Food adventures in Brisbane

I have had a similarly food mad friend staying with me, so my food experimenting has gone out of control lately.

Firstly, there have been lots of visits to cafes and restaurants.

When I first came to Brisbane, some visiting Melbourne gourmands decided to treat me to a yum cha in Fortitude Valley and were horrified when we were offered courses like fried rice, sweet and sour pork, lemon chicken and fried dimsims - 1950s Aussie Chinese food.  This time, we visited Oriental Yum Cha  in 512 Wickham st, Fortitude Valley, and had one of the best yum chas I have had - even in Melbourne, all you Melbourne snobs!  Lots of very good dumplings!  We'll be back to this restaurant!

I also took my friend to some of my favourites for decadent, unhealthy, coffee and cakes, particularly:
Della Mano at 29 Doggett st, Newstead and  Vanilla Pod at 119b Lancaster rd in Ascot:

We also had a nice lunch at New Farm Deli and Cafe.  My octopus salad had beautifully marinated and grilled baby octopus, though the salad bit was a bit boring.

We visited the GOMA lunch bar because they were advertising a Japanese lunch and we had had a brilliant meal in the restaurant years ago, which was on a par with Pearl in Melbourne. Unfortunately, we had to meander around all of the four restaurants until we found the correct restaurant with a few other people.  They gave up searching for it as the directions we were givien by the (admittedly helpful) staff  were misleading, to say the least, but we finally found the right place : the lounge.  Unfortunately, there was only one, very distracted and obviously not interested, girl  who was the only member of staff there for the tables and the kitchen was somewhere downstairs, so she had to run up and down to give orders and get meals.  It took simply ages.  Plus, she told us when we tried to order dessert with our main course, that she thought it was not yet made up but that she'd tell us at the end of the meal if they had made it.  We waited and waited but finally gave up since she seemed to be more interested in taliking to a young man than serving the customers.  Anyway, we were full, but the whole attitude of The Lounge seemed a bit unprofessional

The meal was good but not brilliant considering how long we had to wait, so we left feeling a bit miffed.

We also did a lot of cooking at home.

Trish made a very nice meal from Luke Nguyen's "Songs of Sapa" - chargrilled pork patties with vermicelli.  Super yum.  I "forgot" to remind Bob that there were, miraculously, left-overs, so I had a second go of them for my lunch and he missed out.

 

Among the meals I made was grilled chicken with stir fried vegetables and brown rice:

 

 

 

I also used hot smoked salmon and spring onions and spiral pasta and, I think, improved the recipe based on Nigella's mackerel and marsala meal that I gave you in my last blog.

I made her okonomiyaki, realised just in time that the premade flour mix contained gluten, and made her her own mixture using gluten flour, and it apparently turned out okay.

When she had left, I got an urge for more Asian food, so made this dinner influenced by Korea, Japan and China:

Assorted pickled vegetables:

 Steamed snow peas and broccolini with abalone sauce, and  sushi rice-stuffed bean curds, topped with seaweed and sesame furikake

 Miso soup

 Grilled, salted mackerel

 I discovered, after some research, that the gungo peas that I have been yearning after for years, after experiencing them in the West Indies are aslo called pigeon peas and can be bought at Indian foodstores as the lentil toor dal.  So, I decided to make a vegetarianish meal with them.  My mother used to make rice and peas the traditional way, but somewhere along the line, with four children and very little time after a full day at work I invented a micowave , quick version.  I used to use kidney beans when I cooked for the family, and white, long grained rice and full cream coconut milk, but this time, I tried to be healthier. 

This is my recipe for Gungo Peas and Rice, using my rice cooker, but you could adapt it to the microwave or the stove. This meal fed two of  us for 2 days and gave us a lunch as well.

Ingredients:
2 chopped garlic
2 chopped golden shallots
2 cups brown rice
2  1/2 cups light coconut milk
1 cup vegetable stock
1 tspn thyme.
I/2 packet frozen pigeopn peas.

Method:
Soften garlic and golden shallots in 1 tablespoon oil in a fry pan.  Transfer to rice cooker with other ingredients.  Cook in rice cooker till done.

I like to have at least one vegetarian meal a week, so this is what I cooked with it: a vegetable curry with influences from India, Malaysia and Vietnam.  I used what I had in the fridge, so you could change the ingredients according to your tastes, budget, and what's in season.  If I had more time, and the ingredients, I would have crushed the whole spices and roasted them first, and used fresh grated turmeric.  Real vegetarians would leave out the shrimp paste and use salt or soya sauce or stock.

Ingredients:
3 tablespoon canola oil
2 carrots, cut into chunks
2 green bananas, cut into chunks,
1/4 buttternut pumpkin cut into chunks
1 small sweet potato, cut into chunks
1 large zucchini, cut into chunks,
1 handful of  snake beans, cut into chunks
1 onion, cut into eights,
1 knob diced/crushed ginger.
1 teaspoon coriander powder
1 teaspoon dried cumin
2 cloves crushed garlic
2 tablespoon tamarind
1 small block of palm sugar
1teaspoon turmeric
1 teaspoon seeni sambol or some other curry flavour.  Make it the chilli heat you prefer by adding more or less.
1 teaspoon shrimp paste
salt
1 can light coconut milk
2 cup carrot juice
Bean sprouts.

Method:

 Fry dried spices in oil until just fragrant,.  Stir in onion, garlic and ginger until softened. Add shrimp paste, tamarind, palm sugar, coconut milk, and carrot juice and stir until the sugar has melted.  Now add the harder vegetables.  Cook until they are nearly softened. Add the softer vegetables and cook until softened.  Taste and add salt if necessary.  With the lid off and the sweet potatoes, the liquid should be thick, but if it isn't, add some cornflour, diluted in a little water.

Serve on the gungo peas and rice, and sprinkle some bean sprouts on top.  I liked mine with a mango chutney.

And, we have been doing more adventuring.  I have, after years of relaxing my hair, gone natural, so took Bob off to "Little Africa", in Brisbane, the area around the junctions of Ipswich and Devon roads, Annerley and in the Marouka shopping centre on Beaudesert road, ostensibly to buy some hair conditioner suitable for my afro, but also to search for ackees, which I think of as a Jamaican fruit, but which apparently comes from West Africa.  Unfortunately, most Brisbane Africans come from other parts of  Africa, so we didn't find ackees, but we did find lots of other interesting things.

At the first site,  we recognised the store where Bob had bought his Queensland style akubra, and I got my hair conditioner.  But, we also found an African shop full of  the oddest mixtures, including beautiful cotton African fabrics, a huge range of hair extensions, African videos,dried and frozen fish and meats.  Next door, a Persian shop sold wonderful things like copper cooking pots, dried  pomegranate and cherries, spices galore and Turkish style bread.  Across the road, the Sri Lankan shop had pre-cooked meals in plastic container - sitting on the counter and not refrigerated or heated.   I was not tempted. It also had frozen roti, bottled curry sauces, chutneys, and other Sri Lankan delicacies.

In Marouka , the Africans dominated the landscape - the women dressed in a kaleidoscope of colourful traditional garments, the children plump cheeked and looking cuddly, the men tall and arresting.  We found shops which sold plantain, pulses, fufu, clothes, halal meat, relaxing products, large tims of msg, saltpetre, very dried up looking yams, Persian delicacies and other exotic or familiar products.  Unfortunately, we couldn't find an African restaurant which was open for service but we did come away with sour cherry jam, plantain, date syrup, cinnamon quills, and these biscuits (the pale, round ones are coconut and the others are, Bob informs me, a fried dough which is then soaked in rosewater flavoured syrup).