Hell’s kitchen

It was a different weekend of some sorts. We left the car behind and took the public transport into Fremantle.

Pipsqueak cider and Bright ale from Little Creatures are the best partners in crime. I bought 3 second hand Agatha Christies that day, so happy.

Then it was dinner at Ecco! We had a scoopon voucher which came with a bottle of wine, a seafood platter as an entree, pizzas or pastas as main and tiramisu to end with.

The food itself was quite nice. I had a blue cheese and pear and pinenuts pizza. The sharpness of the cheese and the sweetness of the pear made for an interesting and delightful combination.

What was more interesting was the chaotic kitchen and wait staff, and the increasingly furious expressions of our fellow patrons as they waited for their food. There was the waitress that kept bringing wrong orders to tables, and turned around in circles looking lost and perplexed. Also the family of four that were happy and cheerful during the first hour but grew really grumpy after everyone who came later than them received their food earlier. And the poor couple who were romantically holding hands during the first hour of waiting, during the 2nd hour, the guy’s face was black as thunder, his arms were crossed. He looked pretty scary.

Tiramisu for dessert, it was just average for me.  The whole night was just like an episode of Hell’s Kitchen, finishing with a couple walking out because no one bothered taking their orders. Somehow, we still managed to have fun and enjoy ourselves tremendously.

Deep fried prawn wontons that I prepared, froze overnight and defrosted in the oven for our afternoon tea the next day. They were very popular with my colleagues as all fried food usually are. Back to work tomorrow 😦

Saturday family dinners

Yeah, it was a good weekend.

Firstly, my parcel  from The Book Depository arrived in the mail 🙂 Happy Sunday Agatha Christie reading ahead.

Then there was our impromptu Saturday roast chicken dinner with lots of strawberry wine.

With lovely Mandarin cake for dessert. This cake was really yummy.

I wish I could bake that way, not only was the outside of the cake beautiful, the inside was gorgeous too. It was fun cooking together on a Saturday night, feasting together then watching TVB dramas together. What should our theme be next Saturday night? Korean? Laksa night?

This stir fried cabbage is not just normal stir fried cabbage, it has my mother’s specialty hay bee hiam (spicy dried shrimp sambal) in it, so good that a normal stir fried vegetable has that extra oomph.

Claypot chicken and mushroom rice topped with a sunny side up.

Spinach and ricotta ravioli in white wine cream sauce.

Hehe, something that I stole from Jo’s home. So small, white, furry and cute. Hehe.

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.