Labour Day long weekend

Oh no, I’m blogging about the Labour Day long weekend which means the weekend is over (T_________T)!

The long weekend started with brunch at Mille Cafe (1000, Beaufort Street Inglewood). It’s Mark’s little sister Cindy’s first year in Perth, we promised Mark that we would look out for her, so brought her out to try some Aussie breakfast. Unfortunately Mille Cafe’s coffee was burnt and bad, I couldn’t finish it. Sigh, and weekend coffees are usually the best too.

This is my ‘Boston Beans’ which was baked beans with a poached egg in the middle with a toasty white bun ($12.50). The portion was huge and I couldn’t even finish half of it. Luckily Calvin was there to polish it off for me . The beans tasted like normal baked beans, but the bun was nice and soft with a lovely crust.

HC’s ‘Wake Up Call’ ($19.50) was gigantic and had a bit of everything including pork sausage, bacon, field mushroom, slow roasted tomato, herbed potato cake, fried eggs and toast.

Jo’s salmon and toast with rocket, turkish bread, scrambled eggs, truffle oil ($14.50). She said the scrambled eggs were very nice.

Cindy liked her oven baked eggs ($12.50 )which were baked with ham, cream, spinach, parmesan, mozzarella. She said they were very creamy and cheesy and filling.

The rest of the long weekend went by in a blur. There was a fishing/crabbing session, a dimsum and movie session. We even had an irish pub dinner at Fibber McGee’s with Wendy and Jason but I forgot to bring the camera *epic foodie fail*.

Monday was spent grocery shopping, cooking and vegging out in front of the tv. A pot of Malaysian curry always does the trick.

Diced tofu and minced pork dish.

My attempt at Aunty Jenny’s signature prawn omelette dish. Not exactly perfect but I will keep practising. If only all these lovely aunties would keep teaching me their signature dishes I would feel so privileged and happy.

Return of the kuih bingka. I baked a tray of these, half for R’s colleagues morning tea and the other half for our charity morning tea tomorrow. I hope they like it.

And that ends our Labour Day long weekend of 2012.

Queen Bday long weekend

It was the long awaited long weekend. Happily,it was as glorious as anticipated, only as usual, it blew by in a flash, SIGH. I can’t believe it’s all over. Now it’s the long countdown to Christmas (T___T)

During the week, we had a morning tea to raise funds for guide dogs for the blind. I promised to bake a batch of ‘pupcakes’ for the morning tea, so lemon cupcakes it was.

I had lots of lemons leftover, so baked a batch of lemon ricotta muffins for home consumption.

Back to the long weekend, Saturday was our Freo fishing day. It started with ramen at Dosukoi in the Fremantle markets, also known as the first ramen that I really liked in Perth. Back in those days, Dosukoi was not well known and it was easy to get seats any time of the day. But nowadays, even though we were there early, we still had to wait half an hour for seats in this little ramen gem. But it was worth the wait (^___^).

Then it was time to indulge in HC’s favourite past time, fishing! The weather was gorgeous, the ocean was beautiful, in fact, the only thing lacking was err.. the fish.

The serious fishermen. You can always spot the serious fishers.

Real fishermen come fully geared with caps, hats, proper shoes (for climbing around the rocks), have all the fishing gear including rods, buckets, bait and the most importantly, a giant tub of sunscreen.

Whereas the not serious fishers can be seen clambering around the rocks, taking silly pictures, splashing around the water, looking for crabs, clams, abalone, everything but fish. Hahahaha.

Introducing … the not serious fishermen.

Gerry and his little crab. Don’t worry, we put the crab back in the waters.

It was interesting witnessing HC’s love for fishing. He was so patient with all of us the whole day, helping us fools to cast our rods, hook the bait and teaching us different fishing techniques. We had a lovely time, driving to different locations around Fremantle,  basking in the sun, enjoying the gorgeous view and each other’s company.

Hooray for the ultimate fisher HC.

The three stooges by the pier.

Cooking our catch of the day at the end of the night.

All of us had our own dishes, HC with his yummy lemon chicken, Gerry’s tom yum soup, signature garlic prawns and clams, Richard’s pan fried herring, I dealt with the easy dishes of scrambled tomato omelette and braised kailan. It was the perfect seafood dinner to end the day.

It was a fantastic fishing day and long weekend

Deal or no deal?

I’ve been living in Australia for almost 10 years. A decade. Goes to show how old I’m getting. Somehow I’ve never adopted an Aussie accent (in fact I think I’m still very Malaysian) nor have I caught on to Aussie tv. It amazes me sometimes when I look at Jo and HC and how much they love Australian tv!

One of their favourite daily must-watch is Deal or no Deal. I even started watching a few episodes when we were all staying together and started doing the cross arm action ‘No deal! No deal!’ together with the tv audience. So when we walked by Timezone to kill time before dinner on Saturday, I couldn’t resist introducing Jo and HC to the Deal or no Deal game. I knew they would love it. Unfortunately we lost almost everything.

Dinner was at the all you can eat and drink Little Lamb hotpot restaurant. It’s not just all steamboat, they also have skewers of meat etc. which you place on the little automatic rottiserie on the table and it cooks the skewers for you. Super fun.I was really bloated and greasy afterwards though, it took me two days to recover from that dinner.

Sometimes you just need a bowl of fried rice. This was char siew fried rice.

A reader asked me for the honeycomb cake recipe the other day, I went online to look for the link and ended up baking the cake this weekend. It wasn’t a huge success, not holey enough but good enough for me

3 more days to the weekend…

No time

I am running out of time to do anything. The working days feel extremely long and never ending.

Even happy lunch bentos like this minced pork in spicy bean sauce and braised japanese egg tofu don’t make the work days go faster.

Even my photos are rushed nowadays so please excuse my blur photo of kueh bakar which is baked pandan custard kueh. This is for my team morning tea tomorrow, I was going to make savoury siew paos to go with them but well, I ran out of time, so I’ll probably make them on Friday or Saturday.

So visit my house during the weekend if you want a flaky siew pao to go… two more days to the weekend.

Getting over the hump day

We had an abundance of apples in the house.

So I baked an apple strudel with frozen puff pastry and apple slices. Yummy with vanilla icecream (^____^).

Wednesdays teriyaki beef bowls = comfort food. Finally we’re over the middle of the week, two more days to the weekend and 3 weeks of bliss away from work!! Getting excited ….

2 weeks blitz

It’s been more than a week since my last blog post! It definitely wasn’t due to lack of blogging material (I still have so many food places that I haven’t blogged about not to mention the Japan posts which have been overdue for a year *gulp*), I think I’ve just been feeling a little blue due to work. But at least the Easter holidays are almost here! I can’t wait.

This post merges my past two weekend eating. Last last weekend, we went to the trendy Venn for breakfast. I would probably never have discovered Venn (even though it’s so near work) if it wasn’t for Jaso. I don’t know how he finds out about all these up and coming places but he’s a great source of foodie information.

It’s worth going to Venn just to check out the gorgeous architecture and interior design of the building. The old flour mill factory is split into three stories, the ground level being the art studio, street level being the shop (selling cool and expensive knick knacks) and the bar/cafe, and the second level being an art gallery. I really liked how they made use of the light and the tall ceilings, it was a comfortable and airy space.

Back to the food, the breakfast menu wasn’t extensive so there wasn’t much to choose from. Both Jaso and HC has the poached eggs on toast which came out looking very healthy and green. Nothing spectacular but not bad at all.

Calv and I both had the roast beef bagel. I don’t know why, maybe it’s the mysterious hole in the middle, but I really like bagels. This bagel was one of the best bagels I’ve had in Perth, it was soft without being too soft, chewy and yet had a crispy lightly toasted exterior. Cal and I really enjoyed our bagel.

The coffee was good. Pretty milk patterns are always a plus (^___^). All in all, a good find so thanks for the recommendation Jas.

Venn
16 Queen Street
Perth, WA 6000 Australia

While I usually plan my dinner and lunch venues ahead(this includes checking out the menu and already choosing what I’m going to have), sometimes unplanned foodie adventures can be the best.

The couple Jason and Wendy were the ones that introduced me to Chime. They told us about how they planned to go to Chime restaurant  for lunch, but since it was not open, they ended up heading across the road to Phi Yen for good Vietnamese instead.

It was the exact opposite scenario for us. We headed to Phi Yen for some pho, but the restaurant was busy and the waitresses didn’t bother to serve us. So we headed across the road to Chime for lunch instead! The restaurant itself is located in the newly refurbished Northbridge Hotel, it was a lazy Sunday afternoon and we were the only table besides a couple of ladies enjoying a bottle of wine and a late lunch.

R had the premium sirloin with mash and pepper sauce. The steak was more medium than medium rare in some places, but otherwise the pepper sauce was tasty with the steak.

Even before my caramelised pork belly arrived, the two ladies sitting behind us who both ordered the pork belly were already making ‘mmmm’ sounds with every bite. It was quite funny. The asian style pork belly came with yellow turmeric rice and condiments like fried shallots, chilli vinegar sauce. The rice itself wasn’t heavily spiced and lacked taste, but that was fine because the pork belly was richly flavoured, sweet, beautifully caramelized, sticky and chewy. A heavily spiced turmeric rice would have overpowered the taste of the pork belly.

It really was delicious and a sinful indulgence. In hindsight, I think the flavours were a little bit too intense and strong, causing me to feel rather thirsty afterwards, but I could totally understand why the ladies were making ‘mmm’ sounds throughout their meal.

With a buy one main get one main free deal from our entertainment card, it was a great deal and a surprisingly lovely lunch.
Chime Restaurant
210 Lake Street, Northbridge, Western Australia 6003
(cnr Brisbane Street)

Cooking from last weekend. This was Penne Marinara which I tossed with fish fillets, mussels and prawns.

The pork belly from Chimes was so nice that it inspired me to cook pork belly the next day. Mine was nothing like Chimes though and very Malaysian with the usual soy sauce, star anise flavours.

Sometimes simple meals like stir fried broccolli and carrots with grilled chicken wings can be nice for dinner. My chicken wings were marinated with hoisin sauce, honey and five spice powder.

We received a whole bagful of plums during the weekend. Not eating them fast enough, I decided to use them in a dessert tonight, the only problem with Plum Tarte Tatin? They’re not as pretty as Pear tarte tatin or apples.

Two more days to Easter and counting!

Ugly cakes are delish

I didn’t know what to do with our big bag of plums and nectarines that were getting soft so I googled for a plum cake recipe and came up with this Plum and Vanilla tea cake.

The cake turned out really ugly, sunk in the middle with oozing plum and nectarine juice . I couldn’t take a good photo. I thought ‘oh oh… disaster’, then I had a sample bite, and another. The cake was moist and creamy, the topping of the cake was like a  polo bao, sweet, crispy and crumbly. Ugly cakes can be yummy too! I think I might like baking after all.

Lunch bento tomorrow is Thai green curry chicken with turmeric rice! Don’t know what to do with your leftover coconut milk? Add it to your rice cooker (^___^)Y.

Ok, I’m going to get fat and have another slice of cake. Hehe.

Orange and blueberry friands

On Monday I cooked the most unauthentic spaghetti and meatballs in the world.

Doesn’t look remotely like Italian pasta right? Actually I was cooking a Japanese style pasta, as in my meatball was really teriyaki braised mini hambagus and my tomato based pasta sauce was mixed with beef stock and and my teriyaki sauce. It was surprisingly pretty good, very light and tasty. I will cook this again.

My lunch bento tomorrow is another Japanese-y dish, miso and mirin marinated pan fried basa fillets with kailan and steamed rice. Healthy or not?

When I told my mother that I was baking friands, she originally thought that I had spelled ‘friends’ incorrectly. Then she realised that I was talking about friands, a popular Australian pastry which is based on the French financier. These little cakes are very cutely shaped, made with almond meal, butter, icing sugar, egg whites and flour.

I only decided to bake them because I sampled a delectable friand over the weekend and discovered that they’re really easy to make and can be baked without using any machines! Yeah, no cleaning! I didn’t have a friand mould so made do with my muffin tray, the friands still came out looking very cute. I mixed orange zest, orange juice and blueberries in my friand mixture, the mini cakes were moist, buttery and yums. Haha, so happy that I found an easy baking recipe.

Nowadays I love being in the kitchen because it means I’m away from work (-___-). Two more days to the weekend …

Cake of the week

Looks sinful but it’s actually low fat! A recipe from my diet conscious colleague, this Upside Down Maple Syrup Pear Cake was quite nice, especially the sweet pears. Goes well with two scoops of vanilla icecream, which kinda defeats the low fat idea (^___^).

All in a Day’s work

(Early this morning)

Daitaoha to Mel: I’m feeling really unmotivated today. Very grey.

Mel to Daitaoha: It’s not just you. I feel bleeeeahhhhh today.

(10 mins later, Lin walks in)

Lin to all: I’m feeling really unmotivated today. I just thought I would announce it to you all.

(Daitaoha thinks to self : Hey, she’s repeating exactly what I said earlier)

Lin to all: Is it too early for a coffee? Oh… ok, I’ll make myself a green tea.

(10 mins later)

Daitaoha to all: Does anyone want a coffee??

Mel to all: Aarrgh.. and I was just congratulating myself for not getting one since Lin mentioned it 20 mins ago. Oh well, at least I lasted 20 mins, could I have a skinny cap please?

Lin to Mel: Er.. actually Mel, that was just 10 minutes ago.

Mel : Oh. *silence* It felt like 20 minutes (-_________-)

Lin: Who cares?! Let’s all get coffee!

——————-

(20 minutes to going home time)

Lin emails Daitaoha: 20 MINS ALMOST TIME TO GO HOME!!

( 12 mins to going home time)

Daitaoha emails Lin: 12 minutes to go, but who’s counting?

Lin emails Daitaoha: I AM!!!!!

(Both start packing up and switching off computers. Fire drill goes off. Announcement: Beep. Beep. Beep. This is a practice fire drill. Will all fire wardens please go to the fire phones)

I couldn’t believe our bad luck. We had to climb down 8 flights of stairs and stayed an extra 40 mins for the fire drill!!!

Anyway, enough about work, some food photos.

My carrot cake which I found too light and fluffy, I was hoping for a more dense texture so it would be easier to slice.

I tried out Lin’s low fat Malteser slice recipe, for a weightwatchers recipe, the chocolate cake was wonderfully chocolatey and moist, yums.

Mei chai kou rou, braised belly pork with pickled mustard, I love this dish not because of the pork belly, it’s the pickled mustard I like!

Tom yum soup, it was a good way to get rid of all the leftover seafood mix and fish in the freezer.

Yeah, it’s finally Friday tomorrow, I can’t wait for the weekend!! (^_____^)