Burwood Korea House

Humans are creatures of habit who like to return to places which are familiar for comfort and assurance. Dining falls into this category and especially so when seeking something quick and reliable. Céci has always been in this category for Dr King and Kiki, with its value-for-money serving sizes, until they noticed the food starting to taste different and the noticeable absence of the expertly coiffed and well made-up lady owner.

When I told them that Céci had upped and left its original location leaving its name behind to be reincarnated as Burwood Korea House, they were relieved to find out that there was somewhere to reclaim the familiarity. Soon Monsieur Poisson and I find ourselves accompanying them there for a meal where the picture-heavy menu echoes that of Céci as well.

A small handwritten sign on the window mentions that they are behind the original Céci and, stepping inside, we are greeted by similar décor as well as the reassuring sight of the owner lady. Side dishes are brought to us soon after ordering and before we know it our table is crowded with food.

The ‘Seafood Pancake’ with fillings a-plenty and crunchy ‘Japchae’ with its slippery glass noodles act as appetisers as well as non-chilli relief from the ‘Pork and sausage hotpot’ below.

The hotpot is loaded up with strips of thinly-sliced pork belly, tinned luncheon meat, skinless frankfurts, a mixture of vegetables and a cake of instant noodles. Hotpots with noodles always get my attention as they provide a vessel for which to slurp up the tasty flavours of the soup in which they’re cooked.

Between the four of us there is leftover food to take home and change for each of us from $20. Now that’s a familiar situation I don’t mind revisiting!

Burwood Korea House

175 Burwood Rd, Burwood NSW

Tel: (02) 9715 5098

Opening Hours:  7 days..11am-11:30pm

happy eating!

The quest for scones

Scones are one of the earliest things I attempted to bake from scratch rather than from a packet mix. It’s seemingly simple with a short and easily-accessible list of ingredients and no complicated technique involved. But of course the simplest things are always the hardest to get right, precisely because there is so little to be done that it is so easy to overdo.

Over the years there has been much frustration with various recipes combined with my mother’s old electric oven yielding differing degrees of success/failure. Recipes with butter. Recipes without butter. Recipes asking for the butter to be rubbed in. Recipes asking for the butter to be melted. Recipes with plain milk. Recipes with buttermilk. But, most importantly, recipes none of which gave the resulting fluffy scones I wanted.

Finally baking in a reliable oven helped, but what helped most – well, in my opinion anyway – was finally trying out a recipe from the Country Women’s Association, whose famed scones can be found at the Royal Easter Show year on year. The recipe involves using cream which seems to help in keeping the scones fluffy and slightly crumbly, although perhaps me not adding quite enough flour may have had something to do with the crumbly part as well. Hmmm…

I decided to get a little bit Asian and split the dough in half; leaving one half plain and mixing pork floss and nori strips through the other like those soft buns found in Asian bakeries. The plain ones I preferred to have with the jam and cream, whilst the savoury ones worked well with butter spread on them. If done again, I just need to remember to ensure the nori is well-incorporated as exposed bits on the surface tend to burn!

Making these scones also gave me a chance to use part of our wedding gift from Wifey and strawberry jam brought back to us from a road trip by Mistress. Thank you again to the two special women in my life, for this and much more.

CWA Scones (makes about 12)

I scribbled this recipe down from somewhere but can’t actually remember where it came from. Multiple internet searches have proven fruitless for a recipe with the exact same ingredient amounts, although it just about matches various CWA recipe proportions.

Ingredients:

• about 2 cups self-raising flour
• 1 tbs caster sugar
• pinch of salt
• 180mL milk
• 125mL thin/pouring cream

Method: 

1. Preheat oven to 230°C. Combine flour, sugar and salt in a large bowl. Add milk and cream then stir with a flat-bladed knife until dough comes together. It should be soft and slightly sticky – add more flour if it’s too sticky to handle, add more milk if too dry.
2. Turn dough out on a floured surface and gently pat to 2cm thick. Cut scones using a floured 7cm cutter and place close together on a lined tray lined with baking paper. Bake 10-12 minutes then transfer to cool on a wire rack.

happy cooking!

Deus Café

I know nothing about motorbikes, yet I find myself surrounded by them one sunny Saturday morning. There are only a few people in leather biker-type jackets and, for the most part, everyone is contentedly sipping their coffees or looking up at the blackboard menu deciding what to order. I am at Deus Café, an extension of Deus Ex Machina’s motorbike showroom, and I, along with Dr King, Kiki, Weirdo, Ms Sourdough and Monsieur Poisson, am here purely for the food.

Deus Café is hard to miss with its motorcycle mural painting on the exterior of its side wall. Despite the metallic bodies of motorbikes dotting the place, the café is warmly decked out with multiple teak communal tables and help-yourself-cutlery trays in the middle. Weirdo and Ms Sourdough arrive ahead of us and have kindly nabbed a table. Menus can be found at the tables, but the blackboard menu at the cashier where you order, pay and take an order number back to your table is more comprehensive with its inclusion of sweet offerings. Ms Sourdough and I have our eyes on the mini almond croissants before we’ve even considered our brunch options, and purchase one each along with our coffees to indulge in afterwards.

For brunch, I find it hard to go past the combination of ‘Smoked salmon with creamy eggs’ which arrives with a neat rosette of smoked salmon encrusted with dill fronds, watercress and toasted brioche. The humble mound of scrambled eggs doesn’t look like much but is creamy and very substantial.

Monsieur Poisson has the ‘Proscuitto and poached egg with truffle oil, grilled tomato, asparagus and brioche’. Yay for more brioche and a rosette of prosciutto this time. The asparagus is vividly green and slightly nutty from grilling. The flavour of truffle oil is subtle, and we opt to have a side of (de-stalked, interestingly) mushrooms on the side.

And those croissants? Buttery, flaky and very, very messy, dusted with a snowstorm of icing sugar over the tops.

Deus Café

98-104 Parramatta Rd (cnr Lyons Rd), Camperdown NSW

Tel: (02) 9519 3669

Opening Hours:  Mon-Tues  7:30am-3:30pm (breakfast/lunch, coffee until 5pm)

Wed-Sat  7:30am-3:30pm (breakfast/lunch)

              dinner from 6pm onwards

Sun  9am-3pm (breakfast/lunch/coffee)

happy eating!

Food memories: the first time

The first time trying any food is usually the most memorable and especially so if it is something polarising like blue cheese or durian, or confronting like balut or snake.

Personally, growing up Chinese (or any ethnicity for that matter) there are and aren’t a lot of foods that will shock me. Various parts including the innards of an animal are commonplace – less so in modern times – due to agriculture being laborious, traditionally the lifeline of so many, and a bid to minimise wastage. So for me, perhaps strangely to everyone else, my “first time” food memories relate to things which are inherently non-Chinese and quite possibly unexotic to everyone else.

Banana chips did not and do not exist in our household. They only made an appearance at my grandparents’ place when my grandfather lived for a few brief years in Sydney before deciding to return to China. He munched on them regularly. I remember sitting on the knee of one of his lanky legs and holding a golden disc between my stubby four-year-old fingers. Popping it in my mouth, I remember crunchy banana-ness – no surprises there – and being somewhat disappointed as I wasn’t, and still am not, a big fan of bananas.

Cheesecake memories are much more exciting, however. I distinctly remember trying cheesecake for the first time whilst I was a young teen living in Hong Kong. A city not associated with cheesecake – yes, I know – but a city with expats from many countries, particularly English-speaking ones, which makes for a market for Western products and foods. During her younger years, one of my aunts was a live-in cook and maid for an American family posted to Hong Kong for business. It was during that time that she discovered the delights of cheesecake which she, in turn, introduced to my cousins and I from that frozen supermarket foods institute known as Sara-Lee. I can only imagine how funny a sight it would have been for passers-by to witness one grown woman accompanied by five pre-pubescent kids digging into a frozen cheesecake with plastic spoons just outside a supermarket!

Avocado I didn’t try until I was around 16 at a friend’s family barbeque. It was in a salad and, although underwhelmed at first, I later came to appreciate its pairing with and enhancement of other things such as chicken, salmon, toast, nachos… My mother has since explained the absence of avocado from our household, apart from it being not a part of her Cantonese cooking – she had never had it herself and had no idea how it tasted!

“Gourmet pizza” is a term which became popular when I was… (Actually, I won’t tell you when because that would be disclosing my age. Which is never polite for a lady to do, ahem.) It’s always been a term which I’ve found confusing as I can’t determine to whom it is considered gourmet. I grew up with Cantonese cooking almost seven nights a week and pizza usually meant my mother coming home from the supermarket with those frozen subs topped with ham and pineapple. So it was a definite revelation when Gourmet Pizza Kitchen opened and was one of only a few who offered wood-fired pizzas. It soon became a regular choice for gatherings with friends and years later they still have several outlets with pretty much an unchanged menu.

These days, first-time food experiences are usually experienced camera in-hand and are documented with a blog post. More nerve-wracking than trying an unusual food is meeting a food-blogger for the first time, although I am always comforted by the ease at which conversation flows when it comes to the topic of food.

Bar Biaggio proved to be a lovely setting to brunch with Starloz for the first time, overlooking the water at Pyrmont with boats moored alongside. Food servings were generous and they use sourdough bread (yay!). I especially like how neither the mushrooms nor spinach were overly oily; always an ironic issue when they’re oiler than the bacon or sausages on the same plate! Their coffee is well made but lacking in latte art when we were there (I know, I know, it doesn’t affect the taste!), although I definitely was none the wiser when trying espresso coffee for the first time at the age of 21 – it was a takeaway caffe mocha from a university coffee cart.

So, what is your earliest or most memorable food experience?

happy eating!

Firefly Lodge Lane Cove

Monsieur Poisson and I stumbled upon Firefly Lodge at Lane Cove quite by accident. If I don’t remember wrong, we were at the nearby Thomas Dux one afternoon when Ben & Jerry’s were having a free scoop day. We were wandering back to our car when we noticed that familiar, green Campos logo and Monsieur Poisson was drawn inside on the promise of good coffee. Whilst we were waiting for his takeaway coffee order I noticed the magical words of “$10 pizzas” scribbled on a specials blackboard. Various tables appeared to be taking advantage of this special and we were encouraged by the sizeable rectangular offerings served on wooden chopping boards. So we made note of the day and time restrictions and swore we’d be back to try them – and we did.

Firefly Lodge at Lane Cove is attached to the recently revamped Lane Cove Market Place with its entrance via the paved street mall adjacent. The $10 pizza deal is no longer available from when we first tried, and has been replaced by a half-price pizza deal which is still excellent value. (Check their website for which days and times it is available.) The thin-based rectangular pizzas are cut into 8 slices and pack plenty of flavour without being overladen with weighty toppings. We’ve tried their ‘Prosciutto, rocket, parmesan’ and ‘Moroccan Lamb’ pizzas to date (pictured above) but their menu changes regularly with new varieties. The ‘Battered potato fries’ (below) are a mainstay and I highly recommend them for their crunchy exterior and fluffy innards only to be enhanced by the aioli which is served alongside. Dip the fries into the tomato sauce if you must, but you’ll be missing out on the cooling, garlicky creaminess which only the aioli provides.

Unfortunately the ‘Zucchini fries with za’atar’ (above) on a subsequent visit with Ms Japan are limp, greasy, somewhat soggy and the complete antithesis of their potato counterpart. The coating on the zucchini is also intriguingly powdery on the palate. We also order a couple of items from the share plates section of the menu – ‘Scallops with pork belly’ and ‘Meatballs in Romanesco sauce’ (above).

Firefly Lodge also offers more substantial meals in the form of pastas, meat and seafood. We’ve tried a pepper linguine with prawns and deep-fried parsley (unpictured) which was simple but done well. Then there are a selection of desserts, from which Monsieur Poisson sampled their apple tarte tatin.

There are three Firefly locations – Lane Cove, Neutral Bay and Walsh Bay – with each serving slight variations of the menu from the others. With extensive wine lists, simple pizzas, share plates and good coffee, we’re keen to try out the other venues after having had positive experiences at Lane Cove.

Firefly Lodge Lane Cove

Lane Cove Market Place (entrance on paved street mall connecting Burns Bay Rd & Longueville Rd), 24 Burns Bay Rd, Lane Cove NSW

Tel: (02) 9420 1629

happy eating!