Roast Beef | My Favorite :)

Celebrated my birthday last Saturday and I cooked Roast Beef. Yummy! This is my family's favorite and my mom's recipe.

I read the recipe, kept reading it while cooking just to make sure everything is right, but what I love about this is that it's very simple and uber delicious.

Here is the recipe:

Ingredients:
2kilos beef, loin
1 bottle Lea Perrins Oyster sauce
soy sauce
4 cloves garlic, chopped
pepper
msg
1 can Jolly Button Mushroom
1 can Campbell's Cream of Mushroom
1 pouch Nestle All Purpose Cream
1 cup butter

Directions:
1. Marinate beef in oyster sauce, pepper and msg for 30 minutes to 1 hour.
2. Boil marinated beef until tender. Let it cool and refrigerate for 2 - 3 hours.
3. Slice the marinated and boiled beef.
4. Saute garlic, cream of mushroom, and nestle cream in butter. Add the beef with the marinate sauce.

I got really good feedbacks from my friends during the party. They asked if everything that was on the table was catered. LOL. I prepared everything which included Vegetable Salad with Mayo-Curry dip, Chinese Style Cream Dory in Light Soy Sauce (you can find that recipe here), Pinoy Style Red Sauce Spaghetti, Sizzling Sisig (ohhhh-- not everything, my brother cooked Sizzling Sisig LOL) Tiramisu and Buko Pandan Salad. I'll post my (small) birthday party pictures right after this one.


Happy Cooking,
Umbrela :)

Chinese-Style Cream Dory in Light Soy Sauce

My mom cooked Fried Cream Dory last week and I didn't like how it tasted because in my opinion Cream Dory should be steamed! LOL. I told her I'm gonna find a recipe and would teach her how to cook Cream Dory the right way.

I found this recipe ---> http://janiscooking.wordpress.com/2011/04/08/steamed-cream-dory-with-light-soy-sauce/#comment-1312 and at first look I knew it is the one! :)

The only ingredient that I didn't have was the Sesame Oil so I bought one after getting out of the office.

So guys, here it is....

Thank you janiscooking.wordpress.com :) Love your recipe and I'm gonna cook this again for my birthday.

Tiramisu

Dessert! :)

When you don't want a complicated dessert recipe and don't have much time to prepare for one, this is what you should do. Go and buy these ingredients:

3 packs Graham Cookies
2 cans Nestle All Purpose Cream
1 can Condensed Milk
10 packs (3 pieces per pack) Cream-O or Oreo cookies, centers removed and crushed
1 cup cheddar cheese, squares
1 can fruit cocktail, drained

Directions:
1. Mix the all purpose cream and condensed milk together. Let's call this the sweet mixture
2. Layer the Pyrex Pan ( I wanna see the layers of my creation).
3. Here's how you layer the pan:
     a. sweet mixture
     b. graham cookies
     c. sweet mixture
     d. crushed chocolate cookies
     e. graham cookies 
 --this makes one layer, you can make 3-4 layers ( a to e) of this and then....
4. Top it with crushed chocolate cookies, fruit cocktail (or any fruits that are in season, like berries) and cheese squares. Cover with cling wrap and refrigerate.

 See how it should look below:

I did 2 Pyrex Pans with 3 layers each.

Happy Cooking,
Umbrela

Creamy Carbonara

I got tired of cooking the usual red sauce spaghetti, so last Christmas I decided to go for white sauce. Creamy Carbonara it is. Looked for recipes online, read and read, printed some, then took note of the usual ingredients they have.

Went to the grocery with my list of ingredients. I must admit that I have over-bought some of the ingredients and was undecided if I were to buy spinach and basil. I didn't find those two ingredients but found McCormick Basil Leaves. I bought 2 bars of Eden cheddar cheese, 2 450grams of Linguine (instead of Fettuccine), 3 chicken breasts, 1 pack of all purpose flour, 4 250ml packs of Nestle All Purpose Cream, 2 can of Campbells Cream of Mushroom, 1 Can of Jolly Button Mushrooms, 1 pack of Ham (flat) and 450grams of bacon.

So, now with all of these ingredients I started to boil water. Then when it came to a boil, cooked the linguine as per package instruction -- add salt and oil. While waiting for the pasta to be cooked, I decided not to put basil and chicken breasts. LOL. Here's the final list of my ingredients of the sauce (since you already know how to cook the pasta) and followed by the cooking directions.
 :)

Ingredients:
1 450grams Linguine
2 250mL Nestle All Purpose Cream
1 1/2 can Campbells Cream of Mushroom
2 cans water
1 can Jolly Button Mushrooms, cut into halves
450grams bacon, shredded
1 pack ham flats, squares
1/2 cup Eden cheese, grated (then some more for topping)
pepper
garlic


Directions:
1. Fry the bacon until brown use low heat and don't overcook. Set aside.
2. Saute garlic with canola or palm oil. Add the ham and cook till brown. Add the bacon. ( You can set aside 1/4 of the bacon to be used as topping).
3. Add cream of mushroom, water, all purpose cream, and grated cheese. Mix well and bring to a boil.
4. Season with pepper. (How about salt? Do you need salt? NO. The salt will come from the ham, bacon and cheese).

Serve the pasta and sauce separately. Top with bacon bits and grated cheese. Yummm!!!!

Enjoy!

Happy Cooking,
UmbRela

Bulalo

I've been busy cooking this Christmas so I have a few recipes here that I wanna share with you.

The first one is this -- BULALO. It's another Filipino favorite. A lot of families in different areas in the country have built their life and made a life out of this recipe. In Clark, where I work, there's a place called 'BULALUHAN' that is being managed by an Air Force retiree and yeah, people flock there.

At home,we enjoy this recipe every now and then but it is served specially during Christmas and New Year together with Hot Chocolate Batirol. :) It's so simple yet so succulent. But be careful with the marrow and cholesterol. LOL.


Ingredients:
1 kilo Beef
1 kilo special cut beef marrow
2 onions, cut into halves
Onion leeks, thinly sliced
salt
pepper
msg (optional)

Directions:
1. Boil beef meat and marrow till tender with lots of water.
(Option: Refrigerate overnight or less after it cools down and when the fat settles on top, scrape it off. Less cholesterol hehe. Heat it up).
2. Add salt, msg, onions, onion leeks and pepper.
3. Serve hot.

Happy Cooking,
UmbRela

Julie and Julia

At 4pm today while I was trying to figure out what to do with the rest of the day, I switched the channel and landed on HBO. The movie was starting and I had no idea what it was. But I had exactly on the start so I said to myself, maybe this is worth watching.


The setting of the movie was in Paris. Oh I love Paris! I wish I could go there. Then the cast of characters rolled on with Meryl Streep and Amy Adams. Meryl Streep was Julia Child who lived in Paris (but she lived in different places because of her husband's job) and Amy Adams was set in New York. Omg! New York. Queens, New York to be exact, above a pizzeria.

Meryl Streep and her husband, Stanley Tucci were dining at a lovely french restaurant with the waiter deboning the fish. As Meryl Streep tastes the fish, she was in such awe and told her husband that it tastes so good.

I told myself... OK this is going somewhere. This movie is about food. So I googled the title "Julie and Julia" and landed on Wikipedia. It's definitely about food! Yayy!!

The movie is about Julie Powell finding something else to do to get away with the stress of her daily job, which she and her husband figured out that it was cooking. She decided to write a blog about cooking, well, about Julia Child's french cooking. Her mission was 524 recipes in 365 days.

She had her success, she also had meltdowns which included almost losing her husband. She figured that she and Julia Child has a lot in common. Like having a secretarial job in a government agency, having a great husband that supports and loves her and finally, cooking as a getaway.

I actually share the same feeling. Like having a job that I don't wanna do for the rest of my life, and cooking as a getaway, well only I could do cooking during weekends and holidays. If I have another chance, you know, I'll go and enrol in a culinary school, get a diploma and start cooking just anywhere!

Oh! I hope I could get that chance, the chance where I could just begin again and start a new career. It's not too late. Julia Child began her passion for cooking when she was 40+. And Julie Powell began hers while she was busy doing her daily job. I will begin mine soon.. I will with the help of God. :)


Love lots,
UmbRela