Wednesday, February 03, 2010

My Oven's Story

When EG and I were planning on our house renovation last year, we have certain expectations on how certain things needed to be done at our new place. For me, I requested for a built-in oven in my kitchen so that I can try with some "funny" recipes, and I got it.

We didn't go for the branded ones (obviously for cost reason) and we chose a local brand called Izoton recommended by our kitchen renovator which has good service and perform equally well with other branded ones.


My oven
After moving in for almost 5 months, I couldn't find a reason or motivation to use the oven. :P... So it has been idling for months until one day, someone asked us to make some roasted potatoes for a pot luck party. So, quickly I took out the oven manual and found out that we need to "clean" the oven before using it.
The smell was bad... it smell like some strong metalic smell and I had to on all the fans in my house and open all the windows for better air ventilation, else I think both EG and I might just be suffocated. :P
Oven cleaning
EG always like to do these stuff. So, to be safe, we started off by trying with a few potatoes first. :P... So, I quartered the potatoes, he put some salt, paprika, olive oil onto the potatoes. We roasted for like 30 minutes maybe? And ta-da, it was not bad. We had it as one of the dishes for lunch. :P

Roasted Potatoes Trial Run :P

So since it's successful, I quartered up the rest of the potatoes. This time, we mixed everything in a bowl with all the ingredients so that they are more evenly coated, and we added black pepper. We poured all of them into the pan and roasted it again.

The real one

The final result was not bad. Though we thought it could be more crispy. After the potoatoes are cooled, they became slightly soggy. But we still received good comments saying they tasted good. Maybe saja-lah friends wanna make us feel better. :P

The end result

After that, I have been trying to use this oven to bake my mum's carrot cakes, baked salmon for our new year dinner, MUFFINS!!! And baking is really fun...! I have been surfing the net for many different recipes and I shall try them with my this lovely oven..! Oh I love my oven now. :)

But before that, I need to stock up my baking tools and baking ingredients... Hopefully my motivation will stay since EG doesn't really fancy cakes / bread / pastry, but he's a huge fan for potatoes. Talking about that, I thought I saw a recipe for home made potato chips too... Hmmm... :P

Monday, February 01, 2010

Muffins Making

I have always wanted to try to make muffins. The steps look easy but I normally only like to try something that's already being tested - to make sure it's not too sweet and to prevent wastage in case it doesn't work. :D

Yvonne came to our place last weekend and showed me how to make her secret recipe for Banana Choc Muffins. Oh it tasted so good and the steps are so easy. :D... So, since it's a long weekend, I decided to try out the normal Vanilla Choc Chips muffins from some other ppl's blog since I'm lazy to go get the ripe bananas.

I just tried 1 recipe that yields 12 muffins - my muffin cups are tall (actually, i don't even know if they are the real muffin cups :P), else it should yield more than 12.


Baking in process



My cute cute muffins


Close up of the muffin with lots of choc chips :P

EG loves it! =) But he didn't know that the muffin cups can be reused and he spoilt one of them...! =.=

Wasted one muffin cup
I'll definitely try this recipe again next time..!