convenience food

Avocado and promite on bread. simple but rich and tasty... [I like promite better than vegemite now..I'm a convert!] Promite has a certain..savoury mushroomy taste. somewhat like what would be considered "umami" by some food experts. of course I certainly am not.
Another new thing I tried was this vanilla flavoured coffee from Gloria Jeans'. It was so soo fragrant and calming. I'd definitely want it again.
Above are the deep fried shrimp with wasabi mayo from Salamanca Inn. They were really delicious as most things deep fried are.
Leslie made us some yummy chicken schnitzel. Everything in this meal below was cooked up at a moment's notice, with no fresh ingredients at all! The chicken and vegetables were from the freezer, and rice is of course a staple. So, this is the perfect thing to have when you're out of fresh vegetables and are too lazy to go to the store. The veggies tasted just the same as if they were fresh, so I wouldn't have known they were frozen at all.

Chinese new year at Vermont

I didn't think we'd be celebrating chinese new year at all this year, but we were invited to a friend's gathering in Vermont, so we went. This was the only chance we'd get to have authentic malaysian food cooked by malaysian aunties / uncles [far better than any restaurant] !

this was the first thing we saw, the Fried whole snapper.

these are all the CNY goodies like pineapple tarts, fish crackers, love letters [kuih kapit] and peanuts.

Yee sang - just before we mixed it around. It's sort of a chinese salad, with shredded veggies and sesame cracker strips and a thick dressing, with slivers of raw fish [here we had smoked salmon] mixed in.

These were probably store bought.

Everyone mixes it up with chopsticks until it becomes well incorporated and then we eat it! We also had lobak, mee siam, otak otak, jiao zhi [dumplings] and tau yu te [soy sauce pork] but I was too busy eating to take any photos.

So, despite being in a foreign land, these people managed to maintain some chinese traditions.

wedding cake in Hobart

last Friday Gavin and I spent the afternoon at Ben's place in Mt Nelson baking his wedding cake(s). His mum said we were very brave to do it in a small cramped kitchen we'd never been in before, but perhaps we were brave bcoz we didn't know any better! We used a simple butter cake recipe with sour cream and melted cooking chocolate added at the end, that gave it a really moist crumb. We used 14 eggs and half a kilo of butter to make all 3 tiers!

The sugar paste icing was bought from Coles, they come in boxes....it's really easy to use. Just roll it out and put it on! It has a texture like playdough. the sugar flowers were also bought, so really, baking this cake didn't take much skill. It didn't look professional of course...but if you looked at it from a distance you wouldn't be able to tell!

By the way, these red flowers were from his neighbour's garden. How sweet and generous of her!

fresh garden peas

I'd never eaten these fresh before until Glenn showed us how. they tasted sweetish and fresh, with a nice bite. Popping the pods open were the most fun part. I was really amused to see him sitting in front of the tv with a bag of pea pods on his lap popping them open and eating the juicy round peas inside as if they were a bag of chips! I'd always thought that peas needed to be cooked! I'd only ever used them cooked in fried rice, curries or soups. We learn new things every day.