Sushi Train Fail

Weather was hot and warm and I was too lazy to cook on a monday evening. Both of us were craving for something cold for dinner and sushi pop out of Mr. mouth. I like the idea too but where??? Majority of the Japanese restaurant closed on Mon, am I safe to say that? Some on both Sun and Mon. Can't complain much because they need their break too. Can only blame ourselves why we always crave on Japanese food on either Sun or Mon??

I came across Edomae few months ago while I was there for my hair cut. I saw the sushi train and did note the restaurant to give it a try next time. Suggested to Mr. since it's near as well. We did read the reviews on urbanspoon but still decided to give it a try even though it was bad. Never taste never know right?

We were the 4th couple when arrived. There wasn't a lot of different variety of sushi on the train. In fact quite a few dishes were all deep fried food.


Started off with Edamame which wasn't even lightly salted.


Next was spicy salmon roll. It was really spicy!!! I was suspecting whether the salmon was tinned salmon with chilli that are available in the supermarket. I made a wrong purchased before and it was too spicy to consume.


Don't really remember what type of fish this is. The fish was at room temperature and was kind of tasteless. Not fishy for sure but also doesn't taste fresh.


Unagi was very thinly sliced and rice was fully soaked with sauce. Rice roll breaks once we tried to pick it up with our chopstick. Rice roll was machine made and not handmade. Can't expect too much for the price.


Salmon was pretty tasteless again. Why?


Fried Ebi roll was done pretty well. Both of us was amazed as the few dishes before wasn't good.


Mr. ordered bubble tea which is green tea with milk. It tasted horrible! I tried it and told him to stop torturing himself. How did they manage to serve such a horrible drink??? Wonder if the waitress is attentive enough to sense something wrong when she clears the table. Doubt so!


Torched salmon sushi. Can smell the burned fish fat but why the hell dress the fish with mayonnaise? It spoiled the dish totally!

Mini roe sushi. I was amazed how skinny the sushi turn out.


Mr. ordered a fried pork cutlet curry bento. It was one of the better dishes we had throughout the whole dinner. The cutlet was crispy and curry wasn't too sweet.

Suggest to go for their deep fried menu if you are dining there. Don't expect too much from their  service because it sucks! The waitress practically just dump the bento box and throw the spoon to us when serving. Definitely won't be going back again.

2011 Birthday Present

On the eve of my birthday, I was chatting with my Sis, nephew and niece through Facetime. The kids made me a Lego birthday cake and sang me birthday song. It made me really homesick. I made me drop a few tears but I got back to normal pretty quickly as well. That's something I have to constantly adjust and get use to. Can't have everything in the world. I gain some and lose some.

Enough of all the emotion, back to happy event. Past midnight, I was still chatting with Sis and Mr. suggested I better start hunting for my present. Last year, he hid my present as well and it only took me less than a minute. That was because I knew what he was planning. Accidentally spotted him on KA website. This time round I was total clueless, I was shocked! In fact I spend 2 minutes repeating this question " You really bought me something? When did you have the time to sneak a trip to the shop?". When I finally believed him, I didn't know where to start. Although the current house is not extremely big but there's 3 rooms plus quite a bit of storage cabinets. Most important, I don't know what I'm looking for! How big or small is the present???

The kids got involved started giving me suggestion and asking where am I etc. It did take me a while as I'm expecting a small gift. Don't ask me why but that was the 6th sense at that moment. But I was wrong. The gift was huge and heavy! Definitely something from Matchbox when I spotted the wrapping style.


Same wrapping paper and ribbon as last year.


Kids were both excited when present was found and kept shouting for me to open it up quickly as they were curious too.


Did you manage to guess it right? It's a KA food processor. A kitchen appliance which being missing from my kitchen counter .

It was definitely a surprise. How did Mr. know I wanted one? I had never mention to him before. In fact I was still trying to come up enough reason to convince myself that I need one.

While admiring my new toy, Mr. again suggested to start searching for present #2. This time round I spend even more time reassuring that wasn't something he made up to give me a good work out before bedtime.

It was a lot harder to hunt for present #2. Again without knowing what I'm searching and already looked at all the highly possible areas, I hadn't left with much choices. I almost wanted to give up but Mr. said if I can't find it, it will go back to the shop :( No idea how true but I chose to believe it. Sister who was still online was helping by suggesting areas to look even though she had never being to my place before.


Finally I found present #2 hidden among all the unfolded packing boxes we had in the study room.




It's a Pasta Press attachment for my KA stand mixer!

Mr. know I being eyeing on a pasta machine and decided to buy this when he came across it at the shops. I was shocked how expensive it was when I surfed KA website the next day. Well I can't really scold him for spending so much right? Lucky it's only once a year. :P

Yesterday I finally had the time to study, learn and play with my 2 new toys. It took me awhile trying to figure out the food processor. It has a total of 3 bowls and 2 blades. A large working bowl which matches the big blade. A 4-cup small bowl which matches the small blade. What about the medium bowl? The mini blade is too small and the large blade is too big. After reading the manual at least twice, I finally figure out that the medium bowl is require only when using the shredding disc.

I made a batch of pasta. Using the food processor to make the pasta dough and the pasta press to make the pasta. I only play with 1 pasta disc out of the 6 which came with it. Felt I had too little dough to play with all. I wasn't feeling very confident too and had a Plan B as backup if I needed to.


It didn't take me long to feed all the dough thru the pasta press. 


I didn't end up with lots of pasta as well. Just enough for dinner for 2 and Mr. night supper. It tasted alright but both of us felt the pasta was a bit too thick. Not too sure because of the type or because the dough. Need to have more play to find the answer.





I didn't follow the basic pasta recipe from KA manual book. Came across another recipe while I was researching on the pasta press before playing and decided to try that instead. Plus it was a smaller volume recipe. I tweaked it further by using just egg yolk instead of whole egg.

Egg Pasta Recipe 
1 1/2 cups Italian '00' flour (original called for all purpose flour)
1/2 teaspoon salt
100g egg yolks (original asked for 2 eggs)
1 tablespoon oil
Enough water to mixed into a dough (original didn't state water but mine seem too dry)

Red Wine Chocolate Cake, Rotweinkuchen

Chocolate and red wine, combining both my favourite sinful snack and alcohol together I know it will be silly of me to give this a miss when I saw it on Sarah's blog few weeks ago!


iPad with Sarah's recipe on the benchtop.

As my birthday falls on a Saturday and I decided to bring in a cake on Friday to share with my lovely colleagues. I bet they won't say no to a slice of red wine chocolate cake for morning tea. It's also a good chance to start the "rule" back in the office. The birthday gal or boy has to bring a cake to work for morning tea. But we kind of stopped after shifted to the new office location. Felt it's a good excuse to allow all of us to mingle around and chit chat.



Before I left to attend my weekly exercise session, I had all ingredients measured and laid on the beach top to bring down to room temperature. I did tweak the recipe slightly as I didn't have any vanilla sugar in the pantry. I never buy them therefore I substituted with vanilla extract.



Cake mixture in my newly bought bundt cake tin. It only cost me $20 from Wheel and Barrow at Doncaster Westfield. Just found out from the website that it cost double the price. Definitely a steal.



It was my 1st time using a bundt tin and was afraid I will have problem getting the cake out after baked. So I greased the tin with butter and coco powder instead of flour. White flour don't match with chocolate cake. That also explain the different colour tone on the cake surface. I was very glad that I didn't go lazy on that step because the cake just popped out straight as I over turn the cake tin.



I went all the way and glazed the cake. But I sucks at glazing :(
I didn't add enough icing sugar to the glaze, the mixture was too thin. Glaze just flow thru the cake and dripped onto the plate below. In the end, I kept scooping the glaze from the plate and spread across the cake trying to cover every single area.



Cross section of the cake. Can't really see the glaze. But it definitely didn't spoilt the taste and texture of the cake. Everybody loves it! Some just felt in love when I told them it's a red wine chocolate cake without even tasting it. M loved the crust of the surface, not sure what cause the slightly crunchy crust. The cake tin or glaze or combination of both? Some commented how moist the cake was.


This is definitely a keeper and a winner!!!

Some of my colleagues are already scratching their head what to bring on their coming birthday....hehe

Braised Pork in Soy Sauce Bun - 扣肉包

Braised Pork in Soy Sauce,扣肉 is one of many Mr's favourite dish. Every time Mr is back in Singapore, Mummy will definitely cooks this dish for him. When I found the recipe in the late Mrs Leong Yee Soon cookbook, I was happy and determined to give the recipe a try.

 
Bought a few cookbooks from Kinokuniya during our stay in Singapore. Because our baggage was so over-weighted. I hand carried all of them home to Melbourne. Am I crazy or what? Bought the whole collection (box of 6) of Mrs Leong cookbook.


Bought a beautiful piece of pork belly from Victoria market few weeks ago. Just perfect for this dish.I started cooking the night before having the dish. I tried sticking to the recipe as close as possible to accurately test the recipe. 

 Following it step by step. Pounding garlic and shallots as finely as possible.

 After slow cooking on the stove for more than 2 hours. 


 The next day after cooled. 


The instruction didn't state to sliced the pork and continue to cook in the sauce again but I did it as that's what Mummy always does. Letting the pork to soak in more of the amazing gravy. As I had left the dish over night to cool, a pretty thick layer of oil had formed and harden. I couldn't help to scrap and dump it away. I'm just trying to be more healthy :P

 Sliced pork ready to be place back into the pot of gravy. I continue to let it cook for at least another hour since I need to get busy with the bun.


As for the bun, I started mixing the ingredient and let the dough raise 1st thing in the morning. But it wasn't looking good after proofing for 2 hours. It doesn't seem to have raise double in size. In fact I don't think it had raised at all. :( I was disappointed. No idea what went wrong but I always don't have much luck when it has to deal with yeast.

That didn't stop me from continuing the next step which was splitting the big dough into hen egg size and roll them flat before brushing some oil and fold it into 2. After steaming for 15-20 minutes, it looked pretty good for a 1st timer if I may say so myself.

 Hot steamed handmade bun

  
The final product

Separate the bun, place a slice of pork in between and drizzle a bit of gravy on top of the meat. All ready to be enjoy :)

I'm very happy with the flavour of the pork. Initially I was afraid the end product will be too salty as the recipe required a few tablespoons of dark soy sauce. Although it's dark soy and not light soy, there's still quite a bit of saltiness in it. I also did add a tablespoon of dark caramel sauce to sweeten the pork. This recipe is definitely a keeper and most important Mr loved it.

Dead Man Espresso

It had being a few hectic weeks since we got back from our long vacation, getting back into the routine. It wasn't hard to be back to work mood as both of us were flooded with job to be done. We didn't even managed to get our 1st weekend off to catch up with Melbourne breakfast and most importantly coffee which we missed so much! Mr. shift was scheduled on the weekend while I was allocated to help out in another project as my colleague was away.

But we did manage to check out Dead Man Espresso the week after :)

Planned was to meet up with R and L for breakky, catch up with all the gossip and envy them with our vacation stories. I had a few cafes in mind but I left R to chose. The breakky menu attracted R. To avoid the crowd and as R was required to work that night, early breakky was decided.


Dead Man Espresso at 9am on Saturday morning. 


Soy cappuccino + cafe menu


Mr. normal cappuccino

The coffee was alright. Felt it was a bit too milky but pretty good considering we haven't had any decent coffee for almost 8 weeks! L had a chai latte to start with but felt it was a bit too weak.


Rosti - herb and potato rosti with poached egg, avocado and smoked salmon (choice of between salmon or bacon)


It wasn't easy to decide what to order. I want almost everything listed in the menu. Finally decided on rosti. Rosti was crunchy and full of herb but sadly too salty for my liking.


BLT - pork belly and spinach puree on brioche with gazpacho

Mr. BLT was very fatty, rich but very nice! Pork belly was soft with lots of fats. There goes dieting.

Looking back at the picture, realised the serving wasn't big. I could easily fit in another toast. But all 4 of us liked what was ordered and served.

p.s photos were taken using my iphone4. I totally forgot about my point to shoot camera.