rarerollingobject

Check out My link for some great Hanoi food. And there are some treats/streets worth ferreting out, particularly Grilled Chicken Street and places for good banh cuon (steamed rice 'pancakes', most ephemerally delicious things you can imagine). I've spent alot of quality eating time in Hanoi, I'll be back in the morning with some more cogent recs when this festive season champagne wears off.

Beautiful meals, Franci and percyn! (And I say that as someone who has basically been living on ramen and beer for six months, so pure hunger is my qualifier!)

Very excited that you're blogging, Nikki! Apart from the intolerable heat, Singapore is one of my very favourite food places and I BEG you, on behalf of all eG, to go all out on the gluttony! Six meals a day, if you can help it! Show us everything!

It got to 37 degrees Celsius in Sydney today (that's 99F!) so your humble RRO was both melting and requiring something refreshing and cold to eat; having found this cute lil wasabi stem on the weekend, I had it with salmon sashimi and cold green tea soba noodles with nori, green onions and a tsuyu dipping sauce. I don't have a proper wasabi or even ginger grater so the texture wasn't quite right but it definitely packed a punch.

Loving the photos, percyn. Is the jalebi dough similar to gulab jamun? And happy Diwali! I went to a Diwali lunch this week at work and it was one of the most sensational feasts I've had in a long time. I'm STILL full, two days later.

Ooh, percyn! This is gonna be good.

I have absolutely no sense of smell, so I happily asparagus-chomp with abandon! And with a nary a thought for my co-habitant either.

The wasabi leaves were peppery, a little tangy. More like a very piquant rocket-y taste than wasabi, but I don't have a great sense of taste since I have no sense of smell - so someone with a more refined palate might pick up more of the wasabi. And guess where I got them?! Coles, of all places! Will PM you a pic of the package. For the sauce, I followed this recipe. For the wings themselves, I just tossed in flour, laid on a foil-lined tray (sprayed with cooking oil to avoid stickage) and put in the fridge to firm up while the oven pre-heated, and then baked for 40 mins at about 200C/400F, turning the wings over half way through, and turning the the tray 180 degrees in the oven also. Keith - that is a BEAUTIFUL meal. I love the pic of the hotpot ingredients.

And proper dinner; grilled snapper with salsa verde. And a very interesting salad of leaves from the wasabi plant. Never seen them before so snapped them up when I spotted them.

Nick, that looks lovely..clean flavours, very refined. Less refined is my 'dinner'. I actually made this and ate it Sunday morning, but since I've been up all night on conference calls, it's effectively my dinner and thus I post it here! KFC; Korean Fried Chicken wings (well, nearly - oven-baked as I hate deep-frying). Crispy and toasty, tossed in a sauce of gochujang chilli paste, minced ginger and garlic, soy sauce, honey, sesame oil and rice vinegar. I love the slow-burn of gochujang, there's no other chilli flavour quite like it.

I also use my iPhone and iPad in the kitchen all the time - IndyRob is talking about Windows Phones specifically here though. Something that would be good for a kitchen reference app is the basic ability to make notes. For example, I have a couple of cooking apps but if I want to note something about temperatures (example: that 200C listed in a recipe works best as 210C in my cantankerous oven, and no, it's not a consistent margin at different temps!), I have to come out of the kitchen app and make a note of that in iPhone Notes. It may be out of scope of what you're intending, but a very basic note editor in some of these reference apps would be invaluable, IMO.

Why, HELLO there... Edited to add, superfluously: that's beautiful, mis.

Well, with the parlous state of wild fishing stocks in nearly every global region, I for one am totally glad that there are solid blocks of people in many countries (those with the luxury of choice) who will neither buy nor eat fish! Everyone should eat less fish, other than me.

I don't think it'd be quite as flavoursome, without the seasaltiness of the clams, but it'd still be very nice and definitely worth making. It's an especially good, restorative dish for those who've totally lost their cooking mojo of late (and I'm referring to myself here.) I like your idea for layers of fennel flavour..seeds and bulb. Might try that next time!

Jmahl?

No picture, but the recipe was lovely..toast some fennel seeds and pound with salt and a clove of garlic. Heat oil in a pan and gently brown some fish (I used blue eye but any firm white fish would do) for a minute or two, then tip in the fennel/garlic mix and a handful of frozen peas (I used shelled broad beans) and fry a minute longer. Pour over half a cup of white wine, half a cup of chicken stock, a big handful of parsley and a handful of clams, drizzle with a bit more olive oil and clamp the lid on, till the steam opens the clams. The broth of the mixed clam juice, wine and stock is incredible. The parsley is almost a vegetable rather than a garnish at the end, and the fish is heady with fennel and moist with the braising. It's a Neil Perry recipe, here.

Not sure whether you'd consider it 'fake' but I prefer evaporated milk in my tea rather than fresh, especially when I'm having Hong Kong style tea - it just doesn't taste right without that tinny, odd taste. And I quite like crab sticks, the fake surimi kind that are lurid pink on the outside, snowy white within. Junky, true, but I'd prefer these when in the rare mood for particuarly junky 'Aussie' sushi to real crab, I think.

Minor brainfart, the Midtown Aoki shop is in Roppongi, not Shiodome. As you were!

The basement of Isetan, in Shinjuku, is astounding. The most incredible French pastries, chocolates, macarons, you name it. Also excellent range of Japanese sweets. To get there, you can catch the Yamanote line from Shinagawa to Shinjuku, fight your way out of one of the East exits, and then wander about two blocks North East. There's also a Sadaharu Aoki shop in Midtown (the new development in Shiodome) and a Pierre Herme shop in Aoyama that I like, but really, both of them have counters in Isetan so I would just camp there and bliss out. (Seriously, next time I'm in Tokyo, I'm looking for a hotel as close as possible to the Isetan foodhall and just basically never leaving.)

That's a good list. I too love yoghurt - but re shrimp, I recently made a lovely tandoori prawn dish that involved marinated the prawns in yoghurt and spices and salt etc, and then grilling them. The yoghurt dissipates down to a slightly tangy/sweet glaze. So it's not entirely unthinkable with shrimp. And ice cream MADE from yoghurt is delicious (something along the lines of frozen mango lassi). All this talk of yoghurt is making me crave..bacon.

I see your breakfasts are as devilish as ever, percyn! All is right with the world. A fairly devilish breakfast myself; squares of butter puff pastry, spread with Dijon mustard, confit leeks, lardons of bacon, an egg cracked over and finished with white pepper and chervil.

Thank you! It was just an iPhone pic snapped before gobbling, but the scallops themselves are so pretty it was hard to go wrong. Yes, I thought the male 'roe' was slightly sweeter, less bitter, a little muskier and more oceany. Not a huge difference but I did prefer the taste of it..which is, you know, about right.

That's the way I make stock too (with wings, I do add vegetables). I find the wings give so much more of that wonderful gelatinousness (collagen? whatever) that makes a good chicken stock great, though I do hack through the wing bones with my cleaver to expose more of the bone. It gives better texture and body to the stock than using just carcasses does. In fact, I think I get better stock from all wings than from when I've used a whole chicken, including meat. Great blog, Scottyboy, really enjoying seeing your food world.

Caramel sauce, like for ice cream. I follow the same recipe every time, and sometimes it's thick, luscious and fudgey, which is how I want it, but maybe 4 times out of 10, it's thin, watery and gritty. I just can't seem to get it together, and am down to obsessively trying to note characteristics of the weather, time of day, size of flame on the stove, MY MOOD..as potential variation factors. Drives me effing mad. Caramel sauce - tis my waterloo.

They taste OK, but not good enough for risk serious food poisoning for! I can't really recommend them, eGulleters. The scallops themselves, on the other hand, were heavenly..sweet and oceanic and tasting of all the good things in the sea.