I absolutely love the smell of spice shops. Whether it be mounds of brightly coloured powder in barrels at the market, or in pretty acrylic boxes like Gewurzhaus that I’ve recently discovered in Sydney.
Read More
For quite a few years when I was a kid, one of my aunts – the cool one, in case you’re wondering – moved abroad and lived in England and Vietnam, and came back with all sorts of amazing dishes, like a kickass potato salad, shrimp fried chicken, as well as this glass noodle salad, full of amazing Thai flavours.
This salad became a fridge favourite when my aunt dropped off a batch – I would sneak a bowl between meals when my parents weren’t looking, and at one point I just ended up eating straight out of the tub during those midnight trips into the kitchen.
What? Sleep eating is a thing right?
Over the years, the recipe has evolved a touch. I’ve added loads of fresh veggies – because my mind lays on the guilt like an Asian mother – and taken out the chicken, just for preference. It’s not quite the same as what my aunt makes, but it’s become my own version of the fridge favourite of my childhood, ready on hand for lunch boxes…
…and of course, midnight trips to the fridge.
It just so happens that the theme for this month’s #LetsLunch is noodles, so I’m sharing my recipe for this Glass Noodle Salad, for the last weeks of summer!
[yumprint-recipe id=’2′]
This post is also part of the Let’s Lunch linkup! If you’d like to read some of the other noodle themed Let’s Lunch posts, check out these blogs below:
Even the most eager of home cooks come to a point in their week when they get a bit lazy, and because I’m a night eater (ooh that should be my Super Villain name!) my laziness always comes in the form of not entirely having fresh ingredients at the end of the week, and not wanting to rush to the shops to buy last minute ingredients in the final 5 minutes before they close.
Enter this Easy Tom Yum Fried Rice, made entirely out of ingredients that I keep stocked at home! You’ll notice that my frozen prawns and veg is cooked straight from the freezer – no thawing time! And it works, too, because the prawns are small and the veg is bite-sized. If you have larger pieces of meat that are frozen, they may require a little bit of thawing, unless they were cut before freezing, in which case, substitute away!
But the whole point of this recipe is that it’s more of a guideline: feel free to mix and match ingredients that you might keep on hand, and create effortless deliciousness!
[yumprint-recipe id=’1′]
I’ve always been fascinated by cocktails and iced teas, probably because the delicate mixing of flavours to me is like alchemy, and that promise of absolute gold at the end of you get it right.
Well this summer, T2 has come up with fruity iced tea mixes, ready for your teapot and a bit of hot water.
In the T2 Cool Sorts box ($22), you get 5 flavours to try: Banana Riot, Juicy Ginger, Mango Twister, Melon Head and Peaches and Cream.
I really bought the whole box because of the mango – it’s sweet without being too cloying, and refreshingly light and fruity, exactly what you want an iced tea to be. The peach brought similarly refreshing notes, but with less sweetness straight out of the box.
The rest of the tea though, were a bit average for me. The melon did truly tasted like honeydew, and since I’m a bit more of a rock melon sorta gal, it wasn’t quite my thing. The banana had really nice caramel notes, but wasn’t as refreshing as I wanted my iced teas in summer to be.
And the ginger. It may be because I grew up in a culture that likes our flavour strong, but I barely got a hint of ginger, and then not that much else unfortunately. If I feel like ginger, I think I’d stick to my Apple and Ginger Green Tea.
But that being said, I’m still quite happy with my purchase. It gave me a chance to get some ideas and try some new stuff. And that mango, oh that mango!!
Each pack roughly 10 cups, so it’s enough to keep me hydrated for say, a week?
Shame that you can’t get the pack of mango by itself, but you take what you can get, hey?
A glut of grapefruit seems to be more than I thought it was – I’d made Grapefruit Marmalade, Jam Drops, and still I had some remaining.
So what else do you do with delicious citrus? Maybe get a little tarty!
Read More
Jelly, to me, is one of those summertime treats. There’s nothing like a cold tub of jelly melting on your tongue as you melt in the heat.
Well, I think it’s time to take the jelly game up a notch. How about, SPARKLING JELLY?
Read More
Phew! We’ve had such a hot, sticky heat wave recently, and that can only mean one thing…
IT’S SUMMERTIME!!!
Read More
Eastwood has stealthily become a bit of a food hub, what with places like The Mandoo opening and offering amazing noodles and dumplings, and other stalwarts like Jean’s Chilli Chicken continuing to offer their brand of fire breathing late-night eats!
So when I heard that there was a new Japanese restaurant opening up down the road, I simply had to go and give it a go!
Read More
I get inspired by the strangest things, sometimes. This time it comes in a bottled condiment, called Yuzeful, which I found at the condiments table (every restaurant should have a condiments table) at Chanoma Cafe in the city. It tasted like a funky delicious Japanese Tabasco.
And in my kitchen, that means a new recipe!
I think salads can often be maligned as a boring, bitter, only-eat-if-you-got-no-other-option type of dish. And sometimes, salads are the forgotten cousin, thrown into a menu as a side so that some people can push around salad leaves on their plate to assuage their guilt.
Well, salads don’t have to be sad, and if you’re not a fan of leaves, they don’t have to be leafy either!
Read More