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 :)

Cooking at Home in Melbourne Part 1

As most of you might know, it's impossible to eat out all the time in Melbourne because of the higher prices. The cheapest meal one might get in an el cheapo Asian diner would be around $8 on average, but it would also come with a splitting msg-induced headache as well as suspicions of the hygiene standards of the place. Thankfully, the Australian produce is of really good quality, which makes cooking at home super enjoyable too. Here's a collection of some of the stuff I've been cooking at home, and unfortunately it's a somewhat disjointed post since I've combined about two months' worth of cooking into one rather vague photo essay. Try to follow along, though, and if you want any of the recipes I'd be happy to share them.

Breakfast is my biggest headache since I'm not a breakfast person. Unfortunately, the husband happens to need breakfast every day. I usually try to do simple and interesting things, like bruschetta. Fresh basil, and vine ripened cherry tomatoes.

Together with some bocconcini cheese I found at the supermarket. I know most people don't use cheese in bruschetta, but I happen to like bocconcini. I suppose any form of burrata or buffalo mozzarella would do.

Super cute little balls. It actually looks better before it gets cut up.

Everything diced up finely, with some salt, pepper, lemon juice and a smidgen of grated garlic.

Combined with some drizzles of EVOO, it  made the husband rather happy.

The Melbourne markets also stock an amazing variety of great deli food, including cured meats, dips and cheeses. This was one of the cheese platters we put together for dinner with friends one evening. 

And this was another dips platter that we put together another evening with olives, hummus, capsicum+sundried tomato pesto and sun dried tomatoes. Beautiful with one of our favourite MacLaren Vale wines. 

From here, this blog post gets slightly more detailed in instructional (I told you it was rather disjointed). After settling in a bit more, I started getting more ambitious in wanting to try different recipes. One of the first things I cooked was clam chowder soup. I couldn't find clams, so I decided to substitute it with pippies, which are local shellfish but are slightly larger. 

They were also slightly tougher. 

That same night, I also decided to cook a baked cauliflower+potato dish and roast beef. 

I decided to make it with a white sauce, using flour, butter and milk.

The white sauce is made by melting the butter over a flame, putting the flour in and diluting it with the milk. 

It's ready when the consistency is thick.

So after boiling them, I stacked the potatoes and cauliflower in a baking dish

Before adding the white sauce on top, followed by freshly grated tasty cheese

That went into the oven. In the meantime, I started working on the soup - with chopped bacon, celery, garlic and onion.

Everything was fried with some olive oil

Plus some finely diced potatoes that I had saved for adding towards the end

The pippie meat ready for dicing

Everything being boiled in the pot

Everything looking pretty good, after adding cream

And in the meantime, I seasoned the beef with italian herbs, salt and pepper. I used a 700g piece of scotch fillet, which is what they call rib eye in Australia.

I seared it on a skillet to keep the juices in (at least that's what they tell me it does) 

 This was after 30 mins of roasting at 200 deg C 

The insides looking perfectly medium. PERFECT. Probably my proudest moment this year.

Another close up just so you can see how perfectly I nailed it

 The baked cauli and potatoes were looking good too.

Pretty perfect too, if I may say so myself

The soup was a bit thin and I think one more potato would have done the trick. But it was good in terms of flavour, just that clams would have been slightly sweeter. 

Another day we had lamb cutlets. I love lamb cutlets, which are ridiculously expensive in Singapore. Check out how fresh and tender the cutlets were.

Seasoned with italian herbs, salt and pepper (yes, all the meat we cook could potentially taste the same)

 That night we had a salad of bocconcini cheese, fresh tomatoes and baby spinach

Perfectly pan-fried and juicy on the inside

And because my roast ribeye was so perfect, I decided I had to do it again soon. The following photos are just for bragging purposes. This was a 1kg cut that I did when we had friends over. This time I added a lot of rosemary and oregano too.  

PERFECT again. I am damn good. 

That night, I paired the roast beef with some mashed potatoes. Because I had too much mash left over, I decided to cook shepherds pie to finish it up. It's pretty easy, but rather labour intensive. Apart form chopping the usual garlic and onions, there needed to be finely diced carrots and celery.

I used a mixture of beef and veal mince. I know lamb is traditionally used, but I didn't want to risk having a smelly lamb mince. 

First, I fried the meat with chopped garlic and onions.

Then the veggies went in, together with tomato paste and bay leaves.

I added some italian herbs, as well as rosemary and thyme, and simmered it with beef stock and red wine until it was reduced. Worcestershire sauce goes in too.

Pretty tasty shepherds pie.

We had it with some mushroom soup that I had also made the day before (no instructional pics since I've had a previous post on that)  

That's it for Part 1 on mostly "western" style dishes, stay tuned for Part 2 when we travel to the exotic east (or rather, when we find the motivation to sort out another few hundred photos)