Buns, Buns, Buns and Buns

Warm food, warm friendships.
~ Czech Proverb

Polly and Xiao Qin came by this morning to make the buns Ben & I blogged earlier. We made two batches of buns and experimented with four different type of fillings. Polly brought her own (stir-fried) minced pork and Xiao Qin brought some peanut butter. I still had some pulled pork leftover and I also bought some lotus paste from the Great One Supermarket.

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I had the dough prepared the night before. So, we started off immediate filling the dough. Polly and Xiao Qin did the filling for almost all the buns while I played paparazzi. It was pretty hard work as it took almost 1 hour to fill 24 buns. We baked the buns in two different batches.

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Naan Pizza

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Cheese and bread make the cheeks red.
~ German Proverb

This is Suanne’s invention — a good one I must say. Suanne always had a problem making thin crust pizza, you know, the type that is crispy and crunchy. Until today she has not managed to get the dough just right. So, she substituted the dough with Naan bread. Here is what her Naan Pizza looks like:

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The beauty of this pizza is that it’s very fast to make and it taste just great-n-crispy. Most important of all, there are no dishes to wash. This takes only 20 minutes to make. Suanne makes this for breakfast every now and then. You may want to consider making this for lunch with more toppings like pepperoni, roasted chicken, etc.

To make this you need the following five items: Naan bread, pizza sauce, shredded mozarella cheese, parmesan cheese and some herbs. We buy all these from the Real Canadian Superstore and does not cost much.

The Naan bread costs about $3.59 for a pack of 12 pieces. For the herbs, we use Mrs Dash for flavouring. We like Mrs Dash and used that with eggs, spaghetti, etc. It’s healthier than using seasoning salt in our opinion. We estimated that it will costs about $1.25 to make each piece. The most expensive ingredient is the mozzarella (about 2/3 of the total costs).

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Chocolate Chip Cookies

Friends are chocolate chips in the cookie of life!

Believe it or not … Suanne’s chocolate chip cookies were so good that her recipe has landed into the Richmond School Board’s Grade 5/6 curriculum. He he he … not exactly … but this is how things happened: Just before Christmas, Suanne baked some chocolate chip cookies and gave some to Arkensen and Nanzaro’s teachers. Ms T, Arkensen’s class teacher, liked it so much that she told Arkensen she rationed herself to just one a day. She also asked Suanne for the recipe and decided to organize a class baking project using Suanne’s recipe. Well, the project was carried out today by Arkensen’s class in the staff room and the gym’s kitchen. The class was divided into two groups: the boys vs the girls. Here is a picture of the boys’ cookies:

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The two teams were given the written recipe and were expected to make the cookies all by themselves. They are to learn how to read instructions very carefully. Suanne supervised the boys team while Ms T. supervised the girls.

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Suanne can’t be at two places at a time and so she just took pictures of the boys in action. They had a great time and everyone took active part. Everyone wanted a hand in every step of the process that they did the math and divided the tasks equally between themselves. For example, when the recipe called for 4 teaspoons of vanilla extract, the boys divided the task into 8 half-teaspoon so that each of them had a chance to pour it into the mix. That is teamwork!! (more…)

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Spicy Pulled Pork Bun

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The four food groups: Fast, Frozen, Instant, and Chocolate.
~ ahajokes.com

OK, OK … I know, I know, I know … it’s another PORK dish! Sorry-lah bruder! Before you pass any judgement, just take a look at it … mouth-watering, right? Well, it’s another of Suanne’s fave. It’s a bun filled with spicy pulled pork.

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Suanne uses a bread-machine to prepare the dough. It takes two hours for the bread-machine to prepare the dough — that includes rising time. I guess you could also manually knead it but it won’t be easy. Suanne knows of people who uses food processor or standing mixer to prepare the dough.

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It is easy using the bread-machine because you just dump all the ingredients into the pan and set it to dough-cycle. The mixing, kneading and rising process is all done in the machine. You just got to wait for two hours. Ingredients includes milk, egg, flour, sugar, margarine, salt and yeast.

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