5-Star Makeover: Beetroot Shikai Maki with Shiitake Mushroom and French Bean Filling

hosted by 5 Star Foodie & Lazaro Cooks!

I really don't know where the time went...2012 seems to whizz by so fast and now the time for the second 5-Star Makeover Challenge of the year has arrived. I missed last month's challenge due to disorganization on my part, plus I think I must've lost my creativity cap somewhere during the end-of-year festivities and holidays :). Well, I found it again (just) and for this month's key ingredient, beetroot, I decided to go for an Asian-themed dish.

Diva D is an excellent sushi-maker and her deep love of Japanese food and culture has compelled her to learn how to prepare all sorts of Japanese cuisine from cookbooks and yes, YouTube. Her sushi-rolling skills are pretty advanced to the point that she is now teaching me how to do some of the more creative patterns. Like this pretty Shikai Maki roll, for example.

Watching her make some plain ones a few days ago inspired me to created this beetroot shikai maki. I thought the red of the beets would be visually striking contained within the squarish roll. A shikai maki usually has an empty space in the middle and this can be filled with all sorts of flavors. This time round, I opted for a totally vegetarian dish.

I got hold of some sweet and tender baby beets that I cooked and mashed into the sushi rice. To complement the beet-flavored rice, I made a filling out of Shiitake mushrooms and French beans sauteed with a dash of oyster sauce, honey and seasoning. Wrapped up in Nori, this beet-themed dish had a lovely and a not-too-overpowering sweet and savory note to it.

On hindsight, I wish I'd created an equally 5-star dipping sauce to go with the shikai maki but I was in a bit of a rush to finish photographing and writing this post, it completely slipped my mind! Oh well, let's just say that simplicity and elegance is the order of the day. :)

As always, many thanks go to our superb challenge hosts, Natasha of 5-Star Foodie and Lazaro of Lazaro Cooks! The round-up of participants' makeover dishes will be this Friday over at Natasha's blog, so don't forget to head over there to see what innovations they've come up with.

PS. I did a photo-tutorial on how to create this shikai maki pattern below. If I had more time (read: if I had better time management), this would've been a video.

Beetroot Shikai Maki with Shiitake Mushroom and French Bean Filling

Serves 2

Ingredients:

3 square nori sheets

2 cups cooked sushi rice

5-6 baby beetroot, roasted or steamed until very soft

2-3 tablespoons vinegar

4 French beans, each sliced into two

6 fresh Shiitake mushrooms, finely chopped

2 garlic cloves, minced

1 scallion, finely diced

2-3 tablespoons olive oil, for sautéing

2 tablespoons oyster sauce
1 tablespoon honey

Approx ½ cup water

Salt and pepper to taste

Method:

1. Prepare the filling: Heat olive oil in a pan on medium high heat and sauté the garlic and scallion for 1 minute. Add the French beans and mushroom and stir for another minute.

2. Stir in the oyster sauce, honey and water and cover pan to let the vegetables steam and soften, about 2 minutes. Remove from heat and season with salt and pepper. Set aside to cool slightly.

3. Preparing the sushi rice: Add vinegar to the hot rice in a bowl and stir until well incorporated. Add the softened beetroot to the bowl and with a fork, gently mash the beets into the rice. Let this cool slightly before using (see below).

Assembly:

1. Cut one square sheet of nori into two. Overlap them to create one long piece.

2. Arrange a thin layer of beetroot-sushi rice covering the entire length of the nori. Roll tightly from one end to the other.

3. Cut roll into quarters lengthwise. Flip the quarters so the inside corners face outwards.

4. On another half-sheet of nori, place bottom two quarters and place mushroom and french bean filling along the crease created between these two quarters.

5. Place the remaining two quarters on top of the filling, then carefully wrap the half-sheet of nori around the four quarters, rolling the whole thing into a square. Do the same with the remaining nori sheets.

6. With a very sharp knife, slice roll according to desired thickness. Serve immediately with soy sauce dip.

Tips:

• When pressing the sushi rice down on the nori sheet, frequently dip your fingertips (if using) or the back of a spoon in a small bowl of salted water. This prevents your fingers or the spoon from sticking to the rice.

• When slicing roll, wipe blade of knife with a damp cloth in between slices. This allows for neater cuts and prevents sticking.

Savory Tomato and Beetroot Cobbler with Turmeric Curry Leaf Biscuit Topping

Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.

~ Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

Our party host Penny of Jeroxie blog had us all 'cobblered' this month and believe me when I say this... it is a rare occasion that I will post something savory up on this blog, least of all a cobbler. When you hear the word 'cobbler', images of the freshest seasonal fruits dotted all over or buried underneath something sweet tend to flash across the mind. Correction, make that my mind.

French Fridays with Dorie - Creamy, Cheesy, Garlicky Rice with Spinach, Mushrooms and Beetroot

The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.

~ Maya Angelou

Just a few weeks back, my father met this man. He is 111 years old... I'm not kidding you, there's proof he is "of that certain age". They both attended a group that read scriptures together (a kind of spiritual support group with a therapist called God). These gatherings took place in the evenings and by the time they finished, it was usually close to 11pm. This guy, who's still too young to make it into the Guinness World Records apparently, was always sent to and picked up from the site by his son. But on the few occasions when his son was going to be late, my father offered to send the man home. Listen, if you're 111 years old, you don't want to be hanging around outside on your own near midnight - anywhere. 

International Incident Party: Somewhere Over The Rainbow...

It seemed that I blinked and it's already December. Time to celebrate our greatest moments over the year but more importantly, time for another International Incident Party! Penny of Jeroxie.com as our lovely host has wisely pronounced 'Colour' a.k.a. 'Color' as the theme of this month's party. What better way to see the year out than with a big bang, an explosion of culinary colors? 

In the six months since I've embarked on this blogging journey (I'm a mere baby in the blogosphere!), my kitchen has seen its fair share of rainbow-like dishes gracing its countertop and table. I certainly like to play with the most vibrant colors naturally available - reds, greens, yellows - but there is one oddity and that is my predilection for purple and pink. Strange really, because I'm not terribly feminine in outlook or appearance (in fact, I often imagine myself as a tattoed-up Jesse James with boobies and a black leather apron, real baad, oh yeah!). All this time, my poor brain may possibly be rebelling against this constant desire to be a biker-foodie chick, resulting in recipes that manifest themselves as the girliest-looking concoctions, as you can witness below:  

1. Purple Somen Noodles in Capsicum Bowl

2. Amazing Technicolor Gratin

3. Red Dragonfruit Granita

4. Cashew Crusted Dragonfruit Hearts and Matcha Cheesecake

5. Nectarine, Pistachio and Grape Jelly

6. Tamarind Pasta with Muscovado Chilli Sauce

7. Green Tea Rolls with Purple Sweet Potato Filling

8. Fruity Il Gianfornaio

Anyway, back to this party. I was so excited to showcase more colors in my food that I ended up preparing a three-course meal bursting with flavors and vibrancy. I suggest you put your sunglasses on now as it's going to get crazy-bright in here ;-).

Appetizer: Colorific Salad-in-a-Sushi 

A refeshing, colorful salad presented in sushi form! Slivers of red cabbage, cucumber, carrot, beetroot, yellow pepper and mango are encased in fried egg-sheets, which are again rolled within nori sheets. If you can roll sushi, you can definitely roll these. They're slightly larger versions of regular sushi but they look like pyschedelic babes on a plate! My heart hurt to have to eat these, but hey, someone's got to do it...

Main course: Mother-in-Law's Tongue Pasta (Lingua di Suocera)

I've been intrigued with these unbelievably stunning noodles for a while but when I googled it up, there was no information on how to actually make it. For now, it seems that the secret recipe and technique for producing this pasta will remain with the Marella family in Puglia, Italy who makes these by hand! Never one to give up, I bravely attempted my own version of Lingua di Suocera. However let me just put on record that my real-life mother-in-law's tongue was not the inspiration for this creation (in fact, I'd be worried if hers took on these hues!).

I experimented with 6 colors derived from carrot (orange), spinach (green), black sesame (black), blueberry jam! (blue), turmeric powder (yellow) and cocoa powder (brown), and left one plain. It was pretty tedious work lining up the linguine-sized noodles lengthwise against one another before rolling them flat to seal - and of course, they never do in the exact way you want them to - then trimming off the edges to form a wide, flat, stripey, colorful noodle.

It was a warm afternoon when I made this, and after painstakingly crafting a whole set of just 5 noodles, I gave up and  jumped into the pool with the kids. The rest of the linguine was not wasted though, they were heaped together and cooked into a gorgeous multicolored pasta dish that my young housemates devoured after their swim. Luckily, I remembered to take a snapshot before it was all gone!

But here's the real star of the party, my version of Mother-in-Law's Tongue pasta accompanied by red cabbage, garlic and coriander (cilantro) sauteed in butter. Those Italians have totally got it sussed out, they know exactly what it takes to make food that take your breath away. 

  

 

Hmm, I could stare at this the whole day.... if only I wasn't so hungry.

Dessert: Sweet Potato and Coconut Milk Agar

This purplelicious layered agar is flavored with purple and orange sweet potatoes and coconut milk, two ingredients that go extremely well together. The topmost layer contains thin strands of purple sweet potatoes (achieved using a mandoline) encased in sweetened clear agar. For the opaque sweet potato layers, the potatoes are first steamed and then blended with hot agar liquid to form a puree. Despite its carb contents, this pretty layered dessert makes for a delicious and surprisingly light finisher!

I had fun creating these dishes, it felt as if the rainbow had somehow shone its way into my kitchen and inspired me to look closer at its spectrum for ways to brighten up the plain old plate. Now before you come here looking for that pot of gold, check out what colorful goodies the other participants came up with by clicking on the thumbnails below. 

In the interest of maintaining a fun and light International Incident Party atmosphere, all recipes featured here will be posted separately in the coming few days. We wouldn't want to derive yawns resulting from a long-drawn out post now, do we? Haha, no we so wouldn't.

Don't forget to put some (natural) color in your lives and on your plates. Thanks for reading, and yes, you can take those sunglasses off now!

Beetroot Cake

I've been wanting to try this beetroot cake recipe out for ages, and I had a chance the other day. This was actually a recipe for carrot cake, given by my friend Noraini all those years ago in Germany. I've always loved it because you just need a blender to mix everything together and then it's ready to bake. And yes, it tastes finger-lickin' good, as Colonel Sanders likes to say!

Btw, I've substituted the carrots in the original recipe with beetroot, a very healthy (and very RED) vegetable that we don't often eat at home for some strange reason. You'll see what I mean when I said "Just blend everything together"....

I LOVE the rich colour of a beetroot!

Chopped!

Everything in its own layer in the blender.

Layers: Sugar, Veg oil, vanilla extract, eggs, beetroot

Blending away

Mix with some flour and pour into a lined baking pan. Still loving the purply-red tone!

Once cooked...yikes, the beetroot turned a caramel colour.

Still yummy though, with a splash of chocolate sauce on top.