Spatula, Spoon and Saturday

So from our last shashlik encounter, as promised, the Japanese potato salad recipe.

1. 4 medium potatoes, peeled (Buy the ones covered in dirt, they stay fresh a bit longer. Don’t be prissy, you’re going to peel them anyway. A bit of dirt won’t kill you.)
2. 1/2 Lebanese cucumber, thinly sliced
3. 1/2 small carrot, very thinly sliced
4. 2 hard boiled eggs, cut into piece
5. 1/8 Spanish onion, very very thinly sliced
6. 3 tbsp of Japanese-style mayonnaise (buy this at your local Asian grocery or the Asian aisle of your supermarket)
7. Salt and pepper to taste

Cut the peeled potatoes into large-ish 3cm cubes. Cover with cold water, add a few pinches of salt and bring to boil. Simmer for about 10 minutes or until the potato cubes are tender. Drain thoroughly and immediately toss through the carrot pieces. The left over heat from the potatoes should cooked the carrot.

Let the potatoes and carrot cool completely. Add the Japanese mayonnaise, salt and pepper. Roughly mash the potatoes, leaving some chunky bits. Taste now and adjust accordingly. It should be relatively mild. Toss through the cucumber and onion. Add the boiled eggs and gently mix. Refrigerate for about an hour.

This is awesome at a barbecue – practically from typical fridge and cupboard ingredients. It makes you seem a bit more cultured when you take it to your mate’s barbecue. I did. And it didn’t even look lazy.

I should probably get this post out before winter is over, shouldn’t I? This was a lovely winter barbecue event rather than a traditional summer one. My dearest Tania invited us over to her place for a Russian-style barbecue (either that or it’s Tania-style barbecue) of shashlik.

Shashlik is basically a good-ol’ meat-on-a-stick food. Let’s face it, you put some meat on a stick, chuck the sticks on some fire equals fantastic results for non-vegos. Primitive? Of course. Delicious? Hells yeah!

Tania and her nice Mum and aunt had themselves cubing two whole legs of lamb and chicken breasts (I imagine more time than I personally would have cared for chopping meat). She then marinated the meat over night. I got there early and helped her thread the meat, onion and red and green capsicums on the shashlik skewers. Read the rest of this entry »

Cookbook Challenge Week 39 TV Chef

Book: Rick Stein’s Seafood Odyssey by Rick Stein Recipe: Char-grilled Snapper with Mango, Prawn and Chilli Salsa

Rick Stein is the man. I totally loved his recent (recent on the ABC anyway) Far East Odyssey. But this is from his original Seafood Odyssey book which is full of really great seafood recipes. It’s definitely a must-have for seafood lovers (now some nice PR person please pay for that blurb of unsolicited advertising).

This dish is so awesomely simple. Well, the fact that I bastardised it so much made it even easier (note my title and Rick’s title?) Unfortunately, I couldn’t find snapper fillet on the day but I figured barramundi would do the trick. And I forgot to add prawns to the salsa but it turned out good anyway.

Fish for two (not Rick’s recipe):

1. 2 x barramundi fillets
2. salt & pepper
3. a dash of olive oil
4. 1 mango, sliced into cubes and scooped out the flesh*
5. 1 avocado, diced
6. 2 spring onions, chopped
7. 1 fresh coriander stalk, chopped
8. 1/2 red chilli, deseeded and finely sliced
9. juice of 1/2 a lime
10. pinch of salt

Add the mango, avocado, chilli, lime juice, spring onion, coriander and salt and toss together.

Heat a little bit of olive oil in a frying pan. Season the fish fillet with salt and freshly cracked pepper. Fry the fish on both sides for about 1-2 minutes until the outside is golden brown. Serve with the salsa.

* I honestly thought the Australian way of eating a mango is a much better way than the Thai way of peeling the mango first and then slicing out the cheeks. So cumbersome!

(Josh taking over the last bits of my breakfast)

We were in Sydney for an impromptu ‘just because’ trip in April. Yes, I am well aware at how behind I am but you do realise I still have our honeymoon to cover right? I mean, our first is due in December so a post from April this year  is practically on time!

We didn’t really set out to Sydney to eat but rather to see because neither of us had really been to Sydney as a tourist before so we did all the touristy thing we could manage over a long weekend and unfortunately, that didn’t leave a lot of room for checking out all the great Sydney restaurants. Plus I noticed this silly Sydney trend of queuing up for food (Billy Kwong, Chat Thai, etc.) I am a Melburnian, damnit! We do not queue for food as a principle since there are so many fabulous restaurants out there where we come from.

(Sunrise drink of orange juice, banana, yoghurt and berries – $6.50)

So let’s get to bills – the famous Bill Granger’s chain of restaurants. bills (what’s with the no cap and apostrophe?) was possibly the only food place of any distinction that we visited. We rocked up there at about 10.45am (because we are never early people when we travel. Or ever.) and the place was still packed with the breakfast crowd! I mean, it was a non-public holiday Monday!

Sydney-siders are strange.

The joint was so popular that we literally snagged the last two seats at the main communal table. The two people arriving after us literally stood there for about 15 minutes before they got any attention from the waitstaff. Couldn’t blame them either, it wasn’t like there was any space left. If this were Melbourne, I would have just left and went next door and it would have been likely to be just as fabulous. But we were in Sydney. They didn’t have too many choices, I guess.

(Sweet corn fritters with roast tomato, spinach and bacon – $18.50)

Upon Jacqui’s suggestion/command, I reluctantly forwent the famous bills scrambled eggs and ordered the sweet corn fritters. It was a dish of perfect food of course. The bacon was smokey and lovely as bacon should be (I have been stoked that my local Safeway had actually begun to stock relatively decent bacon), the corn fritter held together nicely without being to greasy and the roast tomato was gorgeous. I did think the spinach would have been better cooked, but there you go. Maya recently went to Sydney and bills on my recommendation and said that the scrambled eggs were the best she ever had. I really should have just had the second breakfast or something. Read the rest of this entry »

Awesome! I just found the draft of this blog from January so I might just continue it.

(Spicy octopus)

If you have heard about Dainty… Look. It’s not that hot. Really. I have heard a lot about Dainty Sichuan – first from Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations (the ‘Australia’ episode) and a few other tweeters, bloggers, etc. Being absolutely chilli mad that I am,  I have been wanting to try it for ages. The one day we actually got to it, we found a closed sign. Dainty Sichuan was moving itself from that dodgy little Chinatown lane to the much trendier Toorak Rd. in South Yarra.

We walked through a cloud of smoking kitchen staff who were loitering just outside the steps. What a great first impression. A waiter enquired… wait… I meant interrogated if we made a booking. We did. Without bothering to check our names against the reservation list, he waved us carelessly to a table. Another waiter comes along and threw us two menus. Extra menu request (well, there were four of us) was met with a death glare (oops, I guess I am not a regular) and told that they  don’t have enough menus. Fair enough. Oh and get your cutlery and drinks (including Tsingtao beer) from the fridge, thank you very much! Now, I may not know much but surely self-service of alcohol would be against liquor licensing law! Anyone knows?

(Dainty Sichuan’s Chongqing Chicken)

Let’s get on with it. We figured the standard 3-chilli rated chicken-buried-in-dried-chilli-and-Szechuan-pepper dish (Chongqing chicken) is required. We received a huge pile of of crispy deep fried chopped pieces of chicken wings. I loved it personally because I really didn’t mind bits of deep fried chicken wings but my dining companions reckon the bones get a bit too much. Yes. It was hot and yes it was awesome. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a bit of an overdue thing. As you may have noticed, I attended the first Australian Food Bloggers’ Conference and a few blogger had written a bit about how and why they blog. As overdue as usual, here are my reasons:

This is the baby beetroots I stole from my father-in-law’s garden dressed with olive oil, garlic and thyme before roasting.

This is the Japanese black kare raisu (curry rice) – tasted just like normal Japanese curry but black that I ate in Odawara on our honeymoon.

These are our wedding cupcakes. We froze a few of them and had them on our first wedding anniversary. They tasted the same.

This is the nasi lemak I had for breakfast at the Jonker Dessert 88 cafe in Malacca, Malaysia

This is Aix Creperie’s raspberry and rosewater yoghurt crepe.

This is a week night dinner of lamb chops, tomato, goat cheese and sourdough salad, and radicchio and mandarin salad.

This is how I blog: I blog by taking pictures of food I ate (or sometimes Josh takes photos and I steal them), restaurants I visited, places and things I saw and I put them up here with my memories of them. As I said before, this is my fabulous food porn blog.

This is why I blog: so I remember all of these fabulousness, so I have a record of these fond food memories, so I get to share them with you.

I will never write about some silly products for PR purposes. I will not write sponsored posts. I will not write anything I don’t want to write about. And I especially cannot be bothered keeping up with the food trends and ‘in’ restaurants.

I write because I appreciate something. I write because I don’t appreciate something. I amy write some really bad things about a restaurant and I might change my mind later. But I need you to bear in mind that I am not a restaurant critique nor a chef. There is no professional standard involved in my writing about food because I am not a professional food writer. I make zero money from it and it is a hobby of mine.

Meeting up with other food lovers and bloggers and making friends have been an incredible bonus I have never expected and the social side of this is much appreciated but I don’t set out to change my blog from the way it was.

I want you to come back to this blog ten years from now and still be able to cook from my haphazard recipes. I want you to be able to come back to this blog ten years from now and still appreciate the honest, simple food porniness of the restaurant food photos and think gee, I should go and try that.

Happy eating. I know I do. I love eating so much that writing about it afterward feels like getting to eat it all over again.

That’s a win-win situation, isn’t it?