Ube Waffles

I wanted to make stroopwafels, unfortunately I don't have a pizzelle wafer iron but I have a 10-year old Belgian waffle maker and that's good enough for me. I have been reading about stroopwafels in other blogs and magazines for the last year now that I want to try them so badly. Strange thing, I went to visit The Netherlands in February of 1982, never noticed a single shop that sold these, or maybe I didn't know what they were, but I could have seen other people eating or lining up to buy them to get my attention but I did not. Oh, well. One thing I acquired from the Dutch and glad I did is eating French fries with mayonnaise.

Anyway, I made regular waffles using baking powder instead of yeast and replaced ½ cup of the flour with purple yam (ube) powder. I love the milky smell, taste, and texture of ube in just about any bread including puto. The butter-rich dark syrup, actually thick caramel sauce rather than syrup, the recipe I got from a Dutch recipe website, is super yummy but beware of the fat and sugar content. This snack/breakfast treat should be eaten in moderation.:=)

ube waffles with dark buttery syrup, sooo yummy

Ube Waffles
1½ cups all purpose flour
½ cup powdered ube
2 tablespoons sugar
½ teaspoon sea salt
4 teaspoons baking powder
2 cups milk
½ cup melted butter
2 eggs

• Preheat waffle maker. Mix ingredients until smooth. Bake waffles according to manufacturer's instructions. Serve hot topped with warm syrup. Or slice the waffles and spread caramel/syrup on one slice, top with the other half and eat like stroopwafels. Either way it's delicious.

Dark Treacle
1½ cups dark brown sugar
1 cup butter
6 tablespoon dark corn syrup
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon

• Mix syrup ingredients in a small saucepan and heat until sugar is melted and mixture is smooth. Serve warm with the waffles.

I recently read that ready baked wafers are available at Trader Joe's. I guess it's time to go to TJ's.:-)

Peanut Butter Truffles & Grape Jellies

peanut butter truffles with various coating: ground peanut butter, cocoa powder, dark and milk chocolate and peanut butter chips

grape jellies

A few weeks ago I borrowed from the library the gigantic and super heavy THE FRENCH LAUNDRY COOKBOOK by Thomas Keller which has really superb and elegant recipes but some are too complicated for everyday meals. I prefer to cook simple dishes and if I want fancy I'd go to a restaurant. The desserts are very good, though, some are simple to make. I'm still deciding if I'll buy my copy. I got the peanut butter truffles and fruit jellies idea from this cookbook but did not follow the recipes for both the truffles and jellies.

Peanut Butter Truffles
1 cup crunchy or creamy peanut butter
1 cup chopped milk chocolate (chips are fine)
½ cup heavy cream
2 tablespoons butter
suggested coating: ½ cup each semi-sweet chocolate, milk chocolate and peanut butter chips, ¼ cup ground roasted peanuts, ¼ cup cocoa powder

• Melt all ingredients except coating in a small pan over low heat. Pour into a metal square pan. Place in freezer for 30 minutes.
• Using a melon baller, scoop out portions and place pieces on a piece of aluminum foil. Working quickly, shape the candies into marble-size balls. Divide balls into 5 portions. Keep 4 portions in freezer for 1 hour. Roll the remaining balls in ground peanuts. Refrigerate.
• Coat another 1/5 of the balls in cocoa powder, refrigerate. Melt chips one at a time, coat each portion, sprinkle tops with ground peanuts, if desired, then refrigerate. Transfer candies into individual paper cups, if preferred. Refrigerate leftovers.

The recipe for jellies is here.

Salmon Tocino

I never had or heard of dried fish tocino when I was still in the Philippines and learned about it recently in Christine's blog. While looking for Filipino recipes in Gene Gonzalez's The little ulam book, I got so excited when I saw the Bangus Tocino recipe which does not require drying time. The marinated fish is fried in a little oil just like pork or chicken tocino. I have a piece of wild salmon in the fridge and used it in place of the boneless bangus. It is very very good but should have added a little bit more salt to the marinade.

Bangus or Salmon Tocino
2 pieces boneless bangus or salmon
2 tablespoon calamansi or lemon juice
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon sea salt, or to taste
2 tablespoon sugar
2 tablespoon anisado wine (I used Pernod)
¼ teaspoon ground white pepper
¼ teaspoon prague powder (pink salt), optional

• Combine seasoning ingredients. Marinate fish in the mixture for at least one day. Fry and serve with steamed rice and hot pepper-vinegar dipping sauce.

I have a jar of pickled santol which goes very well with the salmon tocino. I will make tocino again with another kind of fish and will dry them in my food dehydrator.

I Heart Chuck!

CHUCK, that's the new NBC show that debuted last night and it was love at first watch. The show is Mission Impossible meets Beauty And the Geek, the difference is the Tom Cruise-like character died, which is good, and the beauty who is actually smart, works as a CIA agent and is adept in using knives to defeat her adversaries of the moment. The whole show is funny, not slapstick, but intelligent funny and action-packed. Read more here. Chuck, the lovable geek and social nerd, works at a BestBuy-like store and drives a tiny geekmobile. He shares a house with his sister and her boyfriend, also his co-worker and best friend is even geekier than he is. The dead guy sent him an email containing government secrets that got embedded in his brains when he opened it which will eventually lead him in coming episodes to work with the agents. My favorite scene: When Chuck and the girl were preparing for their date, in their respective houses of course, she was strapping on her ankle a thin belt full of small knives and wore 2 deadly metal chopsticks as hair accessory which she later used against a group of NSA agents while they were dancing in a club. Chuck did not notice the approaching men in black and that they were falling one by one except for one. But he wised up to the government agents' agenda, prevented an assassination, disabled a bomb, then went back to his job the next day. All in a day's work. Excellent show. I now have something to look forward to every Monday evening.

For the past 2 or 3 years I have been watching only a handful of the regular network's TV shows, Heroes, Medium, and Law & Order SVU are my favorites. There were no sitcoms or dramas worth my time. I occasionally watched Dancing with the (has been)Stars and regularly some of Bravo's reality series like Project Runway and Top Chef and the very funny Showdog Moms & Dads a few years ago. I think I'm the only person on this planet who hasn't seen a single episode much less a single minute of Grey's Anatomy, I got tired of Desperate Housewives pretty quickly, and lost interest in the second season of Lost.

The new TV season looks promising. The Journeyman is okay but has the potential to improve. I'm not sure about Bionic Woman but Ill watch it, Pushing Daisies from ABC is also interesting. Sitcoms are hopeless, though, nothing new that will make me watch. I miss Seinfeld. I'll continue watching America's Next Top Model and Beauty and the Geek, at least they're entertaining.