Feeling Blue...

I make it a point to make a loaf of bread every week.


For this past week, I made a loaf of bread using this mashed purple sweet potatoes. There are two types of purple sweet potatoes available at the market...although both have got purple skins, but for one of them, the inside is orange and not purple. I searched around the internet and followed a suitable bread machine recipe here.

It was the first time I have tried boiling these purple sweet potatoes in water as I prefer to eat steamed ones. After leaving the sweet potatoes to boil for about 10mins, I returned to the kitchen and was shock to be greeted with a pot of water which had turned 'blue-black'. I was hesitating whether to use plain water instead of the dark purplish cooking liquid to make the dough. I wouldn't want to churn out another 'black beauty' (I have tried using oreo crumbs to make bread, and the loaf turned out charcoal black!). In the end, I still stick to the recipe, and used the cooking liquid as I believed the amount used was too little to cause any serious 'damage' to the finished loaf.


Indeed, the dough didn't turned dark purple...it was in a nice pastel purple hue. Although this bread can be made fully by the bread machine, I only used the kneading function(I let the dough knead for about 30mins)...it has long been a habit of mine to shape the dough and bake it with my oven. This way I get to play around with the shape of the loaf and control the browning of the crust.


When freshly baked, the crumbs was pinkish purple in colour. However, when left over night, the colour turned into a deeper tone. The texture was very soft and light on the day it was baked. The bread tasted sweet, just like a sweet bread and was good eaten plain. Unfortunately, this bread didn't seem to keep well. Left over night, the bread turned moist and was dense and heavy. On the second day, it tasted quite 'doughy'...the crumbs tend to stick to the roof of my mouth :(

I guess I won't be going back to this recipe again, as such I won't be translating the recipe and post it here.

On a side note, I have been quite bothered lately, with the downside of blogging. To me, the whole idea of blogging is about sharing and learning with one another who share the same common interest and passion. As much as I can, I will post the recipe for each single blog posting. For me, it does take up a fair bit of my time and some effort is required to put up each post...from baking, taking photos, typing out the recipes, writing up the post and providing relevant links as appropriate. I find it very disturbing whenever I encounter cases where my recipes were copied word for word and posted by others without any acknowledgement. This is especially so when the original recipe is in Chinese as I have taken the time to translate and type out the instructions. Even for recipes which are written in English, I do make it a point to type out the recipes from cookbooks and re-phrase the instructions to make the steps much clearer (or more long-winded, lolz!), which I thot would be good for beginners.

I thot it's time I put a stop to this. I looked up the internet and was happy to be able to find a 'solution' to prevent others from copying my text without my knowledge. I installed some codes into my blogger template to disable the 'right-click, copy & paste' function. It was quite easily done, but, it was not a happy ending after all.

It bothers me when readers commented that they find it troublesome to hand-copy or type out my recipes, especially when the instructions are pretty long (lesson learned...don't be so long-winded ;p). I don't mean to create the inconvenience since it defeats the whole purpose of sharing if I make it difficult for others to access the recipes. I tried to look up for ways to install codes so that with a click, one is able to convert the recipes to printer-friendly documents. However, I almost 'see stars' just reading through the instructions! I am simply too lazy and won't want to mess around with the html codes.

I have now removed the script that disabled the right-click function. I guess I have to come to terms that there is not much I can do to prevent others from lifting my text, and accept the fact that it's part and parcel of the blogging world. I would probably blog less in the future, as I think I should be spending more time coaching my kids with their studies! Maybe I should just stick to flickr....which requires less writing (something which I am really very weak at) and focus more on photography. All my photos posted here are simply 'point & shoot', without any techniques or skills. I would love to spend some time to acquire knowledge in this field...at least for once, I must get down to figure out how to use the various functions in my camera ;)

More about → Feeling Blue...

A New Toy

I bought a new toy the other day: a blood glucose meter. I was curious about my post-meal blood glucose after my HbA1c reading came back higher than I was expecting. A blood glucose meter is the only way to know what your blood sugar is doing in your normal setting.

"Glucose intolerance" is the inability to effectively control blood glucose as it enters the bloodstream from the digestive system. It results in elevated blood sugar after eating carbohydrate, which is not a good thing. In someone with normal glucose tolerance, insulin is secreted in sufficient amounts, and the tissues are sufficiently sensitive to it, that blood glucose is kept within a fairly tight range of concentrations.

Glucose tolerance is typically the first thing to deteriorate in the process leading to type II diabetes. By the time fasting glucose is elevated, glucose intolerance is usually well established. Jenny Ruhl talks about this in her wonderful book Blood Sugar 101. Unfortunately, fasting glucose is the most commonly administered glucose test. That's because the more telling one, the oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT), is more involved and more expensive.

An OGTT involves drinking a concentrated solution of glucose and monitoring blood glucose at one and two hours. Values of >140 mg/dL at one hour and >120 mg/dL at two hours are considered "normal". If you have access to a blood glucose meter, you can give yourself a makeshift OGTT. You eat 60-70 grams of quickly-digesting carbohydrate with no fat to slow down absorption and monitor your glucose.

I gave myself an OGTT tonight. I ate a medium-sized boiled potato and a large slice of white bread, totaling about 60g of carbohydrate. Potatoes and bread digest very quickly, resulting in a blood glucose spike similar to drinking concentrated glucose! You can see that in the graph below. I ate at time zero. By 15 minutes, my blood glucose had reached its peak at 106 mg/dL.


My numbers were 97 mg/dL at one hour, and 80 mg/dL at two hours; far below the cutoff for impaired glucose tolerance. I completely cleared the glucose by an hour and 45 minutes. My maximum value was 106 mg/dL, also quite good. That's despite the fact that I used more carbohydrate for the OGTT than I would typically eat in a sitting. I hope you like the graph; I had to prick my fingers 10 times to make it! I thought it would look good with a lot of data points.

I'm going to have fun with this glucose meter. I've already gotten some valuable information. For example, just as I suspected, fast-digesting carbohydrate is not a problem for someone with a well-functioning pancreas and insulin-sensitive tissues. This is consistent with what we see in the Kitavans, who eat a high-carbohydrate, high glycemic load diet, yet are extremely healthy. Of course, for someone with impaired glucose tolerance (very common in industrial societies), fast-digesting carbohydrates could be the kiss of death. The big question is, what causes the pancreas to deteriorate and the tissues to become insulin resistant? Considering certain non-industrial societies were eating plenty of carbohydrate with no problems, it must be something about the modern lifestyle: industrially processed grains (particularly wheat), industrial vegetable oils, refined sugar, lack of fat-soluble vitamins, toxic pollutants and inactivity come to mind. One could make a case for any of those factors contributing to the problem.

More about → A New Toy

For the Love of Matcha

Ever since I started my baking journey, I have developed the love for matcha. Recipes with matcha would always catch my attention. Even my elder boy has been influenced by me...he has been telling me for a long time that he would like to have a taste of Green Tea Mcflurry. He finally got to try it a week ago...it was a rare occasion that we dropped by the McDonald's after dinner on a weekday night...we were there just so that we could collect the latest Darth Vader figurine that came with the Happy meal! The cup of green tea ice cream didn't look appetizing at all...it was just vanilla ice cream served haphazardly with a generous heap of green tea powder. I told my kid, from now on, I can make him a homemade-version anytime ;)



Back to my baking...I made this batch of Matcha Buns following the dough recipe for these garlic buns. I added a teaspoon of matcha powder to the recipe and relied on my bread machine to do the kneading. I like the way the dough turned out...very smooth, elastic and non-sticky...which made shaping the doughs a breeze.


To add flavour, I wrapped some mini-chocolate chips in each bun. I would love to use adzuki beans, but I didn't have ready-made ones with me and I won't want to go through the hassle to make my own red bean paste, lazy me! I baked the buns in paper liners, unfortunately, they were one size too big!

Thanks to the wonders of icing sugar, with just a light dusting, the finished buns looked so much more appealing, don't you think so?





It is indeed a wonderful and yet simple bread recipe, the buns stayed soft even after 2 days. I could taste just a hint of matcha but the chocolate chips went well with it. Without doubt, this recipe is gonna be a keeper!

More about → For the Love of Matcha

GIRLIE OREO MACARONS

Oreo cookies buzzed up in a Blizzard from Dairy Queen are my idea of summer. There's nothing better than sittin' against a log on the beach watching the sun set into English Bay while slowly scraping the slender plastic red spoon across the craggy soft-serve vanilla ice cream studded with brown-black cookie chunks.

Summer is slowly slipping away and the evenings are chillier in Vancouver. Instead of the Blizzard, fall beckons me to create macarons!

Though you won't find pink anywhere in my wardrobe, for some reason I find it a very appealing colour contrast for anything chocolate. Pink and brown are fabulous together and in terms of baked goods, you've seen how well they go over in my Girlie Chocolate Buttermilk Cupcakes! Yummo!

I was aiming for the flavours of an oreo cookie but I wanted something more girlie and more delicate. I think Oreo cookies with a pink filling instead of white would be such a big seller! I know my kid would be dragging me down the local cookie aisle for them.

So, instead of the shortening-laden oreo-cookie filling, I grabbed a huge hunk of white chocolate from my wine fridge. By the way, did I tell you that along with my red wine, I've been storing chocolate in my wine fridge? I've been doing this for years. It's so working out for me! The chocolate never gets a bloom, and it never melts in the summer. My two favourite things in one special little temperature-controlled environment. Unorthodox, yes, but I love it.

The white chocolate buttercream...well, it was so delicious! I totally winged it and just chopped up about 6 oz of some Callebaut white chocolate, melted it and added it to my buttercream in the mixer. The texture of the filling turned out to be like that of oreo cookie filling and the flavour was definitively of white chocolate. And any buttercream tastes better when it's pink! To my trusty tried and true favourite basic macaron recipe, I added a couple of tablespoons of dark cocoa powder to the batter. My macaron shells were topped with organic crushed cocoa nibs. They were a lovely textural contrast and injected another dimension of cocoa flavour to the delicate French cookie. I loved how the pink white chocolate buttercream contrasted with the dark cocoa macaron shells. They were so edible.

There you have it: my Girlie Oreo Macarons

More about → GIRLIE OREO MACARONS

Mini Snowskin Mooncakes

Our first homemade snowskin mooncakes...

I always have the impression that mooncake-making is something that involves very complicated steps, very time consuming, and any effort to try it would unlikely pay off very well. It was only after reading a recent article featured in the papers that I learned that snowskin mooncakes are actually quite simple to make, especially when baking supply stores here are well-stock with all the necessary ingredients, including ready-made fillings. The recipe which was published alongside the article almost made me wanted to drop everything and rush to the nearest store to get all the items. Well, I got all the items a few days later...except one important tool, that is, a mooncake mold! I didn't quite like the designs of the molds available at the store, and I didn't want to buy one since I wasn't sure how the mooncakes would turn out. So I used a set of cookie cutters instead. This is nothing new, as I have seen several very creative bloggers use their Disney cookie cutters to shape their mooncakes.

When I told my kids that I was going to try making mooncakes for them, they too got very excited, and were very eager to help me out. Both had fun shaping the dough and the fillings into small rounds. I finds it very satisfying to release the finished mooncake from the cutter. It was also a surprise that they tasted really delicious, I certain didn't have any high expectations when I was making them! Everyone commented that the sweetness was just right. The snow skin was soft and a little 'QQ' which means chewy. The ready-made white lotus paste was smooth and not overly sweet. Those who have tried them were all thumbs up. Our first attempt at making mooncakes was a great success.

Before I went on to make the second batch of mooncakes with my remaining ingredients, I searched around the internet for other recipes to try. It was only then that I discovered that fruit juices can be used to replace the water in the recipe. So, for the second batch, I tried with this recipe here. I divided the ingredients into two equal portions...I used mango juice for one portion, and the other I experimented with pomegranate juice...both were what I had in the fridge. The pomegranate gave a pleasant purple tint to the dough. However, without the use of any artificial essence, the flavour was not prominent. I tried moulding the mooncakes with my Pooh cutters, but it was not as easy as I thought. I couldn't achieve a smooth surface, Pooh's face looked all cracked and wrinkled ;') In the end, I had to fall back on the piggy cutter.


This is the last batch I made yesterday. The yellow snow skins were made with mango juice and I used strawberry milk to made the pink ones. Again, I didn't use a proper moon cake mould, instead, I used a set of improvised moulds...which happens to be my old plastic koniyaku jelly trays.


I have pretty much convinced myself that I should get a mooncake mould next year. It's very obvious that the surface of the finished mooncakes were filled with awful cracks. I wondered whether it was the way I mixed and kneaded the dough? Do I have to knead it longer in order to get a very smooth skin?? Furthermore, I read that the proportion of the dough to filling ratio should be roughly 40% : 60%. As such, I used about 20g of dough to 30g of fillings. However, I find that the dough was a little too thin for easy wrapping the fillings.


We made this assortment of mooncakes and the kids were very proud to give them to their Granny. It was a good learning experience and I hope I can do a better job next year!



With this set of calligraphy done by my younger boy (yes, he stil has got a long long way to go before he could reach his brother's standard), I wish all of you who will be celebrating the mooncake festive today, 中秋节快乐!

More about → Mini Snowskin Mooncakes

Inactivity and Weight Gain

Most of the papers I read in the field pay lip-service to some familiar stories: thrifty genes; calories in, calories out; energy density; fat intake; gluttony and sloth.

It may sound counterintuitive, but how do we know that inactivity causes overweight and not the other way around?  In other words, isn't it possible that metabolic deregulation could cause both overweight and a reduced activity level? The answer is clearly yes. There are a number of hormones and other factors that influence activity level in animals and humans. For example, the "Zucker fatty" rat, a genetic model of severe leptin resistance, is obese and hypoactive (I wrote about it here). It's actually a remarkable facsimile of the metabolic syndrome. Since leptin resistance typically comes before insulin resistance and predicts the metabolic syndrome, modern humans may be going through a process similar to the Zucker rat.

Back to the paper. Dr. Nicholas Wareham and his group followed 393 healthy white men for 5.6 years. They took baseline measurements of body composition (weight, BMI and waist circumference) and activity level, and then measured the same things after 5.6 years. In a nutshell, here's what they found:

• Sedentary time associates with overweight at any given timepoint. This is consistent with other studies.


• Overweight at the beginning of the study predicted inactivity after 5.6 years.
  


• Inactivity at the beginning of the study was not associated with overweight at the end.

In other words, overweight predicts inactivity but inactivity does not predict overweight. With the usual caveat that these are just associations, this is not consistent with the idea that inactivity causes overweight. It is consistent with the idea that overweight causes inactivity, or they are both caused by something else.

More about → Inactivity and Weight Gain

Welcome SITS Readers

I am so extremely flattered! Heather from "The Secret is in the Sauce" picked me to be their featured blogger today! Thank you ladies!

Just a little about me...I am a creative person by nature. With three busy little ones running around, I don't have a whole lot of time to put into that part of myself in this season of my life. Sure, I dabble a bit now and then, so I take out my creativity on my daughter's heads. My husband refers to it as "hair art". I have so much fun talking to my daughters while I twist and contort their hair to whatever my hearts desire is that day. Just this morning I got a rundown of the entire third grade class at my daughters elementary school.

I want to thank all of you that have come to my little corner of the internet! Have a look around, make yourself at home, enter a contest!

More about → Welcome SITS Readers