Macha Pan

I love green tea products. Green tea ice-cream, green tea cake, green tea syrup with red beans. But I'm not crazy about green tea. Don't know why.

Anyway, I was thinking to myself this morning: why isn't there a green tea bread? I looked it up on allrecipes.com and there was none. So, to satisfy my desire to see GREEN TEA BREAD, I decided to create my own confection. (I looked it up again and found a green-tea with red-bean filling bun on MamaFami's Spice & Splendor which looks really nice as well.

Here's what I used:
400gms bread flour
280mls water
1 tsp salt
3 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp milk powder
2 tbsp olive oil
2 tsp vanilla essence
2 tsp green tea powder
1.5 tsp yeast
50gm pumpkin seeds (whole, not chopped)
1 tsp black sesame seeds

Putting it all in the breadmaker with a setting for a 1.5lb dark loaf, this is the result after 3h 45mins:
A very light and refreshing chewing experience. Despite the pervasive green-ness of the bread, the macha aroma is more of an uplifting aftertaste than an overpowering trip to Osaka.
The occasional surprise of a crunchy-nutty pumpkin seed, and the grittiness of sesame made the bites interesting. Overall a nice mix of flavors, I must say. I'm glad I didn't use butter. Olive oil gave the bread the twang I wanted and didn't drag it down with a bovine heaviness.

Ethan was the first to sample it and for the first time he said, 'NICE BREAD!' There is no greater gratification than to have your two-year old pronounce that on your experimental baking.

So there it is, Macha Pan, my very first confectionary creation!

Nutritiondata is awesome

I haven't visited nutritiondata.com in ages to my loss or rather (weight) gain. It's really fantastic now. Just clicking around on it I've found these new features which are really useful:

1. My Tracking - which allows me to add up the day's foods and analyse its content
2. My Foods - which saves a catalog of my choice of foods (and they have an exhaustive fully-searchable database)


3. Custom food entries - where I can key in the breakdown of a food item/dish which is not on their database, and then save it as one of 'My Foods' (So, using the Asian Food Database on nutritiondata.sg I can build my own catalog - like in Bak Kut Teh above.)


I've also noticed that they have added in information on glycemic index and inflammatory index on top of their classic nutritious and filling scores. Who ever knew that bananas were pro-inflammatory?

Truly amazing.

Know what you're McStuffing your face with

It's good that McD's has taken the lead in providing full disclosure of caloric and nutrient information of the food they sell. They certainly took the lead in making the world fat, it's time they redeemed themselves! You will also notice the same information on all their boxes and wrappers so it's quite easy to workout what you're putting in your body.

I had a Sausage McMuffin meal this morning which comes with a Hash Brown and coffee. It was 466kcals. Not too bad. Rule of thumb for me is to avoid the coke (go for Diet Coke every time) and the fries and you won't do much damage.