The Day

In a couple of hours I'll be on a plane to HK.
Not sure whether I'll have time to post before I leave for Taiwan so come back in a weeks time and hopefully I will have posted what happened during that entire week.
Hope everyone stays safe and has LOTS of fun these holidays.
I'll see you guys later.

3 days left

A quick update. I'm leaving in 3 days, I'm really excited but at the same time I'm a tad sad. Won't see twin for 6 weeks :(
Anyways I'll be in HK for a day and then I leave for TAIWAN!!!! I've wanted to go there ever since I've been hooked onto dramas and stuff.  I'm going with some family friends and I'm sooooo excited. Staying for 5 days :D What are some must eats in Taiwan?
Also i might be going on some food tour for 2 days to my mum's home town Shunde (i think that's how you spell it) in Guangdong province. I've been there before and the food is amazing.
Also might meet up with my good friend and FOOD BUDDY Bens :) All year we just spent chem class talking about food which i think contributed to my bad scores in chem. Bens loves his food, not surprising considering his father is a chef...
Really have to finish packing.
And Doug still needs to make Carbonara....maybe tomorrow night. Mum's making chinese roast pork 烧肉tonight =P

Eating Out: An An Viet Noodles, Station St Box Hill

My friends and I for some reason really like viet noodles. They have got to be up in the top 3 of my favourite noodle dishes. I spent the morning rollerblading, one of my hobbies, and i've gotten worse over the last couple of months thanks to lack of practice. After blading i had to go to school to pick up my yearbook, quite disappointed as there is a lack of Interact pics. Then I took the bus with twin to Box Hill (asian land :D) for lunch. Went to this new place called An An 大头虾. Why there? Cos it said $5.90 for a bowl of viet noodles :) So we ordered a small sliced "rare" beef noodles and Bún bò Huế (beef and pork noodle soup but its not like normal viet noodles, its a tad spicy and just different) I've always wanted to try this dish since i read about it in Pauline Nguyen's cookbook/autobiography Red Lantern. I love that cookbook. 

Small Viet noodle. Normally the beef slices are wafer thin and rare right? Well for some reason they were half a cm thick and cooked...not sure whether they gave us the wrong one or not. But it was quite good. Quite a bit of beef considering the amount of noodles. Not bad for $5.90

Sorry it looks half eaten but I didn't think of taking a picture until twin added everything in and was about to eat. There were 4 or 5 slices of pork (pork belly, that pork loaf stuff in viet rolls, and some other piece of meat that neither of us knew what it was) It came with round noodles not the normal flat rice one. The soup was just a tad spicy and a little sweet. But i loved it, it was delicious. 

Would i recommend it? Sure thing, especially bun bo hue, it is soo nice. But since i've never had it before i'm not actually sure whether its a good bun bo hue or a bad one...

One last thing, who likes adding the viet basil in their noodles? Friends had a debate over it. I don't mind it but if i had a choice i'd leave it out.

Eating Out: Wealth Garden, Doncaster Rd, East Doncaster

2 nights ago we went out for dinner with some family friends to this new chinese restaurant called Wealth Garden. Most of you will probably say where?! This place used to be called Purple Sands and in my head it will always be called that. So over the span of 5ish years it changed from Purple Sands to New Panda (what?!) to New Patterns (huh?) and now its Wealth Garden. I haven't been to this restaurant in quite a while, nothing much has changed, done a bit of renovating and that's about it. So we ordered a banquet. I only took a few pics because everyone was starving and dug in before i even thought of taking a pic. The food was decent, nothing special. All the dishes you would expect to find at a chinese restaurant.

For starters we had an oyster with XO sauce. I love XO sauce, its so fragrant, a tad spicy and just full of flavour. I especially like it with noodles. The oyster was quite big, but that doesn't really mean anything. Sometimes the smaller the oyster, the richer the flavour. The amount of XO sauce was a tad overpowering and a bit too chilli to enjoy the oyster itself. But the oyster was just cooked and was nice and soft and not tough.

 

The banquet also came with Peking Duck, one of my favourite dishes. Definitely not the best peking duck around, there was limited skin but plenty of meat. The fat was delicious =P I feel that they could have put a tad more spring onion and cucumber but thats just my personal preference. The pancakes for delicious, just right.

 Would i recommend it? I guess yes but don't expect too much.

Cooking: Fried Chicken

I know Sunday was 5 days ago but I kept forgetting to blog. So since mum used the fryer on Saturday, she decided to use it again on Sunday. That morning i watched a video on youtube on how to make fried chicken and therefore wanted to try it out. It was pretty easy to make and quite tasty but also a tad oily. Didn't exactly flour them enough so the skin wasn't all coated but all in all it wasn't too bad for my first try.

Dinner :D

Also tried out this method of de-boning a chicken wing after its cooked, its a great idea. Here's a link on how to do it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRcOY-PvOC8

My Food Wall

This is a really random and boring post so be warned. Just for you Steph.
About 6 months ago I decided to stick recipes and food cut outs onto my wall in my room. So each week i collected a few recipes from the paper and soon my walls were filled. Then came the heat wave last week and melted half the recipes down (blue tack and heat obviously aren't friends). Therefore on the weekend I decided to pull down most of the them and just leave the ones i really want to make on the wall.
So this is what my wall looked like before I decided to take half the recipes down.

Bored yeah? Sorry about that.

Cooking: Spaghetti Marinara

Halfway through exams right now so really I should be studying.
Today I decided to cook creamy spaghetti marinara as the marinara mix at Safeway was almost half price. Took about 20-30 mins from start to finish.
Ingredients: Spaghetti, Marinara Mix, Cream, Onion, Garlic, White Wine

Tasted okay, wasn't exactly salty enough and the seafood lacked flavour. But the pasta sauce was really thick and creamy just how I like it. I think that's the way pasta sauces should be, especially cream sauces, just thick enough to coat the pasta. Unfortunately my family likes to drown their pasta in sauce, to the point where it is pasta sauce soup. I think a hint of chilli will make it that little bit better, next time I guess.

Eating Out: High Tea Inn, Tunstall Square, Donvale

Today I finished school at 1pm so I went out for lunch with my mum and my bro.

We went to this place at Tunstall Square, Donvale called High Tea Inn which is actually an Asian restaurant.
I think someone recommended it to mum saying their fish head noodles are really good. So of course mum ordered it but unfortunately mum loved it so much she didn't share any with us :( And also she devoured it before I even got a chance to take a pic. So I guess I can only describe it. Two reasonably large crunchy fried fish head pieces (which mum said was salmon) ontop of a bowl of udon style noodles in a slightly creamy broth. Mum was loving it so much she didn't even hear me talking to her =.="

Doug had a viet style Lemongrass Pork on Vermicilli noodles with spring rolls. However he also was too eager to eat and ate a springroll before I took a pic. So there is a springroll missing in this pic.

Doug said it was pretty good. The springrolls were hot and crunchy, and the pork was quite nice. I realised he savoured the pork till last.

I ordered a Hainanese Chicken Rice as nothing else on the menu really appealed to me, most of the other dishes were Vietnamese and I'm kind of over Vietnamese food after making pho a couple of days ago.

I can't say it was the best Hainanese chicken I'd ever eaten but it wasn't too bad. However I did realise it didn't come with soup like most Hainanese Chicken dishes come with. But it didn't matter because I had my awesome Honkie Milk Tea.

Awesome cup yeah? These are the types of cups they have in HK! Don't see them here very often. Love them. They make me miss HK. Milk tea was very honkie although it got a tad watered down by the ice. But all in all it was a good lunch. Service was great andthe food came quick. The place is newly renovated I think, very modern and spacious. Can't really say anything bad about it.