Sick Boyfriend Food 2

So guess who got sick as soon as it hit winter? That Boyfriend of mine. So I did the nice thing and went by his house to cook him some soup since he never eats when he gets sick. Wanna know how he repaid me? He got me sick and I took time off work. He didn't visit me because he was sick. Boom, love right there.

True love.

Anyway, I made him these two simple soups from some of the stuff I picked up that weekend at our local market. Its all winter, in season produce, so now is a great time to buy these ingredients and make your own soup. Buy some tasty, fancy arse bread and soak up these soups. My Boyfriend seems to enjoying dumping white rice in the leftover vegetableless soup for some reason.

For the potato soup, its a very simple dish to make and you can honestly knock it out in a few minutes, depending on how picky you are about cutting stuff up. The ingredients are very forgiving however you do need  a very good stock to balance it all out. I've used generic washed potatoes found at Coles, I've also use baby Nadines that I've gotten from an organic grower at the Jan Power Markets. Go by the way, that stall is the only one with gourmet potato species, including some blue flesh potatoes!

Its entirely up to you, whether or not you leave the potato skins on. I find the older the potato is, the thicker and slightly bitter the skin becomes. The organic baby Nadines had a lovely thin skin that was barely noticeable. The skin is of course where all the nutrients is. Otherwise, I guess scoop off the skins and bake them with salt, paprika and cheese or something. I am also a big fan of potatoes dunked in a mixture of rosemary, salt and olive oil baked. I'll share my recipe someday.

 For the mushroom soup, this is basically the same ingredients I use in my breakfast mushroom recipe. Take away the stock and cream and its the same thing, oh and substitute the word bulb for clove. That being said, I don't normally roast entire bulbs of garlic of breakfast mushrooms, ain't nobody got time for that. Cut up the mushrooms however you want, but the more surface area you have the faster they will cook, the more flavour you will have and the prettier the soup will look if you leave the mushrooms chunky. I normally use white button mushrooms as they are easy to find.

For roasting garlic, it completely changes the flavour of garlic becoming soft, sweet and really nutty with a hint of garlic. Add to absolutely everything, mashed potatoes, soups, bread, cheese whatever strikes your fancy. There's not even a hint of garlic breath and its amazing when you have a cold to ward it off with that much garlic! Please however, do NOT remove the outside of the garlic bulb aka the paper part. If you bake garlic without the paper, the outside becomes hard and gross, much like cooking prawns without their shells. I don't know where I learned to roast garlic from but apparently I've been doing it wrong! Here is a very good blog explaining the ins and outs of it all!

For the cream used in this recipe, I use whatever is marked down in the supermarket. I've used thickened cream, single cream and even dolloping thick cream. I don't find it makes all that much of a difference, it just needs that hint of creaminess/velvety texture to it. I think sour cream, yoghurt, buttermilk or even milk will do in a pinch. Notice that the amount of cream is handily half of what is generally the smallest size of milk commercially available outside of long life.

Potato and Leek Soup

Uses: Sick boyfriend food

Ingredients:
500g-750g of potato, diced
2 large leeks, white parts only, sliced thinly
1L of chicken stock
100ml of cream
Salt and white pepper to taste
Butter

Instructions:
1. Heat up a large saucepan/soup pot on medium-high. Dice up your potatoes and leeks.

Imagine this with wayyyy more potato

2. Melt some butter, enough to coat the bottom of your pot. Saute off your leeks, poking them with a spoon or something until their rings all fall apart and they soften, 3-5 minutes.
3. Throw in your potatoes and the stock.

POTATO AND LEEKS

4. Lower to a simmer, scoop off any foam that appears.

Blessed by the god of student housing

5. Once the potato has cooked to your liking, I dunno maybe 15-20 minutes, throw in your cream and season appropriately. Once the soup has amalgamated and foam starts appearing, scoop it off and then serve the soup immediately.

Chunky!

*If desired, puree the entire soup. Do it in batches, hold down the top. Hot soup gets everywhere.

Breakfast Mushroom Soup

Uses: Sick boyfriend food

Ingredients:
500-750g of mushrooms, sliced thinly or diced very finely
1L of stock
100ml of cream
1 large sliced onion
1 large bulb of garlic, roasted and cooled
1-2 tablespoons of thyme
Olive oil/butter
Salt and pepper to taste

Instructions:
1. Heat up a saucepan/soup pot on medium high. Heat up an oven to 200C.
2. Slice off the first 1cm of garlic. Wrap your garlic in a little nest of aluminum foil, top and bottom, or a large baking dish with a foil lid. Drizzle olive oil over the top of the papery bulb and sprinkle liberally with salt. Do not remove the outside paper of the bulb. Bake for at least half an hour

These were cheap and nasty 50c piece sized garlic bulbs. Still delicious

2. Peel and slice all your mushrooms. Or just wash and then slice them if you're in a rush.
3. Melt some butter in your pan/pot and cook your onions until they soften and begin to change colour to a lovely light golden.

You'd think I'd have enough sauteed onion pictures by now but nope

4. Throw in your mushrooms and thyme, cook for long enough that your mushrooms start releasing liquid and start shriveling up.

This

To this

5. Throw in your stock and start squeezing out the roasted garlic cloves into the soup. Don't worry about squishing the garlic anymore. I never find chunks of roasted garlic in my soup, they just melt away and become delicious soup.
6. Bring to a nice simmer and cook until the mushrooms are cooked to your liking. Scoop off foam!
7. Throw in your cream. Give it a few seconds and a few stirs to mix it all in and scoop off that nasty foam! Season and serve immediately.

My pick of the soups

*If desired, also puree this soup in batches with the lid firmly held down.

Thai Wi-Rat

Thai Wi-Rat!

This was my Boyfriend's choice and the only time thus far that he has won scissors, paper, rock against me. We use it to decide on decisions I am too undecided to make as I then immediately know where I want to go.

Their news article?

Its a little place located in China Town behind all the yum cha restaurants, in that street behind the TCB building that has all the banks in it. Its located in a cool shady spot, with lots of tables inside to eat and it always seems to be quite full whenever we go past there.

We ordered our food, grabbed a number and sat down with our drink. One drink, I wasn't interested in anything in particular so I drank my Boyfriend's. He got this apple and pineapple crush drink, I've seen it around quite a bit but never felt interested enough to get it. Its because it doesn't taste fantastic, it's apple and its pineapple but the combination of fruits isn't an outstanding one like say mango and orange or apple and blackberry.

Bleh

There's an extensive alcohol menu, entrees, grilled stuff, salads, fried noodles, noodle soups, stir fried, curry, lunch special and banquets options. Here it is. The lighting was a bit odd, so it gave all the photos a particularly bluish tinge.

I got this fried noodle mix up consisting of flat rice noodle with dark sweet soy sauce which had the unpronounceable, gyay teaw pad ce aw, beside it. It also had bits of onion, egg, broccoli and bok choy. Its a simple and slightly greasy looking dish but it took a long time for this to come out. I'm guessing it was probably about five minutes after the other dish came out and we waited about forty minutes for that too. A lot of customers came in after us, were eating before us and left too before we even started.

Stir fried noodles!

I didn't really like stir fried noodles, my Boyfriend did though. It had a very, very slight charry flavour but the greasiness of the noodles was a bit off putting to me. As was these raw pieces of chicken that I found. When the waitress came to pick up our plate, she didn't comment on this at all nor did she ask how our meal was.

Dun dun dun

My Boyfriend got this chicken laksa. He didn't it, I liked it though. There wasn't really much in it to be honest, it had rice noodles, chicken, carrot, broccoli pieces and that's all I remember eating. It was a delicious savoury, coconut creamy soup with a sour tamarind tang. We probably should have swapped dishes.

Yummy!

Thai Wi-Rat
Atmosphere: 6, cool, airy, typical Asian takeaway. He gave it an 8, because there was a cool water fountain
Service: 4, meh. Got our food, obviously didn't like our meal but nothing was said.
Food: 4, because of my uncooked chicken. Otherwise maybe a 6? It wasn't great but it was very cheap.

PPP: New Shanghai

New Shanghai is cursed. Every time I want to go there with friends, it falls through. Just like when I wanted to go to Alfred and Constance before it was cool, I don't wanna talk about it. So far, I've tried to go with H., twice and she bailed, twice.

The first time, she bailed because she had to get help from her Aunty regarding her citizenship papers or something. The second time, she had to have dinner with her fiancee's parents. The third, I went without her, now she's mad at me. So we're going again in May with some of the other nurses, if we can all get the day off. Once again, H., is the only person without a day off, the only days she has off, everyone is working. Typical H.,

So this day, I invited G., J-Dawg. A., H., L and D., Maz., Liz, Darcie, De., and myself and my Boyfriend. Of course, you can guess already, that the people who showed were L., D., A., myself and my Boyfriend. G., was waiting for her boyfriend to finish work. J-Dawg never called me back, but she had a fun run to go to the next day. H., of course was working a late shift. Maz had sick grand children to look after and De., had a cousins birthday to attend. Liz also had a cousins birthday to attend and Darcie said she had something important but forgot what it was. I suspect the three entries were lies.

Anyway, it wasn't too bad after some issues with reserving a table. I waited for days for an email confirmation that never showed up in my email or my junk mail. This is because, as my Boyfriend found out when he had to call cause I chickened out, they don't take reservations on a Saturday night, but they did advise us to arrive at around 6.45pm to snag a table. We got there early and snagged the only 10 person table with our party of five.

I was the only person who know New Shanghai was. I go to the city a lot, so it makes sense to me when I say its in the food court that has T2 and Coles Express. Its at the far end of Queen Street Mall with all the fancy shops like Louis Vuitton and Chanel, and its opposite the Winter Garden. It took a while for people to get there.

Anyway, since we went with L., we got her to order since she speaks Mandarin. We also learned that she knew the owner of the restaurant and kept leaving our table to talk with people she knew around the restaurant.  So at the end of the day we snagged a 10% off discount. With that being said, we did spend some time perusing the menu and trying to figure out what we wanted. Most of the following pictures are whole, but in a few sneaky circumstances, my Boyfriend or D., managed to snag a piece before I took a snapshot.

Entrees.

Dim sum!

Soup and veggies

Noodles and rice

Mains

Dessert and other things

Random drinks

Their extensive menu of cold drinks

More drinks

Even more drinks

Last one

For drinks we go a pot of angry jasmine tea. I quite liked this teapot to be honest, can you see the angry face within the paint?

RAWR TEA

I'M CRANKY CAUSE I'M HOT

D., and my Boyfriend got icy cold lychee frappes. It took a while for D's one to arrive, I think they misheard and thought we were only ordering the one. It was delicious. Like pure lychees.

Yummy

I got a pineapple frappe. Mine wasn't as good as the lychee one, the pineapple didn't have any hint of sourness. I also was desperately thirsty and gave myself a nasty case of brain freeze for about five minutes. It was agony.

Pineapple!

First to arrive was this drunken chicken within seconds of being ordered. No wonder since they pre-slice all their cold entrees at the front of the restaurant where you can watch the xiao long bao being made. I'm not a fan of drunken chicken, to me its cold, the skin is a bit gelatinous and a bit pointless. It tasted like rice wine and that's about it.

Appetising no?

This is their cute pan fried meat buns with pork. They had a delicious soft bun on the top and crunchy golden brown skins on the bottom. The pork was really tasty and well seasoned. As well as this it came with a puddle of soup in there too. This was harder to remember to nip and sip than the normal xiao long bao, because they were so sturdy when you lifted them up.

Cuties

With their bums

Here are their signature xiao long bao! A really classic Shanghaiese dish, they are paper thin dumplings with a sip of soup in there. The idea is that you pick up the dumpling delicately, place it on a spoon, nip open a hole, sip out the soup and eat the rest of the dumpling as is. How do they get the soup in there? They either freeze their soup or make it with a high collagen content so that when it cools down it solidifies into a gel. It is then combined with the rest of the meat portion and wrapped in a wrapper, when they get cooked the gel turns back in a soup. These were quite good, well seasoned, pretty to look at and just the right size.

Pretty as a picture!

 This is their deep fried chicken with special garlic and chilli sauce. It was solid, the flesh was moist, the skin was crispy and there was a lot of it. The special garlic and chilli sauce was odd, I thought of a sambal sauce for some reason. It was actually like a thin sweet soy sauce with vinegar added, the chillis used weren't very spicy and the garlic was there but not noticeable at all.

I was expecting like KFC crunch level?

This was the dish of the day to reuse a certain show's stock phrase. It is a shepherd's purse and pork wonton tossed in peanut butter, chilli oil, cucumber and spice. D got to this first which is why the right side looks so lop sided. We only ordered this because we were all speculating as to what shepherd's purse actually was, I had a sneaking suspicion it was like some weird sea animal, my Boyfriend thought it wasn't anything but sounded suspicious and I can't remember what A., said.

Cute, like little hearts.

It turns out shepherd's purse is a pretty little plant from the mustard family that has triangular leaves like a shepherd's purse. It also has major abilities as a natural haemostatic agent and mild effect on hypertension, so its mostly been used throughout the ages before we had stuff like tranexamic acid and vitamin K. In some of the things I was reading on the internet, it was especially mentioned to slow down bleeding in intracranial trauma and post birth haemorrhages.

I'm really glad that we did though. It was delicious, the shepherd's purse gave it an interesting aroma as well a not quite peppery taste to the pork? The sauce was delicious, sweet, spicy, creamy, we were dredging the dumplings through it trying to catch every last drip of it. We ate all the cucumber slices as well.

I wanted to get noodles and I was sneakily trying to guess what a few of the other people were having for dinner. We knew it was something stir fried but couldn't figure out what, so we settled on these Shanghai noodles stir fried with pork and veggies. It was mostly noodles to be honest, chewy, sauce coated slurpy noodles that were really good, they reminded me a little of udon noodles. There wasn't much pork or vegetables though, once we took off that top layer, it was nearly all veggies.

I love noodles

What's an Asian restaurant without its salt and pepper calamari am I right? This is the best one I've ever had outside of my mother's. Its light, tender, well seasoned and definitely has a great salty/peppery/garlic coating. There were also dried hot chillis scattered throughout, D and my Boyfriend got bored with all our girly, worplace talk and D., started daring my Boyfriend to eat it. He did, and he was convinced that they weren't very hot. Until he got to the end of the pod where all the seeds had fallen.

Those chillis were seriously spicy.

All of a sudden, we were keen for dessert. My Boyfriend doesn't like Asian desserts, he says he doesn't like the weird tastes/textures and it's too different for his mouth. He changed his mind though when he read ice cream. We quickly ordered this and he ate the ice cream before I had a chance to have more than a spoonful, it tasted faintly of soy, I wonder if it was a soy based ice cream? I swear you could hear the sizzle as it hit his tongue. There was a big blob of sweet sticky red bean mush on top of a soy milk infused shaved ice and condensed milk. Nothing fancy, but perfect after a hot day or spicy dinner haha.

That spoon looks super shiny.

L., ordered the slow cooked white cloud fungus with papaya. Its a sweet soupy concoction that can be served either hot or cold. I think this one was cold. Cloud ear fungus is an interesting thing, you can cook it savoury or sweet, and its more of a textual aspect than anything else. The texture when briefly cooked is like cooked seaweed, mildly crunchy, and heavily cooked like this, it becomes soft and slippery. L., said it was very good.

Looks like a cocktail of spit and apricots.

D., ordered this mini sticky rice balls in a Chinese rice wine soup. There were little goji berries sprinkled on top and something else I'm not really sure of. D., said it didn't really taste of anything but he liked the sticky rice balls, he said they were like mochi.

This isn't much better looking

ROUND TWO OF NEW SHANGHAI!

We went here a week later, L., Boyfriend and me. Once again, everyone bailed on us. D., arrived about three minutes after we came out. This time we waited over 40 minutes in line to get a table on a Friday night! Since we had gone so recently, we tried to avoid ordering the same things as the last time.

Woah tall tea!

Milk tea! Sweet, strong, cold milky black tea. Nothing better than a nice tall glass of it. Nothing more to say.

Blergh

L., ordered this entree, lotus root stuffed with sticky rice in syrup. I think its supposed to be a sweet starter? For people who have no taste buds perhaps. Its cold, the lotus root tastes what you imagine thick glue to taste like and the sticky rice is chewy. I really did not like this. Neither did my Boyfriend, who had one bite, and hide it under his napkin. L., remarks, normally its much sweeter. God have mercy on us all.

Stock standard favourite

Combination fried rice because I couldn't decide what noodles I wanted this time. Just a really good fried rice, not greasy, lots of colourful ingredients such as ham, prawns, eggs, corn, onion and green onions, it was little under seasoned I think but no one else thought so.

Lurking in the background were more shepherds purse and pork dumplings

Crab and pork xiao long bao, the soup dumplings again! I didn't like the combination of flavours, there was a lot of crab pieces but they were so soft against the pork I felt like I was eating something uncooked? Once again, just a personal thought. My Boyfriend liked these more than the plain pork ones as he felt the soup used was a good match this time.

There was actually a lot there

Salted egg yolk and calamari. We debated long and hard over this, as we wanted a main but didn't know what. I wanted salt egg yolk something though, I like its grainy texture. This was terrible by the way, it was overly greasy, the calamari was overcooked and rubbery, and the salted egg yolk batter itself wasn't very salty? It was just salted egg yolk and that's it.

New Shanghai

Atmosphere: 7, really busy. Not too bad though, it can get really crowded but its not as noisy as it could be. Possibly because they don't have an actual ceiling and it doesn't bounce back sound.
Service: 5. Even though we brought along L., who speaks Mandarin, knows the owner and most of the staff. They still missed a few of our orders, god forbid we come back without her.
Food: 7, after I ate here. I felt like I felt like I could go back the next day for another round and I did. I would still happily go here a third time.