cafe blu @ oaks on pier, glenelg

on a business trip to adelaide during a 38 degree heatwave, once i checked into the oaks on pier in glenelg i had absolutely no intention of wandering further than the hotel for dinner. considering it was still about 34 degrees at 7pm there was no way i could stomach anything apart from a salad so i plonked myself in a little corner at cafe blu, one of the hotel’s dining options.

i decided on two entrees, starting with a sweet potato salad with danish fetta, rocket, cherry tomatoes with extra virgin olive oil and sweet balsamic dressing.

it was a huge serve as you can see! this went down an absolute treat. the sweet potato was cooked to perfection and the combination of ingredients was pretty awesome. totally using sweet potato and fetta together in summer!

i also ordered the crispy fried squid with lemon pepper, cucumber, fresh mint and spanish onion salad with preserved lemon aioli.

would have preferred the squid grilled and there were only 3 slivers of onion, but apart from that it was pretty good!

can’t say i’ll be heading back to adelaide in a hurry anytime soon but if you are i’d totally recommend the hotel and cafe blu.

brownie maximus from ganache chocolate lounge

remember this post with the mini brownie?

well, for my 25th i decided to get the pumped-full-of-steroids version.

sunday brunch with the girls

in case you were wondering, there were also chicken wings in the oven and ice cream in the freezer

mark’s assam laksa, KL

my dad comes from a tiny village called balik pulau in penang, malaysia. i mean village. toilets outside the huts and all that jazz. a purebred city girl, i used to hate going back because there wasn’t any internet, dad didn’t buy a tv for the house that we stayed at when we used to go back, the list goes on. but the one thing i did love about balik pulau was a small coffeeshop an aunt owned with the best bloody assam laksa i had ever and have ever eaten.

assam laksa is a spicy and sour fish-based soup served with shredded fish, laksa noodles, shredded cucumber, pineapple, onions, lettuce, mint, lemongrass and cut red chillis. it’s accompanied by a black shrimp paste that you add as little or as much of into the soup. i, the queen of accompaniments, add as much as they allow me to, and more if i can get away with it!

i haven’t been back to penang in a long while now and had no plans to head there in my most recent trip so i had to find a substitute assam laksa in KL. mark’s assam laksa in the 1 Utama shopping complex in petaling jaya is the best option in my area, although it’s no match for my aunty’s offering.

we normally also order a dessert to combat the spiciness, this time it was cendol (shaved ice with coconut milk, green flour noodles and palm sugar).

bak kut teh in KL

i mentioned in a previous post that i was heading back to KL for a gastro-fest. each time i head back, there’s a list of things that i HAVE to eat in order to consider my time there well spent. one of the main dishes is bak kut teh.

my friendly pal wikipedia describes bak kut teh as ‘meat bone tea’, and is best described as various pieces of meat simmered in a broth of herbs and spices. the broth has a very distinct flavour and the dish probably stands at the more adventurous end of the local food scale for those who are trying malaysian cuisine for the first time.

i normally head to cheow sang, a restaurant in ss2 (a suburb in petaling jaya, selangor). apparently this restaurant now also has a branch in aman suria (another PJ suburb), a stone’s throw from where dad stays at, but this time we decided to head to another bak kut teh restaurant in subang jaya (yet another PJ suburb).

bak kut teh is never complete without a serve of yeow char kuay (fried dough) that you dip into the broth before eating.

my mouth is watering. crap.

you also need to soak freshly chopped garlic and cili padi (birds eye chillis) in soy which you use to dip the meat in later. another key ingredient to the bak kut teh experience

the main cut of meat would be pork ribs. but depending on how adventurous you are you can also opt for tripe, tendons, intestines and stomachs. i’m a rib and stomach girl myself!

this is served with rice, and i personally soak my rice in the broth, soak my meat in the spicy, garlicky soy and then eat that all together (with a soggy yeow char kuay piece if that fits in too!). but, you know, whatever floats your boat.

we normally order a serve of veggies on the side as well, normally lettuce with oyster sauce and garlic.

depending on how monstrous our appetites are dad and i also normally get a small serve of cold tofu (also with oyster sauce and garlic) that is normally served in bak kut teh restaurants.

because of the crazy variety of brunch options in KL i only had this dish once. but man i wish i had more now!

fun in the kitchen – salmon and asparagus

panfried salmon and blanched asparagus with masterfood’s hollandaise finishing sauce. can’t get much easier.

alev alev, elsternwick

wow, this post is totally overdue. it’s ridiculous how far behind i’ve gotten in posting.

i first visited alev alev (450 glen huntly road, elsternwick 3185) MONTHS ago. we felt like trying something new and turkish seemed like a good way to go. we ended up deciding on a platter of mixed grills – mixed kebab, lamb, chicken, lamb cutlet and kofte shish – with hummus and ispanak (spinach) dip.

the mixed grill platter included a basket of turkish bread which was great with the dips…

the spinach dip was so much better than it sounds! and was not only a great accompaniment for the bread but for the meats too.

the hummus was a bit disappointing though, the texture was quite rough – although i guess that’s what you get if it’s home-made – and both of us were probably more used to a smoother dip.

the mixed grill was more than enough for the both of us, and although the mixed kebab was a tad salty everything else was yummy. the rice had been cooked in some sort of stock/broth and was really tasty too!

fast forward a couple of months and i decided i couldn’t be bothered cooking so i got takeout. we shared the mixed grill again… which despite being taken away tasted pretty much exactly as we remembered it…

the salad was crisp and pretty. apart from that, it was… a salad. a necessary evil

we went for the patlican (eggplant) this time along with the ispanak…

which was much better than the hummus. i still think the spinach was the best though!

felt the need to round dinner off with some sweets and when i spied a pack of 4 turkish delights for $3 i had to give it a shot.

there was the original pink delight, which wasn’t bad. the other three though – vanilla, chocolate and nougat – were so sickeningly sweet i couldn’t have more than a nibble. texture-wise they were good, however i have a sweet tongue but it’s not THAT sweet!

would definitely recommend alev alev if you’re feeling like turkish cuisine, they also do a good selection of turkish pastries and kebabs. i’m heading back soon for sure!

fun in the kitchen – baked chicken with barbecue and garlic marinade

just came back from the most amazing gastrofest in KL and Koh Samui, hopefully i’ll be able to post pictures soon! in the meantime here’s a quick dinner i prepared knowing that i would be flat out with work and not having had the time to do a proper trip to the supermarket.

i had some chicken wings and drumsticks in the freezer that i defrosted. i threw some garlic, olive oil and dried herbs together…

before adding some barbecue sauce to finish it off…

and once that was done i popped it on the chicken before leaving it to marinate overnight.

popped it in the oven the next day – 35 minutes at 180 degrees – and served it with some blanched asparagus, cherry tomatoes, rocket and parmesan. done-ski.

shoya, melbourne

hellbent on visiting at least one new restaurant before i leave for KL and thailand, i made a reservation for four at shoya (25 market lane, melbourne 03 9650 0848). when i called the waitstaff informed me that there were three types of dining. the bottom is a smokeless japanese barbecue, the middle is a traditional horigotatsu style area where you have to take off your shoes and sit at a sunken dining table, and the top is a fine dining area. i opted for the horigotatsu area.

we opted to share a bunch of dishes and spent a bit of time navigating through the fairly extensive menu. the waitress we were allocated certainly had her upselling techniques down pat, although while i’m sure it wasn’t her intention i felt just a little bit uneasy with her. we started off with a sashimi platter.

which arrived with a bloody huge lump of wasabi which completely distracted me from the seafood! the waitress assured us that we just HAD to have a selection of chef-selected sashimi. as you can see, some pretty fantastic cuts of fish including salmon and tuna belly, scallop and salmon roe, snapper, clams, swordfish and so on. while i really enjoyed the whole dish, this might be more my fault for not double checking than that of the waitress but she was very good about wording her recommendation in such a way that we had no idea we had actually been sold a sashimi platter that was double the price of what we had originally asked for. again, i suppose that that’s their job but being fully aware that it was our first time at shoya, i personally would have appreciated a heads up.

we opted for a dish that was touted as shoya’s ’signature and must try dish’ of mashed scallops wrapped around a quail’s egg and shiitake mushroom.

visually, like all the rest of shoya’s dishes, this was stunning. taste wise though, i really didn’t feel that this stood out at all. i could not taste the scallops, instead it felt like i was eating a bog-standard piece of yong tau foo.

we opted to try one of the daily specials, a lobster tail with a soft japanese omelette topped with the chef’s special thickened sauce.

our waitress had told us that we should get 4 pieces (as she did quite frequently throughout the ordering process) but wanting to be able to have a bit more variety we just went for 2 serves. I’m sorry, but this was just NOT worth $15 a piece. the sauce was overly starchy, the flavour was bland and while the lobster was fresh, it just wasn’t interesting.

i took a really bad photo of a duck dish marinated in miso so i haven’t included it here. while the duck was cooked really well, the bed of noodles the meat sat on was overly sweet.

we also decided on two serves of a wagyu tar tar (take on tartare, i’m guessing) with a marinade of miso paste.

again, visually stunning but taste wise – blah. the beef tartare at horoki was miles better (not to mention cheaper!).

we rounded off with steamed rice and two hot dishes. the first of which was the nasu dengaku – fried and grilled eggplant with prawns topped with fresh sea urchin miso paste.

this was my favourite dish of the night. the eggplant was lovely and firm, the sauce was wonderfully tasty and went really well with our steamed rice and the prawns added a lovely crunch.

we also ordered the saikyo moyomi-yaki – a marinated grilled white fish.

this was average, i immediately compared this to nobu’s black cod with miso and this came out second best. probably an unfair comparison, but the similarities to strong to ignore.

feeling a bit underwhelmed with the meal, we decided to leave without having dessert. i may go back one day to try the barbecue on the ground floor, but for the price we paid i would much rather have gone to nobu, or even horoki or yoshi for half the price. the experience and food quality would have certainly been on par.

The Age Good Food Guide 2010

this is a year of achievement for me (big and small!) and in line with this i have set a new target. as xm said, a much more achievable target than any exercising goals i may have set.

By the time The Age Good Food Guide 2011, I must have tried at least a third of the restaurants in The Age Good Food Guide 2010.

Simple.

I’ve gone back into my past posts and popped blog entries about current GFG10 visits… hopefully i’ll be able to add to this regularly!