Last month, I attended the International Cooking Class for the 1st time. It was
Ghana Cooking Class.
Yesterday, I went to this monthly International Cooking Class again. This time, it was Brazilian cooking. :)
There were 6 types of dishes prepared for this time. Ok, let me do a review on them one by one. ^_^
Arroz (Brazilian-style Garlic Rice)
A simple way of doing nice garlic rice.
Left : Heat up 1 tablespoon of olive oil, add in 3 cloves of sliced garlic and fry until golden brown. Then add in 3 cups of long grain rice and stir well. (Japanese rice not good for making this garlic rice). Add a small pinch of salt in it.
Right : Put the rice into a rice cooker, add in 4.5 cups of boiled water.
Then, all you have to do is press the cooker button and wait for mum mum.
Voila! Lovely looking white rice. Curious to know what are the side dishes that went with it?
Come come, let me show you...
Caldinho de Feijao (Black Bean Soup)Bean soup is a very common dish that you can find on Brazilian dining table. I had both the black bean (Feijao in Portugese) and "white bean" before, I like the black bean more. However, as this time it was quite difficult to get the black version in Japan, it was replaced with the white version.
Left : Part of the ingredient for making the bean soup.
The ingredients include : 250g of bean, 2 bay leaves, 2 chopped onions, 4 cloves of finely chopped garlic, 1 big tomato in chunks, 120g of finely chopped leeks, 1 finely chopped chili pepper, 60g of finely chopped Parsley, 80g of bacon and 80g of linguica (Brazilian sausage).
Right : The bean was soaked in water overnight, and cook with a pinch of salt and bay leaves until soft but still maintaining the good shape.
Then, by using some of the "soup" from the boiled bean, blend 2/3 of the bean with 1/2 of the prepared onion and garlic, all the tomato, 1/3 of leek and all the parsley in a blender. In case your blender too small, you might have to divide the blending into a few times.
A big bowl of nice bean puree will be formed.
1. Fry remained garlic, onion and 1/3 of leek until light golden.
2. Then, add in the bean puree and bean, stir well.
3. While making the bean puree, stir fry the linguica to make it slightly burnt outside.
4. Cut the linguica into 3cm cubes.
5. Add in bacon, linguica and chili pepper. You can also stir fry the bacon with other ingredient first (as in 1) if you want. Put everything in boil and add water.
6. After cook for around 10 minutes, turn off the fire. Then top the remained leek on the soup.
Hohoho! A nice big pot of Caldinho de Feijao was done.
This, was a vegetarian version for the bean soup. Especially prepared for Eli (an Indonesian student), Morita sensei and fish fish.
Moqueca de peixe (Fish Cooked in Coconut Milk)The 2nd side dish was a fish dish very much resemble the South East Asian food, by using a lot of coconut milk. Brazil is also a country that use a lot of coconut in their cooking as coconuts are very easy to grow plant there.
1. A layout of the prepared ingredients.
2. Main ingredient for the dish, white flesh fish. The one that used on that day was "red fish". 8 big pieces.
3. Also, 200g of shrimp. The washed fish and shrimp were marinated with salt and black pepper.
Other ingredients included 2 onions (1 cut into chunks and 1 into slices), 3 cloves of chopped garlic, 1 red pepper in slices, 2 chili pepper, 3 tomatoes (2 of them cut into chuncks and 1 into slices), 200ml coconut milk, 2 teaspoons of olive oil, 2 teaspoons of cilantro, 1 tablespoon of vegetable oil, 2 tablespoons of chopped green oil, salt and black pepper.
4. Heat up olive oil and fry the garlic until it gets golden. Then add in onion (square) and fry. After stir fry for a while, add in the tomatoes (square) and red pepper as well. Season with salt and black pepper. Then steam for 1-2 minutes.
5. Next, add the coconut milk and mix well with the ingredients.
6. Add in fish and simmer for 5 minutes in low heat. After that, add in shrimps and vegetable oil and simmer for another 10 minutes.
7. Place onion and tomatoes (slices) in layers. Then top with cilantro and green onion. Give a light stir.
8. Let the whole thing simmer for 5 minutes. However, the chef didn't use cap for the simmer process, she said without the cap also can do wor~
Finally, a splendid looking pot of Moqueca de peixe was done.
A close up at the coconut fish. Look nice or not?
Farofa (Fried Cassava Flour)
Yap, we have the 3rd side dish. This time, the main ingredient was cassava (mandioca) flour. So, not only Ghana like to use cassava, even in Brazil too.
By the way, just a small out-of-topic information, my mum makes one of the tastiest tapioca kueh. ^_^ But, as far as I know, I've not yet seen cassava cooked in this way in Malaysia.
The ingredients were 300g of cassava flour, 1 onion cut in square, 2 eggs, 1/4 cup of green olives (cut into big pieces), 50g bacon, 60g dried raisin and 60g butter.
First, fried the bacon with butter. Then add in onion, green olives and cassava flour. Stir with wood spoon as shown in the left picture.
Right : After a while, add in egg and mix quickly. Then add in raisin. Stir well and done.
A close up on the cooked Farafa.
This was the vegetarian version without bacon.
Desserts
Brazilians love sweet thing, so how would a Brazilian meal be completed without desserts. However, there will be no picture on the making as these 2 desserts were prepared one day earlier.
Dessert 1 is called
Manjar de coco.
For those of you that are interested, here is the recipe :
Ingredients are 1/2 cup of corn starch, 250ml of milk, 1/2 can of condensed milk and 200ml of coconut milk.
First, dissolve the starch in milk. Then, in a pot, put in condensed milk, coconut milk and the dissolved starch. Stir and cook until the whole thing becomes thick like cream. Then, transfer the cream to a mold and put into refrigerator to cool for 2 hrs.
You can use prune and caramel sauce to decorate it as shown in the above picture.
Next, is Passion Juice Mousse. Sorry, no idea how this was prepared, as it was a last-minute dish added by the chefs.
The portion for each person.
Meet the chefs, Karen Harada (left) and Mirian Sakuno (right). Both of them are Brazil born Japanese. In fact, in Brazil, the most Asian that staying there are Japanese, though the Asian percentage in Brazil is about 2% only.
After all the dishes has been prepared, it was time to lay out everything.
This was what each of us had. For a 500yen of participation fee... too nice to be true huh~ ;)
Oops!! Everyone was eager to sit down already. Yap, our tummies were grumbling a lot by the time we finally could have a taste on these drooling dishes.
My comments for the dishes :
Arroz was very nice. The nice fragrance of the garlic evokes one's appetite easily. However, there might be too much water inside, make the rice a little bit mashed.
Caldinho de Feijao would be the number 1 dish for the day. Even without the bacon and linguica, the bean itself gave a nice savoury taste to the soup. I have eaten Brazilian bean soup a few times, and one common feature of the soup was "very salty". Then, I realised that Brazilian foods were salty and sweet. So, today, I specially requested Karen to cut down the salt addition.
Voila! The bean soup turned out to be so nice. Yum~Yum~
I tried some
Moqueca de peixe without taking the fish and prawn. As expected, the creamy coconut milk taste gave a very good South East Asian touch to the dish. In fact, this was a nice dish too. My Indonesian friend loved it so much. She had 2 plates. Well, this dish was ok with fish fish. I usually don't take much coconut milk dish as it will make me feel very oily and satiated.
Farofa, a very unique kind of new taste for me. How would I say... It it like a Brazilian style "sprinkling powder" (Furikake) for eating with rice. The cassava flour itself will be too dry, but somehow the sweetness of the raisin gave a very good blending with it. Good to eat with Arroz with some bean soup.
Finally, the dessert. I love the prune, it was so nice. I like the
Mousse, the sour taste of the passion juice inside it was something good for a person who like sour thing like me.
Unfortunately, the
Manjar de coco was too sweet. Not my cup of tea.
If you all notice, this is actually my first time post a food post with "nice recipe" in it. Kihkihkih...
Usually, I'm too lazy to tell people about how to make a dish, but I'm thinking of giving it a challenge today. (with the already printed recipe :P)
So, what do you guy think? Do I have the potential to be an online cooking teacher. :PbPb
