Cooking for Can Too - Jenny and Kathy's Wine Tasting Event

Lechon Love

Blame the Hubby and Heston Blumenthal.   

I offered to cater for the 38th day party of my new niece T, and was in the midst of planning the menu.  I mentioned to the Hubby that I was thinking of having a centrepiece of sorts for the party, but wasn't quite sure what it should be.  We were watching the program "Feasts" by Heston Blumenthal, where he served a whole pig to his guests, complete with "intestines" made out of fancy sausages, when it hit me - of course!  Why not truly celebrate T's coming into the world with a lechon?   

And so the quest was born of finding a Victorian supplier for the much-loved Filipino feast specialty - a whole pig(let) roasted over hot coals and served whole, covered with the most delicious mahogany brown crackling that you can imagine.  It's a lavish dish traditionally reserved for very special occasions, and Filipinos will know well that nothing beats biting into that sweet, succulent flesh and seriously wonderful crackling. 

After Googling and a few phone calls to Apolo's Lechon, plus an almost clandestine rendezvous (worthy of a Tarantino movie) at a carpark marked by a Subway sandwich restaurant in an outer suburb of Melbourne, the 31-kilo and 1 metre long lechon graced T's party.  My brother-in-law was fit to burst with excitement, and so was I - it had only been around 15 years since I had eaten lechon, and the Hubby was chuffed that his idea worked so well.  The party girl T just greeted the whole hullaballoo with a yawn and a little "wah" while in the arms of her Mum - after all, she wasn't even going to get a taste of the pig. Her big brother J was too busy at the swings to give the piggy much thought, but the other kids around were incredibly curious and frankly fascinated.

M was given the honour of dissecting the pig with his beautiful Global cleaver, and with great aplomb and skill too (thank God for his chef's apprenticeship!) despite him feeling quite under the weather.  Thanks, M.  And to everyone's credit, despite some initial shock and feelings of being confronted with seeing where their meal was coming from, everyone dug in and had some lechon, with a few going back for seconds, thirds and even fourths.

There was other stuf to eat too, of course, including my Mum's Bicol Express (a wickedly hot chili dish) reincarnated as a canape on crisp wonton cups, and Thai-style prawn and chicken miang on betel leaves.

A particularly fabulous find at Melbourne's Queen Victoria Markets was Pimientos de Padron  - a chili that I always thought could only be grown in Queensland by Midyim Eco Growers, who had suffered previous poor harvests due to inclement weather. 

Suffice it to say I was beyond thrilled to see the pimientos available to serve at T's party, as I only ever know to serve it one way - sauteed in plenty of olive oil until charred with whole blanched almonds and plenty of salt, then on a platter to be picked at and eaten whole.  Also known as the Russian roulette of peppers, it's said that 1 in 10 Pimientos de Padron is seriously hot, the rest sweet as capsicum.  Absolutely perfect party food when there's lots of brave partygoers and alcohol to wash down the (potential) chili heat.

But back to the lechon - many Filipinos would agree that lechon leftovers are even better than the main event, in the guise of "paksiw na lechon" - an unctuous stew with soy sauce, vinegar, peppercorns, bay leaves, garlic and the leftover special lechon sauce.  Best served with lots and lots of steaming hot rice - yummo!

With remarkably only around 8 kilos of lechon left over (we only did have around 25 adults to devour the beast!), there were plenty of leftovers, and even enough for us to take back to Sydney. Absolute bliss!

Marvelous Maha Bar & Grill, Melbourne

I love Melbourne. There, I've said it.  Sydneysiders feel free to slag me off now, but I have to say that if there was any other city I would choose to live in Australia, it would be Melbourne. 

And yes, I think the food and service is better in Melbourne restaurants than in Sydney.  So much so that the Hubby and I chose to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary in Melbourne and with a very memorable loooong lunch at Vue du Monde with their Gastronome menu - a ridiculously decadent 10 courses with matched wines, and as it was Perigord truffle season we had that shaved over a few of our dishes as well. That meal currently stands as our best and most expensive to date.

So on the odd occasion that we do head over to Melbourne for a day or so, I do my research and decide which restaurants we should eat in - always a pleasurable but painful undertaking, as we only have so few meals and so many restaurants to choose from!  We could only fit in one dinner for this visit too, so that was seriously difficult.  After much umming and ahhing, it was a feature on Maha Bar & Grill and some of their recipes in a recent Gourmet Traveller issue that sealed the deal for me.  And I was very happy with the experience.

We chose to go with the 5-course "soufra" menu - basically a tasting menu made up of their signature dishes.  I must say that the "tastes"were rather large, much more generous than your usual degustation style serves, but that would be my only complaint in an otherwise meal-perfect night.

We started off with an incredible starter soup - a white bean shourba with a venison kefta skewer.  It was so delicious, and the Hubby was happy with the white bean aspect of the dish as he is mad keen on anything bean-y or lentil-y. This was perfectly matched with an Efe Fresh Grape Raki.  It's an ouzo-like aperitif with a very strong aniseed flavour, and at 45% alcohol it's strong in another way so do take in small amounts.

This was followed by an array of cold mezze, comprised of:

• havouch-Turkish carrot and yoghurt
• fried cauliflower, tahini and walnuts
• olives-fel fel
• anchovy bastilla, tomato salad, feta foam
• pilaki-turkish carrot, bean and dill
• pickled eggplant with pomegranates

Yes, I know, all of that!  And it was delicious, with the anchovy bastilla (the one in the glass) and the eggplant my personal favourites.  It was interesting that this course was matched with a Chardonnay - Medina Girgentina D.O.K 2007 from Malta  Not being a chardie fan I was quite dubious, but it was quite a fine match considering the range of flavours on the platter.

The hot mezze was next, with two stand-out dishes: salmon, saffron, fennel and mussel doughnuts, and a family recipe of fenek stuffat,(braised rabbit) with potatoes and green peas.  The rabbit was particularly scrumptious - again, not a big bunny fan  as I have cooked with it only twice in my life and find it difficult to not think cute, white, fluffy bunny wabbit while slicing into it - but I don't mind it cooked for me and this was dish was superb. 

At this stage I was pretty full, and was a bit worried about stuffing two more courses in.  But I simply, simply had to have room for the grill course - the famed Maha Bar & Grill 12-hour roast lamb with shaved iceberg and kousa (preserved lemon).  It was, as expected, heartmeltingly tender. 

Not to be outdone in the melting stakes was the grilled butterfish in aleppo pepper butter sauce. It certainly lived up to its name as a butterfish!  Both dishes were served with a pine nut rice, and with a lovely red wine - Massaya Silver Selection from Bekaa Valley in Lebanon.

After all this beautfiul, beautiful food, the trio of desserts did not disappoint as the final course.  We were presented with the signature Maha doughnuts with a Turkish delight and pine nut praline, sweet corn cream and salted caramel with burnt butter ice cream (my fave!), and a quite interesting beetroot and chocolate sponge with chocolate mousse and milk ice cream.  We of course just had to wash it down with a Yarden Muscat 2007 from Israel.

Thank goodness our hotel was at least a 15-minute slow walk up the hill - I needed every bit of exercise after such an incredibly indulgent meal.  But hey, we're only in Melbourne once in a blue moon, and the dining experience in Maha Bar & Grill was well worth the wrath of my nutritionist! 

The only other thing to make this whole experience complete?  I'd like to know where I can buy aleppo pepper please!  It's quite integral to many of Maha's dishes, and I am dying to try the recipes out.  I have inquired into so many places for this, including Herbie's and the actual suppliers to Maha (Bas Foods), and still have no joy.  So if anyone knows where I can buy it, please let me know!

Champagne and Canapes - A "Welcome to the World" Party

One of our very lovely friends K & M has been blessed by the loveliest and most chilled-out baby that we have met, beautiful Amelia.  So the Hubby and I were more than delighted to cater for their "welcome to the world" party, with a special theme of canapes matched with champagne. 

We were also extremely lucky that one of K's friends is a very talented photographer.  So for the first time since Rachey started getting paid to cook, we have beautiful photos of some of our "signature" canapes.

Here's the menu and those amazing photos:

Smoked chicken & aioli in filo cups

Tartare of tuna and goat's cheese

Wild mushroom pate on mini Melba toasts

Roasted scallop with lime ginger butter on Chinese spoons

Sweet corn fritattas with creme fraiche & salmon roe

Also included in the menu were garlic prawn and/or chorizo mini skewers with gazpacho in shot glasses, and individual strawberry zabaglione with mascarpone and amaretti biscuits. 

So thanks K & M for supporting Rachey Cooks!  :)

Spanish Tapas Ole!

Every six or eight weeks, a group of our friends get together for a dinner.  I'd forgotten how the dinners got started, and our host Y reminded me that it started when we would come over to their house and cook dinner after their daughter and first child N was born - 10 years ago!!  My how time flies. 

Anyway, lately we've been theming the dinners against a cuisine.  Hosted by S & Y, they provide the house and some nibbles to start off, I provide the bulk of the main course with A & P if they are around, and T & M cook dessert.  

There was one dinner where we swapped it all around and I made dessert.  Baking is really not my thing but I do give it a go and do my best, and the Hubby is a much better baker than I am.  The dinner worked out well, but we all quickly reverted back to our old ways.  Yes, we are creatures of habit after all! And as S is vegetarian, it's always fun to come up with veggie dishes that don't feel like a big side dish or just a jazzed-up salad.

We decided this time we were going to go with Spanish tapas seeing that it was still summer, so here's some of the dishes we had, and all the fabulous photos were taken by Y - she's good with that camera!

 

 

Clockwise from the top right:

• baked eggs in braised chickpeas with tomato sauce
• albondigas - beef meatballs in spicy sauce
• chorizo with garlic and parsley
• stuffed eggplant

Wonder what the next dinner's theme will be?

 

Hungry Rachey on the Loose in Hong Kong - Part Two

So it's our second and last day in Hong Kong, which I'm sad about, but not too sad that I'm going to miss out on eating some seriously good food. 

As we were flying out to Sydney that evening, we thought it best to have a long and suitably lazy lunch at the Langham Place Mongkok's signature restaurant, Ming Court.  It was a bit of a bonus that it also happened to be one of Hong Kong's two Michelin-starred restaurants, so it was going to be our very first experience in a Michelin-rated eating establishment.

And it was a delight to learn half an hour before we went to lunch that we were upgraded to Business Class on our overnight Qantas flight to Sydney.  More on that later...

As we sat down, I looked around the restaurant and had this weird feeling I had seen it before, somewhere.  I wracked my brains, until I finally I realised where I had seen it - yup, this was the Chinese restaurant featured in last season's Masterchef when the finalists went to Hong Kong for their challenge.  Now contrary to what a lot of people think, I'm actually not a fan of Masterchef, at all.  I can appreciate how the show has changed the way people cook and think about food, but the commentary just irritates the hell out of me, and I find the contestants plain annoying.  It just so happened that I was watching this particular Masterchef episode set in Hong Kong, and found it more interesting that the others I had cursorily seen.  All I can say is thank God my well-meaning friends and family have stopped asking me when I was going to apply to go on Masterchef - once you're paid to cook, you're ineligible.  Whooopeee! 

Now where was I?  Ah yes, the food.  We decided to go with the special lunch menu which featured a neat 5-course meal designed to not be too filling, which was good as we planned to do the tram to the Peak and some last-minute sightseeing before heading to the airport.  We started off with a dim sim set featuring their famous har gao (shrimp dumpling).  This was the most refined yum cha we had ever had, and you could tell masters were at work on the food. 

We followed it with the silkiest chicken and sweet corn soup we ever had.  Again, a really refined version of what you would get in a suburban Chinese restaurant, with no gristly chicken bits and clumps of cornflour to ruin the delicate flavours.

My favourite dish in the course was next - beautifully stir-fried prawns and asparagus with a Szechuan style sauce.  The prawns were lusciously fat and juicy, and the asparagus crisp and bright, bright green.  The only downside was that the fried rice was served AFTER the prawns - it would have been so perfect to have had that rice immediately after each yummy mouthful of prawns and veggies.

Dessert was a not-very-attractive looking red bean "soup" - and no matter what I did, I just couldn't take an appetising enough photo of this dish.  But the taste was something else altogether - even though I wasn't a big sweet bean fan, this dish was a fitting way to end the meal.  The best way to describe it is a slightly watery "champorado" - a Filipino sticky rice and chocolate pudding-like concoction that my Filipino friends may well have fond childhood memories of, just like I do.

All up, our first Michelin-starred eating experience cost us a grand sum of...wait for it...AU$30 each.  Not bad really, considering that we easily get up to $50-$60 eating yum cha in Sydney. 

And what of our lovely upgrade to Business Class on the way home?  Well, suffice it to say that it was a very "Kath and Kim" moment, with the Hubby and I all goggle-eyed at being seated on the second level, in the very first row of seats behind the pilots.  Yes, pointy end of the plane indeed!  And they gave us the toiletries bag (his and hers), AND the Morissey all-cotton pyjamas. And the seats!  You could lie down, FLAT, and have a massage too!  Oh my... 

I just had to start off our flight with a couple of glasses of champagne - yes, the French stuff - followed by a sumptious Asian-style chicken dish courtesy of The Ponytailed One (a.k.a. Neil Perry) and a slice of wicked chocolate tart with a glass of Rutherglen muscat.  Oh, but all this only after we had selected our breakfast (creamy scrambled eggs, hash, fresh fruit and yonghurt), all individually prepared for all 24 of us in the special end of the plane by two very lovely flight attendants.  I would have taken photos, but it just would have been too, too gauche.  All I can say that it was a very fitting ending to a lovely gastronomic 48 hours in Hong Kong.  Noice!!!

Hungry Rachey on the Loose in Hong Kong - Part One

A long held dream of feasting my way in Hong Kong was realised when the Hubby and I spent a glorious couple of days last week. It was a stopover on the way home from Cebu City in the Philippines, and despite feeling unwell from a nasty cough and cold, I was determined to try out a few of the "foodie musts" as specified by a few blogs, Lonely Planet and a few wonderful friends.

Breakfast on our first morning was an interesting one. We decided to have a wander around the streets of Mongkok around our hotel (the Langham Place - highly recommended and with the best pool I've ever swum in) to search for where the locals eat breakfast.

We bravely ventured into a little noodle place that looked the deal - linoleum tables, plastic chairs, patrons noisily slurping from the bowls and chatting with friends or reading the paper. We were welcomed by the loveliest man who spoke minimal English but who still eagerly tried to describe what a local would have for breakfast.

We are happy to report that we thoroughly enjoyed our beef and noodle soup followed by eggs, a "breakfast sausage" and white bread with margarine and lashings of warm tea. I suppose that's the rough translation of the characters are in the menu below!

Beats Vegemite on toast...just!

Translation, anyone?

We also had a wander around the fresh markets near our hotel.  The rain didn't daunt us from having a browse among really beautiful fruit and veggies, and of course the more unusual ingredients that make up Cantonese cooking.  Suffice it to say the meat and fish were very fresh, and the chickens were a bit too fresh for my liking, what with clucking, feathers and all!  We also beheld a bit of a sight of a fish monger beating the crap out of a madly flopping fish on the floor - oops, sorry, I should have had a warning to animal lovers and vegetarians then.  Even I felt really sorry for the fishie.  Still, we must be respectful of how other cultures treat their food. 

Very fresh meat...

Even fresher chickens!

'

Beautiful dried meats...damn those quarantine laws!

For lunch we supped at two supposed institutions in Hong Kong. First we ate at the Luk Yu Teahouse on Stanley Street. In Lonely Planet's words, "Most of the staff have been here since the early Ming dynasty and are as grumpy and ill-tempered as the emperor desposed...but the dim sum is really quite delicious".

As recommended, we stuck with the classics like BBQ pork buns (cha siu bao) and prawn dumplings (har gao), and it was rather yummy. We didn't find the staff grumpy at all - I actually find staff in some Sydney Chinatown yum cha places worse - and it was helpful to have an English menu with prices.

We didn't want to get too stuffed, as I specially wanted to make room for "Hong Kong's best roast goose" as served in Yung Kee Restaurant just a stone throw's away from Luk Yu. According to Gourmet Traveller, this place serves on average 400 geese a day all of which they rear and roast themselves. The goose didn't disappoint, although I was expecting the skin to be a bit crispier. The yummy surprise was their house-made XO sauce - absolutely incredible and a perfect accompaniment to the simple stir-fried greens and rice that we had with the goose.

Yummy XO sauce!

We couldn't let go of our only full night in Hong Kong without more exploring, and after a bit of umming and ahhing we decided to brave the dai pai dongs (street food stalls) of the famous Temple Street market. The slight hesitation came from a news article we read that day about a number of acid attacks on Temple Street shoppers over the past few months, with acid apparently flung indiscriminately from the tops of the buildings along the street. We thought the chances of an attack on a not-so-busy Monday night would be slim, but nonetheless I cast a few nervous glances up at the buildings as we walked and I conscientiously tried to walk in the middle of the street to be a bit away from windows and rooftops.

In the end we were glad with our decision, as we had one of the nicest meals. The beef brisket curry was melt-in-the-mouth and bloody spicy, and the lemongrass and garlic chicken wings were delightfully crunchy and tender. The steamed greens weren't half bad either!

The one thing that kinda disappointed us was how hard it was to a bar or pub that we could have a drink in. Not that HK didn't have any bars or pubs, but they were few and far between in Kowloon and around where we were staying. We were pretty much stuck to either drinking (expensively) in the hotel, or buying a few beers and drinking in our room. We opted for the latter and enjoyed a few bevvies while surveying our 35th floor view.

Tomorrow would be another day, albeit a short one as we fly back to Sydney in the evening, but who would have thought we would have our first Michelin starred experience, and an airborne gastronomic experience! But I'll leave that for my next blog post - promise! :)