Faux Yogi Biscuits

The following recipe is, and I have this on good authority, extraordinarily healthy. It will make you live longer, happier, increase you jump height and your performance in bed. It will also help you lie better, c.f. the above.

If you are ambitious, you will of course want to make 'real' yogi biscuits, not faux yogi biscuits. Very well. That recipe is even simpler: First, go and catch yourself a yogi. They like to hang out near Buddhist or Hinduist temples, just follow the smell of incense. Rap the yogi smartly on the head - they generally do not put up a great struggle, as they are all vegan and hence very weak. Drag him home and grind him up. Add a bit of sesame if you want to, a dash of honey and put him in the oven.

Unfortunately, yogis are increasingly hard to come by here in Switzerland, probably due to overhunting by eager yogi-biscuit makers. Luckily my friend K. gave me the following faux yogi biscuit recipe, handed down in her family for generations:

You'll need:


*) 250 g of butter
*) 3/4 of a cup of sugar (brown, my girlfriend insists)
*) 3 cups of oat flakes
*) 2 cups of  whole grain flour
*) 1/2 a cup of awesome grains or nuts. (Sunflower, sesame, almonds, walnuts, go nuts)
*) 1/2 a cup of  raisins, soaked in water over night
*) 1 tsp of cinnamon
*) 1/4 tsp of salt or NaHCO₃ (baking soda)
*) pinch of powdered clove and ginger (the plant, not red-haired people without souls)

Preheat oven to 200°C.
Heat the butter in a water bath until liquid, then dissolve the sugar in it. Mix all the other ingredients in a bowl. Add the butter and stir. If its too dry, add a bit of warm water, the dough should stay fairly viscous, though. Use the lid of a nutella jar or something similar to form the cookies on a baking tray. Shove into the oven, and bake for about 20 minutes.
The biscuits will taste best after two or three days.

Rye bread

They don't know how to make bread in western Switzerland. It's all fluffy baguette and croissants - nice on a Saturday morning with du café and a pretty lady in your bed, but nothing you can really subsist on - not the wonderful, heavy and dark bread we have in Austria. So, after my success with the lazy-man's loaf, I decided to make my own.

First thing you'll need is a proper sourdough, since a 100% rye-bread won't rise properly on yeast (I know, for I have tried!). For the past two weeks I have been feeding my sourdough starter - I started from scratch with viscous paste of rye flour and water. My first attempt turned bad, but the second:

A sourdough starter. Each day I would feed it a few spoonfuls of rye flour and water, which it greedily devoured.

After two weeks its rising power convinced me, so I fed it up to about half a kg, made a very wet rye dough ( the starter, about 500g more rye flour, some salt, ground coriander and water). I let it rise for three hours, shoved it into the oven, and voilà:

Rye bread! I was a bit too light on the salt, and the next one will get some cumin as well, I think, but still, it was delicious. Next batch will be up tomorrow.

How to cut pizza

I cannot believe I never thought of this before:

The dainty hand of F wielding the sacred pizza-scissors.

Saves the precious, precious edge of your knife. Doesn't scratch the backing tray. Doesn't make a mess. Thought to me by my ingenious girlfriend F.

Sous vide, pork

I made a 24 hour pork roast yesterday (despite RelaxMax's disapproval) - my thanks go to Frank who informed me on how to rise the temperature of a rice cooker: just wrap it in a towel, since the warm setting has no temperature control, depending on the thermal properties of the cooker to reach its temperature.

Wrapping the rice cooker in a towel raised the temperature to 64 degrees Celsius. I seasoned the pork roast with some rosemary and thyme, and left it in its zip-lock back to stew for a day. Then I seared its outside in my trusty cast-iron pan (a roast is a bit too large to comfortably sear with my blowtorch). Very tender.

Sous vide, first try

I've been wanting to try out sous vide cooking for the longest time, unfortunately my kitchen is just too small to fit a water bath in. But recently I had a sudden brain storm - the rice cooker I recently bought has two different settings, cook and warm. And the warm setting maintains a temperature of 57 degrees Celsius. Perfect for a medium rare steak, but just too low for poultry. Yet a bit of experimentation showed that I could use the cook setting and a digital thermometer to set the temperature to, say, 63 degrees, and then the warm cycle would maintain it for two hours, easily. So I bought some turkey fillets and voilà:

Seal them into a zip-lock bag with some salt, pepper and herbs, drop it into the water and wait for two hours. The meat comes out delicious and tender. But Boris, I can hear you scream, what about the delicious Maillard reactions you get in a pan, the crunchy brown bits that impart so much of the flavour? Well, fear not, gentle reader: Enter my favourite kitchen tool, the blowtorch:

This is cooking the way I like it

Mmmh. Don't let the awful white-balance fool you, that piece of dead turkey was scrumptious.

Cooking in your rice cooker

After reading this at lifehacker, I rushed out and bought a rice cooker. Best 25 CHF I've spent in a while.

But Boris, I hear you whine, can't you easily make rice in a pot?

Shaddup, and behold the

Fake Indian Rice and Lentils Dhalish Kind of Dish:

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups of rice
3/4 cup green lentils
a carrot, diced hacked into pitiful pieces
a clove of garlic, sliced into slices
an onion, likewise
a tomato, hexadecimaled
4 cups of broth

Put some oil into your rice-cooker. Add, in this order, while stirring: onion (stir until glazed), carrots and garlic (stir for a minute or so), rice (toss until coated with oil), the rest. Put in some curry powder, or ginger, salt and pepper, or five spices powder, or garam masala. I don't care, go wild. Heck, put in some diced chicken for all I care.



Close the rice cooker, it will do it's magic. Eat when finished.

Cold brewing

No time today for a long Vietnam post, although the Cao Đài are waiting in the wings.

Here is something else I've picked up in Vietnam: Cold brewing your own iced tea. It's right simple: Grab a bottle, stuff some tea in it, leave it in the fridge overnight. Hey presto! Iced tea. Philistines may want to add sugar or other horrifying additives; me, I take it straight. 'Cause I am manly that way.

Lamb roast on a bed of leek and potatoes

Ahh, Easter. The perfect time of the year to kill some innocent young sheep, shove them into the oven and have their succulent flesh melt on your tongue - to remind us of our benevolent god, of course. Also, zombie-jesus.

But I digress. Having acquired a piece of dead lamb, a bit less than a kilo of leg to be precise, I proceeded to season it thusly:

Crush some rosemary and thyme (a handful if fresh), two cloves of garlic and pepper and salt in a mortar. Add a glug of olive oil, and pound to a paste. Then, take a knife and poke a couple of holes into the meat. Widen them with your finger, and stuff some of the paste in. Rub the rest on the roast.

Cut some potatoes in slices, and a stalk of leek into slices. Season with woody herbs (I just used some herbes de la provence), salt and pepper and toss in olive oil. Put the bed down in a receptacle and place the lamb upon it. It'll look like this:

Sweet innocent lamb/ how lively thou grazed/ now hacked apart/ about to be glazed

Shove the whole thing into the preheated oven at 250 Celsius. Maniacal cackling is optional. Now comes the math. Yes, lamb roast requires math. It'll need to stay in the oven for 20 minutes, plus 13 minutes for every half kilo of lamb. At least, that is the formula for some medium rare lamb. Use 10 minutes per half kilogram if you like your mutton still bleating (<-see what I did here?), or 16 minute if you are one of those philistines who likes it 'well done' (a misnomer if there ever was one!).

Turn the roast every half hour, but at least once. When done, take it out and LEAVE IT ALONE. On the outside, you may cover it with a bit of aluminium foil. Only after the roast has rested for ten minutes may you carve it, yea, and not before, for it displeaseth the lord and also lets the juices leak out, which displeaseth the palate.

Nothing says resurrection more than some carved up meat

Bon appetit!

Quick Apple Pie

Yesterday I suddenly noticed that I hadn't baked anything for a while, so I whipped up a quick apple pie (Old Europe style, not the pastry atrocity that the anglophone world likes so much).

Ingredients:

120 g butter
100 g sugar
1 packet vanilla sugar
a shot of rum
 3 eggs


200 g flour
2 tsp baking powder
2 tbsp milk

6 apples, peeled and halved
cinnamon
sesame or almond-splitters

Preheat your oven to 170 centigrade.
Put the butter into a bowl, whip it for a minute or two with your hand-mixer. Then add the sugar, and continue whipping until it the mixture gets creamy. Add the vanilla sugar and the shot of rum.
Add the eggs one by one, whipping for a minute or so before adding the next one.
Mix  the flour and the baking powder, and add it together with the milk to the dough. The resulting mixture should be a very viscous fluid.

Grease up a spring form, and pour the dough in. Place the  halved apples on to, and score their tops with a knife. Sprinkle with cinnamon and sesame (or almonds), and place it in the oven. Bake for about 45 minutes - check if it's done by poking it with a chop-stick; if no dough sticks to it it's ready!

Apple pie, right before it's untimely demise, devoured by a horde of hungry physicists

Schweinsbraten

It is nearly inconceivable that I, as an Austrian who likes to cook, would not have made Schweinsbraten, i.e. pork roast before, that mainstay of Austrian cuisine (I think we stole it from the Czech, actually). But I mostly cook foreign food, mainly out of curiosity. Also, a long relationship with a vegetarian has atrophied my dead-animal cooking skills.

But! Last Saturday I stumbled over a piece of pork on sale, and pounced on it. And then I made the simplest roast of them all: Schweinsbraten am Salzbeet, or pork roast on salt.


Rub your roast with stuff (I used a mixture of thyme, rosemary, mustard, pepper and salt, with a dash of olive oil), and put it on half a kilogram of salt. If your roast weighs in at more than a kilogram, you might have to double the salt.

Mustard rub on pork. Or vomit on innocent dead piggy, if you are vegetarian

Close-up of pig-carcass on salt bed.
Note the baking paper beneath - it will make clean-up considerably easier

Put it in the oven at 200 degrees centigrade, wait one hour per kilogram. No turning, no basting - just leave the poor thing alone. After an hour: deliciousness! I ate it with some home-made bread and some cooked leek and fennel, and it was good.

It's already dead, might as well eat it

So why the salt? I can only speculate here, but I am guessing that the salt serves two functions: it drains fluids away from the cooking meat, (so no gravy for this roast, which is a drawback), and conducts heat much better than air. Anyway, the main thing is it makes for an excellent roast. Njam!

Lazy man's loaf

Making your own bread is fun, but also work, which can give you unfortunate allergic reactions if you are as lazy as me. Fortunately, there is a way to make bread that takes a long time, but is almost no work at all, because you are forcing tiny slaves to do your work for you.

You'll need:

• Three cups of flour (white all-purpose, or something more exotic)
• 1/4 teaspoon of instant yeast (Your tiny slaves, muhahaha!)
• 1 1/2 teaspoon of salt
• Water
• Stuff

Here, stuff can be anything you want to have in or on your bread. You can also be boring and not use stuff, but then your tiny slaves will laugh at you, although you'll get your revenge when you kill them all off after they have done their work.

Take all your ingredients and throw them in a bowl. Mix a bit. It will look awful, especially if you've used colourful stuff. Below, I used 80g of greek olives, chopped, and two heaped teaspoons of olive paste as stuff (since greek olives are quite salty, I left out the salt altogether). Consequently, the dough looks like somebody puked into it. Don't worry, that is normal, although if you have room-mates you might want to check with them.

Puke. Or dough. Could be both.

Cover the bowl, and kick it into a corner. Forget it for 12-20 hours. Let your slaves do the work. Call them names if it amuses you. Afterwards, it will look even worse:

Seriously. That could be anything.

Grab the sticky mass, lift it out and put some flour and different stuff in the bowl. Here I've used some pumpkin seeds, which go well with olives. You can also use sesame, porridge or licorice lozenges. Put the dough back in, and throw it around until it gets vaguely loaf-shaped. You could also do this on a work surface, but then you'd have to clean it, stupid.

Loaf-shaped p.. you get the idea.

Cover the bowl again and let it rest for another two hours or so. It'll double in size, and try to eat you. To prevent your premature death by loaf, preheat your oven (setting "scorching"). If you have a pizza-stone put it in, if not a cast-iron pan will work as well. If you have neither, I fart in your general direction, but I guess the loaf will bake naked as well.
 
Stand in front of your oven and open the door. Then poke the dough - first it will deform: at this point it is not very elastic, then it will lunge at you and try to kill you for disturbing it's rest. Skip aside, and it will land into the blazingly hot pan. Shake the pan a bit to spread it out a bit, and to listen to it's agonising screams. Then put the cover on the pan (use aluminium foil if you don't have one) and bake for thirty minutes. Remove the cover, and gaze in satisfaction at your dead adversary. Bake for ten to fifteen minutes more, until you are happy with the colour of the crust. (If you love black, stop before you are happy. As you are already emo enough, you don't need your loaf to reflect the abyss that is your inner despair. Trust me on this.)

...a great many voices cried out in terror before being suddenly silenced.

Et voilà! Total time of preparation: 14 to 20 hours. Actual time spent doing something: about five minutes. Yeast germs killed: about a gazillion. My kind of bread.

Pumpkin-seed olive loaf

Sesame loaf

Sushi needs Blowtorch

On Saturday I made - or tried to make - some Nigirizushi (握り寿司), which is what we westerners call sushi except if we looked up the proper term beforehand on wikipedia so that we may appear to know what we are talking about. As you can see below, I  my pitiful attempts at making those oblong rice-things were rather pitiful, and were soon abandoned in favour of more simple Futomaki (太巻 ), which are those algae-wrapped cylindrical morsels of bliss.

 But back to the main thrust of this blarticle, namely the use of the blowtorch for making sushi. For frequent readers of this blog it should not come as a surprise that I view the blowtorch as nigh indispensable in the kitchen - truly it's versatility knows no bounds. From preparing desserts (Créme brulée, oh là là!) to flambéing your coq au vin, from browning your steak to making coffee to teaching kitchen-thieves to keep their greedy fingers to themselves, the blowtorch does it all. And one of the things it does best is make Aburi sushi (炙り寿司).

It's like regular sushi, only you take your fatty fish of choice (salmon above, tuna  exhibited below) and torch the shit out of them for several seconds. The inside will stay awesomely raw, while the outside will develop the delicious flavour of fried fish, adding a certain je ne sais quoi to your Japanese meal, which will get confused since it doesn't speak French, thus ensuring you can devour it before it can flee. Everybody wins!

Oh, and a word to the wise: Don't bother with those wimpy kitchen-blowtorches. People on the street will point at you and laugh, and also they are weaker, more expensive  and less badass. And you wouldn't want less badass in your kitchen, would you?
Thought so.

Fr'er Rabbit in Beer & 'shrooms

My parents gave me this excellent cast-iron pan for Christmas. This is really an essential piece in every kitchen - forget all those stupid Teflon-coated anti-stick pans (not that I don't have some of them as well), nothing beats the good old cast-iron.

First of all, you can get it as hot as you like - all non-stick coatings will start to degrade around 200 centigrade, adding some mildly poisonous fluorocarbons to your food. They won't kill you, but can give you flue-like symptoms.

You can stick your cast-iron piece in the oven as well, and it will develop it's own anti-stick coating, which will be nearly as good as the old polytetrafluoroethylene anyway.

But enough of the shilling, here is what I made yesterday: Delicious beer rabbit stew with mushrooms and dumplings.

You'll need: Half a rabbit, flour, baking powder, tarragon, bit o' the old molokko, shallots (or onions), butter, salt, pepper, beer, also some beer for cooking, some nice mushrooms.

The dumplings are simply made: 200g flour, a teaspoon of baking powder, 100g butter, some tarragon, salt & pepper. Add just a bit of milk, knead until you have a non-sticky dough, make eight dumplings and park them in the fridge, for now.

Meanwhile, your pan will be sitting on the stove, but no worries, 'cause it's iron and doesn't care. Coat your rabbit-pieces (I had half a rabbit, cut into six pieces) with flour, add some oil in the pan and sear the shit out of them, or until brown on all sides. Depending on the size of your pan, you might have to do this in batches.

Put all the rabbit-pieces back in, add some bacon-strips and fry - keep everything moving with your trusty wooden spoon. When the bacon starts getting crispy, add a handful of shallots, and 200g of assorted fine 'shrooms - I had some most excellent oyster mushrooms (my favourites), shiitake and uh - other stuff. Fry for 8 to 10 minutes or so (this is not very time-critical, just don't let them shrivel all up), then put in a bit more flour (a tablespoon maybe), about half a can of beer and 400 ml of chicken broth. Turn down the heat, put a cover on and simmer for about half an hour, and preheat your oven to 200 centigrade.
When the half-hour is over gauge the level of fluid - you might want to add some more beer, or water if you are a pussy. You can also season it a bit more, it could probably do with some salt & pepper. Now put the dumplings in so their top sticks out of the stew, and put the whole she-bang into the oven, without cover. Leave it there for another 30-45 minutes, or until the dumplings cry mercy. Enjoy!

Awesome beer can chicken

Yesterday I prepared a dish I have been lusting after for a long time: The awesome beer can chicken (also known euphemistically as "Chicken-on-a-throne"), which is a grilled/roasted chicken, made with the help of beer and awesome. I have no idea why it took me so long to try this, since it is super-easy and takes almost no preparation. I think I had to gather my courage to confront the awesome of this recipe - but it was worth it.

The idea is that  grilling or roasting a whole chicken tends to dry it out, something that develops a delicious crust on the outside, but will lead to the horrifying spectre of a dried out chicken breast. To prevent this and the resulting food fight while preserving the crust you have to moisten the chicken from the inside. Now, when thinking of moistening parched things thoughts will naturally turn to beer, so the solution to the conundrum is easy - ram a half-full can of beer up the chicken's butt:

As a rub I used

• 1 1/2 Tbsp salt
• ~ 2 Tbsp of pepper 
• 2 Tbsp of honey 
• 3 minced cloves of garlic
• A handful of basil leaves, chopped
• 3 sprigs of rosemary, chopped
• ~1 tsp of ginger
•  1 tsp of dried thyme
•  some olive oil

Of course you can mix and match, all woody herbs should be fine. Rub the rub over the chicken and in the cavity. Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 180 centigrades. If you can, you might want to use only bottom heat, or else loosely cover the top of the chicken with a piece of aluminium foil. Half-empty a beer can. Take another one and retry, this time making sure you don't drink all of it. Continue until you have a half-full one, and stick the chicken on it (you can add a couple of holes to the top of the beer can to ensure optimal moistening). Stand it up in a metal bowl or roasting tray and put it in the oven (you can just put it on the floor), making sure the #%!@$ slippery chicken doesn't fall over and leaks beer all over.

After about half an hour or so add potatoes, carrots and/or whole onions to the bowl. Remove the tin foil from the chicken, and roast for another half hour to forty-five minutes. And then:

You can add some of the beer left in the can to the gravy, if you think you can stand even greater awesomeness.
Enjoy!

Brodetto (Losinj III)

One most excellent thing about a holiday in Veli Losinj is the food: seafood, of course. In nearby Mali Losinj there is a fish-market each day, where you can get fresh catch, for example those unhappy guys:

Of course, I'd be unhappy too if I knew how I'd end up pretty soon:

Tasty, tasty brodetto (i.e. "little broth"), or fish-stew. It's mainly called brodetto and not the Croatian equivalent (brudet), because the local dialect still has many, many Italian words in it, back from the 18th century when the isles were part of the Republic of Venice. In fact, many people of Losinj still speak Italian regularly.

Some excellent coca

No, I am not talking about the leaf, although I am sure it is quite excellent as well. Coca is also a pizza-like catalan pastry, and a very fine one at that.
The recipe for the dough is the same as my own pizza-recipe, but the toppings don't. Last week-end I made coca con espinaca y pescado:

You'll need about a kilo of leaf spinach. Blanch it, and spread it over the dough. I also put on some cherry tomatos, some smoked salmon and some peeled shrimps. Season with salt and pepper, and drizzle with olive oil.

The smoked salmon contrasts the spinach nicely, and the acid of the tomatoes serves as a nice counterpoint. A very different flavour than your standard, tabasco-soaked pizza!

Substitution cake

I've made (and posted about) rhubarb cake before. Today, after a very frustrating day in the lab (LabView, oh how I hate you, you and your evil minion the GPIB bus) that thankfully ended on the high note of everything suddenly working - my lab-mates say it was simply the result of a day of hard work, but I maintain that the equipment was cowed at last by myself swinging a small bottle of hydrogen menacingly - I grabbed half a kilo of rhubarb on the way home.

The ingredients-list for the cake is simple:

• Dough:
  
  Four egg-yolks, 150 g sugar, a packet of vanilla sugar, a shot of rum, 150 g butter, 250 g flour.
  
  
• Topping:
  
  Four egg-whites, 100 g sugar, 500 g rhubarb, eventually some grated hazel.
   

 Only at home I noticed that I did not have any butter anymore, I had only three eggs left, and my sugar-reserves were down to a pitiful fifty grams. I could not find the enrgy to return to the shop (it is nearly a hundred and fifty meters, after all!), but I would not be thwarted. Three eggs will do for four, honey is a good substitute for sugar. I had no hazel, but found a packet of sesame seeds. Instead of butter I planned on using vegetable oil - only to notice that I had run out as well! But, there was still some mid-quality olive oil left...

To summarise, I used

• honey instead of sugar
• olive oil insted of vegetable oil  instead of butter
• sesame seeds instead of hazel.

The result?

Really, really tasty. The sesame on top goes very well with the honey, the rhubarb supplies the acidic touch, and the olive oil adds an interesting touch. No, really. It was a pity I had not more eggs, since the egg-whites were a bit overwhelmed by the rhubarb (I just could not bear to cut down on it), so it is not as aestethically pleasing as usual. Also, I suspect the honey inhibited the rising of the egg-white a bit. But still, it's the taste that matters!

Don't ever be afraid of trying something out when cooking - most of the time it will work, more and more so when you get more experienced. Although sometimes... remind me to tell you of the horror that was my banana-liver sauté in crème fraîche!

As a bonus for my german-speaking readers (although others may find it auricularily pleasing) here is a small video about rhubarb cake. Also, why german is awesome.

Pizza

Mmmh, the best pizza is the one you make yourself - no comparison to this travesty! I am not a fan of the Italian thin-film pizza (even though I am doing research in plasmas for thin-film deposition, fancy that), so here is my receipe for pizza:

• 500 g flour
• 7 g dry yeast (or 25 g fresh yeast)
• a bit of sugar and salt
• some warm water
• tomato purée 
• toppings (this time I used four kinds of cheese: Roquefort, Appenzeller, Gruyère and Mozarella, futhermore onions, leek and carrots) 
• Herbs (for example basilicum) 

Put two tablespoons of sugar and the yeast into about 1/8 liter of water, leave it in a warm place until a centimeter of foam is floating on top of it. (This is not strictly necessary, you can mix the dry yeast directly with the flour and start your dough - but I think it will reduce the rise-time later on). Mix the water with the flour, add a pinch or too of salt, and then add water while kneading to produce a non-sticky dough. Put it into a bowl, and the bowl into a warm place. Let the dough rise for about one hour, or until it has doubled in size.
Spread it out,  cover with tomato purée (the concentrated one that comes in tubes) and toppings. Season with woody herbs. The pizza should look like this:

I folded back the sides and hid more chees underneath them - you never can have enough cheese!

Put the pizza in the oven at 200 degrees celsius. After about ten minutes it will start to smell good, then it is time to monitor the colour od the toppings - pull it out when it starts to brown. Here is the result:

Unfortunately I had to mutilate one side - in my greed I made the pizza too big, and it started to droop in the gap between the tray and the ofen door, so I had to scoop it up hastily (hot!). Still tasted excellent, though. don't forget to drown it in tabasco!

Flu/cress

Ugh, at home fighting of the flu - hence the lack of posts lately. It might be an Alien flu from Giger's museum!

Can't understand why though, I have been eating all my vitamins. Even some home-grown ones: Cress. My mother used to grow it every winter, and we'd have it on some buttered bread in the evening. Mmmh.

It's very easy to grow: Just some tissues or toiletpaper on a plate, sprinkle the seeds on it and keep wet. In about five to seven days the little plants are thumb-high, and then it is time to harvest them with scissors. Excellent in a salad, or on your bread!

Update:

This is the garden cress, Lepidium sativum.

Báhn bao

Update: I am informed that these are spelled Bánh bao, and are steamed buns, not dumplings. Thanks go to Ky-Ahn for educating this poor westerner!

Yesterday a sudden hankering after Vietnamese (or Chinese - for us unenlightened westerners the difference is indiscernible) dumplings overcame me. You can make them with amazingly little effort, and they taste great!

The dough is basic yeast dough - 500g flour, water, some shortening, a packet of dry yeast and two tablespoons sugar. Mix and knead thouroughly, and let rise for about two hours, or until the volume has more than doubled.

Then form little balls, about two or three centimeters in diameter, and either throw them directly into the steamer for plain báhn bao, or flatten them and fill them with stuff.
I quickly fried some bacon, onions and vegetables, Garam Masala (not very authentic, I know), chillis and fish sauce, quenched in red wine as a filling.

Steam for ten to fifteen minutes.  Serve while still hot, or keep them in the refrigerator for a few days. Can be re-steamed, or even nuked in the microwave.

Delicious.