the Green Soup

Ingredients:

1 Tbsp of olive oil

2 medium potatoes

2 medium leeks

2 broccoli stalks

1 can of butter beans

2 cups of vegetable stock

a few cubes of hard blue cheese

pinch of tarragon

salt & pepper to taste

Chop up all the vegetables into small chunks. Heat the olive oil on low heat and add the potatoes and broccoli stalks. Cover and allow these to sweat for a while - you will notice the broccoli turns a bright green. Then add the leeks, cover and sweat some more but make sure you keep stirring!

Add the 2 cups of vegetable stock and bring to a boil. Once the potatoes fall off your knife (the one you stabbed into them) then you can reduce the heat and add the salt, pepper and tarragon. Take off the hob and blend all the soup until there are only small chunks showing. Make sure you don't puree it or it looks like bad baby food. Now return all back into the pot and add the butter beans and cheese - stirring on low heat. When the cheese has melted it is ready to eat!

Bon appetit!

the Walnut Maple Roll

I have tried Panash Bakery & Café numerous times as they have an outlet one block from my house – and they are a reliable source for no fuss fresh baguettes and baked goods. My favourite of theirs is the Walnut Maple Roll, which looks very similar to a Cinnamon Roll but far tastier. Yes, I’m sure that sounds very subjective.

I took a stroll through yet another new mall in Tsim Sha Tsui’s iSquare. Not much was opened but that was not the point. The point being it was very uninteresting so I thought I would start my search then, at Panash Bakery & Café. It was a new shop of theirs that opened – the only difference is it seemed much more upper class than their usual outlets. No matter, I had my coffee and realised that they did a HK$55 tea set which is not bad with a 6 range choice of cakes added to a tea or coffee.

But this wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted my Walnut Maple Roll so I decided to order my cappuccino and cross over from the seated café into their bakery and buy my Roll. I discovered a new delight aptly called the Tea Time Cake. I thought why not – it looked different and was only HK$6. I sat down and ready to drink my cappuccino I was told they need to double charge me for my HK$8.50 favourite - my Roll. Not that that would have been a big dent into my budget but the fact they shun you and then charge you for eating their own product in their café confused me. Anyway, the lady who challenged me was rather nice in the fact that I said I didn’t fancy their cakes or tea set and just wanted my Roll instead. So she said, OK but don’t eat it in the open. I sat quietly in my corner, stealing little pieces of my Roll every now and then from its plastic bag and dipping it into my not so great cappuccino.

By the way, the Tea Time Cake was a great new find, it held within its moist sponge, fruit and nuts and just like my Gran’s infamous carrot cake! And then I footed my cappuccino bill – HK$38 plus 10%. Never again.

Panash Bakery & Café

G04 Ocean Terminal, Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong

G/F, 1 Soares Avenue, Ho Man Tin, Kowloon, Hong Kong

1/F, Shop #158-159, 8 Chung Wa Road, East Point City, Tseung Kwan O, Hong Kong

G/F, 250 King's Road, North Point, Hong Kong

G/F, 163 Queen's Road East, Wan Chai, Hong Kong

baking into 2010

After all the baking done during Christmas, I might have thought I could stop for a break…. which I have, with a freshly baked muffin here and there.

My break doesn’t stop me exploring however, the baked goods of others. The next coming months I will be doing research on the best of baked goods here in Hong Kong. From restaurants, café’s, bars to random house treats, I want to know what is out there and what I am competing with. Not that I am selling my baked goods, yet!

So keep coming back to see what home made feeling I can get from spending and eating more and more dollars!