Seminyak "Eat Street"

When I’m in Bali, I avoid having western-style food. The variety of Balinese cuisine and the general Indonesian food in Bali is immense, it’s almost a shame to eat food I can readily access back in Australia.

old spaghetti factory, to fill our bellies

Lunch-size spaghetti (with meatballs) - $8.95

My first encounter with the old spaghetti factory (OSF) was in Winnipeg at The Forks. I was charmed. The decor at the Winnipeg branch had a paris-meets-wild-wild-west feel to it, with its stained glass windows and art deco lampshades and furniture. Though they had a combination of seating arrangements, we picked one of their comfy and intimate booths.

spaghetti meat-a-balls

I’ve always been afraid to cook spaghetti bolognaise from scratch. I'm not entirely sure if this trepidation comes from either the lack of confidence that it can be tastier than pre-bought bolognaise sauce (I know! What a foolish notion) or just from a lack of confidence, period.

pipe rigate alla crema verde

Another quick pasta dish for two, to cook during your weeknights. This time, it's from Gino D'Acampo's book, Gino's Pasta. It's sort of like half pasta meal, half chicken soup, 100% comfort food, 100% healthy.

It's pasta with spinach, parmesan cheese and chicken stock.

spaghettini with tuna sauce

Another pasta dish I cooked on a weeknight is Antonio Carluccio's pasta with tuna sauce, but this time I didn’t forget to take pics! Yay me! *Pat self on back*

What I found after cooking this dish is that I love tomato-based pasta dishes so much better than non-tomato-based pasta dishes. Love that heartiness, that umami-ness, that sauci-ness.

angel's hair with seafood sauce

I made angel’s hair pasta with seafood sauce one weeknight. I stopwatched it, took me 15-20 minutes including preparation and cooking the angel’s hair. This recipe is from Antonio Carluccio’s 100 Pasta Recipes book, which I love love love.

amatrice style thin spaghetti

I love libraries, I borrow books all the time, even cookbooks. It's my way of try-before-you-buy. Try the recipes in the books first before I buy the book. It is a bit hard when you only have three weeks before you need to return the book, but my library allows me to renew the loan once, so I can actually have the books for six weeks.

The latest book I borrowed was this amazing cookbook by Antonio Carluccio called 100 Pasta Recipes. Eventhough Antonio is one of the greatest Italian cooks of all time, the recipes in this book are not pretentious, some are even very easy to do. I have tried three easy recipes so far, and I have added all three of them to my weekdays meal repertoire.

pasta two-ways

A pack of beautiful multi-variety mushrooms at the greengrocer was calling out to me. The only ones I could recognise were the enoki mushrooms. But I still bought them on an impulse, eventhough I don't know what I was going to do with it.

kailis bros fish café blue crabmeat & linguini pasta

A week before Christmas, my sister rang up Kailis Brothers Fish Café to book us a table for Christmas Eve at 6pm. She was told that it’ll be super busy and that we have to be prompt if we didn’t want to lose our table.

We were a bit surprised when we arrived at the restaurant in the early afternoon at about 5.50pm that the restaurant wasn’t that crowded, with plenty of empty tables all around. The waitperson showed us to our table as soon as we told them who we were. My nephew and brother-in-law went next door to have a look at all the seafood in the Kailis Bros Market, meanwhile I accompanied my sister to our table.

spaghetti with prawns, garlic, butter & tomatoes

What do I do with four ripe tomatoes left over from a recent cook up of my grandmother’s red soup? It's such a waste if I just throw it away right? I racked my brain and came up with this almost non-recipe. The beauty of the dish is that it requires almost no effort to whip up and it uses ingredients that I already have in my pantry.

Pasta, garlic and butter are things that I always have in the pantry. I got the leftover tomatoes, so the only missing ingredient was some prawns. I went out to my local supermarket and bought a kilo of frozen, deveined, peeled prawns. The prawns can keep a while, but knowing me, it won’t last long before they're all gone (into my tummy, that is).

cathay pacific meals

Seasonal fresh fruit

Yoghurt

Sweet & sour chicken with vegetables & steamed jasmine rice

Banana loaf

It's been so hectic lately that I find it hard to find the time to blog, what with the new house, the furniture shopping for the new house, the assembling of the furniture, the cleaning and the moving. It feels like I've been spending every single hour getting the house ready. But tonight I have resolved to make time to write this blog. It's about the food I ate during my journey back to Australia flying with Cathay Pacific.

il duca spaghetti alla bolognaise

Spaghetti alla bolognaise - €13

When I'm in a new Italian restaurant and when I'm in doubt, choose spaghetti bolognaise (yes, what a boring choice, but it has served me well so far). Unfortunately, Il Duca did not have spaghetti bolognaise in their menu, but I asked the waiter anyway and he said that there's no problem to arrange it for me. I think you can only request this kind of thing in a small restaurant. Big restaurants won't have the patience in making something specially for you.

Il Duca is a very small restaurant, like most restaurant in Montmartre, but this one is especially small. You can hear everyone's conversation. We sat next to two British ladies, I was totally eavesdropping! The waiter (singular, one waiter in the restaurant) was very friendly, understood English perfectly well. My mere-male husband managed to singe the menu with the candle on our table, but the waiter was totally understanding and got us a new one. Ooops!

not-so-authentic-but-darn-good spaghetti bolognese

As the name suggests, this recipe is by no means authentic, but darn it, it's nothing short of great. I, like many other working persons, don't have the time to make my own pasta sauce (that's what I tell people, in fact I'm just lazy). I'm also not confident that if I do make my own that it'll be as good if I used store-bought pasta sauce. This way I know my spaghetti bolognese will always be delicious. My favourite pasta sauce is Paul Newman's bolognese sauce.

This recipe is good when I need to increase my vegetable intake but don't really feel like eating salad or stir-fried vegetables. You can say it's the cop-out way of eating vegetables. I finely grated carrots and chucked them into the sauce, I can't even tell when I eat it. When I made this last week, I totally forgot about the parmesan cheese, so I went to the nearby Italian deli and had parmesan freshly grated in front of my own eyes, and honestly it did make a difference to the dish. It's not that puke-smelling synthetic parmesan cheese off the shelf.

spaghetti marinara

The past 3 months I have seriously neglected my culinary pursuits because I have my dear mum to cook hearty delicious food for me everyday. It's just so much easier to eat without the dreaded washing up after the cooking. But, I have finally broken the cycle of laziness by cooking up my famous (in my family) spaghetti marinara.

I adore this dish for its freshness and lack of additives. I love the seafood sweetness of the fresh prawns, scallops and squids. It is accentuated by a slosh of my favourite white wine, this time it's Joose of Chardonnay from the Berry Farm in Margaret River. And the saltiness of the tomatoes finished this dish perfectly. Magnifico!

coq au riesling

After one crazily hectic day, I finally made it back to the house and got my hands dirty making this classic dish with a slight twist. Nigella (as in Lawson) said that her Coq Au Riesling is a twist on the classic Coq Au Vin. I was inspired to try out this dish while I was drooling profusely as I watched her show Nigella Express. Added to the fact, that she made it seems so easy on TV, which, honest-to-god, is completely correct. The hardest part of the whole process was the waiting around as I am one impatient person.

I had to sacrifice a bottle of wine from my precious wine reserve for this dish, but it's totally worth it. I bought this bottle from Pemberton in my last holiday trip, it's called Riesling Auslese from this vineyard called Bellarmine. I am no wine expert, but do pick your wine carefully for this dish as you can taste the essence of the wine in the broth. The riesling I used had a touch of mango and lime in it. 

Tips & tricks:

1. If you don't have any garlic oil, do what I did and pop in some finely minced/grated clove of garlic when you pop the chicken into the pan.
2. She specified oyster mushrooms, I used swiss brown mushroom and I think it tasted as good.
3. You have to trust her when she said, simmer it with a low heat for at least 50 minutes. It made the chicken oh-so-tender and your patience will be rewarded with that lovely pink colour.
4. She also said, if you have left-over double cream in your fridge, pop it into the pan at the last minute. I say buy a small tub anyway, and pop them in at the last minute, you won't regret it.
5. I bought some tagliatelle for this dish, but you can use any kind of pasta of your choice, really.
6. If you're eating for one, reserve a glassfull of the luscious wine to drink while eating your pasta. Bon Appétit.