how to find a takoyaki pan たこ焼き器 in your local store

There’s nothing hard with making takoyaki at home, after a couple of goes, we’re experts at it. What might throw a spanner in the works is in the trying to find the equipment essential for homemade takoyaki: a takoyaki grill pan.

nakji bokkeum 낙지볶음

Octopus is an essential ingredient to one of my favourite snacks, takoyaki. The problem is, I have to buy a whole octopus for which I will only use a minimal amount for takoyaki. What was I going to do with the 10 other legs or so?

clams for a sea journey

With the purpose of maximising our time in Victoria, we decided to queue for the earliest ferry from Tsawwassen in Vancouver to Swartz Bay in Vancouver Island. We thought we left our hotel quite early but I guess we miscalculated. It was quite lucky that we were amongst the last half dozen cars that got boarded onto the 7am Spirit of Vancouver Island. Otherwise, we’d have to catch the next ferry a whopping two hours away.

lodeh manisa, a maid's recipe

I woke up one morning with an intense craving for lodeh manisa. The only person who can make it the way I like it is our maid in indonesia, Mbak Mi. I emailed my father and asked for it to be added to the list of food I'd like to eat on my visit in a few months to Malang, East Java. My father emailed back and assured me it won't be a problem. My craving subsided, if only by a little bit, knowing that it won't be long now.

took be gi yukgaejang

I was expecting a slapdash food from a place like Took Be Gi.

frangipani bali nasi campur

I like picture menus, it's like the trailer to a movie, the blurb to a book. You can decide from the photos if the food is to your liking before committing to a restaurant.

pelangi bali crab fried rice

The trouble with living somewhere other than where you grew up is that you'd go through periods where you'd miss a certain type of food so intensely that you cannot think of anything else but.

menega cafe

Have you read my short post on Menega Cafe last year? If you haven't, go on, go ahead, click the link, read about it. It won't take long. I'll wait.

Dum dum dum....

There it is, as you can see, Menega is one of my favourite places to go to in Bali since my wedding organiser introduced it to me last year. And since this is my second post on this place, I won't rave about the food again.

Instead, I thought I'd show you the restaurant itself. Its scenic surrounding. Its cooking, from grill to plate.

bumbu bali nasi campur

Gedang mekuah - Rp 70,000

Gedang mekuah is a bowl of spicy green papaya and seafood soup. It was my appetiser when I went for lunch at this restaurant called Bumbu Bali.

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.

hoi laai pat nahm prik pao

My sister and brother-in-law have recently started their own fruit and herb garden. I never paid much attention to it until just a few weeks ago when I wandered around their backyard. Don't you think it's kinda nice to have your own personal greengrocer? Wandering in their garden, I found some lemongrass and kaffir lime plants. I instantly thought, Thai food! Surely there's an easy meal from David Thompson that uses these two ingredients: stir-fried clams with chilli jam and thai basil.

I bought some clams from my local seafood market, but they must not be in season (either that or the clams were on a diet?) because their flesh were really quite sparing. Plus, the chilli jam that I bought was not a thai chilli jam. It made the sauce a bit sweeter than I anticipated. I don't think my first attempt was very successful taste-wise, though it kinda looks beautiful.

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.

speechless sunday

Rottnest scallops - $19.99/kg

Rottnest scallops (cleaned) - $14.99/0.5 ounce

Whole cuttlefish - $9.99/kg

Barramundi cod - $34.99/kg

Innaloo Seafresh Fish Markets
Corner Oswald St & Scarborough Beach Rd
Innaloo WA

thai gourmet cafe gai yang & som tum set

For us, there were more misses than hits with the Thai Gourmet Cafe. We headed off to Northbridge for an early lunch at the cafe one Saturday morning. The place wasn't that busy at 11am. The picture menu convinced me to order the BBQ chicken set (thai: gai yang & som tum). My sister ordered the chicken pineapple fried rice and my brother-in-law the pad thai.

gung pat nor mai

This asparagus and prawns dish from Thai Street Food is delicious, though perhaps a little bit mild depending on what you prefer. But, you can't go wrong if you go with top-notch ingredients.

xmas lunch 2010

Let me ask you a question, are you a pineapple snob? Do you always tut-tut your friends when they put pineapple in their savoury foods, like pizza? Well, you might as well close this blog post and read my other posts, because I’m about to commit a cardinal sin with this one.

The day before Christmas, my older sister and I have made a date for us to have Christmas lunch together. What could be more perfect for an Australian Christmas to have prawns for lunch, so I went to the local supermarket and bought myself a kilo and a half of prawns (Australian this time, not foreign). I also bought a pineapple and some garlic to go with the prawns.

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.

napa cabbage clear soup with prawns & vermicelli

When I was in Beijing, China for a year to learn mandarin, I went through a phase of eating lots and lots of napa cabbage, either fresh or in kimchi form. I don't eat as much of them now as I did then, but they are still my favourite vegetable.

So, why do I love this vegetable so much? Napa cabbage, or wombok, has this natural sweetness that I really like. Unlike other cabbages, the napa variety does not smell funny (normal cabbage), nor does it taste bitter (brussels sprout).

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).

hawker's cuisine sambal kang kong

I have actually blogged about Hawker’s Cuisine before. But since it was early last year and it was when I was still using my old format, with the claustrophobic 4-picture-in-a-frame photo, I feel like a brand new post is warranted.

I have been to Hawker’s Cuisine a few times since then and I haven’t been disappointed with the food yet. The service, on the other hand, is another matter. When you get a nice waitperson like I had this time, you’ll have the best service. But, when you get a rude one, well, I would just say to myself, I’m here for the food. Such are Chinese restaurants, you have to take the good with the bad.As with typical non-high-end Chinese restaurants, the décor was an afterthought. A few lanterns here, Chinese paintings there, an aquarium, bright orangey-yellow chairs, bright colour wall and presto. It’s definitely not a first date kind of restaurant, it’s more like a 30th date sort of place.