Christmas food

hope you've all had a good christmas! We didn't really plan anything but I was pleased to have been invited to lunch and we didn't even have to prepare anything! We just showed up and enjoyed ourselves.

 the usual Christmas feasting began ystd with prawn cocktail and crackers with bad jokes in them.....

 the obligatory ham...and various sides.

 here's my plate on the first round - turkey, stuffing, ham and lamb...and veggies. i went back for 2 more helpings...

our hosts also showed off his coffee making skills with his new coffee machine....

Jo had heaps of fun with the turkey bone - he held it, waved it around, banged it on the floor and chewed on it with his gums. who'd have thought he'd have so much fun with something we'd throw away?

how was your Christmas?

The Fish Bar, Bellerive, Tasmania

 Situated at Bellerive Beach, this place has a great view, ample parking and great service! This was my first time here, but I've eaten at the other branches in Sandy Bay and North Hobart. I must say this one has the best location though. All the servers were really friendly and accommodating. First of we had the natural oysters $9.50, above, that were really fresh and tasty. I just love how it bursts with fresh salty oyster juice when you put it in your mouth.

 This was the grilled stripey trumpeter with salad, $16.50. Flaky flesh and tasty tartare sauce...but it wasn't as good as the battered flathead, below. [well only because the more fattening things are, the tastier... ]

 We also had the crumbed scallops - very nice.

This was some other battered fish but I dont remember what. Yummy as well. 

 we had ice cream and coffees as well but didnt bother photographing them...This is a great place for seafood with a view when you don't want to pay Mures prices, wait in line or pay for metered parking at the docks.

strawberry season and Southern Lights Aura cafe

 We had lunch at Aura cafe at the Southern Lights Hotel in Kingston. There's a nice view of Kingston and the river Derwent and a bit of the eastern shore on the other side as well. and a very good two man band were playing this afternoon. "Where's Mary" is their band's name. But, i'm most concerned about food, so above is the Chicken parmigiana which was excellent. What's not to like about deep fried chicken smothered in cheese, ham, tomato sauce and eggplant?

 The moussaka was nice too, with lotsa cheese, white sauce, eggplant and tomato sauce.

 This was the fish of the day, for $29.95 - very healthy! grilled travelley with sweet potato mash, steamed asparagus, red cabbage and truffle oil. How many superfoods can you pack into just one meal?
All in all I'm quite impressed with the chef here, the food exceeded our expectations. Wonder why there were hardly anyone here today, a Sunday?

 My first strawberry ice cream  made with my Breville freeze n' mix. Just strawberries, cream, milk and sugar went into this. It was really easy to do - just puree some hulled strawberries, whisk that with cream, milk and sugar, chill in the fridge, then churn in the [pre-frozen] ice cream bowl.

Everyone thought it was okay. Who knows? might be better than Haagen Dazs'... hehe

more spring blooms

 anyone know what these are? they're everywhere! the previous owner of this house must've liked them.

 more weedy flowers... that look quite nice on their own!

 a dark red version of the earlier nameless flower

 and a pale pink one.

 a deep purple one!

these are from a huge bush that had buzzy bees all around it.

How nice that I'm enjoying all these flowers that I didn't plant... ! now if only the previous owner of this house had planted cherry, apple and orange trees...

spring flowers in the garden

 the birds are out singing and so are the blooms. these are only some of our flowers!

 dont know what these are but they just popped out of nowhere!

 lovely huge roses

 some weedy ones...

 tiny daises

 geraniums

 a succulent

 some sort of iris....

 fuchsias which arent even fuchsia in colour!

 tinier daises

some other prolific purple and white daises

raspberry pancakes

I had some raspberries that needed using up so i added them to a regular pancake mix. Raspberries are something i just can't eat on their own - too sour! I tried giving them Jo [my 6 month old] and his scrunched up his face from the sour-ness! and this was even with it mixed with mashed banana. well I made him eat it anyway - i wanted him to have the vitamin C. 

Mixed in with pancake batter, they looked a nice pink hue.

after flipping over

.

wonder why the first few ones never look as good as the subsequent pancakes. 

anyway, they were lovely with maple syrup and cream! 

recipe:

whisk together 1 cup flour, 1 cup milk, a pinch of salt, a tsp sugar, 1 tsp vanilla essence, 1 egg and 2 tsp baking powder, then add some [maybe a cup? i didn't measure, just eyeball it] raspberries [or any berries really] and keep whisking until smooth. spray a nonstick pan with oil, heat to medium hot and ladle the batter  in whatever size you like. flip over when bubbles appear on the surface, cook a further 2-3 minutes depending on the size of your pancakes. 

serve with maple syrup or ice cream or cream or honey or icing sugar.

baking...with my new Breville mixer

 I got this for $270 at the Good Guys - it has a scraper which scrapes the sides of the bowl but I found that I still had to scrape the bands of mixture that gathered on top of the scraper bit. I'm quite pleased with it after having used it just twice. my old cheap one died after less than 10 uses so i thought i'd get a proper one, and of course, those colourful KitchenAid ones were much coveted! but I couldn't justify spending that much, especially since my baking skills aren't up to that level!

These are from Mrs. Field's chocolate cookbook - I modified it a lot because her recipe involved putting melted chocolate into the mixture which I couldnt be bothered doing... 

One thing about American recipes is that they always end up being too sweet. I've learnt to reduce the sugar but even then it's just guesswork. These cookies still ended up being slightly too sweet although I'd reduced the sugar by 1/5. Perhaps american sugar is less sweet than ours  ? 

but, they were yummy anyhow! 

here's the modified recipe: 

cream 220g butter, 1 1/4 cups brown sugar, 3 eggs + 2 tsp vanilla

in another bowl, whisk 2 cups plain flour, 3/4 cups cocoa powder + 1 tsp baking soda

fold flour mixture in, then stir in 340g chocolate chips. 

preheat oven to 150C, drop by the tablespoons 2 inches apart. Bake for 18-22 mins, cool for 1 minute on baking tray, then move to a wire rack to cool completely.

Olliebollen festival

 The annual Olliebollen festival at Calvin Christian School was on today and we went in anticipation of delicious freshly fried olliebollen...unfortunately the baby whacked it out of my hand after I'd taken only 2 bites of it! so it ended on the ground. to make up for it, i had the waffles with ice cream, maple syrup and berries, above. and some other things below:

presumably "butter cake" in Dutch, above. really nice - it had a rich crumbly texture and fragrant almond scent. I wouldn't call it a cake though, it was more like shortbread.

we wanted to have some of the roast pork that was looking really luscious on the spit roast but alas, it wasn't ready when we were there and we had to leave for another appointment.

apart from that, we were very pleased to have snapped up a boxful of 2nd hand books for just $2. hooray for school fairs!

siu yoke [roasted belly pork ]

 I discovered these pork belly roasts in vacuum sealed packs at coles.  They're really convenient sold this way, as they keep longer in the fridge than if they were just glad wrapped on a Styrofoam tray.
sorry for the bad photos again! i just dont have the time to read through the camera manual properly so i just point and shoot like the amatuer i am.

this is a simple way to cook it from a Chinese Malaysian cookbook - just dry the skin well, make slits in the underside and stuff with garlic cloves, and sprinkle underside with 5 spice powder. leave in fridge a few hours or overnight to dry out.

then, sprinkle and rub a TON of salt on the skin, and put into the oven on a rack with a dish of water underneath at 180C for an hour, then remove all the salt [i just scraped it with a butter knife and wiped it as much as I could with a paper towel] and shove it back into the oven at 240C for 45 minutes or until skin crackles.
let rest before slicing.

i didn't bother with the traditional nam yue [fermented tofu] or rice wine, just used salt, 5 spice powder and garlic for flavouring - and it worked very well.

traditionally its eaten with rice and some raw cucumber and tomato slices to counteract the fattiness but in my opinion it'll take more than that to "negate" its health effects. Perhaps some oatmeal and omega 3 tablets will help! and uh...a few hours working out on the treadmill? 

wok tossed noodles and rice

Sawak's offshoot stall at the Moonah Island market - has the best char kueh teow and fried rice in the state! not that we've had that many outside of Hobart but these 2 dishes were as good as any good ones in Malaysia - perhaps better than some bad ones there [like in shopping mall food courts...] At $7.50 a plate, with substantially sized prawns, not bad! the fried rice came with a nice crispy oily fried egg on top, which i found very satisfying. and both had significant amounts of "browned bits" [from a really hot wok flame!]

I'd definitely come here again and order these same dishes often, provided the same chef cooks them... 

the curry puffs were only so-so though. 

open on market days only - Thurs-Sundays. 

been..VERY busy!

i havent been able to log in to this blog /or any blog! in ages because i've been tied up with this:

yep - becoming a parent is ... indescribable. people told me lots of things about it before he was born but it never registered how extremely EXHAUSTING it would be. will this turn into a parenting blog? i dont know.. but, as we go along in life passing through its different stages - different things take up our attention and time and we can't hold on to the past... 

getting only 1-2 hours of sleep every day [im not joking!] for months is no fun at all. in fact i wonder if sleep deprivation were used as a form of torture in war? i thought babies slept most of the day but mine slept even less than most adults i know! those first 3 months were like a blur to me - completely and utter brain fog/exhaustion/brain dead and i cant quite remember much from that time. it just passed by in a blink of an eye but felt like years and years....

but of course, seeing his face and smile makes it all worth it... perhaps that's why God made babies so cute. if they weren't, we wouldn't go through this torture for them..

anyway. if i feel that some parenting posts would be interesting, they might find their way in here but it's something not everyone's interested in [unlike food...] and i always zoned out whenever someone talked about their kids [before i had one] because i couldn't relate. so i can totally understand if people can't relate to this aspect of my life now. 

for months i was unable to cook/bake anything as i had to hold him 24/7. but, it's still one of my passions!

so i've resorted to ëasy, instant foods like pita pizzas. 

this avocado, cheese and bacon pizza i made was yummy - and so easy to make too! [not much more work than a sandwich really]

 the hubby took the baby this afternoon promising to let me have some time to myself so I made this ricotta cheesecake from Belinda Jeffrey's book. unfortunately my photography skills haven't improved much so this photo is wrong on so many levels. anyway, i enjoyed finally baking something, after months of not having baked anything.
even more fun was going to the neighbour's homes to give them some....