Chocolate mousse.

There are many different ways to prepare a chocolate mousse. It is a simple dish with a lot of variety. The word mousse means "foam" or "froth." the origins are mostly unclear, yet we know that it was created sometime in the 17th century after the Spanish introduced chocolate to the french.

We will need:

Chocolate (While I used dark chocolate, you can use milk or white chocolate, make sure the chocolate is good for melting.)
Whipping cream
Powdered sugar
Nutmeg
Peppermint extract
Vanilla Extract
(optional) Baileys Irish cream/Kahlua
 1 egg.

This is a dish which I prepare in 3 separate stages, The first stage is the whipped cream, which can be done while the chocolate melts or refrigerated; The second stage is the chocolate, while the third stage is the combination of the two.

The whipped cream.

The best way I've found to whip  cream involves constantly chilling the mixture. Most recipes will advocate chilling your bowl and instruments. A nice way to make this step easier is to use 2 bowls, a larger bowl filled with ice water on the outside will constantly chill your cream.

The first step is to add the heavy whipping cream and egg to the bowl. Begin whipping the combination together.

Once the whipping cream starts to hold its shape on the whisk, while still bending as it is soft, you have a stage 1 whipped cream. 

This means it is time to add the powdered sugar, which helps it retain its shape. You are actually removing the protective membranes around the fat, allowing it to harden together over the air bubbles.

After a bit more time and whipping, we will start to see harder peaks as the whipped creams takes shape as a stage 2 whipped cream.

Here is where I add a little bit of flavor before it is done, with a hint of vanilla extract, peppermint extract and a little Baileys Irish Cream.

Whip a bit more to mix the ingredients in before refrigerating  the cream.

The chocolate.

 To ensure the chocolate melts evenly, I like to start the water to boil before I add the smaller steam pot.

Once this starts to boil, we add the smaller pot.

Steaming the chocolate helps it melt slowly and evenly, which is very important as melting the chocolate directly can make an inconsistent, partially burnt chocolate. We want a nice smooth melted chocolate to add in to the cream.

Once it was melted I took the smaller pan out and moved it closer to the whipping cream, so that I could easily add it to the cream. The important thing is to add it slowly while you whip, to preserve the temperature and consistency.

I add a little bit at a time, whip and repeat until it has the taste and consistency I prefer.

Stop adding chocolate when it tastes perfect to you, there's no point in overloading it with chocolate, because there's some left in the pan.

Baked Tilapia on a Carrot Purée.

Preparing this dish was an interesting experience, as it was so far out of my comfort zone, but I had good guidance, it was fairly simple and once I was done, it was the best thing I'd eaten.

I used tilapia, which is a very old dish, first cooked in ancient egypt. Tilapia is a milder fish which gives more accent to the sauce or preparation. Make sure you thaw your fish.

I decided to use a mixture of lemon, butter, salt, pepper, cilantro and tomato as the sauce. I wanted to make a lighter purée, so that it accented and did not overpower the fish.

The carrots need to boil so we want to start that before preparing our sauce. Do not chop the carrots, cook them whole. You lose a lot of nutritional value if you chop them, you also get a lot of water in the carrots, which leads to a runny purée. Boil some water with a little bit of salt.

We need to cut off the tips of the carrots, before we put them in the boiling water.

While that is cooking we want to dice a tomato for the sauce.

We need to try to cut it as fine as possible.

We add some butter, salt and pepper.

Now we mix in some lemon juice.

We should finely chop some parsley.

We will need to mix all these ingredients.

We need to heat the pan to the desired temperature before we add some butter or olive oil.

We need to cover one side with the sauce, making sure we get the butter on the fish.

We will place this side face down.

Now we want to cover the fish in the sauce.

We want the fish to cook for 6-8 minutes on each side. It should be completely white when it is done, but be careful! it becomes very delicate when cooked and might break.

You might add a little butter if you feel as though there isn't enough of it in the sauce.

For the Purée.

We want to add the food to purée hot, straight from the boiling pan , as it purées better and faster.

Then we will want to finely chop some raisins to add to the purée, add a little nutmeg.

We will use a spatula to scrape the bits off of the walls at various intervals, to ensure an even purée.

Once the purée of carrot, raisin and nutmeg is done, place the purée on the plate.

Place the cooked fish on top.

Beautiful.

Afterthoughts:

This was much simpler than it sounded when I started it, and was very easy to make, especially considering it was honestly better than anything I can remember eating.

I can't wait to try this again with other purées, fish and sauces. The flavors blended better than any I've experienced, many thanks to the chef who recommended this to me.

Steamed Dumplings.

Steamed Dumplings (zhengjiao) are very popular, yet not often made at home. A food from ancient times, the Asian jiaozi variety are often eaten as a breakfast celebration of new years. I've made it often before and decided to revisit the dish, while trying a few new things.

For this recipe we will need:

Packaged wonton wrappers

Filling:

1 Pound ground pork

3 Green onions

1 Egg

3 Garlic cloves

3 Tablespoons of soy sauce

2 Tablespoons of sesame oil

3 Cups of Napa cabbage

4 Mushrooms

1/2 Teaspoon salt

1/2 Teaspoon of pepper

2 Teaspoons of sugar

1.5 Tablespoon ginger

Sauce:

4 Tablespoons soy

2 Tablespoons sesame oil

2 Tablespoons white wine vinegar

1 Teaspoon sugar

1/4 Teaspoon salt

1/4 Teaspoon pepper

1 Tablespoon honey

2 Green onions

1 or 2 Cloves garlic

1/6 Teaspoon chili powder

Slurry:

Corn starch

Water

One of the new things I tried was to salt the cabbage leaves and dry them for 30 minutes prior to making the filling, it seemed to make them easier to work with.

The next step is to lightly fry the mushrooms, garlic and onions for the filling in the pan, to take some of the raw bite out of them.

Now we want to add the egg and the pork to a bowl.

Lets add the 1/2 teaspoon of salt, 1/2 teaspoon pepper, 3 tablespoons of soy sauce and 2 teaspoons of sugar, I heard that its best to mix the filling with chopsticks, it seems to be true.

We should add and mix in the tablespoon and a half of  ginger.

Mix in the 2 tablespoons of sesame oil

Once the vegetables look slightly bruised and a little tan we should start to dice and add them.

The smaller the better, obviously we don't want to try and make dumplings with large chunks of garlic and onion floating about.

Give that a nice even mix.

Once our cabbage is ready we will shred it finely.

Add 3 cups of this to the filling mix.

Our filling mix is ready!

Now its time to begin making the dumplings!

We will need to seal the dumplings, and for that we will need to create a slurry out of corn starch and water.

Now we will add some corn starch to a bowl then mix in an equal amount of water, mix with a fork, which behaves like a miniature whisk and gives a better consistency faster.

The steps we will be repeating are as follows:

Place a wrapper on a plate and wet 2 adjacent edges with the slurry

Add a bit of the filling to the middle.

Fold it in half and seal.

We can create a large amount of dumplings with this recipe, we also have the option to make some dumplings now, and save the meat filing, wrappers and slurry for use later.

We will need to add as much water to a pan as we can, without touching the bottom of the steamer. It is better to begin boiling and steaming the water before we add anything else.

If you put the dumplings in as it is, the dough will expand into the holes and tear when you remove them, to avoid this we will be placing some of our cabbage leaves down as a shield.

This will allow us to remove our dumplings once they are done.

We will let the dumplings steam for 15-20 minutes.

Its possible to remove them by sliding the leaves off of the steamer. Remember to use fresh leaves with each batch! the leaves tend to degrade as the dumplings cook.

The sauce:

Hoisin sauce

We can use the same trick to mellow the 2 green onion and 1.5 cloves of garlic as we did for the filling.

we will  begin by adding 4 tablespoons of soy sauce to a bowl, mincing and adding the garlic.

Chop and add the green onion, by slicing horizontally, we can get beautiful rings.

we will add and mix the rings, then we will add 2 tablespoons of sesame oil, and 2 tablespoons of white wine vinegar, 1 tablespoon of honey, 1/6 teaspoon chili powder, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon of pepper and 1 teaspoon of sugar. Once we mix these ingredients together, we will have our hoisin sauce

The end product comes out rather well!

The water from steaming can be drunk to dispel some of the ill feelings you might gain from overeating.

Afterthoughts:

The recipe makes a lot of filling, but it is all right because its easy to store and will be really easy to make later, maybe I can experiment with other methods of cooking such as pan frying them.

The actual final result was delicious! Drying the cabbage worked really well, frying the ingredients a little before adding them also seemed to help, and the big change I loved was the cabbage leaves keeping the dumplings from tearing and sticking to the holes in the steamer, as usually happens.