Thursday, 15 September 2011, Day 296/365.

The good thing about working in the city is the easy access to quite a number of eating establishments.

I met some ex-colleagues for lunch last week and we went to a dumpling place – they seem to have risen in popularity recently.

Somehow we ended up with a soup dumpling hot-pot which was quite delicious but I didn’t get my dumpling fix as there were only two each.

Despite that, it was delicious and filling.

© Jen for Semantically driven, 2011. | Permalink | No comment

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Monday, 5 September 2011, Day 286/365.

See how things are fairly even on my mantleshelf. I like things to be even and balanced. It’s the Libran in me I presume.

Tuesday, 6 September 2011, Day 287/365.

Am trying to eat more vegetables and less of the pasta and rice. I’ve never really made a stirfry that I like and this one was ok, but my son didn’t like it that much. I can’t win. He eats certain veges but isn’t that keen on meat and I think it’s a texture thing for him.

It’s hard trying to cook as healthily as I aspire to be and to please him. Damnit.

© Jen for Semantically driven, 2011. | Permalink | No comment

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Monday, 29 August 2011, Day 279/365.

Mmm, chocolate. Hard to resist.

My sister went interstate and mentioned that she’d be stopping by a place that sold organic chocolate and licorice.

Without a second thought I handed over some money and told her to buy up.

There’s still some rocky road and some chocolate covered licorice left. Sorry to all concerned that I didn’t have a chance to share.

© Jen for Semantically driven, 2011. | Permalink | 3 comments

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Thursday, 16 June 2011, Day 205/365.

I made a trip to the local market and it’s much much better than buying food in the supermarket.

The food is newer, I hope, and it’s certainly cheaper. I bought strawberries for about $2 cheaper per punnet than at the supermarket and bananas were $2 a kilo cheaper too. They’re still around $10 per kilo at the moment though because of the cyclones and bad weather in Queensland earlier in the year.

I’ve started making more fruit and yoghurt smoothies just so I can make some powder (a glucosamine type thing) I’m taking for my sore knee joints more palatable. You’re supposed to drink it with water but it smells and tastes hideous and makes me dry retch the two or three times I tried it.

With a fruit/yoghurt and milk smoothy I can barely taste it and if I hold my nose while the container’s open I don’t have to smell it at all.

© Jen for Semantically driven, 2011. | Permalink | 2 comments

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

You eat it with soft cheese, like brie, and crackers and its sweetness complements the brie perfectly. I haven’t met anyone who doesn’t like it.

I found a quince paste recipe from the Australian Women’s Weekly and here’s what happened. I’ve italicised my notes below.

Ingredients

Method

Wash, peel and core quinces. Chop quince flesh coarsely and place in large saucepan. Tie peel and cores in a small piece of muslin to form a bag. (Only do this bit if you want to. I didn’t have enough room in the saucepan so I didn’t bother). Add to the quinces in the pan.

Add enough water to cover the quinces and boil, covered 30 minutes or until fruit is very soft. Remove muslin bag and push flesh through a fine sieve into a bowl. Alternatively you can process the fruit until very smooth (however, this method is only good if you have been very thorough in removing all skin, parts of the core and seeds from the quinces when preparing them.) Weigh the fruit pulp. You should have about 1.25kg of fruit pulp. Weigh out an equal amount of sugar.

This is what the paste looks like when you first add the sugar to the pan.

Combine sugar and fruit pulp in the same cleaned saucepan. Cook, stirring over a low heat until the sugar dissolves. Continue to cook, stirring every 5-10 minutes, until the quince paste is very thick and a deep ruby colour. At this stage a wooden spoon drawn through the paste will leave a very distinct trail across the bottom of the pan. This will take approx 1½ hours.

This is what it looked like towards the end. I had to stir it fairly constantly so it didn’t burn to the bottom of the pan. Next time I will try it in the slow cooker as I think that will do a great job.

Transfer cooked paste to a lightly greased and lined 20cm x 30cm lamington pan. Spread paste flat.

Place in fan-forced oven with only the fan working (no temperature set) overnight or for several hours to dry out. Alternatively you can dry the paste in a very low oven (90°C) for several hours, or you could use a traditional method for drying the paste: in the sunshine if you have constant sunshine, in an airing cupboard, in a gas oven with the pilot light on, or as Stephanie Alexander mentions in her book – the cook’s companion, one of her reader’s wrote in to tell her she had successfully dried it on the back shelf of her car under the rear window!

Whichever way you dry it, wrap it in baking paper and foil and then place in an airtight container. It should keep indefinitely. It’s a great accompaniment to cheese, or can be melted down and used in fruit tarts and pies. It should be cut into small wedges or squares to serve.

I was very pleased with how it turned out and I have quite a bit to keep me going. Some of my friends tried it and we all loved it. The difference between this and the bought quince paste is how fruity it is. Even though it is a bit time consuming to make I thoroughly recommend giving it a go. It’s absolutely delicious.

© Jen for Semantically driven, 2011. | Permalink | 2 comments

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

What’s a girl to do when she’s out of a job? Why go out for lunches of course. Well I won’t be making a habit of it because I’m not earning money at the moment but I met up with an old friend a week ago for lunch. He was in town to celebrate his 50th and I haven’t had a good catchup with him for years.

I met him and his wife separately about 20 years ago before they met each other. Him through a friend I used to date and her through an old school friend – they did nursing together.

The next day I went into the Central Market to do a bit of food shopping and I also met The Surfer for some lunch. On our way to the restaurant I heard my name being called out and it was my mate I’d seen for lunch the previous day. How’s that for a coincidence?

My next mission is to find some well-priced Chinese food that is tasty. We’ve had too many bland Chinese meals.

© Jen for Semantically driven, 2011. | Permalink | 2 comments

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Part of my daily tradition in my new job is going to get a coffee. I don’t walk around as much now that I’m here probably because it’s a small office and I don’t need to. At my old job I’d quite often go and speak to someone rather than email them so I got off my bum and away from the computer for a little bit.

Now I take a ten minute break and go and get myself a coffee, and one for anyone else who wants one. It also gives my colleague (who usually comes with me) and I a chance to catchup so you could almost say it’s work related.

I snuck this shot in – he had no idea. I do find that I can only have a small coffee. If I have a larger one it keeps me awake at night.

© Jen for Semantically driven, 2010. | Permalink | No comment

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

In a nutshell we ate very well in Bali. It was great not to have to cook at all. Our breakfasts were included as part of the hotel accommodation and in the first hotel we stayed in it was more varied than the second hotel with the mix of western and Asian food but by the end I was sick of trying to decide what to have. Generally I had an omelette from the egg station, some toast and something else like a pancake or a danish. So I ate a lot more for breakfasts than I usually do when at home. Unfortunately the coffee was awful and apparently the tea was weak in both our hotels.

One morning I was standing at the toaster and two pieces came out that looked just like what I’d put in and when I asked a person nearby if they were his he got quite defensive about the fact that they were his and that there was plenty of food to go around you know. Ok, I was just making an observation, not trying to get into a fight or anything.

Because we ate such big breakfasts we usually didn’t eat much for lunch or had quite a late lunch and then by dinner time we were ready to indulge again at a nearby restaurant. We had dinner one night at the hotel which was included in our package and it wasn’t very nice at all. It was a seafood buffet and the fish at these buffet’s was mostly overdone and not very tasty. Also, one of our party got Bali belly from a seafood salad he ate which was really unfortunate especially as it was on the last day and we had a 1am flight the next morning to come back home.

There were a couple of standout meals. One was in a restaurant opposite our hotel in Tuban. We chose some fresh seafood from out the front and they cooked it on the grill before serving it to us. I had prawns, The Surfer had the best snapper I’ve ever tasted which would have been enough to feed two people and my friend had chili crab. It was absolutely delicious.

The other standout meal was a Bumbu Bali near Nusa Dua. In retrospect we should have had the kids babysat so we could really enjoy the feast, the taste, the smells, the dancing and everything. But we didn’t. We still managed to enjoy ourselves once the kids settled down a bit. I liked that everytime a group walked in there would be a sing-song greeting ‘selamat malam’ which means good evening. While we were eating the music and dancing started which kept the kids occupied a bit too.

The image at the top of this post was JJ’s and L’s food. By the time ours came I was ready to devour it, not take photos of it. It was so delicious and I’m glad we ate here towards the end of our stay because it would have tainted our experiences at other places. The meal was probably the most expensive we had in Bali but one that was definitely worth it. The photo above are the chefs at Bumbu Bali who aren’t hidden away in a kitchen.

At restaurants I expected to have more Indonesian food choices but most restaurants tried to cater for all types of tastes so there’d be pizza, pasta etc, ie more western food. This was a bit disappointing although we did go to an Italian restaurant in our hotel where the food was absolutely delicious. I hadn’t been expecting that.

What I really really liked about eating out in Bali was the service. Because there were essentially two groups of us we could split the bill. That is one family ordered on one bill and we’d order on the other. We got used to saying right at the beginning that we were ordering for bill 1 and they were ordering for bill 2. It made paying at the end of the meal so much easier and because we were away for two weeks it saved us having to worry about meal IOUs. We already had to do that for transport and a couple of times when it got confusing I was able to organise the money so it all worked out. Usually money handling confounds me but I left my travel companions confounded a couple of times about what had just happened. I jokingly said I should become a money exchanger because some of them have quite dodgy practises (not that mine were).

Most restaurants also had a kids menu and this was my favourite looking meal out of all of them. Guess who it is.

Now I can’t have a food post in a foreign land without mentioning what happens to it at the other end. Don’t worry, I won’t go into graphic descriptions of Bali Belly. I didn’t get this at all. In fact it was the opposite. I’m usually very regular and to not be regular was a bit distressing and quite uncomfortable. I ended up buying a box of green tea bags because green tea helps me but even that didn’t really work. Towards the end of the two weeks I feel like I hardly ate at all because I felt so constantly full and that was really annoying. You’ll be pleased to know that I’m all back to normal again, and my stomach’s come down to it’s normal size.

Apologies for ending on a more of a non-food note for this post but it’s all gotta end up somewhere!

© Jen for Semantically driven, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

These canned tomatoes are supposed to be rich and thick and I wanted to see if they really were. Some canned tomatoes I buy are more watery than tomatoey but these seemed to live up to their promise.

Makes enough for 4-6 serves.

Ingredients

• 250g dried Penne pasta
• 300ml thickened cream (I used low fat cream)
• grated rind of 1 lemon
• 3 tablespoons lemon juice
• salt and ground pepper to taste

Mushroom meat sauce

• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 400g pork or veal mince (I used beef mince)
• 200g mushrooms – sliced
• 410 can Ardmona wine infused chopped tomatoes
• 1 cup water
• 5 stalks silver beet chopped
• 1/4 cup pine nuts (I didn’t use this as my son’s allergic to nuts)
• 1 cup grated Mozarella cheese

Method

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees celcius
2. Cook pasta in a large saucepan of boiling water according to packet directions. Drain and return to saucepan.
3. Stir through cream, lemon rind and juice. Season to taste with pepper. Set aside.
4. Heat oil in frying pan. Brown mince for 3 minutes over high heat, stirring often to break up lumps.
5. Stir in mushrooms, canned tomatoes and water. Return to the boil, cover and simmer for 8-10 minutes. Stir in silver beet.
6. Spoon a layer of mushroom meat sauce into 8 cup casserole dish, top with pasta mixture and remaining sauce. Lightly toss together.
   
7. Sprinkle with pine nuts (if using) and cheese.
8. Cover with foil and bake for 25 minutes. Remove foil and bake further 5-10 minutes until cheese lightly browns.

When eating this my son actually complimented me on the taste which he very rarely does this. For me, the lemon made all the difference as I’ve never used lemon with pasta before and it was gorgeous.

I’ll definitely be cooking this one again. It was easy, delicious and big enough to last us for a few meals.

© Jen for Semantically driven, 2009. | Permalink | 3 comments

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

We go to the local farmer’s market just about every Sunday morning to get our fresh produce and usually only spend as little time as possible there. However, there is a kids club that has different activities.

A couple of weeks ago JJ participated in the kids club doing the edible garden. The edible garden involved watering plants as you can see above, picking plants that were ready and then planing some new seedlings.

JJ was happy with everything he was doing and looked interested so I was able to dash off and quickly do some of my shopping.

Kid’s club usually involves eating food and this time they ate some very cute little round carrots they’d picked and drank some apple and carrot juice that a nearby market stall donated.

We also got a bag of silverbeet and rainbow chard which I used in a stirfry. And all this for free. We don’t usually have the time to stay around for an extra hour but when we do, the kid’s club is a great activity and we’re very lucky to be able to participate.

I would love to do more gardening but I don’t really have the room and I don’t really have the time. We grow herbs and that’s about it. My tomato crop from this summer was decimated by the extended heatwave we had so it was a waste of the water I used to try and keep them alive. We do have a local community garden and I’d like to get a plot there one day when I’ve got more time. One day.

© Jen for Semantically driven, 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh