How to Make Soggy and Soft Fun (French) Fries Crispy Again

Potato French fries or fun fries are nice when hot and crispy but they will turn soggy real fast when left at room temperature.

Sometimes, my kids would bring back home the fries that they are unable to finish at fast food restaurants and it would a waste to throw them away.

The easiest way to heat them up amd make them crispy again is by frying them without oil using non-stick pan. There are loads of oil inside the fries and heating them up this way would cause all these excess oil to flow out onto the pan. A good way to get rid of the oil if you want to cut the calories! LOL!

Please use low heat to ensure that they are heated throughly and not burned.

Best way to detect Urea or Urine smell in Stingray before buying

Further to my post,Why Some Stingray have Ammonia, Urine or Urea Smell – How to get rid of it?, last weekend, I asked my regular fishmonger, where is the best place to smell a sting ray for foul urine or urea. He told me that since the leakage is cause by improper gutting which resulted in urea flowing from the kidney and glands into the fish flesh, the best place to smell is at the location shown by red arrows in the photo above. The arrows show the nearest part to these organs before they gut it and cut out the mid portion of the sting ray. Hope this tips are helpful in helping you to choose 'urine/urea' smell free stingrays!

Happy Weekend and Happy Marketing!

Why Some Stingray have Ammonia, Urine or Urea Smell? How to get rid of it?

Alice Law and SuiTuaPui commented about their experience with Ammonia smell in stingray at my post, Simple spicy Stingray with Butter and Masala Recipe. I have once bought a stingray that reeked of urine smell and no matter what strong spices I used, the smell is still there. There are several reasons why stingrays have urine, urea or ammonia smell. Stingray is a cartilaginous fish related to the shark. Their body and tissues are designed to be isotonic with sea water. In order to do so, stingrays and shark kidneys are designed to excrete urea into the body tissues. Therefore, when their body is in osmotic balance with sea water, they can prevent water loss from the body cells. When a stingray dies, bacteria will break down the urea compound and turn it into ammonia. This explains why stingrays that are not fresh have very strong ammonia smells. Fresh stingrays have clear bright red coloured blood and those that are not fresh would normally have darker red blood. Since ammonia is alkaline, soaking the stingray in light cooking vinegar which is acidic would neutralize it into salt and water. A possible reason for Stingrays to have urine or urea smells is very likely that they are not gutted properly. The person handling the fish might have accidentally cut the kidneys and other organs that have high urea content. The urea can leak into the flesh, thus contaminate it. Since urea is acidic, soaking the stingray in Sodium Bicarbonate (Baking soda) which is alkaline might help to rid off the urine smell. So, the questions is, how do we know the smells is from ammonia or urea? If the fish doesn’t look fresh and have a nose piercing smell that very likely it is from the ammonia. If the fish is fresh and have clear bright red blood colour, then the smell is very likely from the urea content. I was lucky to have only one bad experience with stingray with terrible odour. Whenever I buy stingray, I would smell it first and check the blood whether is clear bright red in colour. Please note that you might not see much blood in stingray cut after the fishmonger washes them. This doesn’t mean that they are not fresh. It is always good to ask the fishmonger for advice. I normally buy fish from a few fishmongers that I know are reliable and have been my regular supplier for years. This really helps a lot in ensuring that I get the best fish. Happy marketing and cooking!

Cooking Hard Boil Eggs Using Rice Cooker – Hassle Free and Easy Way!

We normally use boiling water to make hard boiled eggs but there is another easier and hassle free method that you might be interested to try. I learned how to cook hard boiled egg using rice cooker from an email forwarded to me recently. I don’t know where the original source of this email is from but the method works really well when I tried it! The best thing is the egg will not crack if you use rice cooker to cook it and the time taken is also faster than using boiling water. As you only use a very small amount of water, very little energy (electricity) is needed to generate the steam that cooks the eggs. Therefore this method saves energy, money, time and water!

1) First wet some tissue papers (3 to 4 pieces) and put them at the base of your rice cooker pot. Then put the eggs on top of the wet tissue papers.

2) Set the rice cooker to ‘cook’ just like you are cooking rice. When the light turns green, the eggs will be ready. Do not open the rice cooker cover yet. Leave the eggs in the hot rice cooker for another 2 minutes to ensure that they are perfectly cooked.

3) Tada!!!!!!, your perfect hard boil eggs!

4) Hard boil eggs with skin peeled off. See, they are perfectly cooked using the rice cooker way.

Then........I made some stripes on the eggs using dark soya sauce and put them in my ‘Tau Eu Bak’ (Soya Sauce pork belly). I told my kids that these are dinosaur’s eggs! Unfortunately, my kids didn’t believe me but they were very happy to eat the ‘dinosaur’ eggs. Gosh, it is not easy to bluff little kids nowadays! ROLF!