Eat 6 of These and Call Me in the Morning - Dr. Tamara's Awesome Brownies

Living in Singapore as a foreigner, you get used to the fact that many of your friends leave to go home again, wherever that might be. I'm sure this happens in other places as well, but I of course feel it more acutely here. I've made many good friends here - but many have moved away. I'll stay in touch and see them sometimes when I travel, but for the most part, they are gone. (Well, at least until Facebook happened...)

So it's pretty rare that somebody, especially another foreigner, moves *back* to Singapore. Which is what my friend Tamara did. She moved here in the mid-90's, set up a very successful chiropractor practice (she's the best) and then a few years later, moved to China to be with her husband.

A couple of years ago, she moved back and resumed helping bad golfers like me recover from our excesses, being a great friend to many people and delighting everybody she met with her great heart and phenomenal baking skills. Cookies, tarts, cakes - but most of all, Tamara's brownies - were always the hit of any party. And she baked prodigiously. It's amazing she had time for anybody's back...

Often she'd drop by with 2 or 3 boxes of some great baked delights, saying she just did them in her spare time and thought the kids and I might like some.

Might, indeed. We were lucky if they lasted to dinner time.

Anyways, Tamara is once again packing up her chiropractor tools and baking tins, and leaving us - this time for Perth. While she promises to one day return, she leaves behind many good friends, lots of adoring patients, and thousands of children bereft at the hole she is leaving in their dessert menus.

Luckily for all of us, she's also leaving behind her recipe for those great brownies. Modestly, she says they are nothing much, but we all know differently. (In typical Tamara-style, she even makes two different batches each time - one with nuts and one without - and then goes so far as to label them!)


Tamara, we'll miss you (again). But your brownies will always stay with us.... Thanks for everything.

Tamara's Brownies:
3/4 cup flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup butter
1/4 cocoa
3/4 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
3/4 cup nuts
Melt butter, stir in cocoa and cool. Add sugar, eggs, vanilla. Mix in dry ingredients. Add nuts if desired.
Bake at 350F for 25-30 minutes.

FROSTING

Cream 1/2 cup butter with 2 cups icing sugar. Beat 2 tsp vanilla, 2 Tbsp milk and 1 cup icing sugar into mixture. Gradually add 1 to 2 Tbsp milk into icing until smooth and of desired spreading consistency. For a chocolate icing add 1/3 cup sifted cocoa to the first addition of icing sugar.

"I sometimes just throw the frosting ingredients in a bowl without measuring. This frosting recipe makes a lot of frosting. But then I often make 2-4 pans of frosting to take over to friends parties if this amount of frosting is made. "

Chicken Liver Pate with Green Peppercorns - Sunday, April 25, 2010

(Photo courtesy of http://trueslant.com/mikehess/)

Like Motley Crue, my weekend was full of girls, girls, girls. Must have been 12, 15 of 'em around. All of them under the age of 7. Quite the tsunami of happy, silly, fun energy. If this is what it's like at 7, I can hardly wait til they're all 12 or 14 - I'm definitely going to need reinforcements.

I almost certainly moved a few steps closer to being allowed into heaven after taking 4 girls under the age of 7 to buy a hamster at the local mall on Saturday. They ooh'ed, they ah'ed, they squealed, they shouted "daddydaddydaddy" a few hundred times. They told me that when this hamster dies, they wanted a horse.

But the trip was a success and we're now the proud owners of a miniscule, smelly rodent that bites and poops a lot but the girls just adore. Depending on who you're talking to - and when - it's either named "SqueakSqueak" "NumNum" or "Stripey". It was sweet though; I got to be hero for a day and was justly rewarded with a nap afterwards. We'll see how attentive the girls are to the new pet. I certainly don't intend on shopping for a horse any time soon.

If that wasn't enough, I decided to have a few friends over for an ad hoc BBQ on Sunday. A "few" turned in 15 or 16, luckily most of them were kids. Teresa brought over some lamb shanks (we think - they were in her freezer for a long time), a large hunk of beef she thinks was a London Broil and a large variety of sausages. I cooked up the corn and potatoes, there was plenty of wine, swimming, running around like banshees and everybody had a good time, it seems. The kids certainly slept well.

While we were cooking, the adults ate a big hunk of really ripe Valencay (a French goat cheese that, after an hour or so in the tropics, resembles Jabba the Hut - though far tastier) with some sliced baguette and Wasa crackers. And a chicken liver pate I made earlier in the day.

We buy chicken from the same guy at the wet market every weekend and sometimes he gives us a bag of chicken livers as a bit of a bonus. We got a pound of them on Saturday and since I knew we'd be having the bbq, I thought I'd try something new with them. The "Silver Palate Cookbook" has been on my shelf for a long time and many of its recipes seem a bit dated - kind of 70's. But every once in awhile, I can still find a gem in there, and this is one.

The pate is quite easy to make and people were literally licking the bowl clean. That may say more about my bbq skills than the pate, but people genuinely seemed to like it and it disappeared pretty quickly. I substituted vermouth for cognac with no ill effects - and I added about a spoonful of rendered chicken fat we had skimmed from the soup the day before. Oddly, I didn't have a 2 cup terrine vessel lying around, but a standard bowl worked fine.

My own pictures to come shortly.

6 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup finely minced yellow onion
2 cloves garlic; peeled chopped
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1/2 cup celery tops
10 black peppercorns
2 bay leaves
6 cups Water
1 pound chicken livers
2 tablespoons Cognac
1/2 teaspoon Salt
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
5 teaspoons Water-packed green peppercorns; drained
1/4 cup heavy cream

Melt the butter in skillet. Add the onion, garlic and thyme and cook,covered, over medium heat for about 25 minutes, or until onion is tender and lightly colored.

Meanwhile add celery tops, black peppercorns and bay leaves to 6 cups of water in a saucepan. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer for 10 minutes.

Add chicken livers to water and simmer gently for about 10 minutes, livers should still be slightly pink inside.

Drain livers, discard celery tops, bay leaves and peppercorns, and place livers, butter, onion and garlic in the bowl of a food processor fitted with a steel blade. Add Cognac salt. pepper, allspice and 4 teaspoons of the green peppercorns. Process until smooth.

Pour in the cream and process again to blend. Transfer to a bowl and stir in remaining teaspoon of green peppercorns.

Scrape mixture into a 2 cup terrine, cover, and refrigerate for at least 4 hours before serving. Let pate stand at room temperature for 30 minutes before serving.

(Yield: 2 cups)