Pekopekopekopeko!

So.... I had been living a block away from this restaurant- Peko peko, for almost 3 years before I actually ventured into it. It's located at 190 Wells Street in South Melbourne and serves up pretty decent Taiwanese food, and they have specials which change every now and then. I've never given this place much thought but since it's convenient and close by, we decided to head there for dinner one night. I am surprised everytime I head there as it's always packed full of people, and there's always someone waiting for a table. Even at 9pm today it was packed. 

Spinach dumplings. These are vegetarian- they are stuffed with spring roll/ popiah filling and served with vinegar-ish soy sauce. The boy thought this was average, but if you like the dumpling skin more than the filling itself (like me!), then you'll like this. 

Prawn & mango spring roll- I liked this...thought the mango gave it a nice contrast in flavours and the skin was crisp to the bite.

Don't let the pic fool you....I really, really liked this. It's wasabi mayo beef strips. Although next time I might ask them to add more wasabi to the mayo.

And every single time I go there, I never fail to order the green tea latte. I know it's made from green tea powder, and not fresh from the leaves... but it's yum with a lil bit of sugar! Nothing beats the green tea milkshake from Samurai on Glenferrie Road though.

We really wanted to try the earl grey tea panna cotta with black sesame ice-cream but they ran out! :( So we settled for black rice pudding with green tea ice-cream. I've never had anything like this before but I have to say, it didn't make me go wow as it tasted just like any other dessert....sweet! :D I guess as long as it does its job...who's complaining? 

Happy Friday for tomorrow everyone! Off to Ezard for dinner ..can't wait to try their degustation :)

Lunch breaks are....dangerous!

They make me do things like buy 3 more bottles of nail polish when I recently bought 7 bottles less than 2 weeks ago.

On a side note, I just looked at the pictures in my previous post and boy, do they look unappetising! I might post better pics up if I get the chance to.

Off to paint my nails for the weekend! That's a celebration in itself :D

Fragrant rice

Texted Mom in the morning for the recipe to make 'Yau Mei Fan', literally translated as fragrant rice. I was apprehensive when I pressed the Cook button on the rice cooker because I wasn't sure if there was enough water, or if the taste was ok. I gave it 15-20 minutes or so and scurried to the rice cooker to taste once the button popped up to indicate it was cooked. To my surprise and delight it tasted a-ok!

This was taken while it was still in the rice cooker so it looks a lil bit dark but the colour is exactly how I imagined it to be. I added sweet potato instead of taro as I couldn't find any today. The recipe's fairly simple (thought I'd jot it down here so I don't have to keep asking Mom everytime I felt like cooking this!):

Ingredients:

2 cups white rice (wash, drain and set aside)

2 thigh fillets (cut into small cubes) 

Strips of shitake mushrooms

2 cloves garlic (chopped and minced)

Yam (chopped into cubes)

Dried prawns a.k.a 'Har mai' (soak before frying)

3 dried scallops (soak)

3-4 dried oysters (soak)

2 tsp light soy sauce

1 tsp dark soy sauce

1 tbsp abalone sauce

1 tsp caramel sauce / sweet soy sauce

Chinese cooking wine

Sesame oil

Method:

- Put uncooked white rice in rice cooker together with shitake mushrooms strips and taro

- Heat up oil in frying pan

- Brown garlic in hot oil

- Add dried prawns and dried scallops to the garlic and fry together

- Add chicken to the above ingredients and fry till brown and fragrant

- Add sauces, cooking wine and sesame oil into the pan and fry everything together

- Transfer all the ingredients and sauce to the rice cooker

- Add water to the rice cooker (ie. same amount of water needed to cook 2 cups of rice + a bit more to take into account of the other ingredients in the rice cooker)

- Here comes the critical moment: Press COOK!

Thought I'd whip up watercress soup (Sai Yong Choi) too. I added soooooo many things into the soup- goji berries, dates, dried figs, pork bones and dried oysters to give it flavour. Once again, taken in the pot hence looks like it's from the dungeons. From this, you get...

This! The dried figs I added made the soup so deliciously sweet. That's a fig right there in the pic below and you can see some goji berries floating in the soup.

Do your hear my resounding *burp*? :D

Sister's Birthday!

It's my sister's birthday tomorrow and the boy suggested that we get her a cake. So off we went at 8.45pm- hoping cake shops were still open. Our first choice was Brunetti as we knew it closed late, otherwise we'd have to trawl the city and Lygon St for other options. It was a good decision as I spotted a very pretty cake! I haven't seen cakes decorated this way before. The sign said it was a chocolate sponge cake with milk chocolate mousse and hazelnuts but when we cut into it we saw it was made up of 90% mousse and 10% sponge! I thought it'd at least be more sponge than mousse. However, it tasted surprisingly nice and even the boy (who is fussy over everything) agreed. The mousse was light enough, and not overly sweet. The sponge in the middle, bottom and side on the cake provided more texture to the cake. This is the type of cake you savour slowly, not devour in under 1 minute.

See what I mean by the pretty deco?

One more for the album.

Knowing that what I wanted to get her because she loved them and chances of finding a nice one in Australia were close to nil, I bought her a pressie while I was back in Malaysia. This is a jigsaw puzzle consisting of 2000 pieces (measuring a whopping 72cm x 103cm or something like that) and the best part of it is that it glows in the dark- well at least the yellow-ish bits do! I've seen the completed puzzle in the showroom and it just looks amazing. Too bad I couldn't cart the frame back here...it was too big to carry with me and I wasn't sure if checking it in would wreck it.

Remember from my last post I mentioned that I would use our hotpot leftovers to cook today? I bought some chicken stock, added leftover abalone juice from one of the days we ate abalone and made Yee Mee. Very simple and fuss-free. Not much to clean-up too, which is always a plus in my books.

Yummmm. The red baby chillies were particularly hot this time around. I couldn't eat more than 5 :s

Nothing Dainty about spicy sichuan food

The torrential rain and windy days have made me crave hotpot so the boy and I went to Dainty for some spicy sichuan food. The term 'ma la' is frequently used to describe Sichuan food and it literally translates to 'numbing spicyness'. Dainty (with branches in the CBD Chinatown, South Yarra and Smith St) serves up very authentic Sichuan and when we left the place, our faces were flushed red. Here's a picture of our order. Normally a hotpot is best eaten with more people so more dishes can be ordered (hence more variety), however there were plenty of tables with just couples tackling a gigantic bubbling hot pot.

We opted for mixed soup. In the pic below you can see that the clear soup is in the middle and the fiery red soup sits on the outside. Pre-boiling stage:

Post-boiling stage...our food is ready to go in!

Our dishes- which we didn't finish as the rice cakes were a lil too filling, so we took the rest home and I guess it'll serve as ingredients to the dinner I'll be making tomorrow. From L-R, top to bottom: Potato noodles, oyster mushrooms, lotus roots (very nice when boiled in the spicy 'ma la' soup), rice cakes, pork slices, black fungus, coriander beef balls and spinach. We also ordered yummy sesame dipping sauce.

Moomba was held over possibly the worst weekend ever as the weather did nothing but hail and rain, but guess what we saw? A giant plush!

And since my contract with Optus has expired, I transferred my number over to 3 and added-on an internet package..... I'm now a brand new owner of this:

Pic credits: Here
I finally get to surf the web on my phone :)

Happy Pill Monday! :D

Giant pill for mega-happiness. Just drop one whenever you feel down. Side effect: May foam at the mouth.

Happy outfit for the weekend (but it turned into a freaky day!)

Accompanied by happy colourful nails which reminded me constantly of Mentos everytime I looked at them :D

Freak hail storm in Melbourne

I'm so tired I'll let the pictures do the talking. It all started when the sky became overcast and at 3pm, it was so dark it looked like 8pm. We took shelter for half an hour because we didn't want to get hit by falling hail. When I got home the power was out and I couldn't get into my apartment because the doors in the stairwell wouldn't open, so I followed the boy to pick up some friends for a soccer match and the plan was that I hang out in his house till he finished soccer. Bad move.

Because of the freak hail storm (there was hail as big as golf balls apparently) and the torrential downpour that followed, it was flooded EVERYWHERE! People were knee-deep in water at Flinders St. So we had to take a million detours and STILL couldn't get into the city. Ended up spending 4 hours in the car battling massive jams. Off to rest in bed...it's been a long day sitting on my butt!

Cooking frenzy

I've been cooking all week (except for Pizza day) and attempted Wan Tan noodles one day.

The noodles were very surprisingly very yummy and quite close to the real deal. Yay, now I know that I can make it at home and have it as often as I want!

Sister's friend got her some macarons from Sydney (I wonder which shop) and they were very good. Eating 4 macarons over 2 days has reignited my love for them and someone please fly me to Adriano Zumbo in Sydney for 10382847343674 of them!

Long weekend ahead and I've got quite a few errands to run. I finally signed up to Medibank so I want to get a new pair of glasses, and maybe even sunnies if possible. And my phone plan is due to expire soon so I get to pick a new phone!

If you guessed Moonlight Cinema...

a hundred points for you! We decided to take advantage of the good weather (it's gonna be cold and stormy for a week from tomorrow) and make good use of the Moonlight Cinema vouchers I pre-purchased a few months ago. 'In the Loop' looked to be a good flick (verdict: it was funny! The dialogue cracked us up) so we bought 2 large pizzas for the 2 of us, and a bottle of Rosemount Shiraz to wash it all down. 

I highly recommend pizzas from Crust (www.crust.com.au). Very yummy and chock-ful of ingredients. L-R: Smoked salmon pizza with avocado, capers, spanish onions etc. Peri-peri pizza which we'd expected to be a lil bit more spicy but the chicken and mayonnaise combo was delish.

We sat behind the gold grass area which made viewing the screen a tad difficult as they were seated on bean bags which meant some heads were poking out. If we go again next year we'll probably camp right in front of the screen (but also near the speakers!). In the pictures below you can see the screen slowly being inflated.

Finally!

You can see the city skyline lighted up behind the trees.

We brought pillows and blankets as it got a little chilly when the sun set.

Crazy bird who wouldn't shut up until it got fed. I was afraid it would peck at our pizza boxes. Someone threw it some food and it ran away to eat it, without bothering to share with other birds nearby. Greedy bird!

Random note: Bought 7 bottles of nailpolishes on my lunch-break today :D

*Excites excites!

Look what I got in the post today...

...my Sasa haul :) Currently a fan of Aquamoist products, they are soooooooo moisturising. I'm liking that they are water-based as well. Threw in a Laneige Strawberry Yogurt Peeling Gel- it smells divine.

And guess where I'm going tonight?

:D

Mom, can I eat Flounder?

The boy cooks! Pretty impressive considering the only thing he used to cook was rice, and roast store-bought pre-marinated chicken kebabs from Woolies. :D Very tasty too, nomnomnom