I have moved my blog – 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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Friday night mojitos at the Red Monkey Bar in Victoria Street were taking effect. The stress of the week was melting away; my defences were low. The phone rang – unknown number. Was it the unexpected delight of hearing from an old friend? The late afternoon sunshine? The mojitos? After hanging up I realised I’d agreed to go to a Melbourne Victory game the following night.

The plan – which, to my surprise, still existed the following day – was to meet at Etihad Stadium at 6.15. This posed two problems. One was resolved relatively quickly: Etihad Stadium is The Stadium Formerly Known As Telstra Dome, or The Stadium Known Even Further Back As Colonial. The other problem was more worrisome. What about dinner?

We figured that we could have an early snack, then a late snack, and call that dinner. Dumplings seemed to fit the bill for the what. The issue was where. Docklands doesn’t have much to offer, nor does the western end of the CBD. Hutong was rejected for being too far east and a call sent out on Twitter garnered that and Dumplings Plus as options. So Dumplings Plus it was.

We’ve been to Dumplings Plus before. It’s definitely not my first choice of dumpling diner in Melbourne, although it does have the advantage of being open early enough on weekends to qualify as a breakfast joint. The menu is fairly broad, with a selection of dumplings, rice dishes, noodle dishes and plates best shared. And it’s cheap. It must be this last fact that explains why it was fairly crowded even at 4.45 on a Saturday afternoon, because a lot of the food really just isn’t that good.

There’s a picture on the first page of the menu that has always intrigued me. We’ve tried to order it before but have always failed to match a description to the correct photo. This time, I was adamant – C was to point at the pic and ask for that. He didn’t; he made a guess as to which of the 12 or so dumplingy/appetisery menu items sounded most like how it looked and took a stab. He was right, but I was still disappointed. The picture was of a thin pancake/flat bread wrapped around lamb and I imagined that it was going to be a flaky bread – perhaps similar to the sesame pancakes we had in China – wrapped around a salty, cumin lamb. Instead, the bread was quite rubbery – like an Indian roti (as opposed to a Malaysian roti) – and the filling was shredded iceberg lettuce, julienne cucumber and chunks of lamb in a thick, sweet hoi sin sauce. Quite bizarre! It was filling, and in some ways felt like the perfect prep to a football game in Melbourne: sort of a fusion souvlaki. At least I won’t die wondering… but I won’t order it again.

The service, which is slack at the best of times, was even further off the mark this time. We were delivered the bill after we’d finished the lamb wrap, before we’d received the other two dishes we’d ordered. Then we had a long wait, wondering whether the waitress was following up our missing dishes or whether she’d misunderstood and was removing them from the bill.

Our anxiety was resolved when two steamer baskets were delivered to the table. The top one held the Xiao Long Bao – six pieces of Shanghai’s famous “soup” dumplings. They can be difficult to eat: if they’re straight from the heat, the explosion of boiling soup can be a scalding hazard. The best way to eat them is to take a nip from the side and sort of slurp out some of the liquid, catching any escaping lusciousness in a spoon held underneath. That’s my usual approach; of course, we weren’t given any spoons and couldn’t catch the attention of any staff to rectify that. The dumpling skins were really thick – not really nippable, in any case. The upside? The dumplings really weren’t that hot… which is, of course, a downside, too. The other basket held our four siu mai. They appeared to have been taken from a larger basket and just flung into the presentation basket, since one of the four was on its side and two were completely upside down. Poor form.

As we watched the dumpling makers working behind the glass, somebody ordered spring onion pancakes (or “oil cake”, as they are sometimes called). One of the dumpling makers pulled a packet of them from the freezer. The couple beside us looked defeated by their pan-fried dumplings. I like generous servings as much as the next foodaholic, but these are ridiculous. We ordered them the previous time we’d been and, like these diners, had been thrilled to see a plate of ten enormous dumplings delivered. Quantity is no substitute for quality, though, particularly when even the quantity is deceptive; probably 50 percent of the dumpling is the almost-impenetrable wrapper.

Our snack did fill us up for the game, and beyond. We weren’t in any need of an after-match top-up, but we were only superficially satisfied with this meal. For XLB, I’ll stick to Hutong. For siu mai, any number of yum cha joints (there’s even a new place right next door to DP). For noodles, the Noodle Kingdom on Russell Street is reliable. I will go back to DP to try the green beans and they’re not up to scratch, DP will be officially off the menu.

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.

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.

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.)

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.