Thursday, February 3, 2011

Cooking Hack

Happy Chinese New Year All!
This time I have the opportunity to "celebrate" the Chinese New Year in Singapore. A country with most of its population are Chinese.
At first, I thought it is going to be glorious to be here during the CNY because the people here are more enthusiast which makes there's something to be consider. Since most of the people here were celebrating the event, most of the food courts / hawkers or even supermarkets are close.

Some experience to help my parents running the small restaurant when they're still alive, certainly helps me a lot :)
So during this opportunity I would like to share one of the cooking hack :)
Cooking hack is basically finding the substitute ingredients due to some certain reasons... it could be because of the unavailability... or even because you're too stingy to buy it hihihi...

This time as my sample I would like to introduce my family "tomato sauce" recipe. This simple sauce is quite easy to make and useful for some cooking, such as: steak and egg foo young.
The original required ingredients are: bottled tomato sauce, sugar, vinegar, margarine and for additional ingredient: cornstarch.

Here, actually I could find all of the ingredients. However, due to the packaging which are really big, I didn't buy the sugar and vinegar. And I also forgot to buy
margarine and cornstarch :P

So I started to "scavenge" my refrigerator to find something that can be useful for substituting the ingredients that I didn't have.

First, for margarine is a bit easy, I could use one or two tea spoons of olive oil to make the sauce a bit "greasy".

For the sugar and vinegar, however, it's a bit difficult. Actually, lime could be used as alternative to replace the vinegar. But unfortunately it's not available in the refrigerator.
So I start to look at the available canned soft drinks. Ahaa... there's a lime tea... It contains the lime and sugar... however I believe the taste will be weird because of it also contains tea :P
Then I started to look around again, and found a perfect substitute... which is lime soda drink :P It contains lime and sugar... you don't have to worry about the soda... which is actually only carbon dioxide... so when you boil the carbonated drink... the carbon dioxide gas will be evaporate :)

Finally, for the cornstarch... I couldn't find the alternative... But it won't effect the taste of the sauce... just adding extra "sticky" feel to the sauce... so we can skip this one :)

Maybe the substitute ingredients sounds weird... but trust me the taste is not that different... hehehe...

That's all...

Have fun trying to do some cooking hack but do it with your own risk! hahaha...