Cheryl Marie Cordeiro

Personally I would leave the steak some eight minutes before serving to let it rest a bit and even out the temperature. I have found that this leaves the steak much juicier too.
Text & Photo © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro 2013

Admittedly, it was a feeling of pure lust that washed over me from the moment the succulence of it appeared under my visual radar. I wanted it. I knew from the first instance I saw it, it was mine. Without a doubt, I wanted all of its deliciousness home with me.

It was not so much a question about how many inches of it I could have, but the fact that already the first two would give me a really nice piece, with both strip steak side and the tenderloin.

I really don’t know what it is with big chunks of beef that releases so much of the primitive hormones in me, but it seems the case that I often end up buying way too large steaks to a small household. Perhaps I just like large, in general, like fruits, diamonds, cars, houses. Anything.

However, there is no way any one single person can down a four lbs (2kg) T-bone steak alone. Not even two grown up persons can do it comfortably. With some modest side dishes, you need to be at least four.

And there you have it, a perfect reason to call a few friends and throw a dinner party.

I have always also felt a little bit intimidated by outdoor barbecuing, because it seems so hard to get any steak exactly the way you want it. Too many burst and charred tomatoes, too many raw and inedible chicken parts etc. have left their scars on my self confidence I’m afraid, but this would be the day, with a gorgeous find of a T-bone.

After considering a Barolo, my choice fell on a full bodied 2001 Rioja which worked out well.

When planning a dinner, I like to choose a wine that will complement the food, as soon as the menu is settled. In this case I felt a steak this brutal, would take a robust, mature red wine that would stand its own ground and not fade into the wallpaper when a medium rare two inch thick steak landed on the plate.

My rule of thumb when preparing a meat dinner, is one glass in the sauce and one in the chef. In this case I was not planning to have any sauce, so I recalibrated the wine ratio, which also worked out OK.
Continue reading “Love at first bite” →

From a late night’s adventure in baking – two different types of sourdough bread, from a kefir culture and a buttermilk culture.
Text & Photo © CM Cordeiro 2013

At this year’s Passion for Food Festival 2013 in Gothenburg, one of the talking points was about how homebaked sourdoughs are now coming back into fashion in Swedish households. Most people still lamented the time it took for a culture to start and rise, this being the primary reason why sourdoughs were abandoned for decades as a household project due to a lack of time.

So sourdoughs were not always favoured in breadbaking history, and I couldn’t help but laugh when I read in a well-regarded Swedish cookbook printed in the late 1990s that sourdough cultures were cumbersome to work with because they tended to die on you, not give enough raising strength to the dough or worse, produce bread with uneven holes in the texture. And to think, at this year’s food festival, I was so taken in by sourdough bread with exactly those large, uneven roles going through its entire structure that I thought I’d adopt a sourdough culture as a pet project to see how it works out.

It’s been a few months and the culture is alive and well, no fuss to it at all, contrary to how it is often written about in numerous cookbooks and websites. Just see that you have enough of the starter after a baking project, leave it out a few days and I can almost assure you, it’ll live. Yeast and bacteria are after all, quite resilient organisms.

I now in fact have two different sourdough cultures to experiment with to my heart’s delight, where as pets, they hardly take any time looking after at all.

Homemade egg noodles / pasta served with meat sauce, topped with thyme
and a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil from Italy.
Text and Photo © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro 2013

A fork full of this homemade egg noodles / pasta brought an instant flash of a Madeleine moment of sorts where I was reminded of my first encounters with egg noodles as a child of about age six.

It would be one of my first days in school in Primary One at CHIJ Katong in Singapore, dressed in freshly pressed blue pinafore over a starched collar white blouse. I was new to the routine of going to class, making new friends and having to navigate recess time buying food at the school canteen on my own. It was perhaps the second day of school that I found myself drawn to one of the more crowded canteen stalls that sold fishball noodles that cost all of Singapore $0.40 cents during the early 1980s. I realize today that the bowl that was filled half with noodles and two fishballs, was not large though it seemed at the time, very large in my tiny hands.

I’ve always found myself to be a slow learner and remember that at age six, while some other girls had mastered the art of eating with chopsticks, I sat for most part of the recess time, struggling to put strands of noodles onto the soup spoon for a neat consumption. It took time and I was happy that on some days, my father’s father was around to keep me company, sometimes laughing at my actions, most times just sitting and watching in amusement. Continue reading “Homemade egg noodles / pasta in under an hour” →