cafe food at home

I am guilty again for the long absence. I have no new posts as I have not been baking that often. Instead of baking, I find myself getting more interested in cooking.

Unlike baking, I do not always follow recipes to the t when it comes to day-to-day cooking. I tend to replace or substitute ingredients freely and I could get away with eyeballing the amount of ingredients or seasonings I put in the dish. As such, I find it difficult to share cooking recipes especially when I am not a good cook to begin with.

While I may not be able to spell out the cooking instructions, I thought why not share some of the photos of the dishes I prepared. The quality of the images are not great since they are taken with my mobile phone under very poor lighting condition.

I used a free mobile app to jazz up the pictures and they don't look that bad, at least I am not shy to post them ;)

This is an easy meal I prepared for my husband when he was home for lunch...poached egg and mushrooms served on store bought focaccia. I learned this from a cooking show on tv. For the toppings, I stir fried some button mushrooms, oyster mushrooms and bunashimeji with some onions, garlics and seasoned it with salt and pepper. The salad dressing is a simple combo of 3 parts olive oil to 1 part lemon juice, nothing fancy.

The most tricky part of this meal is cooking the poached eggs. This is the first time I have ever poached an egg. The eggs were cooked using a straight forward method...just bring a saucepan of water to a simmer, then create a 'tornado' with a spoon in the water and put in the cracked egg. No salt or vinegar is needed. Although the eggs turned out looking quite ok, at least for a first timer, the water temperature was a bit too high, the water became so cloudy with egg whites floating all over, what a waste!

This is a visually appealing and delicious meal with a good mix of protein, fiber and carbs. Even though it is something so simple, I can't help but to feel proud of myself to be able to put together a cafe style meal like this at home. All I needed was a nice cup of coffee to end the meal.