I entered a food photography competition a couple of months ago. I didn’t get shortlisted or win anything, but that’s alright. I had wanted to shoot an top down view of a meal at a table for a long time. I thought it was a good time to try it. Plus it was a good meal and I had some nice and willing hand models who kindly waited while I snap photos before getting to eat.

The dessert one’s slightly weaker, I didn’t spend much time arranging the table, the paper table covering had gotten dirty from the main meal, so we took it off and I had to use artificial lighting as my main source since the sun had already gone down. Plus I hadn’t even notice that someone had moved one of the set of flowers so close to the edge of the table instead of where I originally had them. On the upside… the pavlova and apple tarts were excellent. Oh you’ll probably also notice that there’s an empty spot at the bottom middle of the table. Someone cancelled on me so I had an empty seat. Anyways!

I made marmalade for the first time this year. I wanted to make it last year, but missed the Seville season. This year, armed with a copy of Salt Sugar Smoke, a bunch of Seville oranges, blood oranges and grapefruit, I finally made my first batch of marmalade. I struggled a fair bit trying to get it to set properly, I think I might not have scraped off enough pectin from the muslin bag. Strangely enough, it seems to be fairly set in my flat, but when I bring it in to the office, it starts to melt. Probably because it is considerably warmer in the office kitchen.

Regardless, it seems to be quite popular, with the jars lasting only a day or 2 when I remember to bring them in. And amazingly, it seems to convert marmalade haters too. So if you want try possibly the best marmalade in the world, check out this recipe by Nick Selby of Melrose & Morgan.

Found this sitting in my drafts folder, so I thought I might as well post it. Continuing with my obsession with pomegranates, here’s a citrus salad, with grapefruit, clementine, honey, pistachios, greek yoghurt and of course, pomegranate seeds.

Recipe is based on this, but without the alcohol.

I recently bought this book, The Lebanese Kitchen by Salma Hage. I’d been browsing through it at Waterstones a while back and one recipe caught my eye immediately. The photo in the book was just beautiful. Vibrant, red pomegranate seeds and coriander sat on top of chicken breasts in a pool of pomegranate sauce. I didn’t buy the book then, but knew I wanted to cook that recipe. So I looked it up online and to my joy, the Daily Mail had posted it as an accompaniment to the book review.

I cooked it once. I cooked it twice. Then I cooked it a few more times. For myself. For others. And I fell in love with it. The sauce is heavenly and I found myself craving for everything pomegranate. By the second time that I made that dish, I’d ordered and gotten the cookbook and spent ages just looking at the food photography, all the amazing textures, colours and incredible looking food. All I wanted to do was just to cook from the book.

And so I had the chance when A came up from Falmouth to stay at mine for a day, before flying back to Czech for New Year’s. We wanted to cook, so I thought I’d invite a friend of mine and her mum, seeing as they invited me to join their Christmas dinner. And here’s what we ate:

Starter
Zucchini and dill fritters with dill yoghurt dip
Pumpkin hummus with toasted pita bread

Main
Chicken with pomegranate
Saffron rice
Monk’s salad / eggplant salad / el-raheb

Dessert
Apple dumplings with vanilla ice cream

Well, only two of the things we cooked came from the cookbook, the rest from a bunch of different websites and the saffron rice I kind of made up myself.

Recipe from SBS food
Ingredients for zucchini fritters (serves 5-7):
600g zucchini
sea salt
1 small onion, grated
1 small clove garlic, finely chopped
100g feta, crumbled
¼ cup finely chopped dill
2 tbsp finely chopped flat-leaf parsley leaves
2 eggs, well beaten
½ cup plain flour
2 tbsp rice flour
Freshly ground black pepper
Olive oil

Preparation:
Grate the zucchini coarsely and put into a colander. Sprinkle lightly with salt and toss, then leave for 20 minutes to drain. Rinse the zucchini briefly, then squeeze it to extract as much liquid as you can and pat dry with kitchen paper.

Mix the zucchini with the onion, garlic, feta, herbs and eggs in a large bowl. Sift on the flours, then season with pepper and stir to combine.

Heat a little oil in a non-stick frying pan over medium heat until sizzling. Drop small tablespoons of batter into the hot oil and flatten gently. Cook for 2 minutes on each side, or until golden brown. Drain on kitchen paper and serve piping hot.

Recipe adapted from The Lebanese Recipes Kitchen
Ingredients for dill yoghurt dip:
Dill yoghurt dressing
200g carton Greek-style yoghurt
2 tbsp finely chopped dill
1 garlic clove, crushed

Preparation:
To make the dill yoghurt dressing, combine the yoghurt, dill and garlic in a small bowl. Taste and season with salt and pepper.

Recipe adapted from The Lebanese Kitchen cookbook
Ingredients for pumpkin hummus (serves 8):
500g pumpkin, peeled, seeded, diced
extra virgin olive oil, for drizzling
400g (before draining) can of chickpeas, drained, with ¼ cup of the juices reserved
4 garlic cloves, peeled
4 tbsp tahini
juice of 2 lemons
2 tsp sea salt
2 tbsp chopped coriander

Preparation:
Preheat the oven to 200C/180C fan/gas mark 6. Put the pumpkin into a roasting pan, drizzle with a little oil and roast for half an hour or until tender. Remove from oven and let it cool completely. Drain the chickpeas, reserving ¼ cup of the can juices, and rinse. Put the chickpeas into a food processor, add the garlic cloves, tahini and pumpkin and process for a few minutes.

Add the reserved can juices, followed by half the amount of lemon juice and the sea salt and process until smooth. Taste and add more lemon juice, if you like. Scrape the hummus into a serving dish, drizzle generously with olive oil, sprinkle with coriander and serve.

Recipe adapted from Taste of Beirut
Ingredients for eggplant salad (serves 3-4):
2 large eggplants, roasted over a flame or in the oven till skin is blackened, then peeled and drained and diced
2 tomatoes, diced
1 medium onion, diced or several spring onions, chopped
several tablespoons of chopped parsley
½ cucumber, diced (optional)
½ green pepper, diced (optional)

Dressing:
One or more tablespoons of pomegranate molasses mixed with double the volume of olive oil; add a clove or two of garlic, mashed with a dash of salt.

Preparation:
Wrap the eggplant with 3 layers of foil and roast it over the your gas hob, turning it every 5 minutes to get it even. After roasting, cut it in half, remove the flesh from the skin and drain it to get rid of the juices. Dice the eggplant once drained. Put aside some of the chopped tomatoes and parsley to layer on top of the salad. Mix the eggplant with the rest of the ingredients and assemble the salad.

Recipe from The Lebanese Kitchen cookbook
Ingredients for chicken with pomegranate (serves 4):
4 chicken breasts
1 tbsp olive oil
2 spring onions, chopped
2 garlic cloves, grated
100 ml pomegranate juice
1 tablespoon clear honey
2.5cm piece fresh ginger, peeled and grated
½ tsp ground allspice
½ tsp ground cinnamon
½ tsp grated nutmeg
pinch of ground cloves
3 tbsp lemon juice
5 thyme sprigs
salt and pepper
pomegranate seeds and chopped fresh coriander, to garnish

Preheat the oven to 190C/170C fan/gas 5. Brush the chicken with the olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Heat a skillet or frying pan, add the chicken, skin side down, and cook over medium heat for about 5 minutes until golden brown, then turn and cook for another 2 minutes.

Remove the chicken from the pan and put into an ovenproof dish. Put all the remaining ingredients, except the pomegranate seeds and chopped coriander into a food processor and process until thoroughly combined. Pour the sauce over the chicken and cook in the oven for 20 minutes or until the chicken is cooked through. Garnish with pomegranate seeds and chopped coriander and serve.

Ingredients for saffron rice (serves 3-4):
2 cups basmati rice
2½ cups chicken/vegetable stock
pinch of saffron threads
½ tsp turmeric
1 cinnamon stick

Preparation:
Just cook how you’d normally cook rice, but with stock instead of water and the extra ingredients.

Seeing as she now bakes for a living, I told A she was in charge of dessert. Put on the spot, she couldn’t make up her mind on what to make, so I suggested these apple dumplings, which I hadn’t eaten in more than 2 years.

Recipe adapted from stacy newgent’s at design*sponge
Ingredients for apple dumplings (serves 6):
3-4 apples, peeled, cored and sliced
whipped cream or vanilla ice cream for serving
almonds, crushed

Pastry:
300g flour
2 tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
85g butter + extra for the filling
180ml milk

Sift flour, baking powder and salt together. Work in butter and add milk- then mix until dry ingredients are well moistened. Turn out onto a floured counter and knead until smooth. Roll dough out to 1/4” (a little more than ½ cm) thick and cut into 6 squares, or smaller squares to make more.

Put a few apple pieces onto each square along with a dash of sugar and a pat of butter. Fold the corners inward to make a square, making the corners overlap in the center. Put into a baking dish.

Sauce:
300g white sugar
80g brown sugar
2 tbsp flour
½ tsp salt
350ml boiling water
85g butter
1 tsp vanilla

Stir sugars, salt and flour together in a pan.  Stir in boiling water, add butter, vanilla and place over low heat until the sauce begins to thicken a bit. Pour ¾ of the sauce over the dumplings and bake at 205C/185C fan covered for about 30 minutes – then pour the rest of the sauce in and sprinkle with crushed almonds- bake uncovered for another 15 minutes until brown. Serve right away with whipped cream or vanilla ice cream.

And so that was our big, big dinner. I went slightly over the top with the amount of food, but at least I don’t have to cook for the next 3 days.

Every once in a while, I feel the need to go home. Back to Singapore. For my family and for myself as well. Even though, lately, I’ve been feeling pretty happy and settled with my life in London and I feel like I could probably survive not going home for at least 2 years. But I’m also wary of the fact that if I let that happen, I’ll miss out on seeing my parents grow old, and getting to play with my nephews and niece while they’re still young.

But the thing I miss the most about Singapore is the food. I’d go as far as to argue that I miss the food more than I miss my family (shameless, I know). The sheer amount of variety of types of cuisine we get in Singapore. It is incredible. So I wanted to make a video about the food that I miss in Singapore. As it turns out I’m not that heartless and I do care about other things apart from food, so that’s in the video as well.

Homeward Bound from Huda Abdul Aziz on Vimeo.

Singapore’s the kind of place that if you leave and come back in 6 months, there’s a new landmark, or a new shopping mall or a new MRT line, or some other major change. The last time I went back home was more than a year and a half ago, so there was a fair amount of change that happened in between. I suppose this video also serves as a sort of record to preserve what I remember about Singapore. Who knows, it might all be different again the next time I go back home.

And these are just a few of the dishes that I really miss when I’m not in Singapore:

Laksa, which I had a real craving for when I was in London. I made my mum show me how she made hers, so hopefully I can successfully recreate it now that I’m back in London.

Nasi rawan. Specifically the one from Bedok South. (I went a bit over the top with the amount of sides I wanted with it, but I hadn’t eaten it in a long time and wanted everything with it.) This has been a family tradition of ours ever since I can remember. Weekend breakfasts at Bedok South Rd market. Nasi rawan, prata and teh tarik. What more do you need..

Recently, I found out that my mum doesn’t even find the food at a few of the places my dad used to bring us all that special. It surprised me. And I was slightly disappointed. Those places that formed so many of my food memories. It made me question if I actually even like the food, or did I enjoy it just because it’s all I can remember? Going out on food outings with the family pretty much sums up my memory of home. Being so far away from Singapore, hanging on to my memories of it is just about all I can do.

But who’s to say that’s a bad thing?

I’ve always wanted to do a baking video. And I’ve always wanted to do a Christmas video. Last year, I left it too late. This year, I managed to get started on this in early December, but being ill and the short winter days, with its disappearing light, meant that I had to keep on delaying it a couple of weekends to finish it. But it’s finally done, despite deciding to change the music at the last minute and re-editing it on Christmas Eve. And I’m pretty pleased with the outcome.

Christmas Baking from Huda Abdul Aziz on Vimeo.

And this is the cake, recipe from Nigella Lawson:

Happy Holidays everyone.

Oh man, I do have a lot of catching up to do on this blog. Things have been a bit busy at work these last couple of months and I’ve been slightly more active in posting my photos to Facebook and Flickr than I have on this blog. I finally have a few days off from work where I’m not out of the country, so I’m going to try and clear the backlog of things that need to be posted.

I finally got the chance to do some food photography for a real client in the latter half of October. Work got me to do a photoshoot for Quaker, not a huge job or any kind of serious print ads, but photos for fan engagement for their UK Facebook page. But it’s still my first proper photoshoot with a real client, so I was pretty happy. So I spent a day with bowls of porridge and breakfast setups. It was really hectic and I was briefed to take as many different photos in different settings as possible in 7 hours. Not really how I would have chosen to do it, but since I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity, I didn’t try to school them on how food photographers & stylists usually spend like a day to get a small number of shots just perfect (especially for big companies).

I was told to do it at the office, which I was hesitant about, given the challenge of making an office look like a breakfast setting, but I managed to bring most of my props and equipment in, so it was fine in the end. I spent the night before buying wooden planks, sanding, painting and distressing them, so I was knackered even before the job began.

Despite all the challenges, I’m quite pleased with most of the images. I think I managed to do around 20 different setups that day. But now I need some new surfaces to use as I keep relying on the same ones. Anyway, I had such a rush the whole day and it was nice to be away from the desk and do something different at work. I think it was pretty obvious to everyone that I was really happy doing the shoot. Totally knackered at the end of it, but happy.

I’m alternating between upbeat and really harrowing music at the moment. First up, Otis Redding’s (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction. I prefer this version to the original by The Rolling Stones.

And I’m loving also anything by Steve Reich. For a while Music for 18 Musicians was my favourite. Then I went to work on a weekend and put on New York Counterpoint and it helped me get through the workload.

Then work started getting a bit mental and lots of overtime put my head in a strange place. And I found this recording of American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME) playing Steve Reich’s Complete String Quartets, which consists of Different Trains, Triple Quartet and WTC 9/11. They’re all really powerful pieces and in retrospect, it probably wasn’t a good idea to be playing it over and over again when you’re stressed. It’s haunting and affective, yet amazing to listen to.

Steve Reich is performing with London Sinfonietta at the Royal Festival Hall in March and I might just have to check it out.

Recently, I bought this book, Eat, Memory: Great Writers at the Table. It was a used book I got off Amazon. I didn’t expect to find a note inside of it, from someone named Phil to the previous owner.

It says:

To my darling food obsessed darling,
I hope you enjoy these as much as aduki bean paste desserts,
with as much love as I can muster,
Phil x

Appropriately, I guess you can consider me to be somewhat food obsessed and I really do love my aduki bean paste desserts. So thank you Phil, whoever you are. I appreciate your love. Unlike the previous owner, who got rid of the book you once lovingly gave to them. I don’t know, maybe you smothered them too much with your love. You did call them darling twice in a sentence.

Anyway, the book has a nice collection of essays on food and the writers’ memories on food. Which is something I’m hoping to explore myself if I ever get around to writing my own book.

This weekend, I went to Borough Market with my friend, D. It was her first time properly exploring the place, which I think she really enjoyed, being a proper foodie and an ingredients person. I hadn’t been past the fresh fruit and vegetables section of the market in a while, so it was brilliant to see all the vivid colours of the squashes. The bright orange and vermillion against the cream, greys and dark greens.

And I just love going to Turnips at Borough Market. Even if only to see the different types of tomatoes that they have on display.

We ate quite a lot that day. I had a vegan superveg burger from The Veggie Table. While D had some sort of sausage sarnie (I think.. I didn’t pay much attention to it).

Then we had portuguese egg tarts. Not the whole lot. Just one each.

And then we each had a crème caramel pot.

And I made D try her first granadilla, also known as buah susu in Malay.

After a trip to Falkiners (bookbinders & specialist papers) at Southampton Row, we headed to the Nordic Bakery in Soho.

Where we made the mistake of ordering even more food, rye bread sandwiches (D had brie & lingonberry, while I had the egg & herring), a cinnamon bun each and drinks. It was good, but we definitely should have shared a cinnamon bun after all that food in the morning because we both couldn’t finish it all.

We also bought some apples at Borough Market to make a tart that evening, but decided we had enough sweets that day and couldn’t stomach any more. All in all, a good day. I was really, really taken by the colours of the squashes and the different types and shapes, definitely need to get some soon, cook with them and take even more photographs. Hopefully next week.

I was going to open with what a rubbish week it’s been, but let’s be honest, nobody likes it when somebody complains. We like things that make us feel good and that’s exactly what you need when you’re feeling poorly. When it’s cold outside and you need something warm and comforting. Like a bowl of chicken porridge. And spending the day under the covers.

Okay, I admit, I don’t usually make chicken porridge. In fact, it was my first time making it. And I don’t normally eat porridge. Like rice porridge. Let’s call it congee, to avoid confusion, since most people in this country seem to think of oats when I say porridge. Perhaps to confuse you even more, chicken congee is also known as bubur ayam in Malay.

Recently, I find myself cooking the things that I would not normally cook, simply because they remind me of home. And congee just seems to be one of those things that you eat when you’re not feeling well. It’s something your mum would make for you when your body just can’t digest anything else. That and barley water. But barley water? I still won’t make that, unless I’m actually that desperate to try and remember the times that my mum forced me to drink it when I was ill. Which might happen, you never know.

So. Making congee is pretty straightforward. It’s hard to screw it up. It’s basically like cooking rice that’s been drowned in lots of water, so it absorbs it all and then the grains start to break apart. You don’t need to be so exact with the amount of water, as you can add or remove to your liking whilst it’s cooking. But I read somewhere that generally it’s about 8 cups of water per 1 cup of rice. But it also depends on how thick or thin you like your congee. Be warned, the proportions of rice in congee differs greatly from making normal rice, because the rice expands so much since there’s so much liquid. You’d be surprised how much you actually get from just 1 cup of rice.

Ingredients: (Serves 4)
1 cup of rice (soaked for half an hour)
8 cups of water/chicken broth
shredded chicken
fried shallots
sliced spring onions
shredded omelette
sesame oil
sweet soy sauce

If you’re making chicken congee, then you can use chicken broth instead of just using water. I cooked my congee on the hob for about an hour, simmering on low heat. Make sure you stir every once in a while to make sure the rice at the bottom doesn’t stick to the pan. To help the grains break apart, you can use a ladle to mash it up once the rice grains are soft, so that the congee has a smoother texture.

Once your congee is cooked, you can top it with shredded chicken, fried shallots, sliced spring onions, shredded omelette and a drizzle of either sesame oil or sweet soy sauce, or maybe even both if you like.

Then you can perch yourself beside the window, play Vashti Bunyan’s Diamond Day and have yourself some chicken congee.