australia

Mad Mex, Darling Harbour, Sydney

by Craig on January 5, 2012 · 5 comments

in Dinner,Food

 

First of all, HAPPY NEW YEAR!  I hope 2012 becomes everything you want it to be!

Our first restaurant visit for the year is Mexican, and after reading about Mad Mex at The Food Pornographer, we just had to come and give it a try.  The shop in Harbourside at Darling Harbour is brand new.  We saw it a few weeks ago, but it was still boarded up and we said we’d come past again soon once it had opened.  It has now opened and is looking good.

The ordering process is similar to Subway.  Plenty of options and combinations to choose from.  Not as many as Subway, but still too many in my opinion.  What I reckon they should do is have a few pre-selected options so you can just ask for “Option A” and not have to go though the hassle of choosing each item individually.  The process is simple as long as you can decide what you want!  Step one is to choose your style.  Crispy or soft tacos, nachos, burrito, naked burrito (served in a bowl without a wrap), quesadilla or tortilla.  Next step two, choose your filling.  Chicken, shredded beef, steak, pork or veggie.  Then step three, add salsas.  Tomato, corn, tomatillo, roasted tomato, chilli and you can add guacamole for an extra $2.

We opted to share our meals and chose quesadilla, with chicken, corn & tomatillo salsas, and guacamole ($11.90).  Very nice taste.  I would have preferred it if I could pick up a slice and eat it with my hands but it was a bit too floppy for that and required the use of a knife and fork.  The corn was nice too, it comes with pineapple, onion and jalapeño, but it isn’t hot.  The tomatillo was nice, but I didn’t really get to appreciate it much as I didn’t really have anything to dip into it, or pour it over.  The star of this meal in my opinion was actually the guacamole, which I could have polished off myself given the chance.  (Which in itself is odd considering that a couple of years ago I hated avocado, considering it far too bland for my attention.)

Next we had the nachos ($10.90).  You can hardly see the meat for all the salad and salsa, but there was more than just the one piece you can see here.  This was very nice, particularly the cheese sauce, but I would have liked to have seen an option to have cheese grilled onto the top.  The salad and salsa was lovely and the nacho chips were fresh and crispy.  More guacamole was of course welcome!  The meat was wonderfully tender.

For drinks we chose the Mexican soda, Jarritos.  There are more flavours but I chose the mandarin, and Caro chose the Lime.  We each had half of each others, and both of them were highly enjoyable, and wonderfully vividly coloured!

For dessert we had a portion of churros with chocolate sauce ($5.90).  Very hot, very nice.  The sauce had a strange consistency, almost like gooey play dough than a sauce.  When you scooped a bit out of the tub with the end of the churros the whole thing would want to come out leaving the container clean.  Very strange, but very tasty.  For those not in the know, churros are a Mexican doughnut.

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Tagged as: australia, churros, darling harbour, harbourside, jarritos, mad mex, nachos, new south wales, quesadilla, sydney

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Book Review: Bill’s Everyday Asian, by Bill Granger

by Craig on October 29, 2011 · 6 comments

in Food

Bill Granger’s new book “Bill’s Everyday Asian” was released recently, and we managed to get our hands on a copy at the Crave Sydney International Food Festival Breakfast on Bondi event last weekend.  Bill Granger and Hayden Quinn were the guests, and we were lucky enough to meet Bill, and get our book signed.

We really only got to meet him for about five minutes or so, but we had a brief chat while he signed our copy of the book.  Neither Bill or I managed to shave that morning!

Bill’s been a bit of an inspiration for quite a while, so it was quite a privilege to get to meet him.  More about that in a moment.

As with most of Bill’s books, this one is clean, easy to read and well presented.  Lovely photos grace the pages like this one (above) of barbecued prawns with three dipping sauces, on page 86.

Japanese crumbed pork cutlet with cabbage salad, on page 149.

Meatballs with tamarind glaze, on page 156.

Mango pudding, on page 239.

What I really like about Bill’s books, and this one is no exception, is the quality of the photographs.  In addition the photos are not all about the food.  I really enjoy looking at the other photography in the books, which is usually a depiction of some locality, in the case of this book, I think the images are of various localities within Asia.  He also includes information on his perfect Asian pantry, and there’s a little piece of text per chapter.  The chapters cover the usual topics pertaining to food; starters, soups, salads, seafood, poultry, pork, lamb & beef, noodles & rice, vegetables & tofu, and desserts.

The meals all look so sumptuous and I’m sure that they will taste just as good.  They’re generally healthy too, which is what Bill is all about.  However, if you’re after a book that accurately replicates Asian recipes then this book may not be for you.  This book is Bill’s interpretation of Asian food, and while I think it’s perfectly acceptable, if you want accurate, have a good look at the book before you buy.  Bill explains:

With this book I wanted to draw on all my encounters to demystify the idea that preparing this kind of food is more complicated than anything else – in a lot of cases it’s so much simpler… It’s about healthy, zingy, uplifting dishes that can be prepared quickly and easily – plus a few that are marinated and cooked slowly to enhance those deeply savoury flavours, but are just as simple to make.  My one rule is that nothing should require a list of a hundred hard-to-find ingredients or be swimming in gunky, unidentifiable sauce… For those of you who know me it probably won’t come as a big surprise to learn that I’m not a great believer in using a million ‘essential’ ingredients, even for Asian-style cooking.  I’ve been through the phase of wanting to be authentic down to the last detail but, these days, I’m a lot more mellow.  [If you want authentic, that's ok] but otherwise, [my] list [of 35 Asian ingredients] should carry you happily through most of the recipes in this book.

I think there’s a good chance that I’m going to be busy cooking a lot more Asian-style dishes in the future!

You can get Bill’s book online from:

Dymocks Online (Australia)  – on special at the moment for only $29.99
Amazon.co.uk (UK) 
Amazon.com does not appear to have a valid page yet. 

or from any good bookstore. 

As you can see, we have a good few cookbooks, most of them Asian, so Bill’s new book fits in perfectly.  Just Bill’s books alone we have 9 of (the new book is not in the photo).  I’m pretty sure that is all of Bill’s books except for “The Best of Bill” which is a compilation.  Other inspirations are Nigella Lawson, Ken Hom, Jamie Oliver and Kylie Kwong.

But it’s Bill Granger and Kylie Kwong, and Bill in particular that I think might be responsible for turning us on to Australia.  I can’t remember when we started watching his shows, but I always remember seeing wonderful views of Sydney.  It was always sunny, and everyone was always happy.  Bill always looks so content and relaxed while cooking his meals, which themselves always look so vibrant and healthy.  It is scenes like these that sow a seed of interest, that eventually evolve into holidays and, if you’re really lucky, eventually into moving permanently to a city and country that you have now grown to love.  Of course, it’s not really always sunny, and people are not always happy, smily and relaxed, but Australians are some of the smiliest, happiest, relaxed people that I know, and I’m very, very happy to be living here now.  It’s been a positive influence on me, and I think I partly have Bill to thank for that.

Let’s not forget Kylie Kwong of course.  While I acknowledge that Bill is the one that probably started it all off, I also very much enjoy watching Kylie’s shows, which while different in some respects, have a similar feel.  It comes as no surprise of course, that Bill and Kylie know and have worked with each other.

Sydney Food was Bill’s first book to my knowledge, and another of his books that we’ve had for a very long time, as can be seen by how yellow the book has become.

This is the kind of photography that I love in Bill’s books.  To me, this photo just epitomises part of the Sydney lifestyle that I am so privileged to be able to experience.

But it’s not all about the photography.  Bill’s ricotta hotcakes are one of the recipes in Sydney Food.  We’ve cooked them, and they’re awesome.  But what’s great about living in Sydney is that we can now easily pop down to any of the three Sydney restaurants that Bill operates and get these same meals.

Doesn’t that just look amazing?  Bill’s steak sandwich.

Wow.  Now I’ve made myself very hungry.  This post was scheduled for a few days after it was written.  Don’t be surprised to find a new entry on one of Bill’s restaurants in the very near future! 

And so, thanks Bill.  If it wasn’t for you we may not be here now enjoying the wonderful lifestyle that we now have, and living in this wonderful country.

And thanks Australia, for just being here, and being so awesome! 

Tagged as: australia, bill granger, bill's everyday asian, book, review, sydney

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Ramen Kan, Haymarket, Sydney

by Craig on September 30, 2011 · 0 comments

in Dinner,Food

This week was ramen week and we set about looking for a decent place to have some of Japanese, noodly, soupy goodness.  Ramen Kan came out as a good option, so we again headed out to Chinatown.

Again the menu was overwhelming.  There must have been at least fifty options on the menu, not just for ramen, but for udon, katsu, gyoza, cocktails and more.  In the end we settled on a few dishes and placed our order.  A short while later our order arrived, as did the order of the table next to us, who ordered a “hamburg”, a hamburger patty on rice.  It looked very good.

We started off with edamame ($3).  For the uninitiated, edamame are lightly salted, steamed soy beans.  They’re surprisingly nice, and before I tasted them I had fobbed them off many times with a “bleh” sound.  Mistake.

We followed up the edamame with ebi (prawn) gyoza.  Perhaps not the best gyoza I’ve ever tasted, but there was certainly nothing wrong with them.

For mains, Caroline had the Wafu Beef Ramen ($10.90).  It was quite nice, the beef was tender and it was spicy!  While we can certainly handle chilli, this was the lowest rating on their scale of three.  I’d hate to know what their hottest dishes are like!  As you can see it was perhaps a little on the oily side.

I had the Tokyo Ramen ($10.50), which has a soy based broth, noodles, bamboo shoots, pork, egg, seafood flower and nori (seaweed).  Very nice, but I wish it had more pork.  I finished the whole thing and spooned up all of the broth.  Also perhaps a little oily, but very nice.

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Tagged as: australia, beef, edamame, gyoza, haymarket, japanese, noodles, nsw, pork, ramen, ramen kan, sydney

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Golden Harbour Chinese Restaurant, Haymarket, Sydney

by Craig on September 29, 2011 · 0 comments

in Dinner,Food

Welcome to the first post of our renamed site, Damn Fine Food!

Well actually we used to run a segment of this blog way back when it was called “What We Ate Today”, and owned a similar Internet domain to point to our proper restaurant review section.  In essence, renaming this blog, yet again, marks a sort of milestone in the evolution of the blog.  First we had “What We Ate Today” which was effectively exactly what the title said.  The site back then was a chronicle of pretty much everything we ate, morning, noon and night, and we had a section to that site called “Damn Fine Food” that was for restaurants that we considered to be truly excellent.  That site would post on average three times daily, which got a bit too much after a while, I mean there are really not that many people who want to follow what we ate in intricate detail!

Because we had a lot of Internet domains to renew at the anniversary of the blog(s) it was also getting a bit expensive, so we decided to merge the blogs with our personal blog, and “What We Ate Today”, became a section of our personal blog called “What We Ate Recently”.  It was meant to be a bit less frequent, perhaps only once a day, but ended up dropping the home made meals and focussing only on food we eat while out.  Around this time we also moved to Australia and don’t really have the time to be blogging so frequently.  I’d also noticed that visitors to the site had dropped, potentially due to confusion that the food posts were now mingled in with all the other non-food posts, so finally I decided to split off the food blog again.  I had a look to see if our old domain ‘damnfinefood.info’ was still available, and it seems that it is, but that the hosting provider is holding it and now wants $60 for it.  On a whim, I tried ‘damnfinefood.com’ and amazingly it was on auction.  The bidding price was only $5 so I thought why not give it a try, and I won!  Amazing, since .info domains are sometimes problematic, a .com is much better, especially since I started posting to Urban Spoon and found that they were initially blocking posts from .info domains because of too many spam posts.  They did relax this when I queried why my posts were not coming through, but only on the proviso that the spam from other .info domains did not return.  Well now I don’t have that problem if they do decide to revoke .info posts.  So here were are with a brand new domain, and hopefully we’ll keep it for a long time.  The blog has grown to a point where we only report on meals eaten in restaurants, although you might occasionally see other stuff if you follow us on twitter.  We’ll be posting once a week only – unfortunately we have become rather busy and don’t have time to post more than this, but we will endeavour in future to try and make the posts more interesting!  We now also have a cuisine rotation so that we don’t miss out on any specific cuisine that we like, so every week you can expect a post from one of the following cuisines: Seafood, Fish & Chips, Pie, Italian, Indian, Vietnamese/Indonesian/Korean, Malaysian, Pub Food, Mexican, Burgers, Sushi, Take Out, Chinese, Steak, Japanese, Thai, Pizza, Chinatown, Ramen, Other.  You’ll see there’s quite a variety there, and quite a lot of them are Asian, but all reflect our tastes.  You’ll also notice that there are cuisines within cuisines, like sushi and ramen are both Japanese, but we have Japanese as well.  Well that’s because we like those things so much that they have to have their own category!  If you go back through our last posts you might notice that we’ve been following this schedule for a while already.

You may also notice that our Asian food posts have moved over to this blog too.  These are the meals that we make ourselves, and we said we were not going to include those here.  They’re here temporarily, and will eventually move over to their own blog in a few weeks or so.

So on with the food post.  This week was Chinatown week.  Now although we picked a Chinese restaurant, there are plenty of other cuisines in Chinatown and future posts may include some of those too.  Today though we feature Golden Harbour Chinese Restaurant.

It’s always a mission trying to find something to eat in Chinatown.  Not because there is a poor choice, but because there is far too much choice.  A quick walk down Chinatown’s main street will reveal restaurant after restaurant, food hall after food hall, cafe after cafe.  You get the idea.  Staff wait outside each restaurant beckoning you in – you kind of have to ignore them, or politely smile and nod.  I prefer to look into the places and decide for myself where I want to go.  Golden Harbour looked good so we wandered in.  It’s a nice enough looking restaurant – not too typically old-style Chinese, in fact it looks like they have recently tried to modernise.  I don’t think they’ve done a perfect job, but the place looks pleasing enough.

We pour over the menus, and take a long time to decide what we want.  Our problem, like Chinatown itself, is that we want everything, and have to whittle our choice down to just a few.

For entrée we went with the spring rolls ($7).  They were very nice.  Not too oily and were very tasty.  They were supplied with a sweet and sour sauce.  We were surprised to find that these were actually chicken spring rolls, when the menu mentioned nothing about this, so I hope that vegetarians don’t order this thinking that they’ll be getting veggie spring rolls.

A poor photograph, I apologise.  Our camera seems to have problems focussing on Chinese food.  I think it is the luscious thick sauces that the meat is often coated in that cause the problem.  Here we have Beef with Black Bean Sauce ($16.80) which was excellent.  I love black bean sauce though so I may be biased! :-)

We also had Sweet and Sour Pork ($16.80), which is something that we had not had in ages.  While I love it, sweet and sour pork is usually something the scares the crap out of me because it’s usually fatty or covered in a thick horrible batter, or both.  Well, I’m happy to say we were lucky today because this one was lovely.  Not too fatty, and the batter was certainly not too thick or oily.

Those dishes did not come with rice or noodles so we chose to get some fried rice.  There are two options, a special fried rice, which no doubt contains some kind of meat, and vegetarian fried rice.  We chose the veggie fried rice ($12.80) which was also very nice and not at all oily, which is just how we like it.  The included egg was also very nice.

I’d like to say we’ll be back – and I’m sure that we will one day, but there are so many other restaurants to try in Chinatown that I can’t guarantee it – but that’s certainly got nothing to do with the food which we found to be very good.

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Tagged as: australia, beef, black bean beef, chinatown, chinese, fried rice, golden harbour, haymarket, nsw, pork, spring roll, sweet and sour pork, sydney

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