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I have moved my blog – please come and visit over at blahblogblah.  I will continue to cross-post here for a while, but please change your bookmarks to the new URL.

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“… and can I just run through the specials for today?”

It depends.

It depends on how softly you speak versus how noisy the dining room is. [Tip: try to make yourself heard - it's not that difficult.  Read the diners.  If they are leaning in towards you, looking pained, raise your voice a tad.]

It depends on whether there’s already a chalkboard with the specials written up. [If there is, don't recite them - we can read.  Perhaps make sure they are visible to the diners, but don't bring the board over to the table.]

It depends on whether you can actually remember them without having to go back to check on what they are.

It depends on whether you are prepared to answer the (not unreasonable) question “and how much is that?”.

Oh, and if the restaurant has printed a separate page of the day’s lunch specials don’t distribute it if, at 12.15 on a Monday, the kitchen is already “out of gnocchi”.

1. Fettucine is not an acceptable substitute

and

2. It’s the beginning of lunch at the beginning of the week so being “out” of one of the week’s lunch specials is, well, special.

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I have moved my blog – please come and visit over at blahblogblah.  I will continue to cross-post here for a while, but please change your bookmarks to the new URL.

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Why haven’t I been to Laksa Me before now? It’s taken Streetsmart to finally make the effort to go, and it was worth it. We were looking for somewhere to grab a quick and inexpensive dinner in the city, so checked the list and this certainly seemed to fit the bill.

You certainly don’t go there for the decor. That’s not to say that it’s uncomfortable, just that the furnishings and styling are utilitarian. You don’t go for the wine list, either, however you can bring your own wine for a $10 corkage (they have a small selection and we did get a cold, wet bottle of white from that but I’d suggest you make use of the BYO option). The location is great – public transport friendly with a number of post-dinner drinks options. Liverpool Street’s a little on the daggy side, but that’s not a criticism; comfortable is good.

I’d checked out the online menu before booking and had already mapped out the meal. Unfortunately three of the starters I’d chosen virtually weren’t available on the real menu (Thai sausage, beef in betel leaf and duck rolls). We ended up with the pandan chicken (sublime), mini rolls (perfectly crisp parcels with no oiliness, but nothing spectacular) and fish cakes (tasty).

Despite the fact that the menu listed a number of appealing dishes, there was no way I wasn’t going to get a laksa. I just had to decide between the “My Mum’s Laksa” and the Laksa Lemak (no WAY I was going for the “skinny” version). As I adore hor fun and cha siu I went with the Ipoh style. It was fine – the pork was very tender, the prawns were plump and fresh, the “soup” was spicy and not too sweet or too creamy. Negatives were that the elements of the paste were a little too obvious in the dish, rendering the texture quite grainy, and the chunks of chicken added nothing to the dish.

My partner chose the San-bei-ji, described as “Chunk of chicken braised with 3 cups of seasoning, garlic, ginger and chilli, served with steamed Jasmine rice”. It was simple, with the definite “breath of the wok” flavour – which, for some reason, I insist on calling “dragon’s breath” (possibly because it always elicits the same pained eye-roll). I’m glad he tried it; I’d be making my way through the Malaysian classics before I got to that.

I’m glad I finally got there but I’m still searching for the perfect laksa. Will have to return to try the laksa lemak, just in case… Perhaps before Christmas, when the warm glow of being satisfied by food is extended by the warm glow of supporting Streetsmart.

The migration to bluehost went unexpectedly well!  There’s still some tweaking to do (have to figure out how to bring all my sidebars over), but there is now content over at …blahblogblah…

Please come and visit!

(I’ll probably continue to cross post here for a while, but if you happen to have this bookmarked, please change to the new URL.)

I’ve bitten the bullet and registered a domain, so will be trying to move this blog over to a new address.  First, though, I will need coffee and pastries to fortify me.

When it’s done, I’ll post the new link…

StreetSmart

You might have noticed the StreetSmart logo in the right sidebar.  The annual StreetSmart campaign, which raises money to help the homeless, kicks off tomorrow.  It’s one of those ideas that is so simple: participating restaurants add a small donation to your bill (you’re welcome to increase it from the standard $2, but don’t forget your usual tip!).  As they note on the site – this isn’t even the cost of a cup of coffee, these days.  I’m planning to restrict myself to only eating at StreetSmart supporters for the duration of the campaign.  Restrict, though, is probably a misleading word – check out the list of supporters!  It’s certainly no hardship to eat that list.

For those of you following @StreetSmartAust on Twitter, you can also eat, tweet, and (perhaps) be treated.  (Remember to use #SSEats for your entries.)

Thanks to Ed at Tomato for revving up the Twitter and blogger communities to support this!

Recaps

I’ve been busy over at Reality Ravings this week.  Hell’s Kitchen is winding up, Beauty and the Geek is hotting up, and The Amazing Race is… really a tad boring this season.

Reading

I’ve finished Swallows and Amazons.  How did I not read this in my childhood?  Perhaps I got into too much of a Jill’s Perfect Ponies rut, because I know it was always on the bookshelf at the Mornington house.  It certainly would have fuelled some of the adventure fantasies during all those canoeing-fishing-campfiring Gippsland lakes holidays…  Next up?  Lord of the Flies, which I’m sure I’ve quoted and successfully answered trivia questions on, without having read it.

The second-last episode of Hell’s Kitchen (UK) aired here on Monday.  I’m not sure what I’ll do without my weekly dose of Marco once it’s over.  Great British Menu will be winding up at around the same time, I think, but there are three Anthony Bourdain series that arrived in the most recent Amazon shipment to get into, so I’ll cope.  Anyway, I’ve recapped HK(UK) over at Reality Ravings.

I’m still watching The Rachel Zoe Project and doing blitz recaps of that, as well.  It’s such a fun show to watch, but I hope there will be some personnel changes soon.  Taylor’s constant moaning is starting to get me down.  When it was directed at a floundering Brad last season, it was novel, but he’s found his feet and is one of the programme’s highlights so the carping is now just sad.

Reality Raver was talking up Tabatha’s Salon Takeover and I caught it for the first time today.  I’m not sure how I’ll fit it into the weekly schedule, but it’s definitely worth a look.  It’s Kitchen Nightmares for hairdressers, and loads of fun.  Jeff Lewis is back with Flipping Out, but his meltdowns seem to have been curtailed a bit by the Global Financial Crisis^TM – it appears he can control his personality when he needs to.  Pity.

It’s not all television, though.  After my reading list post, where I realised that 12 months of reading hadn’t reduced either of the 75 lists, I decided I had to make an effort to fit more real reading into my life.  Since posting the Guardian list, I’ve read two books (ok, so they were very short books) and I’m starting to catch up on my backlog of New Yorkers.  My copy of Middlemarch has been found and I think that’s the next project.

I’m not making much progress against either the Esquire 75 or Jezebel’s alternative 75 “must reads”¹. That’s not to say that I haven’t been reading, or that I haven’t been enjoying what I’ve read, but my belief that I am a reasonably “well-read” person has taken a bit of a hit from these lists. That’s why I was pleased to see the Guardian’s Books you can’t live without: the top 100. It’s even got The Magic Faraway Tree on it!

This, therefore, is the list I’m going to try to crack (although… The Bible? Really? I’m going to make an exception for that. Oh, and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. I mean, honestly.)

Anyway, the full list – with strikethroughs – after the jump.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling  (I have some of them, and I’ve read the first one… I guess that doesn’t count)

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

6 The Bible  (Not a chance)

7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell

8 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the d’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy

13 Catch-22 – Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare – William Shakespeare  (Again, I have them…)

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis

34 Emma – Jane Austen

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis (I don’t understand the duplication, here. Surely TLTW&TW is included in The Chronicles?)

37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernières

39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown (Maybe after I finish the Bible…)

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel

52 Dune – Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

72 Dracula – Bram Stoker (Now I really wish I’d joined the Dracula group post Infinite Jest, instead of the Gravity’s Rainbow group.  I’m not sure I can even find my copy of GR now…)

73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses – James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal – Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession – AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton (I’ve read these, and the Narnia books, so many times – does that earn me a pass on Five People?

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupery (I can’t believe I haven’t read this. This will be my first “achievement” – I think I’ll read it tomorrow. Edited 25/10 to add: read it on the number 70 tram out to Burwood yesterday afternoon and loved it.)

93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

94 Watership Down – Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

100 Les Misérables – Victor Hugo

The good news? I’ve read a lot of these already.  The other good news? There is a bit of crossover to the other lists, so Middlemarch, Moby Dick, Ulysses, Cold Comfort Farm and a couple of others will make inroads in two places.  The bad news? Well, I’m stating upfront that I’m not reading the Bible, but… I don’t think “reading the list” is a good enough incentive to get me to pick up The Da Vinci Code, The Lovely Bones or The Five People You Meet In Heaven.  Seriously.  Life’s too short.

As of today, then, I’ve read 62 of the 100.  I’ll try to remember to check back…

25/10 – 63/100 The Little Prince

26/10 – 64/100 A Christmas Carol

7/11 – 65/100 Swallows and Amazons

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1. In fact, in the past year I have only crossed one book off the Jez list and nothing from the Esquire list.

Before heading off on our holiday, I did wonder how long it would be before I craved eating something “not Chinese”.  I was particularly certain that I’d miss the lovely, simple goats cheese and lettuce rolls from Fatto a Mano in Gertrude Street.

Of course, “Chinese food” covers such a range of cuisines.  Sure, I enjoyed my first lunch back at work, but we have been to both Hutong and Dumplings Plus for dumpling fixes, Nam Loong for buns and Noodle Kingdom for soup.  Re-reading “Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper” also fired us up for some Yangzhou cuisine, so on Sunday we got cooking.

I’ve mentioned my irritation with Lonely Planet’s city guides before.  Why, oh why, couldn’t they include a map of the whole country inside the cover?  It wouldn’t have added too much distraction to the “city” focus and would have drawn our attention to the fact that Yangzhou is actually quite close to Shanghai.  Perhaps we could have tried their famous rice and the Lion’s Head meatballs there!  Alas, we were reduced to trawling the internet for a decent recipe for the latter (Fuschia Dunlop kindly includes a recipe for the former).

This is the recipe C cobbled together from a number of these sources.  This particular version makes a meatball in broth; other recipes present the meatball in a thicker sauce.  If we have a crack at that, I’ll post a comparison.

扬州狮子头
Yangzhou Lions Head Meatballs

Makes 4 servings

Meatballs
2 tablespoons dried shrimp
500 lean ground pork (note: it’s recommended that you buy pork belly and chop it up yourself¹)
4-5 cup water chestnuts, coarsely chopped
1 green onion chopped roughly into 3cm lengths
1 green onion finely sliced
1 x3cm chunk of ginger
1 green onion (including top), thinly sliced
1 tablespoons cornflour
½ beaten egg
½ tsp salt
3 tsp MSG
1/2 tsp sugar
1 tablespoon Shao Xing wine
pinch white pepper

Remaining ingredients
vegetable oil for frying
2 cups chicken stock
1 bunch of kang kong leaves.

Preparation

Soak shrimp in warm water to cover for 30 minutes; drain. Mince shrimp.

Chop spring onion in 3cm lengths. Peel ginger and crush with flat of cleaver. Put ginger and spring onion into pestle. Add MSG to pestle with 100ml of water. Use a mortar to squeeze out ginger and spring onion juice. Strain water out through sieve, squeezing out the juice. Discard the ginger and spring onion pulp.

Place mince in a bowl with 1/3 of the spring onion water, egg, white pepper, green onion slices, sugar, cornflour, wine, chestnuts. Use chopsticks to mix evenly, and stir together. Add 1/3 of spring onion water whilst stirring. When water is incorporated add the remaining 1/3, along with 15g salt. Knead meat for 2 minutes and rest for 30 minutes. Form into 4 meatballs.

Set wok in a ring stand and add oil to a depth of about 2 inches. Over high heat, bring oil to 350 degrees F. Add meatballs and cook for 3 minutes or until golden brown. Lift out and drain on paper towels

Place the meatballs in a large claypot with 1 cup stock. Simmer/steam for 1 hour (up to 3 hours) on low heat. Skim the soup, and add the kang kong leaves. Simmer covered for 1 minute and add salt to taste.

Serve, and enjoy!

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1. “The lion’s head meatball, for example, owed its irresistible succulence to the fact that the meat was hand-chopped into ‘fish-eye’ grains, and not minced or pureed”, Fuschia Dunlop, Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper, page 298

I’m still going through the photos from China (slowly! Resizing for the web takes time, although I’m sure there are quicker ways – hints and tips appreciated!) and have decided to break the Beijing photos into categories.  This should 1. take care of the is-this-Temple-of-Heaven-or-the-Summer-Palace-(or-even-Forbidden-City)? issues this end and 2. make the task seem less daunting for me.

Today I tackled the smallest subset of Beijing photos – the pics from our visit to the Dashanzi Art District (also known as 798).  I was something of a reluctant visitor; the Wallpaper guide was all “oh, Dashanzi is so over, you’ve really got to go to [somewhere much less accessible]” and, to be honest, there was a lot of pretty kitschy stuff.  There was, however, some really interesting work and it was wonderful to spend time wandering around a precinct so thoroughly dedicated to art.  (Oh, and there was decent cake, too!) It’s definitely on the itinerary as a longer visit next time.

Chen Wenling’s “farting bull” – “Emergency Exit”, a commentary on the global financial crisis – was extraordinary, and Yan Pei-Ming’s “Landscape of Childhood” installation was truly affecting.  The photos do neither justice, but do serve as an aide-memoire for us – hopefully they give you an idea of the work.

Click here for the Dashanzi photoset.

China wasn’t all multi-dish meals and dumplings, contrary to how it must seem from the previous post.  Oh, no.  There were also breakfasts.  And snacks.  Many, many snacks…

My favourite snack in Shanghai was translated as “meat cake”, which sounds rather unappetising.  Imagine a nice, juicy meatball encased in flaky pastry – that’s the best I can do by way of explanation.  They were sold streetside throughout town.

Another variation on the “meat cake” was a favourite in Beijing – the roujiamo.  It’s basically a round bread (like a Turkish bread) and is split and filled with sliced, roast meat, chilles, coriander and perhaps shredded cucumber, lettuce and onion, depending where you bought it.  The meat can be pork, mutton or beef; naturally, muslim vendors serve either mutton or beef.  It’s been described as a “Chinese hamburger” but I thought it was more like a small doner kebab.  Delish.

I mentioned the lamb skewers in the previous post and they really were something else.  Our guidebooks indicated that they were very popular in Beijing, however we saw many more muslim food stalls in Shanghai than in the capital.  I’m not sure whether we weren’t looking in the right places, or whether the centre of gravity for Xinjiang vendors has shifted.  The kebabs usually comprised three thickish strips of lamb – two lean surrounding a strip of fat.  After they were cooked, they were dipped in a spice mix, unless you requested bu yao tai la (which we didn’t).

We tried a couple of variations of breads as street snacks.  One was cooked in flat, oval loaves of around 40cm x 20cm.  They were sprinkled with sesame seeds and some contained other, subtle spices too.  They’re sold by weight – indicate how big a wedge you want and it’s bundled up in a bag to take away.

The breakfast-on-the-run we had en route to the Forbidden City (and as a pick-me-up on other occasions, too!) was a flatter bread, “filled” with egg and sliced leek.  It’s similar to a Malaysian egg roti.

Spring onion cakes are another version of a fried flat bread/pancake filled with – you guessed it! – spring onion.  They are served as snacks and were also on some breakfast menus.  Noodle Kingdom in Russell Street does a pretty good one and I’ve even found some pretty decent frozen ones at the grocery in Melbourne Central.

Glutinous rice rolls – these are densely packed glutinous rice rolled around a filling. We tried one that had a sweet bean and youtiao filling.  Interesting.  Also on glutinous rice, one of our unsuccessful snack endeavours was a glutinous rice dumpling wrapped in lotus leaf.  Perhaps it was that particular vendor, rather than the overall concept, but it was gloopy and nasty.

Steamed corn cobs.  Again – it could have been a dodgy vendor/end of day for the corn, but it was completely flavourless.  In South Africa, “mealies” are a staple and they look like corn cobs but with cream coloured kernals.  This corn was yellow, but the flavour was bland like a mealie.  I’m a huge sweet corn fan, so was bitterly disappointed!

Shanghai style shao mai are HUGE – not the delightfully dainty dumplings I’m used to.  Still, they were tasty and the size of them meant that one was a satisfying snack, while two puts you in danger of ruining your lunch.

Fresh youtiao have spoiled me for the packaged dough sticks you often get here: light, fluffy and perfect for sopping up the soupy goodness of congee. Mmmm.

Toffee fruit rods.  I was disappointed when the Fruit Rod King in Lonsdale Street closed before I’d made good on my threats to stop there and buy a fruit rod, so I was thrilled to see such a range of toffee covered fruits and fruit portions on sticks in Beijing.  I’m not sure what the fruit was that I tried – it could have been crabapple – but it was pretty good.  I was keen to try the grapes and the orange portions, but we ran out of time.

Drinks

Beer

Local beers were cheap and available at convenience stores (All Days, Lawsons, Kedi) in Shanghai and little bottle shops in Beijing as well as at supermarkets.  Ordering beer at a restaurant was always accompanied by the question “ice?”.  The first time we said yes, we expected that it might be served like a bia hoi, over a big chunk of ice, but it was just cold from the fridge.  I’m not sure who orders lager and asks for it to be room temperature, but it was the same everywhere we went, so it must be a common thing.  The local beers – Tsingtao and Yanjing were the ones we stuck to – are very low alcohol and can be a bit on the sweet side, so aren’t for endless boozing.  Beers brewed under licence (Heinekin, Budweiser) were also low alcohol, so the low price might reflect an alcohol tax – imported beers could get pricey.  Having said that, the otherwise overpriced supermarket at Times Square had an impressive range of European beers and it was cheaper to buy a bottle of one of those than a 340ml can of Schweppes Diet Tonic.  Go figure.

Paulaner has a number of micro-breweries in Shanghai and they are hugely popular.  We dropped into the Xintiandi branch for a beer after dinner on a Wednesday night and the place was heaving with people (and a Filipino cover band).  Not bad, given that they were charging 75Y for a half litre of their draft.  By contrast, 75Y at the deserted Bund Brewery got us a litre each.

Wine

Yes, wine is produced in China.  Not only that, but one of the labels – I can’t remember which one – has recruited a French winemaker to spruik its product.  Good on them.  We only discovered the existence of the wine because C was intent on sampling some baiju.  The woman in the Zhapu Rd supermarket saw us looking at the lethal spirit and guided us towards a Grand Dragon cabernet sauvignon, gesturing to indicate that it was good.  It was only a couple of bucks, so we figured we could try it for a laugh and… it wasn’t so bad.

As a result, we sought out local wine in supermarkets and bottle shops throughout Shanghai and Beijing.  Unfortunately, we couldn’t find the Grand Dragon again, but we tried the Great Wall (not so good) and Dynasty (better than Great Wall, but no Grand Dragon) and a Dragon with a different label.  All in all, I think we managed a fairly comprehensive survey of Chinese cab sauvs, but being no wine expert, the best I can say is “we opened the bottles and didn’t pour any of it down the sink”.

Coffee

Coffee at cafes is expensive relative to the cost of everything else, and thus didn’t seem to offer much value (for us, that is – the Starbucks all seemed to be doing fairly well).  We had a caffe latte at At Cafe in 798 and I felt as though I’d been transported back to early 90s Brisbane.  A tall glass; a small, strangely located handle; a vaguely tan colour but no discernible flavour; an almost impenetrable centimetre of foam on the top.  To satisfy our need for caffeine, we stuck with tea in the evenings and convenience store coffee-in-a-can in the mornings.  Mr Brown’s was the best.

Juices etc

Watermelon juice was a bit of a lifesaver in Shanghai’s heat, so I was pleased – for a change – to see so many juice bars.  Mr Donut made tasty granita style drinks and I developed a bit of an obsession with the pink grapefruit drink stocked at most convenience stores.  I’m sure it was mostly sugar, but it was still pretty good!

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Well, I’ve reached the limit of food reverie – now I’d better get back to sorting the Beijing photos.  Oh, I wish the imperial family had thought to use different colour schemes to more easily differentiate the Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven, Summer Palace, Lama Temple…