Bahan Ganti Untuk Herba dan Rempah Ratus

Courtersy of : ifood.tv



Kadang-kadang masa kita masak atau mencuba recipe baru, kita kekurangan setengah dari rempah ratus dan bahan perasa. Susah kan.... Bila dah masak, rasa macam kekurangan sesuatu... tapi kalau tanya pendapat para pengkritik di rumah ni, dengan muka selamba mereka akan cakap "kurang sedap lah Umi" Adusssshhh....... 

Di sini saya lampirkan jadual bahan-bahan ganti yang saya salin dari about.com home cooking. Macam-macam ada di sini.....


Tapi kena ingat, rasa makanan tidak akan exactly sama dengan the original intended recipe. Jadi, dinasihatkan untuk memulakan substitution dengan setengah dari jumlah yang di kehendaki di dalam recipe, kemudian, pandai-pandai adjust mengikut citarasa masing-masing. Siapa tahu, mungkin rasaa masakan menjadi lebih enak....



So, kalau tak cukup herba dan rempah ratus kat dapur tu tak adalah alasan tak nak masak kan......

Rempah            Bahan Ganti
Allspice               Cinnamon; cassia; dash of nutmeg or mace; or dash of cloves
Aniseed               Fennel seed or a few drops anise extract
Cardamom          Ginger
Chili Powder       Dash bottled hot pepper sauce plus a combination of oregano and cumin
Cinnamon            Nutmeg or allspice (use only 1/4 of the amount)
Cloves                Allspice; cinnamon; or nutmeg
Cumin                 Chili powder
Ginger                 Allspice; cinnamon; mace; or nutmeg
Mace                  Allspice; cinnamon; ginger; or nutmeg
Nutmeg               Cinnamon; ginger; or mace
Saffron                Dash turmeric (for color)


Herba                      Bahan Ganti
Basil                         Oregano or thyme
Chervil                      Tarragon or parsley
Chive                        Green onion; onion; or leek
Cilantro                     Parsley
Italian Seasoning        Blend of any of these: basil, oregano, rosemary, and ground red pepper
Marjoram                  Basil; thyme; or savory
Mint                          Basil; marjoram; or rosemary
Oregano                   Thyme or basil
Parsley                      Chervil or cilantro
Poultry Seasoning    Sage plus a blend of any of these: thyme, marjoram, savory, black pepper, and rosemary
Red Pepper               Dash bottled hot pepper sauce or black pepper
Rosemary                 Thyme; tarragon; or savory
Sage                         Poultry seasoning; savory; marjoram; or rosemary
Savory                     Thyme; marjoram; or sage
Tarragon                  Chervil; dash fennel seed; or dash aniseed
Thyme                      Basil; marjoram; oregano; or savory

Selamat Mencuba

Baldu Merah Mawar Biru

Happy Birthday Mazy

Mazy celebrated her birthday last Tue and she requested for red velvet cake. When I agreed to bake her birthday cake, I didn't ask her on the theme of her birthday party.

I decorated her cake with cream cheese frosting and blue roses. I don't know why on that day I prefer blue color. She uploaded the cake photo into her Facebook, and one of her friend asked for confirmation on the color. Oh no!!!!! The theme color is RED!!! 

"Mazy, thousand apologies. I am really sorry my dear"  

I should have asked her.... 

Steve Jobs’ Outstanding Stanford Commencement Speech in 2005



Ini adalah text ucapan Steve Job, the founder of Apple, gave at Stanford University in 2005 for the graduation commencement. Bagi saya, ucapan ini very motivational and inspiring. Mungkin ada yang telah membaca text ucapan ini atau menonton video semasa meghadiri motivational seminar atau di YouTube.

Sila klik di sini untuk video

Di sini saya salin text ucapan ini untuk tatapan semua.


This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.







I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.






The first story is about connecting the dots.






I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?






It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.






And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.






It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:






Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.






None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.






Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.






My second story is about love and loss.






I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.






I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.






I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.






During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.






I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.






My third story is about death.






When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.






Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.






About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.






I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.






This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:






No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.






Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.






When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.






Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.






Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.






Thank you all very much.

Spaghetti Goreng

Hari Ahad yang lepas, my sister and her family from Mersing singgah kat rumah. Mereka sampai petang, tapi dari malam sebelum tu saya sibuk tanya semua orang kat rumah nak masak apa. Saya ni bab masak memasak ni agak slow sikit. Pagi Ahad only decided nak masak spaghetti goreng.

My hubby tak berapa suka spaghetti bolognese, saya dan Afiqah tak boleh makan mee kuning. Aiman suka pasta with cheese and lots of black pepper dan Batrisyia prefer malay food.... So spaghetti goreng is the best option dan menepati cita rasa semua orang with bit of everything; pedas for my hubby, pasta and blackpepper for Aiman (garnished with grated parmesan cheese), local flavour for Batrisya, and no mee kuning for me and Afiqah.

Bahan-bahan:

1 packet spaghetti

300gm daging kisar

1 batang carrot

2 batang celery

2 biji tomato

2 biji telur

1 biji bawang besar

3 ulas bawang putih

2 tbsp cili kisar

2 tbsp tomato ketchup

Olive oil untuk menumis

garam dan black pepper secukup rasa

Panaskan olive oil dan tumis bawang besar dan bawang putih yang telah di cincang halus. (Olive oil ini boleh diganti dengan miyak sayuran.) Tumis hingga bawang berwarna kekuningan (or golden brown)

Saya gunakan pure olive oil untuk menumis instead of Extra Virgin Olive Oil (EVOO). Extra virgin olive oil has a relatively low smoking point, so tak sesuai untuk menumis. Sila klik di sini untuk memilih EVOO yang sesuai untuk masakan.

 Masukkan carrot dan celery yang telah dihiris nipis. Tumis lagi beberapa minit sehingga carrot dan celery lembut.

 Masukkan cili kisar. Kurangkan cili kalau tak suka pedas... (my hubby prefer it hot....). Tumis sehingga cili masak.

Kemudian masukkan daging kisar. Tumis sehingga daging masak

Masukkan telur yang telah di pukul

Masukkan tomato.....

 Masukkan tomato ketchup. Kacau sehingga sebati.....

Masukkan spaghetti..... Gaul hingga sebati....

Tambahkan garam dan black pepper secukup rasa

tadaaaa.... dah siap... ready untuk di makan....

without any garnishing

Garnished with parmesan grated cheese and black pepper...

Selamat mencuba.....

Chocolate Vanilla Marble Jelly

Last saturday, Batrisyia dan Aiman pergi sekolah. My Hubby pulak seperti biasa golfing. So tinggal Afiqah (my eldest daughter) and I at home. Apa nak buat.... Baju dah masukkan dalam washing machine, nak mengadap computer malas lah pulak.

Teringat pulak Afiqah a.k.a Akak nak makan jelly marble, based on my late mother's recipe. Biasalah kan recipe orang dulu2 mana ada specific berat or amount for the ingredients. Semua main secukup rasa. So, kali ni saya cuba convert "agak-agak" kepada specific amount. Let start....

Ingredients:

• 1 packet (37.5gm) agar-agar
• 1.5l water
• 3 whole eggs
• 2 cups sugar
• 8 tablespoons custard powder
• 4 tablespoons cornstarch
• 500ml milk (or 1 can evaporated milk)
• 2 tablespoon butter
• 2 tablespoon cocoa powder
• 1 vanilla pod (1teaspoon vanilla extract)
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

Agar-agar

In a medium to large saucepan combine water and the whole packet of agar-agar. Cook over medium heat and stir occasionally. Let it slowly come to a boil.

Add sugar (once the agar-agar is completely dissolved). Add vanilla pod or extract and salt once the sugar is dissolved.

Eggs

custard and cornstarch

In a separate mixing bowl, whisk the flour and the eggs. 

Add milk to the mixture. I used fresh milk, but my late mother always used a can of evaporated milk. Whisk until smooth.

Once the sugar is dissolved, slowly, pour the egg mixture into the agar-agar mixture. Strain the egg mixture, if you want a smooth jelly.

Whisk the mixture until smooth and thicken. Make sure to cook under medium heat. Do not boil. Remove from heat, stir in butter. Divide the mixture into two parts (two separate mixing bowls).

Mixed cocoa powder in one of the mixture.

Spoon the vanilla mixture into the mould. I just used a big bowl. However, you can use any jelly mould, any shape and any size....

alternately spoon chocolate mixture

Chill the jelly for a few hours.... 

To invert the jelly, press the edges down slightly with a spoon and it should be able to invert onto a serving plate easily. 

If you use big bowl like mine, you can always cut it into any shape and any size .....

Enjoy



Chinese New Year holiday tahun ni kami sekeluarga duduk kat rumah... tak jadi balik kampung... So, saya pun menghabiskan waktu terluang dengan "KL Shopping Malls Hopping". Pergi menziarah shopping mall di Klang Valley... Walaupun tak bercuti di tempat2 percutian, my visit to the shopping mall is more damaging (to my pocket and wallet), huhuhu...

Last Saturday, before my eldest daughter balik ke Tapah, kami sekeluarga makan di Zam Zam Arabic Restaurant, Seksyen 9, Shah Alam. Akak and I have been craving for Arabic food....

Zam Zam Arabic Restaurant

Oasis 9,

Jalan Tengku Ampuan Zabedah F 9/F,

Section 9,

Shah Alam, Selangor.

My Hubby and Aiman busy choosing the food. Too many choices...

Aiman...

Batrisyia busy with her PSP while waiting for the food

Me and Batrisyia...

Afiqah and yours trully....

Photo session....

non-alcholic beer

My fav, Lamb Mandy

Whole Roast Chicken

Cream Caramel, Batrisyia's fav

Plain White Bread

My hubby bought this breadmaker a few months ago. Although I am not a bread lover and I hate to do all the kneading, I love the smell of homemade bread. Suka bau roti satu rumah...  The other good thing of having bread maker at home (untuk orang yang agak malas seperti saya) is the ability to serve healthy food with fresh and halal ingredients sans preservative to my family.

My son like the plain white bread. To make this bread is as simple as 1, 2, 3...

Add 290ml water

1and 3/4tsb Oil

450gm bread flour

4tsp milk powder

1 and 1/2tsp salt

1tsb sugar

1 and 1/2tsp yeast 

Everything in the pan

Place the pan in the breadmaker. Select the proper setting (750gm weight, set timer) anf turn it "ON".

3.5hr later