The Food Pornographer

On weekday mornings, as I get ready for work, the cats like to hang out in the bathroom while I take a shower. Billy Lee especially loves to sit on the bathroom counter. Doesn’t she look relaxed?

This was a delicious rice noodle stir-fry Jac cooked, with sliced turkey steaks and pork steaks! She’d bought the turkey steaks and pork steaks fully intending to cook them up in whitey meals, but the hungry glutton she cooks for had a craving for something more Asian! She stir-fried the turkey and pork with bok choy, spring onions, fresh baby corn and mung bean sprouts. It was so good – I ate a huge bowl for dinner and another big bowl the next morning for breakfast. And finished the last of the noodles for breakfast the morning after that. When I asked her why she used both turkey and pork, she simply shrugged and said “because they were both there and because I could”. :)

Pixel had already eaten her dinner with a little dish of cat milk. She should’ve had a full belly but I guess she just wants our food because it’s our food! Here she is, looking fixatedly at our noodle bowls.

And here’s a face we know so well – it says: “Why can’t I have some of your food?”

Since there was sausage left over from breakfast and I had a rice craving, Jac made fried rice, with chopped up sausage, corn, peas and mushrooms, and a big handful of chopped fresh spring onion.

She flavoured the rice with Maggi Seasoning (at the linked page, it’s called Maggi Liquid Seasoning, and it’s the second bottle from the right in the image) – that’s my new favourite fried rice seasoning. I’m sure the reason it’s so tasty is that it contains cousins of Flavour Enhancer 621 – otherwise known as msg. I took some fried rice to work the next day too.

After our dinner at Cinnamon on the Park, we all went back to our place and Juji and Jay stayed the night. The next morning, we remembered the red velvet cupcakes Juji had made the day before – she’d brought half a dozen cupcakes with her!

They were red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese icing.

I’d never eaten red velvet cake before. I liked it! It doesn’t just taste good, I love the red colour!

After a cupcake to start the day, Juji and I made breakfast. She fried the sausages and put on the toast while I made scrambled eggs, poured the juice and set the table. Jac may have crawled out of bed at this point.

There were two kinds of sausage – pork sausages and the last of a mystery continental sausage we found in the freezer. Juji just sliced it up and fried it in the same pan with the pork sausages. We had leftover pancakes in the fridge, but I was the only one who wanted pancakes. So I had sausages, scrambled eggs, pancakes and maple syrup. A few people have commented or emailed and said the pancakes look like crepes. Well, crepes, hotcakes, flapjacks, pikelets, blintzes (there are many more!), they’re all varieties of pancakes. And yes, the pancake Jac makes are a thinner crepe-style pancake.

As we sat eating on the patio I thought I heard a little noise near the fence. It was that naughty Pixel playing in the garden bed. See her? :)

As we studied the menu, a waiter placed a basket of complimentary warm pappadum and a little dish of mango chutney on our table. It was fun trying to decide what to order while munching on the crispy pappadum dipped in the sweet chutney.

Jac and Jay enjoyed their Kingfisher beers. Jac said it’s quite light and easy to drink. :)

We decided to share a starter and chose the assorted platter (AU$22.50) which featured vegetable pakora, onion bhaji, samosa, chicken tikka and seekh kebab. We very carefully cut everything into four so we could all try a bit of everything. The pakora and bhaji fell apart but were both really tasty! The seekh kebab was heavily meaty and well flavoured, but my favourite was the chicken – boneless skinless thigh pieces, bursting with succulence. The samosa had a surprising bite to it, thank goodness for the cooling yoghurt dip!

We ordered a few main dishes to share, along with steamed basmati rice and a couple of different breads. We found the Cinnamon on the Parkmenu online before making our booking and Jac was immediately keen to try the house specialty of Cinnamon baby goat curry (AU$21.50, named after the restaurant). This was our favourite dish of the night – the goat was unbelievably tender and the gravy was rich with the flavour of the meat – you could tell it had been cooking for a long, long time.

We ordered the prawn malabari (AU$23.50), which the menu told us is a specialty of Malabar in South India. This curry was made with bursty plump prawns with freshly ground coconut and blended spices. It had a surprising bite to it but wasn’t overly spicy-hot, perfect with a dollop of raita (see below).

Juji and I are big butter chicken fans, so we had to order the butter chicken (AU$18.95). The boneless chicken pieces were tandoori roasted, served in the tomato-based creamy butter chicken sauce. The chicken was very tender but in terms of flavour we thought this wasn’t as tasty as butter chicken can be. And just like the butter chicken I’ve eaten in at Chutney Mary’s in Subiaco, the dish appeared to be mostly gravy – there never seems to be enough chicken in butter chicken.

We all wanted a dhal dish and chose the dhal panchrangi (AU$13.95), which consists of lentils, spinach and peas. It was served in a little bucket and was delicious – it was nice to have spinach and peas with lentils.

Juji is a big fan of keema naan, which I had never tried. It’s Indian flatbread stuffed with ground lamb (AU$6.50). It was yummy, but Juji reckons she’s eaten better keema naan in Sydney.

Jac and I were keen on trying the garlic naan too – flatbread topped with fresh garlic and coriander (AU$5.00). The bread was nice and buttery (well, presumably ghee rather than butter), but it wouldn’t been even better if the garlic was freshly minced rather than (it appeared) garlic granules.

With all the rich flavours and gravy we were glad we’d ordered the steamed basmati rice (AU$5.00) to soak it all up.

We also ordered one of Jay’s favourite things when eating Indian food, raita (AU$4.50). I especially loved to dip a piece of garlic naan into the goat or prawn gravy and then top that with a blob of raita.

My plate, round one, with a little bit of everything. I just wished I had enough room to finish up every drop of that goat curry gravy! I haven’t stopped thinking about the baby goat curry since this meal, which is quite remarkable!

I was quite happy to sit back with my full tummy and watch the others eat dessert. They ordered a couple of desserts and shared them. This was naram garam, a gulab jamun served with ice cream and cream.

Jac loves rice pudding, so she ordered the kheer, which is an Indian-style rice pudding with fruit and nuts in it. She loved it!

I set the table out on the patio – as you can see, we’re still using a trestle table. Haven’t had the time or energy to go shopping for an outdoor setting in the last couple of weeks. Both of us have been really busy with work and house things. And blogging things for me, of course. I poured us each a tumbler of 100% orange juice. I wrapped our cutlery in these crazy fluoro Halloween napkins my late grandma Mama gave us years ago. Mama thought the colours were pretty and bought them for us – she didn’t “see” the skulls and crossbones! The maple syrup is Canadian, but not the usual brand we buy. We usually get Camp maple syrup, which is pretty expensive over here. The last time we ran out and went to buy some, there was no Camp, only this other much cheaper brand, which we bought. I thought better to have cheap maple syrup than no maple syrup, or worse – maple-FLAVOURED syrup (fail!). Next time though, I will aim to get Camp maple syrup. Edit: this post was written a few weeks ago – we’ve since bought Camp maple syrup!

You may have noticed in the very first photo that Jac and I eat our pancakes a little differently from one another. Jac likes to roll up her pancakes. She pours herself a little pool of syrup on her plate and dips pancake and bacon into the syrup.

Me, I like to pile the pancakes one on top of the other. But I make sure each pancake gets a share of syrup – I pour a little syrup on the first pancake before laying the next one on top and adding a little more syrup before adding the next pancake, and so on. I then place my bacon on top of the pancakes and top with a little more syrup. What I’d really like to do is drench the whole lot with half a bottle of syrup, but that remains a fantasy. I show great restraint (I think so, anyway!) when pouring maple syrup over my pancakes and bacon. On this occasion, I had three pancakes. Well, three initially. I ate a fourth one after I finished the first three.

Jac actually made the pancake batter the night before and left it covered in the fridge overnight. She rang me to tell me she was on her way home from the office with instructions: “Please get the pancake batter and bacon out of the fridge!”

This has to be my favourite breakfast combo ever. For me, the only thing that can make pancakes with bacon and maple syrup better (apart from free pouring of syrup, as mentioned before) is caramelised banana, like the awesome mountain of brioche french toast I ate at the Gun Shop Cafe in Brisbane earlier this year. I still dream about that breakfast. It’s probably a good thing I live far, far away from there. :)