Baking Semolina Cake

I bought a packet of semolina last month as one of the recipes, fried calamari, called for it. Then I used a table spoon or two only. The left over (almost the whole packet) was just sited in my kitchen cabinet for almost a month.

Last a few days ago, I was flipping through my Burmese-English dictionary and happened to know that semolina is called Shwe Kyi (in Burmese), which I already known since young. I don't know how semolina looks like in raw, as I saw before was only in finished product, cake only.

In Burma, we use Shwe Kyi (Semolina) to make cake and it is served as dessert. Since I have the whole packet of semolina, I am going to make use of it. Yes I am going to bake semolina cake (Burmese style) with the help of my little Burmese cookbook.

Here is the recipe

1. semolina -2 cups
2. butter - 120grams
3. fine sugar - 2 cups
4. coconut milk (not cream)- 5 cups
5. dry raisin- 1/2 cup
6. poppy seed -2 Tbs

• In a frying pan, heat the semolina till lightly brown color

• Mix heated semolina and sugar in a bowl. Set aside.
• Heat the frying pan, melt the butter. Add semolina sugar mixture. Stir it well.
• Add in 5 cups of coconut milk and 1/2 cup of raisin. Stir continuously until a very thick batter is formed.
• Heat the oven to 180 degree C. Grease 8"x8" square pan and place the batter.
• Sprinkle poppy seed over the surface and bake for about 30-40 mins.
• Let it cool completely in the pan and keep it in refrigerator to set - at least for 2 hours.

Cut it according to your preference size and serve. It is very good to go with a cup of coffee or hot green tea.Enjoy!

Steamed Bean Parata

Most of the Burmese foods are influenced by Chinese,Indian and Thai food. We occasionally like to eat Parata, Samosa during breakfast as well as tea time. Last night, I decided to make a " Steamed Bean Prarata" as supper for my sister. The name strange? :D Yeah, this type of Parata is quite famous in Burma and we usually eat it for breakfast. The mesh steamed bean (with salt+ little bit of oil) is filled inside the parata and fry it until crispy and golden brown. It is really delicious. I used ready-made frozen parata which I bought from supermarket. For this recipe, I used steamed garden pea (Burmese name- pae pyote). I couldn't find this kind of bean in SG's supermarket so far and I can only manage find it in Burmese shops.

Here is the method

- Mesh 2 Tbs of steamed bean with a pinch of salt and add a little bit of oil while meshing. Set aside

- Heat the frying pan and put 1 Tbs of oil

- Place a piece of parata and fry until lightly brown (It is ready to fill in those meshed bean when the bottom side is started to crispy)

- Remove top layer of parata gently and fill in the meshed bean. Cover it back

- Flip it to the other side and fry until golden brown.

It is now ready to serve.

ဒီတစ္ခါေတာ႔ ပဲပလာတာပါ။ ကၽြန္မ ညီမက စာေမးပဲြ ေၿဖဖုိ႔ အတြက္ၿပင္ဆင္ေနပါတယ္။ စာက်က္ေနရေတာ႔ဗုိက္လည္း ခဏခဏဆာတယ္ထင္ပါရဲ႔။ မေန႔ည ၁၁နာရီေလာက္ၾကီး သူဗုိက္ဆာေတာ႔ ၿမန္တဲ႔ဟာ ဘာလုပ္ေပးရင္ေကာင္းမလဲလို႔စဥ္းစားလုိက္ေတာ႔ ပဲပလာတာလုပ္ေပးဖို႔အၾကံရသြားပါတယ္။ ပဲၿပဳတ္ကလည္းအဆင္သင္႔ ရွိေနေတာ႔အေတာ္ပါပဲ။ (ပဲၿပဳတ္က မၿမရြက္ေ၀ blog ထဲက နည္းနဲ႔ ၿပဳတ္ထားတာပါ) ပလာတာကေတာ႔ ready made ပါ ေၾကာ္ရံုပါပဲ။

ပလာတာကိုေၾကာ္ ေနတံုးက်က္ခါနီးမွာ ပလာတာထဲကိုပဲထည္႔ (ပဲက ဆီနဲ႔ ဆားနဲ႔ နယ္ၿပီး ေခ်ထားၿပီးသား) ဆီနည္းနည္းထပ္ထည္႔ၿပီး က်က္ေအာင္ေၾကာ္ရင္ ရပါၿပီ။ အၿဖစ္ပဲပလာတာ ေပါ႔၊ ဗမာၿပည္ကလုိသိပ္အေကာင္းၾကီးမဟုတ္ရင္ေတာင္ အလြမ္းေၿပ ေပါ႔ေနာ္။

Oatmeal Healthy Biscuits/Cookies

Oatmeal Healthy Biscuits/Cookies
Last week, I was thinking of baking a healthy one as my previous attempts contained lots of butter and sugar. Another reason is my BMI trend. It is climbing up and approaching towards the unhealthy range gradually :-(. As I love baking, it is not possible for me not to bake. So I have to look for healthier recipes ( so called " healthier" ) and I found this recipe ( sorry, I cant recall the recipe source). It is just nice that I still have some leftover oatmeal (my sis bought it quite sometimes ago and she didn't want to eat it anymore after very first time eating it), expiry date is still far though.

Ingredients (1)
- 1 Egg (Beaten)
- 100ml Oil
-1 Tbs vanilla essence
-1/4 Cup of Sugar
-1/8 Cup + 1Tbs of Honey

Ingredients (2 - dry ingredients)
- 1 1/4 cup of flour
- 1/2 cup of Oatmeal
- 1 Cup of mix fruit (dry)

In fact, this is a very simple recipe and it will take you less than 15 mins to prepare. Here is the method. Mix ingredients (1) in a bowl. Put all the dry ingredient into ingredients (1) and mix it well using spatula. Pour the paste into baking pan and bake about 20 mins in 180 degree C preheated oven.

My cookies turn out to be better condition than I expected. Let it cool completely in the pan and cut it into bite sizes. Cookies are now ready. Enjoy!

ဒီမုန္႔လုပ္နည္းကို ဗမာလုိထပ္ေရးလုိက္ပါတယ္။ အေပၚမွာ အဂၤလိပ္လိုေရးရတဲ႔အေၾကာင္းကေတာ႔ တၿခားမုန္႔လုပ္တဲ႔ blogger ေတြနဲ႔ communicate လုပ္လို႔ရေအာင္လို႔ပါ။ ဒါေပမယ္႔ ကၽြန္မ ကိုယ္တိုင္ ကလည္း ဗမာလို ဖတ္ရ၊ေရးရ တာကိုပိုအားရပါတယ္။ ကၽြန္မကလည္းမုန္႔မလုပ္ရရင္မေနႏိုင္တဲ႔သူပါ။ လုပ္တဲ႔မုန္႔တိုင္းလုိလုိ သၾကား၊ေထာပတ္ေတြပါ လုိ႔နည္းနည္းအ၀ သက္သာတဲ႔ဟာကိုရွာၾကည္႔လုိက္ေတာ႔ Oatmeal Biscuits လုပ္နည္းကိုသြားေတြ႔ပါတယ္။ လုပ္ရတာလည္ အင္မတန္မွၿမန္ၿပီး သက္သာပါတယ္။ မုန္႔အေၿခာက္ဆိုေတာ႔ အထားလည္းခံပါတယ္ ( ကၽြန္မတို႔အိမ္မွာေတာ႔ ခၽြင္းခ်က္ေပါ႔ရွင္၊ မုန္႔လုပ္ထားရင္ အလြန္ဆံုးခံလွမွ ၃ ရက္ေပါ႔..အစားအေသာက္မေကာင္းရွာၾကပါ :D)

မုန္႔လုပ္နည္းကေတာ႔ အေပၚမွာေၿပာထားတဲ႔အတိုင္း Ingredient I ကိုသမေအာင္ေမႊပါ။ ၿပီးရင္ Ingredient II ကိုထည္႔ေမႊပါ။ ၿပီးရင္ Baking Pan ထဲကိုထည္႔၊ ခပ္ၿပားၿပားေလၿဖစ္ေအာင္မ်က္ႏွာၿပင္ညိွၿပီး ၁၈၀ ဒီဂရီ အပူေပးထားတဲ႔ Oven ထဲထည္႔ဖုတ္ပါတယ္။ ကၽြန္မကေတာ႔ မ်က္ႏွာၿပင္ညိွၿပီးရင္ ဓါးနဲ႔ နဲနဲအရာေလးေတြေပးထားပါတယ္။ ဒါမွ မုန္႔ဖုတ္ၿပီးရင္ အဆင္သင္႔ခ်ိဳးရံုပဲေလ။ မိနစ္၂၀ေလာက္ ဖုတ္ၿပီးရင္မုန္ရပါၿပီ။ မုန္ဗန္းထဲမွာ အေအးခံၿပီးရင္ အရာေလးေတြအတိုင္းအသင္႔ခ်ိဳးပါ။ စားဖုိ႔အသင္႔ၿဖစ္ပါၿပီ။