Cooking in Melbourne Part 2

Melbourne, as a genuinely multicultural city (quite different from another South East Asian city that pretends to be multicultural but decides to have its NYE countdown entirely in Mandarin, ahem), also has amazing Asian grocers that stock almost everything from chye poh to kway teow to fishballs and durians. It's one of the best places in the world, I reckon, to cook Asian food. I've tried a few dishes from different cuisines, and here's some of the stuff I've been pretty happy with.

First up, Taiwanese beef noodles. I got the recipe from a bona fide Made In Taiwan Taiwanese Auntie, and it's one I'm really pleased with. I used chuck which is available here for around $9 a kilo, making this one really affordable meal.  

The chuck was cooked with sesame oil, soya sauce, ginger, garlic and peppercorns, and left to simmer with a Taiwanese spice pack and a chicken frame for more flavour. I threw in carrots and onions for even more sweetness.

On the side, I also fried pickled mustard greens with sesame oil and ginger, as well as coriander leaves. 

These were the dehydrated hand cut noodles that were recommended for the dish.

Yumminess in a bowl after stewing for a few hours, garnished with baby bok choy too.

I found an amazing website called She Simmers, where this Thai lady has documented a number of really good Thai food recipes. I used her tom yum soup recipe which I was pretty happy with. 

The quality of the soup really depends on how fresh the seafood is. 

Everything is simmered with chicken stock.

And I added straw mushrooms too.

That night, we also had olive fried rice using a recipe from Tan Hsueh Yun.  The husband claimed it wasn't authentic, but I didn't care since it was so easy to do using olive vegetables.

Ta-dah! It looked good and tasted even better. Best of all, it was easy to do. No sweat. 

The tom yum was pretty good too, with lots of fish sauce and lime juice. 

Since I had leftover galangal and lemongrass, I decided to do a tom kha gai the next day. 

With coconut milk and chicken. 

This was what it looked like after about 30 mins of boiling. It's a fairly simple soup, no complicated long-drawn stewing. 

But in our house, one can't just do soup. So I started working on a phad kaprow recipe, also from She Simmers. First, I blended shallots, garlic and chilli together

 With lots of fresh Thai basil leaves plucked off the stem.

The garlic-chilli-shallot mixture was fried first, then I added the minced pork and some chopped long beans. She Simmers says that vegetables are not part of the authentic dish, but I needed some fibre and unfortunately it was easier to lump it with the minced pork instead of cooking a separate dish. Here's the finished product, and it was pretty tasty in my opinion. 

I fried a couple of sunny side up eggs.

Perfectly authentically Thai, except for the long beans.

I'm pleased to say I got the eggs done pretty nicely too

And the soup was beautiful, especially on a cold night.

I started getting bolder and more ambitious. Next up was beef brisket noodles, using a recipe I found on the internet. I decided to chuck in some tendons, which are super ugly in their raw form 

Brisket - fairly reasonably priced in Australia too

Some of the aromatics I added according to this recipe

Frying the meat in a skillet before transferring it to a stewing pot

 After a couple of hours of stewing 

And after adding the white radish

Boiling the choy sum to serve with the noodles, they were beautifully fresh

After stewing for almost an entire day

The final product, almost as good as the HK restaurants :)