Kids in the Kitchen

On the middle weekend of the Spring School holidays J, P & R and kids and Cliff, Mitch, Sheldon, Caitlin & I spent a few days at Mandurah.  We were only spending Saturday and Sunday night there.  We decided that the kids could cook dinner on Saturday night.  Caesar Salad was decided on.  Mitchell (18), Eila (15), Sheldon (15), Caitlin (14), Lewis (13) and Aaron (13) headed to the kitchen and without one fuss all decided what part of dinner they were doing.

Mitchell diced the chicken and he and Aaron headed off to the bbbq to cook it.  Caitlin diced and cooked the bacon.  The boys diced up bread and drizzled it with garlicy olive oil and put it into the oven.  Eila, Sheldon & the others then set about cutting up the salad.  Lettuce, onion, capsicum, avocado etc.

The final result was spectacular and delicious and we were all very proud of our kids.  Not so much because of the food but because not one of the whinged and there were no disagreements.  Total Team Work!

More amazing is that without a sound Eila headed back to the kitchen and washed and wiped up on her own!

Omelette

With the last handful of home grown mushrooms I decided to make an omelette for breakfast last weekend.  I diced the musrooms, garlic, 1/2 red chilli, small onion, red capsicum and bacon and cooked in a hot wok with olive oil until slightly soft.  I cracked 3 eggs and added cracked pepper (no milk) and placed this evenly into a hot (pancake) pan.  I added the pre-made filling to one side and a sprinkle of grated cheese and some diced parsley.  I put a glass lid over the omlette for couple of minutes until it set and then flipped the 1/2 with no topping over to make a traditional omelette shape.  Very tasty!

Laksa Ingredients

Home made Prawn Laksa is my favourite type of soup.  The best shop bought Laksa, by far, is from the “Saigon Noodle House” in Northbridge but only when made by my favourite chef.  If he is not on then the Laksa is ordinary.  Laksa at home is a little different from ‘the real thing’ because generally I don’t bother making my own Laksa paste or prawn stock instead I use an authentic Laksa paste purchased from an Asian Grocery.

I get all the ingredients ready up front because it comes together very quickly and is ready in about 15 minutes from start to serve.  I use about 250grams of shelled king prawn which I had to a hot oiled wok with diced garlic, lemon grass, finely chopped coriander stalks and one small red chilli.  I use two large table spoons of Laksa paste and stir for 30 seconds and then add 1 tin of coconut cream and the juice of one lime and wait for it to

Sams Laksa

come to the boil.  I then add a couple of cups of water (no need for stock because the Laksa paste is very strongly flavoured).  I then add thinly sliced mushrooms, bamboo shoots, some green beans and 1/2 of the spring onion.  I then add the fresh noodles.  I prefer to use rice noodles rather than egg noodles but traditionally at noodle bars they seem to use egg noodles.  I find egg noodles too heavy and prefer rice noodles and more veges in my Laksa.  In this Laksa I used Japanese udon noodles (they take on the Laksa flavour very quickly and do not get gluggy as I find the egg noodles do).

I place a big handful of fresh bean shoots into the bowl and add a generous abount of the noodles and veges and then spoon in the Laksa soup.  To garnish I love to add some sliced sping onions, slice red chilli and a generous amount of coriander leaves.  I like my Laksa strong in flavour and chilli spicy hot. Best eaten with a ice cold red back. Slurpingly good meal!

Stuffed Prawns at Joe

Bike Ride Friday and J, P and I decided to do a longer ride today seeing as I was finally over my flu.  We set off at 9am from Brentwood and followed the river to Fremantle.  We had lunch at Joe’s Fish Shack.  They advertise a lot on the tv and their menu looked pretty good.  We had trouble deciding what to have.  Normally we try to stick to non-fried food for lunch (too hard to cycle home on a stomach of fried food!) preferring salads.  However, as we were at a seafood restaurant we decided instead to have seafood!  J ordered a salmon steak which was served on peppery mash with vegetables.  It looked great and she said it tasted lovely.  P and I couldn’t decide so we each ordered a meal and thought we’d share.  I ordered the stuffed & battered prawns and P ordered pepper squid.  The photo is my meal with 3 prawns (gave 3 to P) and some of the pepper squid.  There was a mountain of chips on mine and I only managed to eat about 10 of them.  The prawns were very nice and stuffed with spinish and bacon but after two of them I started to feel the icky oily affect of the fried food.  The squid was mostly ‘baby octopus’ and unfortunately the peppery batter was not the least bit battery. 6/10.

Ingredients - Mushroom soup

Our

Cream of mushroom soup with sauteed mushroom garnish

home grown mushrooms became mushroom soup tonight.   I sliced the mushrooms and set aside 1/4 of them.  Dice two potatoes, one sliced leek, dice 1/2 small red chilli and several garlic cloves.  Add all ingredients to hot wok with olive oil and cook for a few minutes, add knob of butter and cook for further 5 minutes then add water to just cover and simmer for 10 minutes until all veges are soft.  Set aside into a bowl and then cream with food processor.  Put the set aside mushrooms in hot pan with olive oil and diced parsley and sautee until brown.  Plate the soup, add a sploosh of cream and top with the sauteed mushrooms and a parlsley sprig.  Eat with crusty bread.  Delicious!

First Mushroom Crop

Watching mushrooms grow has been amazing.  Mushrooms literally grow before your very eyes.  Even checking them at a 2 hour interval you could easily see their growth.  By day 6 they were just about ready to harvest but we waited until Sunday afternoon to do it.  By then the buttons had mostly opened up.  The first crop weighs a little under a kilo so already the yield value is greater than the purchase price of the mushroom farm.  Growing mushrooms is great fun… you can grow them inside (I grew mine in the bathroom - under the towel rack!), they don’t get attacked by bugs, they grow very fast.  I find I can be a little impatient waiting for veges to grow enough to harvest so the mushroom experience has been great!

Mushrooms (10 + 3 days)

Growing mushrooms at home is just the easiest thing.  You buy a box from the plant nursery which has a thick layer of peet moss at the bottom that has already been inpregnated with mushroom spore.  There is a separate plastic bag containing moist, rich soil which you add water to until you can squeeze drops out through your fingers.  You spread out the wet soil (but don’t press it down).  Then you close over the plastic cover and re-close the box and leave it for 10 days in a non-drafty spot.  I’ve been keeping the box in the bathroom and check the progress each day.  On day 12 there were tiny little button mushrooms showing.  By day 5 they had increased five fold (photo).  Their growth is astouding…. you check in the morning and you can SEE the growth they’ve made during that day when you check them at night.  I imagine we’ll be eating these in a few days.

Bs 21st Dinner

Last night B, M, Cliff and I went to Wagamama Noodle Bar in Fremantle for B’s 21st birthday dinner.  Cliff and I had previously been to the Subiaco restaurant and it was a nice meal.  The Fremantle noodle bar apparently has been open since December however it would have been one of the most disorganised restaurants I have every been to.

They do not have their liquor licence yet so only soft drinks could be ordered (not that that was a problem).  The staff were very inattentive but they took our order after 10 minutes of menu looking.  Cliff’s barramundi however was not available so he had to re choose.  Our meals came one at a time over 10 minutes… Cliff had to wait until we had almost finished our meals to receive his.

B had a chicken soba noodle soup… she said it was very tasteless.  M had teriaki chicken with rice and salad which he said was nice.  Cliff had beef salad and the beef had a lovely flavour and was very tender.  However, although we love chilli this salad would have had no less than 2 whole red chillies cut up and dispersed throughout it making it extremely hot to eat.  I had the chicken kare loman noodle soup… which was spicy and delicious.

Shonky desert - $9.80!!

It had lemon grass, coconut milk, shrimp paste, chillies, fresh ginger and galangal, served with ramen noodles. garnished with a marinated grilled chicken breast, bean sprouts, cucumber, lime and fresh coriander.

We shared side meals of Chilli Squid, Ebi Gyoza which are deep fried prawn dumplings, sweet potatos chipped with black sesame seeds and a wasabi mayonaise dipping sauce.  Cliff and I also had Miso that was serves with Japanese pickles.

We had to wait about 20 minutes to be able to catch the eye of a wait staff member to order desert.  They seemed to avoid customers like the plague! I did not order desert but Cliff had a fried banana with icecream which he said was nice but was not served with the honey/cinnamon sauce it stated on the menu.  M had two scoops of ice cream - coconut and lychee which he said was delicious.  B had a rich choc mud cake with icecream which was supposed to be served with wasabi chocolate sauce (but came with plain choc sauce).

Over all we gave the experience a 5 out of 20!  The service was poor, the meals were not served as the menu said.  The worst meal was B’s desert which was a horrendous $9.80 for a small slice of what seemed like a Woolworth’s mud cake with a small scoop of plain ice cream which would have cost them under a $1.  This desert was, by far, the worst I have ever seen and for $10 you really expect a cafe style mud cake rather than something you’d buy in your weekly shopping!  Each of the mains was around $20 but I think was very overpriced for B’s main of tasteless watery soup with noodles in it and a couple of slices of chicken.

The meal total (with a softdrink each) came to $162 and I don’t think we will eat there again soon!

(The photo of B was taken as we left the restaurant, with the chefs in the background.  Her expression says it all!)

Viet Royal Restaurant

Today was cycling day.  J & P and I decided to travel a litle further afield.  We headed off at 9am from the Lakehouse along the freeway cycle path to the CIty and then turned right towards the South Perth Foreshore.  We stopped for coffee at the Dome.  P & I shared half a BLT and J had a very tasty pumpkin, coriander savoury mufin that had pepitas on top.  It was quite unusual in taste and it reminded me of punpkin soup!

We then headed off past Burswood casino and on to East Perth.  It was a beautiful day, sunny, not yet 30 degrees and the river was as flat and still as a millpond.  We decided to keep cycling and kept to the paths along the river and wet areas through to Maylands and eventually almost to Guildford and if we ran out of time catch the train from the city to Brentwood rather than tackle the fierce side wind along the hot stretch of the freeway.  It was now 11.50am and we decided to head back towards the city for lunch.  P suggested Vietnamese at a restaurant she’d been to some weeks before.  It was a excellent choice!  The Viet Royal is at 81 Royal Street, East Perth.  It was already after 1pm and there were only a couple of tables in use.

Lunch!

We ordered Phad Thai (bottom left), Chilli Garlic and Tofu with veges (top left) and Ginger Chicken (top right).  We also had steamed rice and ate with chopsticks.  J & I had a glass of Amberley Chenin Blanc and P had a Beer.  I decided after my lunch cycle day when I had had a beer and felt awful on the ride home that I’d have a wine instead!

The lunch was delicious although the vege dish was very salty and J found it very chilli hot.  The Phad Thai was just great but lacking in veges.  The Ginger chicken was J’s favourite… phad thai is my favourite all time noodle dish and I always use the lemon squeezed on top when I eat it.

After a leisurely lunch we got back on our bikes.  Our odometres where showing 40kms travelled so far that morning and as it was no around 2pm we decided to cycle back into the city and head to The Esplanade train station.  We caught the train 2 minutes later and stood near the doors with our bikes for the 10 minute journey (much more pleasant than cycling along that stretch of the river… my least favourite part of every cycle!).  Getting off at Bullcreek station we then rode the 10 minutes back to the Lakehouse with enough time for a cold drink before we all head off to pick up kids from school.

I took M to get his hockey gear after school as his first training session is Thursday night.

Tropical Fish

When I was young my grandpa used to have a large tropical fish tank and used to spend hours watching the fish swmming around.  The tank was natural looking with gravel rocks at the bottom and rock with nooks and crannies and lots of live plants.  He had ‘kissing’gourami, black mollies, platti, lots of guppies.  He was quite successful at breeding the fish as many types were livebearers.

Over the past 20 years I have had goldfish and a tropical fish tank.  When we moved to our house in May last year we’ve have a 1 metre deep, large square goldfish pond that is free standing.  We moved our large fan tail goldfish into it as well as a couple of small gold and black koi.  I bought an eco filter that has kills algae and the fish have thrived and grown huge in this short space of time.

I left my old tropical fish tank back at the other house and B uses it for her tropicals.  Instead I bought a 100 litre square tank and moved my fish over in a container along with my Clown Loaches favourite piece of wood.  I had a pair of clowns, one had grown very large though she was the more gentle of the two and the smaller one much more bossy.  They both slept inside the wood in a large cavity there.  Recently when we were away for 5 days the smaller clown suddenly died.  I returned home to tank chaos… it

Kuli Loach

was just awful.  It was obvious that the clown had been dead for probably 3 or 4 days at least and other fish had died since and others were looking sick.  It took several hours to clean out the tank and remove 3/4 of the water that was necessary to clean it sufficently.  I lost quite a few of my Kuli Loaches.  I had about 6 brown and 6 stripy ones.  They are very funny fish and love hiding inside the wood particuarly in the small hollowed out branches and when food was put into the tank they’d all fight to get out through the same tiny hole.  They spend quite a bit of their time hiding during the day but when food is in the tank spend several hours on the gravel at the bottom getting all the little scraps.  They particularly like the ‘wafer’ food that sinks to the bottom and it is like an asp nest at the bottom with them all twisting around each other.

After I got my tank back to near normal except for the water which kept turning acidic no matter what I did to it I headed off to the tropical fish shop to buy a friend for my depressed remaining clown loach.  She refused to eat and spent all of her time in her hollowed out log sleeping.  Clown loach, by far, are my favourite fish.  They actually have personalities, and, each is very different to each other.  I ended up buying two small clowns to add in with her rather than one larger one.  I figured that two youngesters may pull her out of her depression and get her to liven up.   I also bought twenty new platti of different colours from bright orange, pale yellows, silver whites and black/greens.  I only have two tetra left and one scissor tail.