Hainanese Chicken Rice

In attempt to improve start building up some cooking skills, I went to my bookshelf inspiration and found this Hainanese Chicken recipe, along with many other much more ambitious projects which I've yet to start even thinking about collecting ingredients for. I actually thought that this was quite ambitious itself, until I realised how dead simple it was to boil a chicken and mix up three sauces to serve it with. And don't let the picture fool you- the chicken was so much more smooth and tender than it looks! The only challenge really was to chop it up into nice presentable pieces (of which I had no clue how to do so!).

The rice is amazingly tasty too, though you might not want to let people know that it tastes so great because of the amount of chicken fat in it! ;)

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Orient Hotel, The Rocks

The Orient Hotel was probably not the best option for a family dinner, being situated above a (quite noisy) bar, but I couldn't resist buying a voucher for a 3 course meal as it was quite cheap at $99 for four. Luckily, the soundproofing in the restaurant was done pretty well, so despite the large party just outside the restaurant, we managed to enjoy a relatively peaceful meal!

Crumbed lamb’s brains, speck, sauce gribiche

I rarely ever eat Modern Australian, so I wanted to try pretty much everything on the menu, but ended up deciding on the lamb's brains as I'd never tried them before. Their soft squishy texture was quite similar (to me at least!) to tofu, and they were cooked beautifully with a golden crispy crumbed exterior. The small pork cubes were also deep fried until incredibly crispy and were amazingly addictive, although it didn't feel all too healthy as there were a lot more pork fat cubes than meat ones!

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Black Sesame Ice Cream

Another week. Another ice-cream recipe. Yep- I'm in an ice cream stage at the moment!

Winter is my type of ice cream weather- I like snuggle up in layers of thick clothing before slowly making my way through ice cream, unlike in summer where you have to sorta race your way through before the whole thing melts into a puddle of custard. There's the downside of having your body freezing from inside to out, but I guess that's also part of the fun!

I've been wanting to make ice cream throughout my exam period, as I took a food science subject this semester (yay!) and though it was much less interesting than I'd anticipated, there was one lecture which I did enjoy in which we learnt all about ice cream! Well not exactly, but we did learn about the roles of different components in ice cream on the textures and flavours of the finished product, and if there was one thing I actually bothered learning this whole semester, it was that!

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