Spatula, Spoon and Saturday

We wanted a nice dinner out before hitting the pub with the boys from Josh’s work and Church St. Enoteca has been on our to-do list for a while and since the pub we were going to in the area, there was no better place to be for our little dinner.

(Church St. Enoteca, Richmond – its dining room)

We got there a bit early at about 7pm and the dinging was still light-filled (this was January, by the way). It was still sparsely populated for the night and we got a table near the kitchen, where we could see the entire dining room in action.

(sea salt focaccia with olive oil, salt and pepper)

Our waiter brought us some nice salt focaccia, olive oil and salt and pepper. The bread was lovely and fresh and the oil was grassy. I loved it. We pondered the menu for a while and we settled on on an entree to share, a main each, a side salad to share and leave room for dessert. Read the rest of this entry »

Cookbook Challenge Week #18

Book: Food Safari by Maeve O’Meara (recipe by Aziz Bakalla) Theme: Barbecue Recipe: Mechouli

Still playing catch up with my Cookbook Challenge. Since Summer started, we have been quite keen on doing simple grilled meat and salad for dinner. I know it’s not a particularly new concept but we aren’t big meat eaters but we have worked out that a bit of cold meat salad is also quite good for lunch the next day and we haven’t looked back since.

Because our barbecue is actually MIA (we took it up to Josh’s country house for our engagement party – yes you read it right, our engagement party which happened in 2007 and it’s still sitting there unused), we have been ‘barbecuing’ on our iron cast grill. Cast iron grill is great for indoor grilling, it holds a lot of heat and gives you that ‘barbecue’ taste.

As I might have mentioned it again and again, get all your cast iron cookware at camping stores rather than homeware stores. The price difference is enormous.

So back to the recipe! Our new favourite cut of lamb for barbecuing is the lamb back straps – which aren’t available at our local supermarkets (ie. no last minute dinner to be made lamb back straps!) but it’s beautiful, lean and tender that we keep buying it again and again from our local market. If you haven’t tried this cut, I strongly recommend it. Read the rest of this entry »

(entree of oysters in mirin and soy sauce dressing and grilled scallops)

Yep. It’s true. We, the food bloggers of Australia, take our blogging so seriously we actually had a conference about it! It was a great pleasure and honour to receive an invitation to the first ever Australia Food & Drink Blogger conference (see: Eat. Drink. Blog. official web site)

Being a total nerd that I am, I took notes and wrote down a few things I would like to address on this blog. I guess my blogging manifesto, per se. But let’s get to what the food blogger conference was actually about first.

(grilled scallop with fish sauce dressing)

We arrived in the morning at Essential Ingredients at the Prahan Market for the morning and afternoon sessions where a few of our fabulous presenters talked about things like why we blogged, ethics of blogging, copyrights, photography, making money from blogging, hyperlocal blogging, search engine optimisation, how to be social and utilising social media etc. It was very informative and we had a great time discussing all the different topics.

(oxtail wonton in five-spice soup and snowpea sprout)

Because we are a bunch of Twitter addicts, the conference’s very own hash tags (#eatdrinkblog and #eatdrinkblog2010) on Twitter were moving non stop. It was the only conference I have ever come across where it was okay for you to be looking at your phone all the time! Read the rest of this entry »

Since I missed out on the suckling pig* dinner and various other pork related events at the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival 2010, I would like to bring up the roast pork dinner that Josh put together having adapted it based on Jamie Oliver’s recipe of Balsamic-baked onions and potatoes with roast pork from his Jamie at Home book. The roast pork was rubbed with fennel seeds and crackling was just too awesome. It was served with sticky, caramelised onions and potatoes.

This was the best roast pork I have ever had. It was so tender, succulent and just so so scrumptious. Hence I feel the need to title this post with starting with ‘most scrumptious.’ The most important thing, I believe, was the meat. I bought the rolled up boneless pork shoulder from one of the butcher’s at the Queen Vic Market.

(look how beautiful this bit of pork is!)

This little piggy was actually meant as our 2009 Christmas roast but we didn’t get around to it so it sat in our freezer for a few weeks before seeing the light of day!

Roast Pork with Fennel Seed Rub

This will feed about 6-8 people. It lasted the two of us a week. It was fabulous cold in sandwiches.

1. 2 kg of boneless, rolled pork shoulder
2. 3 sprigs of fresh rosemary, finely chopped
3. 2 tbsp of fennel seeds, bashed up with a pestle in a mortar
4. salt and pepper
5. a few drizzles of olive oil

Make sure you butcher scores the rind for you. I personally don’t have a single knife or blade in the house that is sharp enough to score pork rind successfully! Preheat the oven at 200′c.  Rub a few drizzles of olive oil into the pork. Sprinkle a chopping board with the chopped rosemary leaves, bashed up fennel seeds, a little bit salt and pepper (not too much, we will do the crackling later). Roll the pork across the mixture. Roast in the oven for about an hour.

Crackling

Up an hour, carefully untie the roast and use a sharp knife to remove the rind from the roast. Remove excess fat (I saved it so I could render my own lard because I am a freak like that). Spread out the rind. Sprinkle about a teaspoon of salt and more olive oil. Place the meaty part back into the oven, fat side down for another 15-20 minutes. Place the crackling under the grill on medium for 5-10 minutes or until puffy and golden brown. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s go back to normalcy from my erratic blogging behaviour for the moment. Talk of the Town is a little Lebanese cafe on Glenhuntly Road on the Elsternwick side. We went there one Saturday for lunch as The Age Cheap Eats Guide* features it quite favourably.

We got there quite late in the afternoon and other than a few people coming around for takeaway kebabs here and there, we were the only people in the restaurant. Menu took a while to get to us and another while for us to be able to order.

Upon entrance, you could see the fridge full of varieties of salads, dips, meats and other goodies. I have come to learn that this was relatively typical of a Lebanese cafe in Melbourne. The menu centred around grilled meats – you could get skewers of barbecued meat (ready in the fridge to be cooked upon order). The exciting part (to me anyway) was the arrays of salads and dips you could choose.

(Kibbeh, mushroom salad, grilled capsicum salad, dips – around $17?)

We both decided on the ‘plate’ – which meant grills or vegetarian dish of choice as well as choices of dips and salads. I decided on the pumpkin kibbeh. You could get individual salads and the prices were marked accordingly. Because I ordered the plate, I simply chose the three salads that were the most appealing. The very first comment from the server (owner as well, I guess) was ‘so you picked the most expensive salads.’ Read the rest of this entry »

I swear the god of blogging and cooking has been against me – all sorts of computer issues like you wouldn’t believe. Either I am just really really lazy. The facts remain: I spent two weeks in Thailand. I spent last weekend in Sydney and I’m due to spend a week in Vanuatu during Easter. I have much to blog through. Guess what? I still haven’t finished all Japan stuff. And that was our honeymoon. Let’s just soldier on, shall we?.

Anyway, the above picture is the Thai-style chicken rice (khao man gai), which is basically rice cooked in chicken fat, chicken stock, garlic and ginger (and maybe some times pandan leaves). It gets served with boiled chicken, chicken blood cubes, giblet, liver, etc. I generally just stay away from the innards because they get cooked until they are tough. Menolikey.

My crazy mother, on the other hand, has no such qualm. And she loves the sauce which is made up of pounded chilli, ginger, garlic, yellow bean sauce and various other seasonings. The dish also gets served with a little bowl of chicken broth on the side.

This is the Thai-style wonton noodles. As you might actually notice, a lot of these dishes have strong Chinese influence. So here we have egg noodles, blanched bok choy and some yummy wontons. These were good. And they were 30 baht. About a dollar. Read the rest of this entry »

Book: Jamie’s America by Jamie Oliver Theme: Noodles Recipe: Dan Dan Noodles

I have had dan dan noodles a few times at a Taiwanese cafe – which was awesome. However, I have always suspected that the whole Taiwanese home-made style cafe doesn’t lend itself to this authentic Szechuan dish.

As I had no benchmark*, I figured Jamie Oliver’s version is as good as any. And, guess what? Killing two birds with one stone (and breaking the Cookbook Challenge rule since I made this on new year’s eve), I present you this dish. The recipe has been highly bastdardised due to availability of ingredients.

Read the rest of this entry »

Book: Secrets of the Red Lantern by Pauline Nguyen Theme: Soft Recipe: Salt & Pepper Tofu

First of all, I have to apologise profusely about being useless with the whole Cookbook Challenge thing. I am going to catch up. I promise. This was for Week 7 with the theme of soft. The reason this has stopped because my computer has decided to stop recognising my portable hard drive so my photos have been stuck there. That, and I have been away a lot and um, lazy!

First of all I love, love, LOVE the Secrets of the Red Lantern. It was the only cookbook I have ever read from start to finish (skipping the recipes) because it is just a truly special book. I remember sniffing on the train reading it everyday!

The theme soft was inpired by my (then) recent visit to New Kum Den where I fell hard in love with their salt and pepper tofu and soft tofu is one of my favourite soft foods ever. I unfortunately had decided that I should half wing it and half follow the recipe. I went for two separate types of tofu – one Japanese silken tofu and one egg tofu. I found that the egg tofu was by far tastier and much easier to handle while the silken tofu tasted average and was extremely hard to handle.

Anyway! What a disaster! I hate deep frying stuff, it’s horrible. Messy, messy, messy! Because I used the silken and egg tofu, I had to adapt a little. To be perfectly honest, this recipe really isn’t worth the hassle. Not only that, I managed to forget about the oil and caused a HUGE fire! Lesson learned: go and buy a fire blanket and keep it handy. Australia Post sells them relatively cheaply.

Salt & pepper mix

1. 1 tsp of white pepper, ground (I ground the peppercorn in pestle & mortar)
2. 1 1/2 tsp of salt
3. 1 tsp of ground ginger
4. 1/2 tsp of five spice powder

Mix all ingredients together well.

Deep fried tofu

1. tofu
2. corn flour to dust
3. oil for deep frying

Heat vegetable oil in a saucepan until it shimmers. Carefully slice the tofu and dust with the corn flour and deep fry until golden brown. Season with the salt & pepper mixture.

Spring onion mixture

1. 2 spring onion, chopped
2. 2 red chilli, sliced
3. 2 large cloves of garlic, finely chopped
4. 1/2 onion, finely chopped

Fry the onions, chilli and garlic in a bit of oil until fragrant. Top the tofu.

Right, these are all the Cookbook Challenges outstanding for me. I’m going to try to get them out over the next couple of weeks or so. Stay tuned.

• Week 8 Monday 4/01/2010 Sweet
• Week 9 Monday 11/01/2010 Berry
• Week 10 Monday 18/01/2010 Cool
• Week 11 Monday 25/01/2010 Mixed
• Week 12 Monday 1/02/2010 Eggs
• Week 13 Monday 8/02/2010 Love
• Week 14 Monday 15/02/2010 Japanese
• Week 15 Monday 22/02/2010 Muffins
• Week 16 Monday 1/03/2010 Noodles
• Week 17 Monday 8/03/2010 Vietnamese