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rarerollingobject

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  1. Day 3 A bit of a repeat day as far as breakfast - egg tarts. These were from a non-descript little bakery next to Times Square but they were lovely..crumbly buttery short pastry, warm custard, just perfect. And a pork bun, not char siu bao but a spicy ground pork baked into a white bun topped with a squiggle of what tasted like cheese. Dim sum for lunch at Victoria City Seafood in Wanchai(I realise that we ordered virtually the same dishes as the day before, doh) Fried anchovies (complimentary): Har gau: XO Cheung fun: Scallop, himeji mushroom and yellow chive steamed cheung fun: More polo char siu bao: Xiao long bao: The fattiest of fatty char siu, so delicious: Dinner was at Under the Bridge Spicy Crab in Causeway Bay, where we ordered a "medium" size crab and rubbed our hands together with glee at the approximate 2 kilos of crispy deep fried garlic it was buried under: With a 'famous' fried rice to go with all the garlic. This was pretty good, lots of prawn and scallop chunks, and the perfect foil for the garlicky goodness: After eating garlic for what seemed like forever, we had still had THIS much left! More on the morrow.
  2. Day 2 Started the day with a brisk constitutional up Hennessy Rd, and found ourselves in a classic HK coffee shop (OK, apart from the football decor) having egg tarts and milk tea. Only discovered on the way out that this was actually the Honolulu Coffee Shop famous for its egg tarts. They were OK..of the flaky pastry variety, a little too sweet for my liking. Tiring of that, wandered further up towards Wanchai to Fu Sing Shark Fin Seafood Restaurant for dim sum. The line up: Table pickles and chilli oil: Har gau: Something gau (mushroom and seafood maybe): XO cheung fun: Wortip: Char siu (sooooo beautifully fatty): Siu mai (originally four, two nabbed before photo was taken): Polo char siu bao and innards: Xiaolongbao: All very good, and pretty good value compared to Australian yum cha prices - around AUD$50 for 2. A bit of wandering ensued and later on, we stopped for steamed milk puddings at Yee Shun Milk Company. Hot steamed milk with ginger syrup for me: Cold coffee milk for him: And the view of the stacked puddings from the outside the shop: For dinner, I wanted lobster, dammit. Headed to Treasure Lake Seafood Restaurant in Central, renowned for its well-priced seafood. I should have booked, but we took our chances - only to be told there were no tables. Started to slope away, crestfallen, when we were called back with a good deal of shouting and waving - a table had miraculously become available! Who knows what happened, but I wasn't about to ponder it. Lobster braised in garlic and butter, on e-fu noodles (shortly after the plate was denuded a couple of pieces as the waitress served us): Close-up of lobstery goodness: Half suckling pig: And the Vegetables of Decorum: And with that, and a couple of Tsingtaos, I was a happy girl. More tomorrow!
  3. Surprisingly, I didn't find char siu bao anywhere! It was the one thing, I remarked sadly to my boyfriend on the flight home, that I missed entirely. Did have a couple of good examples of its goodly cousin, the polo char siu bao..char siu baked into a crispy-topped sweet bun. See following post for photos of this rare beast!
  4. Just spent a couple days in Hong Kong. As I only had limited discretionary time, visited a few old favourites, so there's nothing really off the beaten track here (and we stuck mostly around Causeway Bay) but it was delicious nonetheless. Day 1 - Dinner Tired and cranky from the flight, wanted somewhere with good eats but not too far from our hotel. Luckily one of the better wonton noodle shops in HK (IMO) was just around the corner - Ho Hung Kee in Causeway Bay. Ordered beef hor fun, wonton with noodle (dry), and a wonton soup between the two of us. Wontons are good here, but with a little crunchiness almost like the prawns aren't quite completely shelled? The stock was very full in flavour and the beef hor fun an oily delight. To be continued..
  5. My favourite dish of the nineties was pasta bowties with sundried tomato pesto. Yeah, I remember SDT and pesto fondly. But I was in uni, so.... Yeah, it was ALWAYS bowties! In a pinch, penne, but bowties were the good stuff.
  6. which according to my googling, are just different kinds of Christmas cookies. But I found the gadget first on http://laurafrunza.com/2011/02/05/nutty-nuttela-nuts/ and she used them to make filled egg-shaped things that look awfully tasty. Her grandmother has a cool old one made by "gypsy blacksmiths". Hmm, it's like a one sided ebelskiver pan. Although I own one of these and call it a takoyaki pan. Culturally confused as ever, me.
  7. I can't decide whether I actually miss it, but have a definite sense of nostalgia for the way that everything was doused in pesto and sun-dried tomatoes. My high school friends and I would make boatloads of pasta with pesto, SDTs and bocconcini and feel we were very sophisticated for doing so.
  8. I'm sorry it didn't work..I doubt you did anything wrong. Maybe it's just that you and your DH were such ardent broccoli-lovers before that you were less surprised than the rest of us at how good broccoli can taste.
  9. Fantastic blog, thanks so much for it! Going to go back and re-read everything from page 1, I enjoyed it so thoroughly.
  10. Wonderful looking. Did you make the chutney? If so, please share the recipe? I hope weather calmed down in your area. dcarch Thanks for your kind thoughts..we've been through droughts, to floods, to cyclones over the last few weeks, and now we're back to bushfires! Chaotic. Last week it got to 42C (108F) in Sydney, today it's 20C (68F). Can't keep up. The recipe I used was here, and I added 4TBSP of bourbon to the mix. The recipe does, shock horror, call for using the microwave but I reduced it on the stove instead for around 20 minutes, since I didn't think microwaving alcohol would work out well for me..
  11. Spareribs in sticky peach and bourbon chutney.
  12. Annoying redirection thing to the popsci.com.au site. Drives me crazy on a regular basis. You can either use a US IP proxy service, VPN (I use Comodo Trust Connect) or try this link (the lab gallery on popsci viewed through a proxy browser): Modernist Cuisine Lab
  13. I can smell them on my hands for a whole day afterwards, no matter how hard or often I scrub my hands with anti-bacterial, lemon juice, water or anything else. I wear disposable gloves to prevent this issue; works very well! I use gloves, too. And I de-vein with sharp scissors rather than a knife or special tool. Then I rub the cut edges with a paper towel. Quick, easy and efficient. OK, I have a high tolerance for ick. If you do too, here's the quickest way to devein shrimp: grab the vein from the center of the cut head end between your fingernails and pull. Keep a paper towel handy to wipe the veins off your hands. Perhaps my high ick tolerance also prevents me from noticing the lingering scent of shrimp veins on my hands. :blink: I only use that grab technique if a recipe requires the shrimp to be deveined and with shells left on. But I don't use my fingernails, I use a blunt tweezers to grab the vein from the cut head end and slide it out slowly. It works, more of less, but it's icky. I don't have a high tolerance for ick. Cleaning shrimp is not a task I like at all, so when I cook shrimp I consider it a virtuous and selfless act. One hated kitchen task to rule them all, it seems. One of my first paid jobs as a teenager involved peeling prawns and shucking oysters all day, every day. My variation on this technique is to peel the prawn, and then lying it down on its side on a paper towel, use a small sharp knife to slice down the back (like to butterfly it), at the same time using the tip of the knife to pick out the start of the vein. Holding the vein down onto the paper towel with the flat of the knife then means you can manoeuvre the prawn away and the vein usually comes out neatly and sticks to the grippiness of the paper. This means that I don't have to touch the vein but it's also (to me) the easiest, quickest and most consistent way to remove the vein in one clean piece.
  14. Mmm. How do you cure your salmon ? I've cured (simple brine) & smoked my own, and I'm fascinated to hear about your approach and flavourings, if you don't mind That's about the extent of it, for a gravlax-style salmon anyway. Mine was a 'white' cure of just white sugar, salt, white pepper and vodka. I also love beetroot-cured salmon, where you pack the salmon fillet in grated beetroot to cure it. Comes out beautifully rosy pink and with a slight earthiness from the beet, just lovely. Like this (not my blog). Edited to add other variations I've tried for the cure flavourings: Chineseish - flavourings of sugar, salt, Sichuan pepper, a little five spice, shaohsing wine, scallions and ginger Vietnameseish - sugar in the form of both sugar and caramel sauce, salt, fish sauce, cassia/cinnamon, star anise, black pepper and chilli. Added a splash of Vietnamese moonshine. Thaiish - palm sugar, salt, lemongrass, galangal, red chilli, tamarind, crushed coriander roots and leaves, and garlic. Didn't use alcohol here and it was fine, slightly different texture. Japaneseish - yuzu koushou, Okinawan black sugar, soy sauce and a mirin/sake combo Frenchish - sugar, fleur de sel, herbes de Provence, lavendar petals, and some Pernod. I used fresh thyme too but it was too overpowering by the end of the cure so would omit that next time. The only really terrible one was the one with toasted belacan shrimp paste, cardamom, turmeric, chilli, pureed shallots and young coconut juice. Flavours were just too much, too muddy, too shrimp pasty and overwhelmed the salmon. Don't know what I was thinking with that one!
  15. That looks delicious, emilyr. Sweet and savoury on the breakfast plate, like eggs and French toast(!), is not something you ever really see in Australia and it tickles me every time. My breakfast was a pretty simple but good combination of rye crispbread, with avocado, lime, flaky sea salt and pepper, and home-cured salmon.
  16. Blanching hazelnuts with baking soda and then rinsing them quickly in cold water denudes them completely. And doesn't effect the taste at all.
  17. That was me again! I do think the Sichuan Cookery one tastes better (more syrupy and sticky) but the biggest attraction was not having to make a caramel first like the Revolutionary one has you do, which I kind of hate as it's hard to get right in the claypot I use. The two kinds of sausages I always see sold together (both in Chinese BBQ shops and Chinese supermarkets), in Sydney anyway, are 1) pork and 2) duck liver. So duck liver lup cheong are pretty common but usually a little darker than the ones nakji showed - these may be liver-less.
  18. Wow - I'm late to the party, but LOVING this foodblog. Carrefour is amazing - I took a hugely long taxi ride in Shanghai specifically to check one out, and am still getting over the full shark's head they had in the seafood case there, and the totally flattened pig's head in the butcher section - round and flat as a plate, and complete with bulging eyeballs! Thanks for blogging, nakji, can't wait to see the rest!
  19. Mango lassi is a great option. Pureed mango, yoghurt, a little salt and spices like cinnamon, ginger. I also like 'savoury' lassis, like mint and cucumber pureed into yoghurt. Make some custard or creme anglaise. This could be thin enough to drink from a cup if watered down a little, but still rich, filling and delicious. Blend silken tofu doused with sugar syrup flavoured with ginger until liquid.
  20. Prawncrackers, that looks incredible. Dinner tonight was pad thai with prawns and LOTS of birdseye chilli..phew. My pad thai is still not quite right, a little too damp, but getting better.
  21. Very misshapen kohlrabi?? Kohlrabi's a little radishy but no so peppery, white on the inside. Hrm.
  22. Indonesia is spot on. Here's an easy recipe for Beef Rendang that I've made before, though I made up my own rendang mix from another recipe: recipe
  23. I also once saw an English chef recommend that you rinse oysters after you've shucked them. Nearly had a spluttering rage-athon over that one.
  24. That the best way to get chopped up ingredients from your chopping board into the pan is to hold the board over the pan, and scrape the food into it with the blade of your beautifully sharpened chef's knife. Don't forget to repeat the scraping to get every last morsel off. Every time I see this, I want to throw something at the TV..talk about a good way to speed up the dullening of your most important kitchen tool. Either use your hands, a dough scraper, or flip the knife upside down, geniuses!!
  25. Soaking the eggplant slices in water for a couple of minutes and then drying them well makes them much more pliable and easy to roll. And doesn't adversely affect the texture at all.
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