Beware the Habanero

Habanero’s are the world’s hottest chilli. They have been known to induce vomiting, bleeding and even unconsciousness.

I’m growing a Habanero plant. I just pulled off a ripe one, cut the end off and it tasted like nothing. No heat. I thought it must have been a dud plant (it happens when the parent plant has cross pollinated with a capsicum). So I cut off a big slather and ate it. Don’t do this. The plant wasn’t a dud after all and…..it hurts.

Nick

Siem Reap – Cambodia

Wow what a different place to Vietnam. It’s hard to describe how. One of our guides in Vietnam told us that Vietnam had culture that was strongly influenced by the Chinese and the Cambodians one that has been influence by India. Although i’ve never been to India, it was still this influence that I indeed felt. Especially in the food.

We arrived late in Cambodia and were tired. We decided to eat at the hotel we were staying at – the Bopha Angkor Hotel. This is always a risk because often in Asia the hotels try to westernise the menu or dull the flavours. But this place was excellent. We had a rich coconut beef curry and Fish Amok. They were incredible. We discovered that Fish Amok is the national (at least regional) dish of Cambodia. It is a simple curry like coconut sauce with a strong lemongrass flavour. Here’s a picture:

We actually loved Amok so much we ate it for five days in a row.

The food in Cambodia is far more like Thai food than Vietnamese food is. Yet it seems to use less dry spices and less chilli. A good change if you’re sick of Thai. We actually went to a cooking school and learned how to cook a few dishes, included Amok. Although I can’t give you the cooking school’s Amok recipe, i can give you my version of the dish for the ingredients commonly available in Sydney. Here it is:

Fish Amok
300g steaky fish, e.g. ling, cut into 1cm slices
I onion thinly sliced
2 cloves of garlic, sliced
1 chilli sliced
1 small nob of ginger, grated
1 small nob of fresh tumeric, sliced (if unavaiable, 1 teaspoon tumeric powder
1 lemongrass stalk, diced very thinly, white part only
1 handful of english spinach leaves
1 can of coconut milk.

Combine chilli, garlic, ginger and lemongrass, tumeric together by pounding in a mortar and pestle or a small blender. Heat a couple of tablespoons of vegetable oil in a pan. Fry onion until translucent. Add lemongrass mixture and cook for a few minutes. Do not shake the can of coconut milk but open it and pour the top layer into the pan until the water is left at the bottom. Add the spinach. Simmer until fish is cooked through, add more of the coconut water if necessary. Serves 2-3. The banana leaf parcel is the common presentation in Cambodia and you can do it if you like fiddling with stuff. Held together by either staples of toothpicks.

The Mekong Delta, Phu Quoc and Goodbye

Well we went to the Mekong as I said we would. This was one of the highlights of the trip. This was the view from our room:

One of the funny things about Vietnam is everyone copies each other. So for lunch in the Mekong we had a full meal of deep frish whole fish, spring rolls, barbequed prawns and thick soup. We arrived at our homestay at night (to discover the word homestay in Vietnam means B&B in English) and we were served exactly the same dish we had for lunch. Great but very funny.

Notice the vietnamese style presentation….very traditional

We are in Phu Quoc now, a little island off the coast of South Vietnam. What I love about this place is the fresh seafood. The best scallops I’ve ever had. Many places display their fresh seafood out the front, you choose what you like and it’s cooked right up for you on coals.

(We ate the ones with tiger stripes)

Tonight we went to a little restaurant and when we ordered the seafood one of the family jumped on their motorbike went to the market and came back with our seafood almost so fresh it was still flapping in the bag.

Went fishing last night too and for the first time i actually caught something. A little fish and a squid. Yum Yum. Would show you a photo but the fish is so big it doesn’t fit in it.

But we say goodbye to Vietnam now. I’ll miss the place where if you a book a tour it can arrive an hour early or an hour late. I’ll miss waving a taxi that is full and literally within 10s his friend arriving to pick you up. I’ll miss the fact that the seafood platters are the cheapest thing on the menu and everything is locally grown and caught and eaten by us.

Tomorrow we head to Cambodia. I’ve heard the food there is nothing to write home about but we’ll see….

Nick

Saigon

Well after enjoying this in HoiAn:

(that’s a coconut)

And this:

….we arrived in Saigon.

Saigon (officially HoChiMinh City – although no one calls it that) is the biggest city in Vietnam. It really is what you’d expect of a big Asian city. Big buildings, lots of business, messy traffic etc. But the traffic is no where near as much fun as Hanoi, and I think it makes less sense. In Hanoi you just walked out into a busy road and the bikes and cars just seemed to dodge you. Here there are actually road rules but i can’t yet figure out what they are. Hope I don’t die.

On out first night we went and ate some street food. A Vietnamese pork and prawn pancake. It was pretty good. But it was cooked in so much oil it kinda left our mouths feeling like a petrol station.

The food otherwise is like any big city. Unless you have really hunted out the great cheap eateries, you have to pay money to eat great food. We’ve eaten some good pho etc but i’m yet to be convinced that the food here can live up to the excitement of the local produce, seafood and value of HoiAn.

Tomorrow we head to the river region – the Mekong Delta. This promises to be a real country experience, with malaria warnings, excessive boat trips and even one night staying in the home of a local Vietnamese family.

I really want to eat some snake or turtle while I’m here, and I’ve heard that these dishes are the specialty of the delta… let’s hope and pray.

Nick

HoiAn

I always wondered why food related things are called gastonomic. Now I realise. Make of that what you will.

Yesterday we left Hanoi and arrived in HoiAn, much further south. HoiAn is a great little seaside town that I think probably survived on the fishing industry but now thrives on the tourism. It’s quiet, it’s hot, the sun shines and it feels like a completely different place to Hanoi.

For lunch we had a local specialty – snapper grilled in banana leaves with lemongrass and dried shrimp. Delicious.

At night the locals line the river while they eat dinner and drink the local cheap beer (bia) – Larue, which happens to be one of the best. So Pen and I did just this. We found a great little restaurant by the river and spent the afternoon enjoying it. I normally despise people who order spring rolls at asian restaurants but here they are amazing. Freshly deep fried crispy ricepaper and filled with great tasting herbs and meat.

Even better were the live clams sitting in the tank at the restaurant that were cooked fresh for us with garlic in a pepper and lemon sauce.

So after 4 plates of food such as this and 4 beers the bill came to about $20 AUD. It was a great afternoon.

The food in HoiAn is very different to Hanoi. Much more complexity of flavour. Much greater use of herbs, citrus and coconut. And like all Vietnamese food, absolutely loaded with garlic.

I’m going to have an attempt at a few of these dishes when i get home, so stay tuned…

Nick

Hanoi

We arrived in Hanoi late last night (Monday). Had three meals on the plane that were, well…Asian inspired aeroplane food. Awful.

Hanoi is a crazy and alive city. About the same population as Sydney but it seems like millions more. I used to think Asians were the worst drivers in the world and now i realise that the Vietnamese in Hanoi, at least, are in fact the best drivers in the world. There are basically no road rules, round abouts or traffic lights that anyone pays attention to, you just have to fight your way through it, and somehow they manage to do it without, as far as i can tell, much disaster.

But this blog is a food blog not a traffic blog. We went to the market our in burbs today which was great. Huge plates of produces and live fish, crabs and prawns. Meat cut and laid out and even quite a few stalls selling whole roasted dog (I didn’t eat any…yet).

For lunch we went into one of the restaurants and had quite a lot of trouble convincing them that we didn’t want to eat their ‘western’ dishes (eg spaghetti bolognese). I would hate to think what that would taste like. They even refused to serve us one dish claiming it wasn’t ’suitable’ for us. I really think maybe Vietnam has been burnt by far too many British tourists who somehow expect to eat yorkshire puddings and pie in Asia. So we ordered a beef stir fried noodle and deep fried whole carp. The carp was meant to be eaten in rice paper rolls and the restaurant assumed we would have no idea what to do with rice paper, salad and carp so they got two waitresses to spend about 15 minutes rolling them for us while we sat there and ate. The carp was great. Tasted like it was deep fried in pork fat and it was so crispy that it was hard to tell the difference between the bones and the meat. Here is a picture. If anyone can tell me how to rotate a picture in wordpress without using an photo editing program i would greatly appreciate it. For now, just twist your head to the lift and it will look great.

I tried a local beer too. They brought the bottle out and it felt and tasted like it had never seen a fridge in its life. As warm as a Sydney summer. Despite that it was a good beer and for about $1.00 AUD i wasn’t complaining.

We spend another day in Hanoi and then head south.

Hello Vietnam

Off to Vietnam for a bit of a holiday on Monday. Can’t wait. Will be blogging the things we’ve eaten and the gastro we’ve had as a result… So stay tuned.

Nick

Let’s Get The Christmas Meal Right

Yes, it’s a couple of weeks away. Yes, you’re completely sick of hearing Christmas carols played over the loudspeakers of the shopping centres you dared to enter on a Saturday. While the sweat and bacteria and dandruff of a thousand desperate shoppers is lashed upon you as you navigate through the retail jungle, the words ‘joy’ and ‘jolly’ mock you like that snotty kid in primary school who always forgot to take his Ritalin. Yeah, I have a deep-seated hatred for Christmas shopping.

This post will shamelessly board the Christmas bandwagon to talk about what, for many of us, is most memorable of every Christmas – the food.

Now as we all know the Christmas festival was a European invention and the traditions surrounding what we eat at Christmas are European as well: turkey, ham, eggnog, chestnuts, pudding, fruitcake, mince pies, white-Christmas etc etc.

But what is nearly always forgotten is that Europe, on December 25th, is in the depths of Winter. In Australia on the other hand, we are in the midst of our notoriously hot summer – and Christmas day is very often (in Sydney anyway) a scorcher.

So Australians have begun to modify the Christmas meal so that now seafood plays a central part. All year I look forward to that meal with my family of whole fish, prawns, Balmain bugs, oysters and calamari. And when it’s over, I feel a little empty inside: like there’s a prawn shaped whole in my heart that only that Christmas meal can fill.

But I’ve started to notice that the traditional Christmas has begun to make a comeback. The recipe magazines feature more turkey and ham than seafood and you hear talk of people stuffing several birds inside bigger birds and roasting in a hot oven to present the ultimate insult to your vegetarian cousin.

So I want to call for a complete eradication of anything that has to go in an oven at Christmas time. And while we’re at it, let’s burn the eggnog and the mince pies so badly they’ll look like your grandmother’s fruitcake. Why a hot eggnog over that freezing cold beer? Why a fruitcake over a sorbet? Why on earth would you put more heat in the air on a Sydney scorcher by firing up an oven? Why would anyone surround a bird or a ham with root vegetables when those that your grocer sells to you at outrageously high prices have crossed the equator to get here?

We’re Australian. We’re Sydneysiders. We will not get a white Christmas. It’s time we woke up to our climate and our own seasonal food and rewrite our own Christmas meal.

Let’s keep working toward that revolution, comrades.

(Photo 1 from freefoto.com, Photo 2 from freedigitalphotos.net)

Terrifyingly Hot Chilli and Boutique Beer

“We want the hot-pot broth very hot” Said my friend Nick Gauci
The waiter replied, “Very hot, are you sure? Can you guys handle it?”
“Yes” said Nick, “Very hot”
“Last time a guy came in and said he wanted it very hot, we served it to him and it was so hot he cried, but ok, I’ll write down terribly hot”.

The waiter left and soon came back with this:

Yes, that is a pot FULL of red hot chilli. We ordered some tasty morsels to go in it too and, to be honest, it wasn’t as painful as we thought. However, i did dip in a little bit of green vegetable and when i put it in my mouth, the leaves touched the back of my throat, causing me to cough and splutter, and yes… cry. Embarrassing.

After two hours of all you can eat red hot chilli, we left. (The name of the chilli place is ‘Red Chilli Sichaun Restaurant’ in Chinatown Sydney – make sure you book for upstairs: the hot-pot room). After this, Nick wanted to show me a new beer place he’d found – ‘The Local Taphouse‘; a place that specialised in boutique and quite expensive, but absolutely delicious beer. This is not the sort of place full of young, Gen Y binge drinkers, nor old bar-flies, but this is the home of those who realise that a good beer can be one of the most delicious substances to ever grace your taste-buds.

This is a mug of Murray’s Dark Knight Porter; it was great! But it is the Dark Knight. Sitting there drinking old-style beer, on old-style couches, made us a feel a bit like this:

The Tagine of Love…

It’s the end of winter, but what a great way to end than with this sort of food.

Last month Pen and I went away on holidays with some friends. We were staying at Mavises Kitchen and Cabins at Mt Warning, a great place to eat and stay if you’re up that way. Great cabins but you also have free access to their organic vegetable garden.

We noticed when we walked in that there was a big unused Tagine sitting in the kitchen. It was cold, a bit wet, and some of us had just run a marathon (long story). While in Byron, my mate Michelle and I drew up the blueprint for a recipe in our heads. We needed preserved lemons, and as hip as Byron hopes to be, they didn’t have any. We found them in Mo-bah (Muwillimbah), a town about as hip as your grandma’s replacement one.

We went home.

We had an organic vegetable garden we could take from.

We had time.

We had friends.

Most importantly, we had love.

Looking at that last comment now, i think i should explain it. We had time to love the cooking and have fun with it. And so despite the two of us having next to no experience in cooking Moroccan food, it was a ripper (if i do say so myself).

We ate it with pleasure and still talk about it way too much. Hence why I’m hoping that the medium of writing will for some reason justify an extraordinary amount of self-congratulations. But after all, it is the Tagine of Love…

Michelle even made a speech about it (and a few other random things as well):

The beauty of the dish is that you buy a whole lamb leg and use the bone to make a stock while the Tagine is cooking. The stock then flavours your cous cous.

Here’s the recipe as far as a i can recall it (Michelle, feel free to send me corrections if i get something wrong):

1 kg lamb leg (bone in)
1-2 onions
5 garlic cloves
2 400g cans of tomatoes
1 cup red wine
1 cup pitted, chopped dates
4 preserved lemon quarters, flesh removed
a handful flaked almonds, roasted briefly in a pan
chopped parsely
chopped coriander
3 bay leaves
cous cous
1 sweet potato cut into small cubes
olive oil
And most importantly, a whole lot of love

Preheat oven to 200C. Bone lamb and cut meat into large cubes. Place bone in boiling water with any vegetable pieces you need to use (carrot, celery etc). Keep bone boiling throughout cooking process, topping up with water as necessary. Put sweet potato on a tray, cover with oil and salt and pepper and cook until done. Remove and set aside. Meanwhile Heat oil in Tagine and brown meat then set aside. Add some more oil, cook onion until soft, add garlic and cook for a couple of minutes. Add tomatoes and wine. Boil until wine is reduced by half. Add lemons, bay leaves and prunes. Return meat to sauce. Add enough water to cover, close lid and place in oven. Cook for 2 hours, occasionally stirring and topping up water if too dry. Just before it’s ready, prepare cous cous using the lamb stock and when ready mix it with the sweet potato. Season Tagine with salt and pepper, then top with chopped parsley, coriander and almonds. Serve with cous cous, friends, and a glass of wine (as the following diagram demonstrates).