Rosemary

Dh and I had the chance to go on a Night Tour with our Catechist community. We arrived at the Pasir Panjang Wholesale Vegetable Market at about 4 am. I managed to get this lot of rosemary all for $3. Usually I would have to pay $3 for about six to eight sprigs of these rosemary at the supermarket.

I think I can make maybe eight roast chickens with this lot of rosemary I bought from the wholesale market LOL. I gonna keep some of them in the fridge vegetable compartment and freeze the rest.

Chocolate Dates With Almond

J called me one evening and told me that she was going to send some dates from Dubai over for me to try.
So here they are delivered to me in a white package. I am happy dancing now because I've never tried this kind of dates before. It's a date covered with chocolate and it also had an almond embeded in it. The sweetness of the chocolate and the date together is quite overwhelming but the almond nut and the flesh of the date together gives an interesting texture. If they had used bitter chocolate instead of milk chocolate to cover the date .... it would have been perfect.
Thanks J for sharing them with me :-)

Dried Lavender Flowers

This is what dried lavender flowers look like. They smell heavenly fragrant.

Here's the website that tells you quite a bit of information on using these fragrant dried flowers.
http://whatscookingamerica.net/Lavender.htm

Winter Dates

I saw a lady handling a packet of these when I was browsing at the fruit section. I caught her eyes and smiled at her and then asked her if I could just eat these dates by themselves. She replied affirmative and then even shared with me that I need to choose those which had the red skin as they tasted sweeter than the dual colored or green dates. I bought a packet and here is what I have to say about them ......

Texturewise ... they are rather crunchy like the texture of apples but the sweetness was rather mild and not at all like apple sweetness. I tried to find some more information from the web but information was limited to where they can be imported from and that is from China.
Since they are crunchy, they can be used as part of a salad dish and also in muffins and cakes too but I have yet to try using them in a salad or baking them in muffins.

I shared them with my parents and they commented that they ate these winter dates in China some years back and they were plucked fresh from the trees and they tasted very much sweeter than the ones I shared with them. They did say that when these were dried they can be use to boil soups just like the red dates we used.

The Red Dragonfruit

Found out that it is also know as the Makana dragonfruit. More information is given here http://reddragonfruit.com/

My first knowledge of this fruit was when a fellow blogger G used it for making snowskin mooncake and the fruit gave a lovely deep pink color to the snowskin. Also almost everyone who tasted this particular fruit said that it was much sweeter than the Pitaya dragonfruit ...that's the one with the light grey flesh. So during the weekend I bought a packet of two fruits from Cold Storage which cost about $3.

I cut it up into pieces so that dh and I would slowly eat them. On offering the tub of pink dragonfruit pieces to dh, he made a face on seeing the pink bleeding pieces LOL I knew straight away that he would not touch them after eating the piece I offered. So much for my presentation of bleeding pink dargonfruit pieces.



The taste of the red dragonfruit has a bland sweetness to it and there is also a tinge of sour sweetness. It doesn't have a distinctive taste and one may have to eat it often before one can grow accustom to the taste.

I pureed the rest of the fruit pieces and dumped them into the chiffon cake batter. They gave a lovely girlish pink to the batter. The black seeds also gave a bit of a crunch to the cake. However after baking the chiffon cake I would expect to see the lovely pink in the pink but the pink seemed to have disappeared and the result was a yellowish cake tinged with the pink bleeding dragonfruit pieces. Not a very nice effect to look at.

Jelly Candy Alphabets

I find these jelly candy alphabets very useful for making instant greeting words on cakes and cupcakes.

They are good for me cos' I've so little practise piping out words. I happen to chance upon these at the Japan Home shop at Hougang Point and I understand that they are also available at Sheng Shiong. I remember they cost less than $3 a bottle and you may need several bottles to make the necessary greetings for your cakes.

I noticed that these jelly candy tend to "sweat" or turn damp if you leave your cake in the fridge with them. So It's better not to leave the cake in the fridge after you've placed them on the cake.

Some More Dates

Here are some more dates that I bought from the supermarket and had eaten.
The Bio Deglet dates are a little more fibrous than the Medjoul dates and cost about the same.

The Azizi Mozafati dates below are from Iran and they look pretty plum up when I opened the box. The cost of this was almost half of what I paid for the above.
The presentation was better and the dates came with a good kind of sweetness.
There was also a date cookie recipe printed on one side of the box. So I guess this box of dates would be a good choice to make cakes and cookies with. I will definitely be tasting more of this in the coming days.

Dates a plenty

It is the Ramadan season of the year where Muslims here will carry out the practise of fasting for a month till the day they celebrate Hari Raya Puasa.

During this this time of the year the supermarket I usually visit is stocked up with all kinds of dates.

This kind of dried fruit has never been in my diet but I'm game to try them. I have no idea how to cook them but I know a lady from a forum board used them to bake her Korma cake. I guessed that they are just like the dried figs where I can just pop them into my mouth and ruminate them LOL.

So here's my choice ...dates from the Jordan River ... they look pretty plum up. I've tasted them and really liked eating them whole. Looking at the nutritional facts .... the energy value for the whole pack is equivalent to eating 4 slices of bread. In addition it has quite a bit of fibre and is also rich in potassium the chemical which helps to prevent muscular cramps.

I bought another pack of dates this morning from Cold Storage. It's the
Amary dates and this is even more fibrous than theMedjoul dates that I ate earlier.
Thumbs up for the Medjoul dates ... and I'm going to eat this for some weight loss for the coming weeks LOL

Vanilla pods

This was the first time I was using the seeds of Vanilla pods to bake a butter cake. I realised that the seeds were so very tiny that I needed my reading glasses to take a good look at them. They actually look like tiny specks of black dirt/mould and they were smeared all over the pair of scissors that I used to cut the pods. I was worried that the pods turned mouldy in the fridge.
I called Jo and she assured me that the seeds were like that. Gosh it was a relief ... if not... my poor butter cake batter would had gone down the drain. Actually the lovely smell of vanilla filled the kitchen when the cake was baking and definitely the pods didn't smell bad when I thought that they were mouldy....LOL
However this would be the last time I would be baking a butter cake with the seeds cos' Jo said that it would be better to use the seeds for making cream tarts.