hotpot time!

Due to something beyond my control, i love hotpot. i figure it's somewhere between the truly social nature of the meal, and that you can pick and eat your way through a night. add in the make-your-own-dipping sauce, and it can be fun. to be honest, i think we drank a lot more than we ate.

This is most of the food that i prepped for the meal. included (clockwise from the bottom) is: noodles, winter melon (dong gua), mushrooms (enoki, shiitake, oyster), potatoes, fried tofu, a menagerie of balls (fish balls, beef balls, cuttlefish, and a lot of other crazy things - i just grabbed things that looked good), sliced beef, silken tofu, pakchoy (i think).


I ended up cheating, and making the soup from a tom yum base, and then adding lemon juice and fish sauce to get the flavours balanced. it had the chilli at the right level, but really needed the zing of the lemon to make it nice. everyone loved it (thank god - i always have a nightmare about cooking for people and they hate it. i think it's almost as scary as the dream where you walk around naked)

the sauces i had for everyone to play with were a ground chilli sauce, bull's head barbecue sauce (i cannot begin to describe how "barbecue sauce" is false advertising, but it was nice), sesame paste (tasted like peanut butter), sesame oil, and garlic. and so it began!

Sixin and Ying enjoying the hotpot.

I think that between the 4 of us, we only ate half the ingredients, so i'll throw it together for a stir fry later today, with garlic, chilli, and some good oyster sauce.

Victims of the subsequent drinking were:

• Korean raspberry wine
• Limoncello
• Japanese plum wine
• Bress winery apple cider http://www.bress.com.au
  
• Glenlivet 15 year old single malt
• frozen margarita bucket
• chang beers, and i think some other things (can't find the bodies)
  

Of course, most of this was consumed playing dice games...


Over all, a good time i think ;)

dainty sichuan restaurant, chinatown.

OK, OK, so i know that this is a bit late - one whole week to be precise.

to be honest, my lips have been recovering this whole time. and to those girls that thought i had "very sexy lips", please don't feel deceived, regardless of the fact that they only looked like that because i was in agony...

what hasn't already been said about dainty sichuan that i can say? it's probably the spiciest restaurant in melbourne (don't correct me if i am wrong; my friends would think it fate, and then suggest a date to try the proclaimed hottest), but beneath that, it's great value for money (notice i didn't say "cheap"), the flavors are amazing, and balanced perfectly, and the atmosphere it hard to describe. think of a restaurant that is fully packed. the smell hits you the moment you get in - it's part tear gas, part desire. the scent is intoxicating - chillies, sichuan peppers, and garlic. it's enough to make you cry, and it instantly brings a rose color to your cheeks, and you begin to feel sweat. then you look around. and you look at everyone - red faces, red eyes, sweat pouring down their faces. they know. you are one of them. you've come for your fix. and it's something you can't avoid. you just have to accept it. "be one of us" you hear them say. but their lips are not moving. instead they are chewing contentedly on chongqing chicken (see above). think of popcorn chicken, but done RIGHT. maybe they're gnawing on crab legs, careful not to get too many chili seeds. but by the time you walk in, the damage has been done.

I admit it, i'm a wimp. give me a nice mild, chili free dish any day. but sometimes, nothing can top that zing you get from a good chili hit, balanced perfectly with garlic and other spices. it's enough to make me want to go back right now (except for the pain, of course).


As you can see, the photos aren't the best. that because i was fighting to get my fair share of the food: eggplant (i didn't even get time to take a pic!), caramalised and rich, creaminess, and the sweet, sweet pain of the chilli.

pig's ears, crunchy and chewy, the flavors balanced perfectly, each crunch of cartilage brings a flavor explosion.


my favorite dish, the innocuous cucumber with garlic. how is it something so sublime can be so simple: smashed garlic, fresh cucumber, a small amount of seseme oil and soy sauce.

And finally, spicy fish. no, that's not soup. it's chilli oil. the fish is firm, tender, and fresh. just right to be taken, and caressed and nurtured. dare i say it, it's even better than the namesake dish at spicy fish restaurant.



So how much was it for these treasures? like than $20 per person, including drinks. will i be back? maybe after i get health insurance!

that's all for now. this friday i'm organising hot pot, so expect pictures from start to finish.

collingwood farmers market part 2 (i wish i knew what redux meant)

Ok, so this took a little bit longer than expected. blame it on me spending sunday afternoon playing squash for 2 hours, and subsequently dying when i got home. blame it on me being absorbed in my flatmate cooking dinner for me. actually, just blame it on my terrible attention span. i truly forgot.

so, here is the follow up :)


The one thing that you can have trouble getting in supermarkets (and the butcher's where i am from), is good meat, and good cuts of meats. things that are lovingly produced. for carnivores like me, these markets are heaven! too bad all the fillet steak was gone, and i wasn't feeling like pork, so i ended up getting some ... mutton. my mum would be SO proud. I just finished it then, and very nice. gamier than normal lamb you get, but it had flavours you just crave sometimes, and fulfills a deep desire...

on the way out, i had to go to the convent to get some bread. i rarely eat bread, so we'll see how good this is. it has to be REALLY good for me to eat a whole loaf of it though.


luckily, this is some of the best bread i've tried, so i'm a big fan. it didn't disappoint either!

and here is my stash: limoncello at the back, honey wheat loaf, manzanilla olives (which lasted all of 20 minutes) felafels, mutton sausages, venison kabana, and pumpkin and poppyseed pappadelle (i think it's called that - is that even a word?)

so far i have eaten the olives, and half the loaf, and made a pasta with the pasta, the sausages, the kabana, some good olive oil, and some cracked pepper. it worked out well.

i just got some new protein powder today (optimum health whey protein), so we'll give it a taste test and see how it goes. tomorrow night: dainty sichuan for a test of the pleasure/pain matrix.

Collingwood farmers market, 12 april

On saturday i woke up nice and early, to indulge in my secret affair - kids cartoons with an endless chain of coffees lined up for the morning. seriously. yes, i'm serious. it's the best way to start a saturday, and a ritual that i have been following since i was a kid (well, maybe except for the coffee). actually, come to think of it, except for the cartoons too - when i was younger, i used to love playing hockey. something about holding, no - wielding a hockey stick that made me love the role of aggressor. i even have the stitches to prove it. luckily, as i grew up, i ended up with more kitchen related injuries than hockey, so i guess it all evened out.

ok, i gotta be honest, there WILL be segues as i get all nostalgic, and have to wipe a tear out of my eye. kidding - it's sleep crusties...

anyway, back to the topic at hand. on saturday, i cut my ritual short (well, if you call 3 coffees and 3 cartoons "short") to head to the collingwood farmer's market http://www.mfm.com.au
i'm not sure if you know, but it is held at the collingwood children's farm, close to me in collinwood (obviously). lucky for me - i'm still a stubborn little child that has no interest in getting a licence so i still use public transport to get around. i'd like to say i am taking the green approach, and trying to reduce carbon emissions, be carbon neutral, and all that jazz, but the truth is i'm just bone lazy.

First stop: olive oil. for some reason this is the first thing that i run out of in my larder. normally i use the cobram one that you get in supermarkets, but i thought i'd try something different. note the DEEP DARK green of the oil on the far left hand - this was a first press of the season, and was very strong, too strong for me! (the one on the far right is the same first press, but aged for a bit). the third from the left was a "third press", and really, i tasted a lot of oil, but not much of the flavours i expect out of my olive oil, possibly good for cooking, but not things like guacamole, etc. the one in the middle, however, was just right. (this is very goldy locks, isn't it...) anyway, i could be a prat and say what i thought it tasted like, but let's just leave it at "olive oil" and move on, shall we?

next up are felafels. yeah, i'm a sucker for them. i have an older sister that used to be a hippie, complete with tie dye clothing, and a vegan lifestyle, before it was cool to do that. she got me hooked on them. these were quite nice (most importantly not dry and hard enough to use for squash), so i got some to eat as a snack with friends. i'm not sure what is traditionaly served with them, but i'm going for a mint yoghurt dip. we'll see how that holds up...

and now we get to the good stuff! this is where i get to mix two of my pleasures at the same time, alcohol and organic produce. i was almost going to skip this stand due my to new year's eve limoncello incident (i laced a friend's punch with limoncello and african cane spirit), but try as i might, i couldn't pass up the opportunity for a free sample.

the limoncello they served was chilled with ice, so as i poured half the cup down my throat, it had a lovely soothing effect ... right up until the alcohol kicked in and tore my throat apart. coughing, i asked the girl was the alcohol content was and was told it was 23-25 percent, but she brightly said i could freeze it. now i'm no scientist, but i thought that the alcohol content had to be higher to freeze? either way, i bought some to investigate. next time i'll be back for the blueberry licqeur though, it looked like a good idea for summer (i doubt it will last til then, but we can hope) on the safe side, i might put it in my flatmates freezer, just in case...

Of course, no trip to the farmer's market would be complete without organic vegetables. luckily for me, i can bypass these stands - i have a loving mother that has a farm in the country (bendigo), so i get an endless supply of organic vegies and huuuuge eggs. let's move right on:

ok, i'm having trouble uploading pics. i'll cap it off here for now, but will update this tomorrow (hopefully).

starting afresh is always hard to do

there's something strangely foreign, and yet familiar, distant, and yet, too close for comfort, about starting something from scratch.

ok, ok, so i got suckered into started this up. i guess it had something to do with one too many jokes about substituting palm sugar for brown sugar... (i'm sure there's some lame nerd joke to be made about carbon chains, but i've got nothing).

anyway, to the crux of the issue - what am i actually going to write about.

so, yeah, i got lots of great ideas.

i got this and that.

i got ... nothing. abso-freaking nothing.

we'll see how this goes.

to be honest, i'll be discussing anything i am passionate about, which will be throwing weights around, keeping fit and being otherwise healthy, trying new recipes, and consuming copious amounts of alcohol (the upside is i can now call it "reviewing")

so if anyone wants to give me ideas, i'm all for it...