Fri 3 Jul 2009
Jac made this chicken curry using madras curry paste from a jar. It had chicken thigh pieces, potatoes, carrots and onions, with a tin of chopped tomatoes added to make up the curry sauce. It was lovely! And of course, I had leftover curry and rice for my breakfast the next morning. 
Wed 1 Jul 2009
We had a family afternoon tea recently at my parents’ home. Jac and I contributed siew mai to the meal - we bought three or four serves from Fook Kee at Spencer Village International Food Hall (200 Spencer Road, Thornlie) and brought them along. Mum and I placed them in a dish to heat up in the rice cooker - it looked like an army of siew mai! We had gingery garlicky chilli sauce and sweet soy sauce to dip the siew mai in.
My younger sister Juji made a banana cake with a thick coating of sticky caramel icing.
The cake was still warm, moist and absolutely delicious. That icing was magnificent.
Mum invited us “kids” to eat this cake - it’s one of Mum’s favourite tricks, offloading leftover food to her hungry children whenever they visit. Do any of your parents do that too? 
My eldest sister CW made this fantastic fudge, with hazelnuts in it.
The banana cake and fudge were very sweet and delicious.
It was hard stopping at just one piece of fudge, and I didn’t! No, I didn’t eat every piece of fudge pictured here - I had three or so pieces. Jac and I took home more cake and fudge too, for later. Boy, it was goooooood.
The week or so before, my eldest sister CW had mysteriously told everyone there was to be a little celebration at this afternoon tea. So what was the celebration for?
It was for ME!
My family surprised me with congratulations on the completion of my PhD! 
They presented me with a gift - a LAMY pen and mechanical pencil set and a Rhodia notepad with a leather cover, and a second notepad. It was very sweet of them all. To be honest, I’ve been completely underwhelmed by the completion of my PhD. My family and friends have all been really excited and thrilled about it, which is nice.
I didn’t take photos of my presents, but the LAMY site has pictures of the pen and mechanical pencil: the LAMY AL-star graphit mechanical pencil and matching LAMY AL-star graphit Ballpoint pen (mine came presented in a gift box), and this is the Rhodia notepad with a leather cover. I’ve been using the pencil to doodle cartoons and the notepad is lovely to write in. I think I kind of feel like I’m spoiling the notepad with my messy scribbles!
I guess the celebration was a great excuse to eat lots of pork dumplings, cake and fudge!
My younger sister Juji had a surprise gift for me too, bought on her recent trip to Melbourne - here it is, my newest two-tiered bento box!
I love it! It has cats on it! Picking apples! Cute! I have used for bento lunch - there will be a post coming up soon featuring my “applecats” bento box (thanks, jetgirlart! LOL).
The moist, meaty, juicy siew mai was also enjoyed by all…
…but mostly, I think, by my little niece Ruby! She just sat there and mowed through the siew mai, eating about eight of them. She would’ve eaten more if there were any left! We’re all good eaters in the family, so we look on this with pride! Ruby loves eating most things - meat, fruit, vegetables… but I think like the rest of us, meaty savoury items are her favourite.
As she ate, she kept stopping and looking at the dish of siew mai, as if checking to make sure there would be still more left for her to eat. She didn’t look happy that her mum and dad, grandmother and aunties kept eating that army of siew mai. Oh well Ruby, like the rest of us happy gluttons in the family, you’ll just have to learn to share! Haha.
Tue 30 Jun 2009
Dinner
Panfried pork steaks with mushroom sauce, served with steamed broccolini, oven-roasted sweet potatoes and potato cubes, with an experimental oven-baked cauliflower and asparagus dish.
Mushrooms and spring onions go extremely well with a succulent, poppingly fresh panfried pork chop.
The potatoes were golden and crispy-edged and seasoned with garlic salt - yum!
The experimental baked cauliflower and asparagus dish was fantastic! But I must apologise - I didn’t write down what was in the dish (other than the cauliflower and asparagus, that is) and Jac doesn’t remember either! It may come back to her, now that I’ve asked her again.
I’m pretty sure there was a little cheese in the cauliflower dish - but whatever gave the sauce its orangey tinge remains a mystery buried in our pathetic memories.
Bento
Jac oven-roasted a whole tray’s worth of extra vegetables especially for bento the next day. And so I packed us roasted vegetables (potato, sweet potato, zucchini, mushrooms, carrots, whole garlic cloves) and corn, along with cold roasted turkey breast and prunes for something sweet to finish.
I cut the corn kernels off the cobs so they’d be easier to eat at work. They were sweet and juicy, beautiful as they were with no need for butter.
A soppy but sincere bento note for Jac… I have my mushy moments.
I was recently asked by a couple of people how I keep the bento notes from getting food all over them. Well, I usually protect them with a little greaseproof paper. I also try to find the spot in the bento box that’s the least wet or saucy (hmm, that does sound food “porny” doesn’t it? ^_^) - that’s where I place the note.
Mon 29 Jun 2009
Here’s some of the food I ate while Jac was away in Denmark (a town in Western Australia, not the country in Europe!) recently, starting with… no surprises for regular readers - SPAM! Whenever Jac’s away I will eat at least one meal of fried SPAM and egg, rice and baked beans. This time, I mixed corn kernels with the baked beans. This has to be my top comfort meal of all time. When I’m feeling down and exhausted (unfortunately, not a rare occurrence), this is the meal I cook for myself, and it always helps me feel at least a little better.
I rode my bicycle to the shops on the Saturday. It was a lovely day, riding in the sunshine with the wind in my hair, then walking around the shops and stopping to have lunch at Nando’s - chicken ribs and chips (AU$13.95 in combo with a drink).
The chicken ribs were succulent, saucy and finger-sucking good. Other customers came, ate their chicken, and left… and there I sat, like time stood still, meticulously sucking on every single chicken bone till not a scrap of meat or sauce remained.
I also cooked one of my “green” stir-fries for dinner that weekend - this one with bok choy, baby corn spears, mushrooms and chicken, loads of garlic and oyster sauce, and a little sesame oil to finish.
While digging around in the fridge, I found a paper bag with a surprise Jac had left for me - mini quiches and mini sausages! I thought it was sweet of her to leave me a surprise of pastries! Here they are just after I microwaved them for a quick snack.
And of course since I’d opened the tin, there was more SPAM to use up. And because there was leftover rice in the fridge, it made sense to cook my favourite fried rice, with SPAM, green beans, egg, garlic, oyster sauce and soy sauce. I really do like eating my favourite dishes over and over again. I’m really a woman of simple tastes. Sitting at my computer, eating a bowl of SPAM fried rice on a weekend alone… happiness.
Mon 29 Jun 2009
This was a kind of naughty junk food bento - a McDonald’s bento, with Chicken McNuggets and a sachet of tomato sauce, and a McDonald’s apple pie for dessert. I also included one of my sweet crunchy salad combos - with mixed greens, grape tomatoes, sliced sweet gherkin pickles, grapes and swiss cheese - the sweetness and crunch in the salad comes from the pickles and grapes. I ate all of the lunch cold. I love McDonald’s apple pies cold. The trick with any deep-fried food you intend to eat cold is to let it cool completely before putting it in the fridge - if you refrigerate it with even just a hint of warmth left in it you’ll risk it turning soggy. Even eaten cold, the apple pie pastry still had a satisfying crispness to it. And the nuggets - well, I can eat mountains of McNuggets, hot or cold, any time.
On the weekend jetgirl and I were lamenting the loss of dark meat Chicken McNuggets. Do any of you guys recall the time when you’d get dark meat as well as breast meat McNuggets? My brother and I both loved the dark meat nuggets, and with every pack, we’d race to identify and eat all the dark ones first. We had identifying dark meat McNuggets by sight down to a finely-tuned art (rather than what jetgirl said she had to do to work out which was which - which was bite them in half ). I’ve never stopped missing dark meat Chicken McNuggets - they were consistently more succulent and flavoursome than the breast meat ones. They’re on my list of
Junk Food Items I Miss. I’ve know I’ve talked about this before, but here’s a list:
The wind is howling and it’s bucketing down with heavy rain outside, and I just heard a deep rumble of thunder. I hope it slows down by the time I have to leave for work. I hate getting wet from the rain first thing in the morning. It’s just so difficult to get warm again when you start the day with wet clothes.
Sun 28 Jun 2009
We’ve cooked minchee using turkey mince previously (I have a category devoted to minchee), and I remarked on how “wormy” the turkey mince looked. It tasted fine, but I think pork mince remains the ideal meat to use for minchee. We cooked up another batch of turkey mince minchee recently though, because 1) we needed to use up a batch of turkey mince and 2) I had a craving for minchee, and with no pork mince in the freezer, this was the next best thing. Jac also stir-fried some vegetables (green beans, carrot, red capsicum, cabbage) to eat with the minchee and rice.
The texture of the turkey mince is very different to pork - the turkey just doesn’t give as springy or as satisyfing a chew.
A couple of nights later, Jac came home with a packet of frozen puff pastry. She said she wanted to try making pastry puffs with the leftover minchee as the filling. As a fan of both puff pastry and minchee, it sounded fantastic to me! She served up her minchee puffs freshly baked from the oven with a little lettuce, cucumber, tomato and red apple, and a dish of tomato sauce for dipping.
I didn’t need the tomato sauce in the end - Jac ate the sauce with her puffs - for me, the pastry and minchee tasted great without any additional sauces.
How’s your weekend been? Mine’s been pretty good - I made a new friend and caught up with an old one. And I made a decision about something significant that I’ve been struggling with for a few weeks.
*This post was written ages ago, and I somehow missed publishing it! I thought the minchee puffs were too good to not post!
