Who Ate All The Pies?

Pictured is the chicken, bacon and thyme pie from Who Ate All The Pies?, the bakery that happens to make the best pies that I've had here. I haven't tried all their pies, but I tend to get the chicken pies because I find them tastier. Who Ate All The Pies? can be found at the weekly (Saturday mornings) farmers' market, but they also have a shop that you can go to for your pie needs if you have to have one of these during the week.

Like I said, these pies are the best. You get them cold so you have to bake them yourself. And the aroma of the freshly baked pie is so rich and tantalising that it makes your mouth water. The crust is light, flaky and tasty and the filling is made up of big chunky, succulent pieces of meat and a good amount of gravy. Yum!

Moist Chocolate Cake

For her bf's birthday, S modified her aunty's already fantastic moist chocolate cake recipe and laced it with bourbon. It looked so delicious I wanted to steal a big, fat chunk and gobble it up right there and then, but I'm pretty sure S would have throttled me. She also decorated the cake with white icing, which contrasted nicely with the dark icing, making it look very pretty.

NB: I've added pictures to the previous posts as promised!

Jamie Oliver's Brunch Breads

This week, for Tuesday's dinner, I managed to dupe S into making something I've wanted to have (i.e. taste) ever since I saw it on The Naked Chef. I'd been badgering E (my flatmate at varsity who, incidentally, loves to cook) to make it for the longest time! But it never happened. I don't remember exactly when I saw it and when I told her about it, but I think by then we'd graduated and were back home (or something like that).

Anyway it was the At The Beach episode and the bread rolls he made on that show looked SO damn good. The savoury one was stuffed with proscuitto, eggs, sun-dried tomatoes, cheese and herbs and the sweet roll was filled with bananas and Nutella. It was the savoury one I was after. It looked so simple, delicious, hearty and (possibly) immensely satisfying.
However, at the time, we hadn't found the exact recipe, so we had to settle for making it by someone else's guess at the recipe (found online of course). It looked pretty good when it came out of the oven. But when we actually ate some, we found that the bread was a little tough and dry and that made the stuff inside the bread dry too. It turns out, instead of drizzling olive oil on the ingredients before rolling up the dough (like in Jamie's recipe), this person's recipe incorporated the olive oil into the dough. Maybe that's why the whole thing turned out dry-ish. It was still okay though. Everyone tucked in quite happily and almost everyone had at least a second helping.

We (and when I say 'we' I mean S doing all of the real work and me just hanging around the kitchen or sitting in the lounge watching tv, occasionally offering to grate cheese or some other trifling thing like that) are definitely going to try to make it again, with Jamie's recipe, and we'll see how that turns out.

Serious Orange Cake

Last week on Tuesday we made Damien Pignolet's Serious Orange Cake. I got the recipe from ChubbyHubby, my favourite food blog (incidentally also the only food blog I read/have read).

Maybe about a couple of weeks back I had a sudden craving for orange cake. Probably because I read about it on ChubbyHubby. So I did what was the only thing to be done when one has a craving in this severely limited town; I pestered S to make it for me! Muahahahah! It's a good thing that she likes baking and trying out new foods, or else I'd be left to my own devices to satisfy my cravings and that would be disastrous.

Making the cake was simple enough. I pretended to help as much as I could; i.e. blending the oranges, using the electric hand mixer to mix the mixture, lazy stuff like that. The cake turned out BEAUTIFULLY! I don't know why, maybe we didn't have any expectations, but we were so surprised and delighted (read: squealing and jumping about) with the result. The recipe required a cooling period before the syrup could be poured onto the cake and after that the cake was to be allowed to cool completely before being taken out of the tin but we were so excited at the prospect of tasting it that we could barely wait the wait.

The cake, fresh from the oven, was warm and wonderfully soft, crumbly and delicate. The syrup had seeped through the cake making it so moist it was teetering on being mushy, but not quite! The flavour was subtle yet rich (a contradiction in terms?). You'd have to try it for yourself to see what I mean. It wasn't too sweet, had just a hint of bitterness (probably due to the Cointreau in the syrup) and the lightest orange flavour that made it just perfect! And the aroma! Absolutely heavenly! The combination of the flavour, texture and smell made for one of those 'heave a huge, melting sigh, relax completely and fall back onto the couch in a heap' moments.

[Note: Although the picture of the cake won't be very interesting, when I get it from S, I'll post it here anyway. Alternatively, go to ChubbyHubby and search for it. His pictures are all always gorgeous!]

Etrusco

As scheduled, on Saturday (9th September) we visited Etrusco. I liked the ambience a lot. It's like the Italian version of Lone Star, which in turn is sorta like Chilis back home but with way better, heartier AND healthier food (no burgers!). Warm, friendly, casual and bustling! I don't know if it was just because it was a Saturday but man they had a rapid turnover! People just kept coming in and filling up the places of people who had just left. I don't know how they managed it though because the mains took FOREVER to come.

According to their website they offer "a wide range of tasty pasta dishes and pizzas from the menu of traditional Tuscan favourites." I don't pretend to know what Tuscan food is like so I'll take their word for it. I will say that, for me, just the word 'Tuscan' invokes thoughts of sunflowers, delicious, mouth watering Italian food, rustic, romantic little towns and beautiful landscapes. I blame the movie Under The Tuscan Sun entirely for my mind's representation of Tuscany.

Etrusco is famous for its pasta. I had the Spaghetti Amatriciana Bianca [chopped garlic, extra virgin olive oil, Pancetta (cured ham), Italian sausage and chilli, tossed with spaghetti; pictured above] and I thought it was pretty good, except that maybe the flavour of the pasta was a little too subtle for my tastebuds (which are accustomed to the strong flavours of Asian food). I still thought it was good though, and I especially liked the Italian sausages, which were not subtle. They were as salty as sausages should be, with a slight spiciness that faintly stings your tongue just as you bite on them.

In contrast, the Spaghetti Alla Puttanesca (a black olive, tomato and anchovy sauce on spaghetti; pictured above) that S had was very strongly flavoured with anchovies and hence, very salty. B had the Spaghetti Alla Marinara (combination of mussels, shrimps, tomatoes, plenty of fresh garlic and fresh parsley; pictured below), which was thankfully nothing like the marinara pasta S had at The Black Dog. They both liked what they had very much.

I didn't take my camera with me because I didn't think that a plateful of pasta, no matter how good, would picture well. But S did so when she gets around to passing the pictures to me, I'll post them here.

We also had starters and desserts but I didn't think that they were very interesting. My chocolate 'cake' stuffed with blueberries and cream and covered in fudge paled in comparison to my favourite (simple!) mud cake at Rafael's because the cake was dry and had poor texture.

On the whole, I think everyone liked the place a lot and we will definitely be going back to try more items on their menu (even though the wait for just our mains was perhaps over an hour)!

(Pictured above is the Penne Al Verde, penne pasta tossed in spinach and toasted pinenuts with a dash of cream and fresh parmesan.)

Minami

Minami is, in my opinion, the best Japanese restaurant in town. It's one of my favourite restaurants and the item I order the most is the chicken katsu don (pictured). Not because it's the only good thing on the menu. Of course not. Just about everything served in Minami is good. I order it so often because Minami is the furthest of the regular restaurants that I eat at, which means that I don't really get to go there all that often. Now Minami has the best food, but it's too far to walk to during lunch break and the other Japanese restaurants located closer to where I work and live serve decent (but not as good) everything except chicken katsu don (and yakiniku beef). Chicken katsu don everywhere else is tasteless crap. So I can get decent teriyaki chicken, sushi, Japanese curry, tempura and what not but not chicken katsu don, and that is why I always feel that should order chicken katsu don when I do go to Minami.

If you don't know what this thing that I've been going on and on about is, let me attempt to describe it. It's rice topped with battered, fried, boneless chicken pieces, egg, onions and spring onions and some shredded seaweed, steamed with a special savoury sauce that is like soya sauce but no where near as salty or strong tasting. I absolutely love it. Having a bite of the steaming rice soaked with the special sauce and runny egg with some of the sweet onion pieces, a bit of the tasty battered chicken and the contrasting taste of the bits of shredded seaweed (seaweed tastes like seaweed, I can't describe it), I tell ya, it is THE MOST satisfying and comforting thing on a cold day. And even though the serving doesn't look very big, it always fills me up. Man just writing about it makes my mouth water!

On the whole, everything at Minami is just that little bit (if not more) better than the equivalent item at any of the other Japanese places here. Their dishes just have that little extra flavour and 'kick'.

Rafael's

We tried the pasta at Rafael's on Wednesday this week and it was mediocre. Very disappointing. We had high hopes for the pasta there because we love going to Rafael's for coffee, wedges and desserts. Their spicy wedges (pictured below, although the picture probably won't do it any justice) are always fantastic. Crispy and salted just enough on the outside, soft on the inside. Always piping hot and served with a delicious, light yet creamy, refreshing, sweetish sourish, tangy dip. The best wedges I've ever had. While all their desserts are quite good, I would say that the mud cake and the lemon cake are the best. The mud cake isn't even slathered in chocolate sauce as most other mud cakes often are, yet it's always rich and moist. I'm amazed at how they get it like this because the cake looks 'dry'. Not 'dry' as in 'dried out/overcooked'. But 'dry' as in there's no mushy, fudgy parts or layers anywhere on the cake yet when you put a spoonful in your mouth, it is JUST the right texture. Light but rich. Moist but not saucy. Big-sigh-after-each-bite + melt-in-your-mouth goodness. Totally satisfying, hits the spot and a great pick-me-up. The reasonable prices for big portions (wedges and desserts) keep us going back for more.

Ombrellos

We visited Ombrellos on Sunday, 30th July. It was pretty good. I was disappointed that we got the brunch menu instead of their lunch menu, but I think that may have been because we went on a Sunday. People usually have brunch (as opposed to lunch) on Sunday don't they? We'll have to go again so we can try their lunch menu. The brunch menu wasn't vast. It had mostly 'breakfast-y' items and just a few lunch items.

We were there at 1pm. I didn't feel like paying $15 for breakfast items. I wanted LUNCH. So I ordered the lamb shanks. B, Sc and S ordered the eggs benedict (pictured at the top of this post), the 'fry up' and the chicken salad (pictured just below) respectively. Sc wanted to order the shanks too but he has this thing about not ordering what anyone else is having. Well too bad, because when the food came Sc and S were envious of my order! Muahaha...

Ombrellos is described as having 'a cafe style menu with Mediterranean and Middle Eastern influences' on the restaurant's website. I concur, but I must confess that my experience with Mediterranean/Middle Eastern food is, at best, limited. My lamb shanks (pictured just below) came slathered in a very nice chunky tomatoey sauce. I want to tell you what the chunky bits in the sauce were, but I cannot. I was too busy wolfing the food down. And even if I did stop to examine the contents of the sauce, I probably couldn't tell you much. Tomatoes, garlic, probably onions, probably lots of spices. I don't know.

The lamb was good. And I don't usually like lamb. The meat on the inside was nice and moist but I particularly liked the well charred, crusty bits of meat on the outside, combined with the sauce. Had a nice bite to it.

All in all, a decent meal. Good portions. Okay prices (for lunch). Definitely deserves another visit!

TBD

[Edit 6 August 2006: I've just added pictures to accompany this post. Pictured just below is the lamb main that B had.]
We had heard good things about the food and desserts at TBD. We had expectations. We were disappointed. Not because the food was bad. The food wasn't bad at all. It was worse than that. It was mediocre. At least if the food was really bad, we'd have something to talk/complain/bitch about. But the food being just 'so-so'/mediocre leaves you with nothing to say except, "BD? Meh..."

I had the beef medallions (pictured above), which were basically little round steaks served with brown meat sauce, a baked potato topped with sour cream and steamed carrots, brocolli and cauliflower with a drizzle of mayonnaise (I think) on the side. I ordered my meat 'medium' but it came a tad overdone for 'medium'. I find this annoying. I don't like my steaks overdone. The meat becomes tough and dry. But I've had this happen more than once, at different places, and I've come to the conclusion that either; 1) every restaurant has a different standard of what is 'well done', 'medium', and 'rare' OR, 2) this place sucks.

I tried a piece of the prawn entrée (pictured above) that R ordered and found it a bit odd. The prawns were fried and the coating was sugary sweet. Quite odd. Not a pleasant tangy sweetness that usually complements savoury foods quite well. But a candy, icing sugar type of sweetness. Odd.

I also tried a bit of S's seafood marinara pasta (pictured above). It was fettuccine with a creamy tomato based sauce (or should I say 'tomato-y cream based sauce - there was more cream than tomato), scallops and prawns. Not good. Seafood will be seafood, but good, fresh seafood should never leave you with the dreaded 'fishy' taste or smell and this dish did. The best seafood marinara pasta I have ever had is still at Pizza Uno in KL which comes with a nice, tangy, pure tomato based sauce.

To be fair, I did not get to try any of the desserts at TBD. R and some of the others ordered some but I left before the desserts arrived. I doubt that I'll go back there, but if I do, I'll try the desserts and we'll see if they live up to the hype.

My meal cost about $32 and S's pasta was $20 and the prices of all the other main courses were within that range. Pretty pricey in my opinion, for food that was only 'so-so'. I don't mind paying high prices for excellent food. But if the prices are high and the food is just mediocre, forget it.

Dining Out

Last week on Friday while we were having a lovely dinner at one of our favourite restaurants, India Garden, we decided to do something about the fact that there are all these restaurants that we keep saying we want to try, but never actually get around to visiting. I can't recall who said it first, but we decided to come up with a schedule for dining at all the restaurants we want to try. And naturally, yours truly (the crazy organizer freak), was nominated by everyone (including herself) to be the person who draws up the schedule.

So over the weekend I set up a schedule for the next six months and fitted in all (almost) the restaurants we want to try on weekends and birthdays. We are now officially scheduled to try/visit three places a month (1 new/fancy place + 2 regular places).

First up was The Black Dog. It was initially scheduled for next month, but because R's birthday was this week and she picked The Black Dog, I did a bit of re-arranging and we visited The Black Dog on Tuesday.

I will try to write a review for every place we visit, but I can't promise that I'll be inspired enough to write a significant piece for every place (if I'm even inspired to write ONE significant piece).