look alot different than when it went into the oven, 

but was definetly hotter I promise. 

The bread was a really nice mix between crunchy crust and soft inside, perfect to sop up the sauce!

Jerome serving the fish to our happy guests Mike and Gloria - who were a bit confused when we didn't serve them the giant pot of chili on the stove! But in the end seemed quite content with the fish and bread.

You're supposed to garnish your fish with pickled jalepenos. They added a nice touch to it. So don't skip them. And as for those mysterious raisins, they did end up being pretty good, they got all full of the sauce and nice and juicy and plump. Overall very good, but the downside was that with the tasty but strong sauce, you didn't get as much of the flavour of the fish. But definetly a great recipe to try. 

And we didn't forget about the chili, it happily simmered away all afternoon and turned out deliciously! I had a wonderfully tasty, hearty lunch every day this week!

Waffle Night

Not long ago, we had the chance to enjoy our friends' amazing waffles for dinner! I thought I'd share some of the techniques we came up with for making the already awesome waffles even tastier with our topping creations. 

Let the waffle fun begin! Toppings included fresh raspberries, strawberries, olalliberries, boysenberries, whipping cream, pure Canadian maple syrup and Jerome's maple breakfast sausages. The berries were the perfect size for inserting into each waffle square! The drink of choice was canadian whiskey and pepsi. 

Jerome went with filling each square with syrup.

Jodie went with piles of berries and whipped cream. 

And Jesse created the ultimate waffle sandwich, filling each square with a berry, then whipped cream, then another waffle, more berries, more whipped cream. A sausage toothpick to hold it all together and a strawberry on top! All covered with syrup of course!!