adriano zumbo

I have never liked macarons until I tried the ones from Brunetti when I was last in Melbourne. I then checked around with my Sydneysider friends on where I should get my macaron fix back here and the unanimous recommendation was Adriano Zumbo.

Finally laid my hands on a box of Zumbo macarons and I must say I was pretty impressed by the range of exotic flavours available. However, I still declare Brunetti's macarons the better ones for their melt-in-the-mouth crusts.

flowers and fruits

I've been making my own fruity/floral tea concoctions at home and absolutely love the nightly (almost) fragrant-cup-of-tea-in-hand-while-watching-tv experience.





Current favourite is bael fruit + dried longan + chamomile mix. Second favourite is honey fig + dried pear + chrysanthemum and next on the list is honeysuckle + rose + chamomile. And I always add a teaspoon of Manuka honey to sweeten it up a bit.

weekend in melbourne

I had a weekend getaway to Melbourne in August courtesy of Pawpaw. As there were so many places and activities covered in that short time frame, I'm too lazy to go into details for the whole trip. Instead I'll let the pictures and the brief captions show you the highlights.

On the streets:


lights bokeh from traffic/cars/buildings



neon boards in Chinatown



purple wigs for a tv commercial shoot



playing with fire in public



hire a bicycle anywhere in the city to reduce your carbon footprint



back alleys and lanes full of artistic graffiti


The parks and the gardens:


Captain Cook's Cottage in Fitzroy Gardens



Fountain in Carlton Gardens right outside the Royal Exhibition Building



Fountain in Carlton Gardens right outside the Royal Exhibition Building



Doing the signature tourist jumps outside Captain Cook's Cottage



Doing the signature tourist jumps outside Captain Cook's Cottage



Doing the signature tourist jumps outside the Royal Exhibition Building



Along the Yarra



Random school girls posed for my camera


Art Galleries and Museums:


Had a history lesson with King Tut



Aboriginal art



Taking the Dinosaur Walk in the Museum



The science corner


The State Library:


Majestic entrance



Inside La Trobe Reading Room



The famous domed roof



Cowen Gallery in the library


The food:


Hearty breakfast on Lygon Street - the little Italian suburb



The Soup Place off Flinders Lane



Best macarons in town from Brunetti's



Best macarons in town from Brunetti's


Lastly the most indulgent splurge: a date with Andrew Lloyd Webber that you can read here.

And that's all folks. Til the next trip.

bael fruit tea

I never knew the existence of the bael fruit (Wiki here) until my visit to Chang Sabai for a Thai massage one weekend. I was served a warm cup of extremely fragrant tea after the hour and a half massage and promptly asked for more information on the tea, after which saw me leaving the spa with a bag of this dried fruit.



I put three slices of the fried bael fruit into a pot of 1.5 litres of water and set it to boil for about 15 minutes. In the absence of Manuka honey (anyone heading to NZ can you please get me some???) I added a few cubes of rock sugar as I like it a bit sweet. It's currently my favourite after-meal warm beverage.

the heavenly tim tam experience

I rediscovered my love for Tim Tams - specifically the Dark Chocolate ones - recently when a corporate guest from the Middle East taught me a new way to eat them with a good cup of strong latte.



In the absence of gourmet coffee, I have been making my own hot chocolate at home for this Tim Tam experience. Some warm fresh milk (I put mine in the microwave for 1.15min)...



... and drinking chocolate - I highly recommend the Vittoria DARK Drinking Chocolate - gives you a great beverage for cold and rainy days. I add a teaspoon of sugar too cos I like mine to be a little sweet.



Now's the time to unwrap the pack of Tim Tams.



Bite off the diagonal corners of the biscuit as seen on the left below. Then dip one bitten-off corner into your preferred hot/warm beverage - coffee/hot chocolate - as seen in the right pic below and suck the beverage through the other bitten-off corner with your mouth.



This allows the hot/warm liquid to melt the wafer and chocolate from the inside out. Without waiting too long for the whole biscuit to disintegrate, remove the Tim Tam from the hot chocolate and bite into it.



This is one step up from my previous way of dunking the entire Tim Tam into the coffee - which is my own personal beverage preference for the perfect Tim Tam experience - because instead of having the warm liquid just melting the outer coat of chocolate leaving the biscuit hard and dry as usual, you are now biting into a moist and slightly softened biscuit with the subtle taste of coffee infused in the wafer inside and the spread of the exterior about-to-melt chocolate coat hitting your taste buds at the same time which is just heavenly.

we had crabs again

I hosted another crabby dinner at my place around late June in return for a previous dinner treat by my dinner guests. This time, it was a rather stressful affair because I couldn't get the necessary ingredients for the dishes I intended to cook and had to tweak the menu at the last minute. The worst of it was I couldn't find a single pack of the Prima Taste chilli crab mix even after combing through all the asian grocery stores in all the nearby suburbs! I ended up having to improvise using some dodgy Indonesian paste and whatever I could find in the kitchen.



Well, fortunately it all still turned out good enough for the guests to pay me some compliments although I wasn't fully satisfied with the taste of the chilli gravy. Here are the guests with the spread: chilli crabs, deep fried buns for dipping into the crab gravy, beef rendang, handmade wanton soup and Mama's special cabbage rice.

birthday dinner - degustation at assiette

Pawpaw gave me a birthday treat at Assiette - a modern French restaurant - in Surry Hills where he indulged me in a three-hour ten-course degustation menu with wine pairing (we only got the wine pairing for one set to share between us as I was on medication and could only restrict myself to one sip per glass).

I managed to take some decent shots, albeit some turned out a bit blurry, with my phone without the flash. Below are nine out of the ten courses as I somehow forgot to snap the third last dish.


Left: Seasonal oyster with Vietnamese dressing and baby coriander (wine pair: Sugii Shuzo 'Shizen Jozo' Junmai Yamahai Muroka Shizuoka, Japan)

Right: Cured Hiramasa kingfish with dashi jelly, pickled octopus and blood lime (wine pair: 2007 Bernard Moureau Bourgogne - Aligote Burgundy, France)



Left: Creamed polenta with sauteed mushrooms and Tasmanian truffle (wine pair: 2008 Pegasus Bay Chardonnay Waipara, New Zealand)

Right: Pan fried boudin noir (black pudding! I like very much!!) with marmalade prawn, pickled heirloom carrots and crackling powder (wine pair: 2009 Albert Mann Pinot Blanc Auxerrois Alsace, France)



Left: Caramelised chicken wings and veal sweetbreads with bacon, pea mousse and mushroom puree (wine pair: 2009 Hautes Cotes de Nuits, Dominique Guyon 'Dames de Vergy' Burgundy, France)

Right: Crispy-skinned mulloway with celeriac puree, curried mussels and lentil fritters - this is the only dish I didn't like at all due to the strong curry taste that totally overpowered the fish and I've also never been a fan of lentils - (wine pair: 2007 Greenstone Monastrell Heathcote, Victoria)



Miso-braised Wagyu brisket with parmesan gnocchi, cauliflower puree and pencil leeks (wine pair: 2009 Chinon, Pascal Lambert 'Tradition Graves' Cabernet Franc Loire Valley, France)

Right here after the Wagyu, we had the Brillat-Savarin cheese cake with honeyed walnuts and pear puree paired with 2009 Seresin Pinot Gris Marlborough, New Zealand. I couldn't stand the strong smelling cheese (just slightly less pungent than the blue cheese) and donated the whole of my share to Pawpaw who loved it.



Left: They call this the 'Pre Dessert' which is lychee jelly topped with some coconut flavoured cream mousse

Right: Olive oil cake with lemon curd, creme fraiche sorbet and raspberry marshmallow (wine pair: 2009 Escarpment 'Hinemoa' Riesling Martinborough, New Zealand)


Because we had a 25% discount voucher, the total bill only came up to only about $200 which was totally worth it as every dish was enjoyable except for the curry fish and the smelly cheese. Although the portions were all about bite sized, I was sufficiently full after the tenth course but Pawpaw was only about 80% full and 110% drunk (LOL). It's his first experience trying a degustation menu with wine pairing so he definitely cleaned every single glass down to the last drop. The service was impeccable and being a Wednesday night, the restaurant was only half full and so we got a really nice quiet table at one corner.

I felt thoroughly spoilt for the duration of the dinner and thought it was a nice end to the special day when I got home at just slightly before midnight.

mama's famous cabbage rice

No amount of words can adequately describe how much I miss my mum's homecooked comfort food. So I will occasionally try to replicate some of her signature dishes just to have a taste of home, one of which is her famous cabbage rice - 高丽菜饭 (pronounced as koh-lay-cai-peng in hokkien). It is a dish that can be eaten on its own when you're feeling lazy due to the simplicity of the cooking method and the many chunky bits of goodness mixed in with the rice, or you can accompany it with one or two extra side dishes if you have time to whip them up.

After learning from a couple of past failed attempts because I always managed to either forget to boil the cabbage or to leave out the seasoning entirely and so on, I finally got it quite close to Mum's standard in the last attempt even though I decided to do away with adding the chicken stock and chicken pieces. I have outlined below the full recipe that I managed to come up with after a phone call to Mum to clarify on some of the little details such as "do I need to boil the cabbage first?" and incorporating all the lessons learnt from the past few experiments.

Ingredients (serves three):
- two cups of rice
- two cloves of garlic finely chopped
- half a head of cabbage
- six or seven dried shitake mushrooms
- a handful of dried shrimps
- two chinese sausages
- cooking oil
- sesame oil
- salt
- ground white pepper
- spring onions for garnishing (optional)
- chicken stock (optional)
- chicken pieces approximately 2cm x 2cm, marinated in chinese wine and light soy sauce for at least 30min (I didn't add chicken this time but it's highly recommended you add the chicken as it significantly adds to the flavour)



Wash the cabbage and cut into big slices approximately 6cm x 2cm. Place them in a pot filled with water to cover all of the leaves and let it boil until soft. Soak the dried shrimps and shitake mushrooms in hot water until soft. Slice the already soft shitake mushrooms and the chinese sausages.



Put the rice in the rice cooker and set it to cook. If you want it to be more flavourful, you can replace the water with chicken stock although I find this makes it too salty for my liking. You can probably experiment with a mixture of water and stock.

Add a tablespoon of cooking oil to a deep frying pan or wok on medium heat. Add in the garlic when the pan is hot and stir fry until slightly brown.

(Additional step I did away with: add in the chicken and stir fry until the meat is about 90% cooked.)

Add in the dried shrimps and chinese sausages and stir fry for about 1min. Then add in the mushrooms and the boiled cabbage and stir fry for another 1min. Add a pinch of salt and some ground white pepper to taste.

By this time, the rice in the rice cooker should be about half cooked. Add the entire pan of the stir fried mix into the rice cooker on top of the rice. Drizzle some sesame oil over it and leave it to cook. When the rice is cooked, stir up the contents to mix all of them in evenly. Cover the rice cooker and leave it for a minute or two. It should look like the below. Ready to serve. ^^v

sweet and sour pork (咕噜肉)

The classic Cantonese dish - sweet and sour pork (咕噜肉 or "goo low yok") - is the one zi char dish that I miss the most from back home. Although it's easy enough to find instant packs of batter and sauce for this dish, I find that they still somehow cannot deliver the crunchiness of the pork and the zing of the slightly tangy sauce to the standards that I want.

So I mixed and matched a few recipes for the pork marinade, the batter and the sauce, and combined the resulting self-created recipe with an extra coating for the pork that was a method I learnt from an ex boyfriend's mum a decade ago to yield a more than satisfactory outcome that I am very proud to say is better than what you can get at a lot of the zi char stalls in SG. Give it a try to find out for yourself.

For the marinade:
- 1/2 tsp corn flour
- 1 tsp rice wine
- 1.5 tsp light soy sauce

For the batter:
- 1/2 cup water
- 60g plain flour
- 30g corn flour
- 1/2 egg
- 1 tsp cooking oil
- a pinch of salt

For the sweet and sour sauce:
- 2 to 2.5 tbsp ketchup
- 2 tsp plum sauce
- 1/2 to 1 tsp white rice vinegar
- 1 tsp oyster sauce
- 1/2 tsp worcestershire sauce
- 1 tsp corn flour
- 1 tsp sugar
- 2 tbsp water
(you can adjust the proportion of each item here according to taste; some like it sweeter - add more sugar; some like it more sour - add more vinegar etc etc)

Other ingredients:
- about 250g of pork tenderloin cut into bite sized pieces
- 10 pieces of plain Hup Seng cream crackers
- 3/4 of a green bell pepper cut into small pieces (about 1cm x 1cm)
- 1/2 an onion cut into small pieces (about 1cm x 1cm)
- 2 pieces of pineapple slices from a can or fresh sweet pineapple cut into small pieces (about 1cm x 1cm)
- cooking oil enough for deep frying the pork pieces



Marinate the pork pieces in a bowl. Cover the bowl with cling wrap and put it in the fridge for at least 30min. Mix all the ingredients for the batter well in a another bowl and set it aside. Mix all the ingredients for the sweet and sour sauce well in a third bowl and set it aside.

Pound the cream crackers in a mortar and pestle until fine - see the 2 pics below.





Here you see all the prepared ingredients ready to hit the wok (left to right, front to back): the frying batter, the marinated pork cubes, the sweet and sour sauce, the cut up ingredients - onions, pineapples and green bell pepper, the crushed cream crackers.



In a deep skillet, add enough cooking oil for deep frying and place it on medium heat. Transfer the pork cubes into the batter and then coat them with the crushed cream crackers - make sure they are well coated.



When the oil is hot, deep fry the coated pork cubes until golden brown.



Dish out the pork cubes and set on paper towels to drain out the excess oil.



In a separate frying pan or wok, heat up a tablespoon of cooking oil over medium heat. Stir fry the onions until translucent. Add in the bell pepper and stir fry for about 30 seconds. Add in the pineapple pieces and stir fry for another 30 seconds or until you can smell the aroma of the bell pepper.



Give the pre-prepared sweet and sour sauce a quick stir to mix it and swirl it into the frying pan/wok. Once the sauce thickens and you can smell the tanginess from the sauce, add in the pork cubes and give it a quick stir fry to make sure all the pork pieces are coated with the sauce. It's now ready to be dished out and served with rice!



Doesn't it look good? Just like what you get in a restaurant and it tastes as good if not better. ^^v