Monday, November 26, 2012

Monkey Bread

Monkey Bread 4 Monkey Bread 3

It is Bread Week on Natural Cooking Club! Time to put your favorite bread recipe into action, knead and rise, bake and celebrate this humble food ever exists!

I love bread for its everything. Versatility, variety, history, and ultimately the fun of making it. Just like diving, you'll find what you specifically look for. If you seek adventure, you'll find one. Whether in yeasty dough, rustic starter sourdough, or the light soda bread and baking powder biscuit, you'll get a personal different experience you hardly forget. If you seek comfort, making it was like a meditation, and nothing can beat the comfort of home-baked bread coming right out of your own kitchen. If you need to get your creative juice running, endless of possibility was laid out in front of you, creating your own version of bread that adds to the already gigantic global variety. If you seek romantic past time reminiscing, the aroma will take you there, to the time where life was simple and problems were either to make loaves now or later after the strawberries were picked.

I love Monkey Bread. I love how it looks, how fun it is to make and eat, and how the unbeatable sweet cinnamon bursts in your mouth, covers your fingers to lick clean. I even love the name! For this Monkey Bread, I used my favorite Classic 100% Whole Wheat Bread. Seriously, you can use any bread recipe you like, even biscuits, which I actually plan to make one with. The "monkey" is the shaping process. You ball the dough, dip it into melted butter, throw it in cinnamon sugar mixture to coat, arrange in a pan. You can add nuts or raisins to the cinnamon, add honey to the melted butter, anything you fancy. You can even fill the ball first before dipping and coating, i'm thinking.. cheese cream?

That's it. When you turn it out of the pan onto a plate, you get a beautiful mounded pull-out breads. 
Shiny, gooey, rustic. There, you get your monkey :)

Monkey Bread 2


Monday, November 19, 2012

Sony SLT-A55V: Killer!

Salmon Salad
Taken by Citra Anggraini Kusuma

What do you expect from a mirrorless camera? I expect smaller and lighter camera, of course, yet reliable to produce near-DSLR quality photos, of course. Not too much to ask, huh?

I was lucky the other day, my friend lent me his Sony SLT-A55V with two lenses: 18-250mm f/3.5-6.3 and  50mm f/1.4. I know I always appreciate any camera, how simple it is, how complicated it is. Every camera is special and personal. As if it has its own life and character that communicates and adapts accordingly to its master. But I gotta say I was blown away by this baby.

Disclaimer:
Sony didn't pay me to write this post. Although it will be nice if they did :D
But you can browse on Shopbot to find even newer release of the camera.

The focus is deadly fast and accurate, color is amazing, sharpness and crispness are beyond expectation. I took it to the Food Photography Workshop where Citra, my foodstylist, and I had fun playing with it and produced great food photos. I also took it with me on my diving trip to Tulamben, Bali, as I thought my DSLR would be too bulky to carry.

So these are the photos taken with the camera with no or minimum editing. And by minimum, I mean one or two clicks max on level or color balance.

Nachos

California Sushi Rolls Fish and Chips

Gado-Gado Tea & Palmier Pastry