Raining Chaos

Category: Random

  • Restaurant Revolution ADL – where I get to be a snobby snob snob

    It’s a little different from Masterchef. It’s a little different from My Kitchen Rules. It’s a real pop up restaurant that you get to eat at!

    When I first saw the shed present on my way to the markets, I thought, that looks interesting. Then ignored it for a good while.

    After a while, I decided it was worth checking out what this commotion was all about. It’s yet another reality TV cooking show, but appears to focus on the setting up of a restaurant and running its everyday matters, rather than a pure amateur cooking competition. I believe the contestants could be people who already worked in a restaurant, but couldn’t be high profile or head chefs. Having had my fair share of dining experiences (mostly high end), I decided I’d give it a go and taste the food there. I agonised for a while how I’d judge the place (for my own purposes, not anything to do with the actual show rules) – would I compare it to an average restaurant? Would I compare it to a fine dining establishment? Was it going to be a disaster where I was left for hours without food?

    There was only one way to find out!

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  • Cooofffeeeee?

    Dear diary,

    Today was a good day. I got up early to make dashi broth so that I could get a pandan infusion going. Then I went to Bar 9 where Ian greeted me and gave me some guest coffee: Honduras Las Moras CoE#4 2014 roasted by Nozy Coffee and described how it was roasted a little darker but not charry. I liked it. I want to go to Japan again. I then chose Bolivia Estanislao Pununi because I really liked it when Artificer made it. Still as sweet and bright, I really like this Bolivian coffee.

    Then I shopped and came home, realised I had way too much watercress and snow pea tendrils because all I wanted was two “arching” tendrils with pretty leaves for the dish I was going to make.

    I marvelled at the 200g sashimi grade Port Lincoln blue fin tuna I bought for $79.99/kg and was very glad I chose that over the standard cuts of yellowfin tuna; there was a marbling to the flesh that made it taste great!

    I cut up a lot of fish and made dashimaki tamagoyaki for the first time. It was a bit too sweet and kept breaking up when I tried to roll it, but the texture was there even though it was a chaotic swirl rather than orderly swirl. It also offset the fish very nicely in the chirashi that I made.

    My knifework isn’t great but I’ll keep working on it.

    My food actually tasted as good as it looked today, which was better than last week where it tasted worse than it looked.

    I’m thinking about buying truffle next week for a beef tartare and call the dish “black gold” because I had this hilarious and useless idea to add gold leaf to a truffled beef tartare. I think it’s too over the top, so I probably won’t do it.

    Then I went to my favourite cafe where I was so tired from so much food making that I couldn’t remember what I ordered. It was the house blend espresso. It explains why the Pedra Redonda tasted so different when I was given that after my first drink. I was surprised because I hadn’t ordered it, but I was thankful and appreciative because I was thinking of a second coffee. Then I was asked how much coffee I can drink, to which I replied a lot even though I recently broke my coffee immunity. I do believe I actually still have most of that immunity.

    I was then given two more coffees; I was essentially cleaning up their batch brew at closing time. One was an Ethiopia Aramo from Monastery Coffee which reminded me of the “sunniest” Yirgacheffes I’ve had. It was bright and fresh and smelled great. The other was the Santa Isabel which did pale a little in comparison.

    I am also proud of the chicken livers on toast I made for dinner. They were a bit bleedy so I didn’t eat it all, but the bits that I did eat were yummy.

    Now it’s bed time. I have to make azuki bean smash tomorrow morning and buy milk to make a matcha panna cotta.

  • Vivid Sydney

    I remember every time Vivid was on, I’d be walking through the city thinking, “oh, it’s that light show event again.” This was the first time I decided to actually go look at everything, plus, I think I now understand how my camera works to take night shots. Also, with my camera and my phone synced, I could use the remote shutter to take steady pictures of things by placing my camera in awkward places! For example, there was one where I was holding the camera with my back to the actual building on display, but since I could see the view with my phone, I managed to take clear pictures!


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  • Gilgamesh in Sydney

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  • Sydney 2015

    Now that I’ve gotten most of the restaurants and cafes out of the way, it’s time to blog about everything else that happened in Sydney!


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  • Sydney Coffee Rush 2015

    Yep, a rush, not a crawl. Though I couldn’t actually rush because I was a little too enthusiastic about coffee, and managed to poison myself on my very first day of adventure! That was not only embarrassing as I couldn’t finish a meal at my favourite soba restaurant, but also had to battle to not collapse in the middle of nowhere!

    That aside, I think I will write this up by cafe in no order except in which they appear in my uploads!


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  • Burj Khalifa

    Ah, the Burj Khalifa. It stands out so much in Dubai due to its sheer height, especially in contrast with the neighbouring buildings. I admit I underestimated the number of visitors somewhat, as I was surprised when the 7PM tickets were sold out by the time my session had started at 5PM, but I’m very glad that I bought the tickets in the morning to secure a trip to the top.


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  • Farewell Cape Town, Hello Dubai, Welcome Home

    This will probably turn into a very long post full of very random rambling things. I would put Dubai in its own post, but considering I spent less than 22 hours there, it may as well all be crammed into one!

    In the last couple of weeks, I realised that I had visited a great many restaurants and cafes, so I decided to try and remember all of them, which lead to me on a mad last week scramble to match the number of places eaten with the number of days stayed – 84 – and managed to complete this quite easily. What an amazing achievement considering I’ve probably visited a low 3 digit count of places in Sydney, and high two digit in two years in Adelaide!

    A last minute cafe that I had to visit was Shift Espresso Bar, who had some cool “specialty” coffees with cool names, such as Rebellion (double espresso with condensed milk and whipped cream), Hashtag (double espresso, vanilla gelato, oreo), etc. I went for the Nicaragua single origin and a Rebellion, and they were both quite nice. I’m not a fan of sweet/novelty coffees anymore, but the rebellion didn’t taste too bad at all; I got it more out of curiosity for their presentation.

     
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  • All that is posh, hipster, pretentious and classy

    It’s almost time to return home, and I feel that I have eaten through Cape Town with a valiant effort. I finally found some mindblowing places – the first being Hemelhuijs. It’s a weird name that I can barely pronounce, but I had noticed a crowd around the place during my explorations, so I decided to pop in for a visit. The decor is visibly posh, and even has a cute little deer head with leaves sprouting from its head as a piece of wall decoration. The other thing I noticed straight away was the black salt in petri dishes at every table.

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  • Happy Easter, etc

    I don’t feel that I did too much over the last couple of weeks – it was a lot of rewatching Person of Interest and thinking up more characters for my amazing world. I also found out that there’s a thing out there called technological singularity, and it’s scarily close to what I was doing for my cyberpunk story, at which point I discovered that I really should read Neuromancer by William Gibson because it sounds amazing!

    In food news, I had my first shakshuka at Origin Artisan Roasters – it wasn’t as salty as I had imagined it, but it had a lot of flavour so I really liked it and felt it was a healthy dish:

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