Home prepared herbal olive oil

There are few condiments and sauces that I cannot ever allow to run out at my home.
Asian line-ups are as you can imagine, but not limited to.
This is what I have to have all year around, one thing that I can't allow to run out.
A lot of shops sale herbal olive oil with the different spiced version, but in my opinion, homemade one is the best. You know what's in it, which kind of olive oil is in, and you can keep making it.
And the biggest difference, it is as fresh as you make!
I use the rosemary from my garden in summer, the taste of pleasure from my own home.

I lined up the ingredients in my favourite balance, but it's totally up to you what to include and how much in the bottle. Try to choose "hard" things (e.g. dried chili, condiments, nuts etc.) and better to avoid the ingredients easy to spoil (e.g. meat, fish, leaf salad etc) unless you meant to use up in once.

Ingredients:
1 stem rosemary
2 small bay leaves
1 small garlic clove
4-5 black pepper corn
1 garlic - pealed
about 10 fennel seeds

Method:
Just bottle it. You can feel the herbal flavour from the right next day.
Basically you don't need to replace the all things in the bottle every time, because the olive oil preserves the ingredients in the bottle quite well.
Point is, keep adding more oil to the bottle whenever you use more than the line of ingredients in the bottle and keep all things under the oil.
Rosemary leaves will come off from the stem but it will not going to get spoiled.
Yet, I do change them about once per about 5 times full refill usage.

This is just when I bottled it. Both the rosemary and olive oil are shinny green.

Then this is the next day, you can see that the rosemary green already started to melt into the olive oil and the oil has fresh rosemary aroma.

By the time, the taste will change to more mature and stronger flavour, and that's the another fun.
I use them for pizza dough, salad dressings, meat-sauces, pastas and more.
My latest best favourite way is, dipping a piece of freshly baked foccacio or crunchy baguette in the dish of this oil from the first 2-3 days with freshly clacked black pepper, sea salt and grated parmigiano cheese. This cannot be starter, because you can't stop eating it :-)

Asparagus cream

This wonderful recipe was from +Loretta Sebastiani, it was a great hit in my family. She has introduced this in foodies+ as a part of Seasonal flavors on canapé top or seafood tartine unfortunately it's not easy to find fresh seafood to serve it together, so I served this simply as a cream with all other Mediterranean style vegetables.
This picture was from my son's birthday, my first trial, that I used LactoFree cheese instead of ricotta for my mother in law's diet. Still the freshly prepared cream was so nice on the crunch toasted slice of budget.

Her recipe page is here.

Tonight dinner was Tonkatsu & Arancini from Foodies+

I do make tonkatsu at least once a month, now Michael F had post Tonkatsu sauce on Foodies+ sounding great. I thought I have to try this.

His post link is here for my reminder: http://doyouevencookbro.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/tonkatsu.html#more
I have to be honest, the sauce was different from what we usually use for Tonkatsu, much sweeter in the taste, but it was really matching to Tonkatsu taste.
This is definitely going to be in my recipe archive.

Then Lisa has posted a very nice Arancini, excellent way to reuse remained rice and what I usually waste from Tonkatsu cooking (breadcrumbs and beaten eggs). Thanks to her, I had nothing remained after cooking :-)
Her post link is here for my reminder:
http://www.italiankiwi.com/arancini/
We were staffed with all those nice foods in once.

Tiramisu

I made this last week, following the recipe from this web page - indulgent one, using my friend's home produced eggs. Very nice recipe, perfectly fit to what I wanted to eat.

Unforgettable perfect slice.

Home made Pizza dough - thin & crisp

We had long painful days of kneading dough for pizza by hands. To my husband, the pain is not because of the hard work of kneading but because the outcome was so different depends on how he kneads and keeps the dough. When we choose this Bread Maker, this was definitely a solid motivate, to make consistent dough for our Pizza night. One small unseen problem was there; the Bread maker cannot make dough for more than 2 pizzas in once. Well, not difficult to resolve it, we just had to repeat the menu as many times, and keep the dough in same condition until start baking them when the last dough is ready.
Now the dough from BM is much smoother than the hand made one (due to our skill may be), it can rollout to really thin and crisp!

Ingredients (for 2 thin & crisp pizza bases)
A:
  1/2 tsp salt
  300g strong flour
  1 tbsp olive oil
  Grounded black pepper

B:
  170ml lukewarm water
  1/2tsp yeast
  1tsp sugar

 Method
1. Scale and put all ingredients under A: in bread pan in above list order.
2. Scale 170ml lukewarm water then pour the yeast and sugar, mix them well then pour it in to the bread pan.
3. Plug in the Bread Maker, place the bread pan in the BM, then select Pizza dough menu (Menu 22 for Panasonic SD-2501) and press Start button. Wait until the dough to be ready.

<To make pizza base>
1. Before dough become ready, scatter extra a hand full of strong flour on clean flat surface. You may need at least 40cm x 40cm clear surface for making dough.
2. Once the dough is ready (BM makes beeps), press the stop button, take the bread pan out from the BM, then take the dough out on to the floured table surface. Punch down the dough, cut it in to 2 pieces, and make them in balls then place one at aside.
3. Rollout one piece of dough in to roughly 25cm circle. Place it over the Pizza pan and cut off excesses using a knife. Now ready for toppings.

<To make more than 2 pizzas for one dinner>
1. Grease a baking tray or large plate with small amount of olive oil.
2. When the first dough is done, punch the dough in the bread pan, take the dough on to the greased tray then cut it in to 2 halves.  
3. Take a bit of olive oil on your hands from the grease then make each half dough in a smooth ball, place them on the plate then cover it with a clean tea towel. (Keep enough space for dough to grow)
4. Keep them in cool place. Repeat the same above method and keep add more on the tray in same way.
5. The dough made earlier get more fermented than the last ones and will be slightly loose to handle. You may want to kneed it after punching the dough for a bit before rolling it out.