Growing Vegetables Update

Our veggies are growing stronger each day. The tomato plant has transformed into a monster and is threatening to overgrow inside our flat. The beans will need replanting soon and something to grip to. The green capsicum has only been planted a couple a months ago and already fruitful.

Beans

When will they go red?

We've become that 'tomato' flat

And the capsicum

Mackerel Fish Black in Bean Sauce

This one followed a mornings dallying around the vegetable markets whereby a local fish longer recommended mackerel to us, us being one half asian and one half eastern european we had never tasted this oily wonder, but we decided to give it a go. Unfortunately, it didn't turn out to be a preferred flavour the below recipe is a bit funky

Ingredients:
1 whole fresh mackerel fish - gutted and descaled 
3 whole lemons - sliced
10 garlic cloves - sliced
1 whole onion - sliced
5cm of ginger - sliced
Olive oil
Cracked Black pepper
200g black bean sauce (Can be sourced in Asian supermarkets)
Lettuce leaves
Spring onion - diced

Method:

Place the fish onto a foil laid into a baking tray. Cut slits in the fish on both side. Place the lemon, garlic, onion, and ginger slices inside the belly of the fish, and into each of the cut slits on both sides. Now coat the fish in some cracked black pepper and olive oil on both sides. Next coat the fish in black bean sauce inside the belly and on both sides until all of the sauce is used up. 

Place the fish into your oven set at 180degC. Cover the backing tray with foil and leave to bake for about 20 to 30 minutes. 

Serve on some lettuce leaves and garnish with spring onion. This is a fantastic dish that you can eat with your eyes. Be careful if you thinking of adding salt as the black bean sauce is already very salty, hence why I've left it out of the ingredients list. Also don't be stingy with the lemon as this is a very fishy. Unless you like it extremely fishy I would use heaps and heaps of lemon.

Honey and Soy Sauce Marinated Chicken with Spinach Salad

Honey and Soy Sauce Marinated Chicken

Ingredients:
500g free range chicken thighs
5 tbs Dark soy sauce
8 garlic cloves - roughly diced
1/5 onion - roughly diced
3 tbs of honey
1/2 tsp. cracked black pepper

Method:

Place the chicken into a tray. Rub all of the remainder ingredients onto the chicken. Cover and leave in the fridge to marinate for at least 12 hours. The longer you leave the better it'll taste!

After the marination is complete, bake the chicken in the oven at 180degC for 30 - 50 minutes. Make sure to check the juices run clear before eating it. Once you are satisfied that it is properly cooked, serve with some rice or mashed potatoes along with some crunchy salad. 

Spinach Salad

Ingredients:
4 cloves of fresh garlic - finely chopped
1/5 red onion - finely chopped
2 cups of spinach - soaked in boiled hot water for 5 minutes
1 cucumber - sliced thinly with a potato peeler
3 tbs olive oil
Salt & cracked black pepper to suit taste

Method:

Make sure you have a good potato peeler so that you can slice off nice cucumber strips. Mix all the ingredients together in a bowl, and add salt and pepper to taste. Serve with a nice juicy piece of meat. Enjoy!

Pea and Tomato Salad

The fruits of our labour, S flew up to Auckland for work, so left me with the tomato harvest, they are delicious.

Ingredients:
Small tomatoes - as many as you like - quartered
Snap peas - as much as you like
Red onion - about 1/5 of a small onion - finely chopped
Olive oil - about 2 to 4 tbs
Salt & cracked black pepper to taste

Method:

First take out the peas out of their jackets and set aside. Don't discard the jackets. Dice each pea jacket into strips, make sure to remove the stringy edges as these don't taste very good though are bit rough to chew. 

Now in a large bowl mix together the red onion, peas, the peas jacket strips, the tomatoes, olive oil, salt and pepper. That's it! Have a taste and add some salt/cracked black pepper/olive oil to suit your taste if required. I can T=taste the hours of sunshine, warm and vibrant in my stomach.

Quick, and Easy Healthy Salmon Salad

I made up this recipe the other day as I was keen to eat something healthy, yet still delicious. Salmon is extremely good for you as it contains loads of vitamins and protein which help to reduce risk of heart disease and diabetes. This is super quick and easy to make, and you really just have to let the fresh ingredients speak for themselves.  

Ingredients:
Fresh salmon fillet - sliced in to chunks
Fresh lettuce leaves - torn
Bean sprouts - soaked in hot water for 2 minutes
Kalamata olives - sliced
Fresh bird's eye chili - sliced (you can leave the seeds in depending on how hot you want it)
Fresh spring onion - sliced
Olive oil - about 3 to 5 tbs.
Lemon Juice - about 1 - 2 tbs.
Salt & cracked black pepper to taste

Method:

You can use as much of the above major ingredients as you want, you simply can't go wrong here. Mix all the ingredients in a large bowl, let it sit for 10 - 20 minutes to let the dressing absorb all of the awesome flavors.

Serve along with toasted bread. Turkish bread works perfect. 

Salmon with Lemon Sauce, and Potato with Mint Salad

Ingredients: 
Salmon and Lemon sauce:
3 Tbsp of lemon juice
1 Tbsp olive oil or any other vegetable oil
200g to 300g Salmon fillets
1/4 cup chicken stock
1 cup full-fat cream
Salt & cracked black pepper to suit taste
parsley - added in the end for garnish 

Potato Salad with Mint:
Small potatoes
1 cup fresh mint leaves
Lemon juice 
Olive oil
Salt & cracked black pepper to suit taste


Method:

Salmon with the Lemon Sauce

Add cream, chicken stock, and lemon juice to a pot on high heat. Bring to boil and reduce the heat to low. Cover the pot with lid and simmer for 10 minutes. Add salt and pepper to suit taste.

Coat the salmon fillets in olive oil, salt, and cracked black pepper. Bring a frying pan to high heat. Fry the salmon on each side for 5 minutes. Serve the salmon and pour the lemon sauce over, and garnish with parsley.

I find this is a great dish as it is generally pretty healthy (the only thing that's not the best for your here is the full-fat cream), and take's almost no time to prepare.

Potato Salad with Mint

We ordered this at a local City Gallery cafe and were surprised at how well the mint complemented the potatoes. Add all the ingredients listed above together in a bowl. You can vary the amount of each of the ingredients depending on how much salad you want to make. It's hard to go wrong here. Mix well and serve. Sue's mum came over shortly after this and just missed out. Oh well 

Great dish for a dinner party.

Growing Experiment Continued

Our growing bug has caught on, and we have expanded. We've managed to obtain more plants for hardly any expenditure. Some of them as you can see from the photos are getting a bit sun burnt.We also finally have our first tomatoes. The pea plants have sadly been starved of all the nutrients as the huge tomato plant has stolen the show. We have also planted several capsicum, and runner bean plants seeds. The runner beans should hav been sowed Nov-Dec but we still can expect a successful harvest in the coming months as the weather continues to improve.

The Beginnings of a Growing Adventure

A few months back now we planted a single tomato plant and heaps of pea seedlings. The tomato plant almost never made it and I've had to mount a heat lamp above it to help it make through the cold. At one point half of the plant just disintegrated. All of the peas we planted (about 50 seeds) to our amazement came up. We decided to redistribute them and the process of doing this killed ALL OF THEM except for one last fighting trooper. Not put off though we bought more pea plants, and now I can safely say about 70% out of the ones we bought made it and have just brought the first peas! 

Here is a montage of our progress and hopefully the beginnings of our little growing adventure:

Super easy, but fantastic Martini

Ingredients:
1 double shot of of gin
1 double shot of  sweet vermouth

Mix the two together in a nice Martini glass and you have a very tasty drink. You don't need to go hard out and use a cocktail shaker, so don't worry if you don't have one. Here in Wellington it's sometimes difficult to get your hands on one. That's because Wellington is a booze town. I remember drinking these after work when I was flatting about 3 years ago, great times. Add 1 or 2 olives on a toothpick for a touch of class.

New Kum Den Restaurant (Melbourne) - Review

Moved to: 
323 Rathdowne St
Carlton

Victoria, Australia
Ph: (03) 9639 9857


Open every day: 11am–3pm, 5pm–11pm
Licensed and BYO.
Yum Cha: Sat/Sun/Holiday 11am–3pm

New Kum Den is Chinese Restaurant that used to be hidden away down on Heffernan Lane in the Melbourne CBD, Chinatown (note they have moved since then to the address shown above!). You can find China town on Little Bourke St just off Swanston st. When we arrived here on Thursday night the place was completely packed. They had two large tables in the middle and smaller four people tables around the perimeter. The noise level was extremely loud from everybody talking and laughing. The presentation of the restaurant is nice.

All the tables and chairs are timber with a glossy dark finish - nothing fancy but nice. It also has a fantastically large bar. This restaurant definitely does not feel like a cheap take-away joint that's for sure. The dinner menu prices ranged from $10 to $27 (AUD). On top of that there is also a lunch, appetisers and Yum Cha menu. The appetisers and Yum Cha cost around 5$ per dish, while lunch meals cost around 10$. Overall if you selected carefully you can eat at this place quite affordably.

The service here was good. We were given a table immediately and the waiter asked what we wanted to drink at first. Our jasmine tea and Heineken beer arrived almost instantly, and the waiter asked me if I wanted another Heineken shortly after I had finished it.

For our meals we ordered stir fried mixed seasonal vegetables, and stir fried roast duck fillet with mixed vegetables with ginger, spring onion, and snow pea.

For appetisers we ordered two sets of fried dumplings. We must have waited for about 30 minutes before our mains arrived. I think this is reasonable given that the place was flat out busy. However before that the waiter asked if our dumplings had arrived yet. When we said no the waiter brought them to us almost immediately.

Our meals finally arrived. The roast duck was cooked superb and the veggies with it tasted fresh and crunchy. The other mixed seasonable vegetable dish tasted a bit strange to us however, the baby corn tasted like it had gone bad. The broccoli also had a funny aftertaste similar to the baby corn. Maybe it is just me. I have not tried baby corn in over a year so maybe I don't know what I'm talking about.

Quality of Food: 7/10 stars
Quality of Services: 8/10 stars
Atmosphere and Presentation: 7/10 stars
Value for money: 6.5/10 stars
Average rating: 7.1/10 stars

Following photos from New Kum Den website:

Cafe Corretto, Melbourne (Australia)

225/227-229 Lygon Street, 
Carlton VIC 3053, Australia
PH: +61 3 9347 2300

Cafe Corretto is an Italian restaurant located in the middle of Little Italy, an area of Melbourne renowned for its restaurants with Italian heritage. It was a Friday night and we were starving. Our craving for good food was further fueled by alcohol. Wandering the streets like a couple of hungry wolves, we stumbled upon this little cafe, Cafe Correto. The place looked great, and it felt Italian. You can tell that everything including the tables, chairs, lighting, and the decorations were carefully selected to set the mood of the restaurant unapologetically naff. It was 8pm and almost every 
table was full. The service here was quick and friendly. We were seated right away, and shortly after our orders were taken. The prices here are higher than your average takeaways. You can expect to pay from $15 - 35 (AUD) for a main dish.

We ordered clam fettuccine and shrimp risotto. The food portions were reasonable, not too stingy but also enough to satisfy even those that are starving (and missed their lunch!). It all tasted amazing. Probably the finest food I've tasted so far in Melbourne. Even though the place was packed full, our meals arrived in only 20 minutes too. I think besides being a bit pricey this place pushes all the right buttons for me, and I would love to come back here again.

Quality of Service: 8/10
Quality of Food: 9/10
Atmosphere and Presentation:9/10
Value for Money: 6.5/10

Overall rating: 8.1/10