PPP: Lash Cafe - High Tea

My social functions are always disasters, maybe they're disasters because I call them social functions? In any case, if I invite ten people to something, a party, heading out to lunch, I would be lucky to get four people coming over, and that would include my close friends. I think this has something to do with the fact that shift workers require a month's notice for anything to happen, since we're so tightly bound to our work roster.

Another reason is that my friends frequently get sick, which is far enough, and some of them are flakes. You know who you are, you're that friend of mine who never calls me or RSVPs to tell me they're not coming, who falls sick last minute, who forgets we're going on the day, who has to go to something else last minute, who can't find a free day in their entire month despite working less than full time or working fixed shifts.

So high tea was supposed to be a repeat of my  high tea last year. I had gone to Stamford Hotel's high tea with NZ-A. and NZ-H, just the three of us out of almost, I can't remember the number but it was a lot. I booked it for six people from memory, and that's the only people who turned up despite having almost a month's advance notice. It was a lot of fun, we all dressed up nicely, chatted for about four hours on the waterfront whilst drinking tea and eating tiny sandwiches and desserts before going bag and tea shopping in Queens Street Mall.

Later at work, I was approached by many people who had found out and told me that they would be happy to go again in the future because it was "their cup of tea". Long story short, no one turned up. Except L., cause she is a solid friend and JGirl who lives on the rich north side.

It was bad from the get go. I had a 1pm booking and I had to leave home at 11am due to the long commute. I already had a bad feeling about the whole thing and this was only confirmed when I began texting people. Some people were sick, some forgot it was on, some were out of town and some never replied. My only pair of heels snapped and I was talking to a friend and I had to go to that damn tea party. I got lost in Morningside, went the wrong way twice, couldn't text L., about where I was, couldn't get through to the cafe via phone to move forwards my booking and life was just terrible.

Found you sucker.

That being said, the cafe held my booking until I got there almost half an hour late, L., and her fiancee D., were there and I managed to wrangle J.Girl to come by as well. Its hard to find! Its bordered by a car wash station, a one way road, a cemetary and is its own little slip street. Even JGirl had trouble finding it and she lives within walking distance.

Oooh pretty, shiny everythings.

Its a super cute cafe. Designed by women. For women. No boys allowed. Its almost disgusting how cute it is. Its a very airy, brightly lit shop with super cute buyable art, jewellery and treats everything. The furniture made me squeal, that's how cute it is. I would happily have this entire shop transported into my house.

I would steal these chairs if I thought I could

The view from our spot. Cute cute cute.

Love conquers all sign. Super fucking cute

Cute jewellery that is super expensive

I didn't manage to get a picture of where we were sitting, as I didn't want to shuffle D., and L., out. This was the area opposite us. I really liked the iron framework of these chairs, although they don't really look very comfortable. They are very pretty though. We have the same table as they did, except higher and squarer, a small garden type table against a full sized coffee table.

Am I in Japan? Everything is so cute.

Here is our GF and normal diet high tea! Accompanied by our menus! The GF was marked with a skewer of wood with the burnt words GF on it, and the bread is noticeably fluffier and has seeds in it.

GF side

GF side turned around :>

Flour food :D

The menu!

I think the display from the other high tea I went to at Stamford was a lot prettier, this looks like an industrial cake display. I also felt the garnishing is a bit cliche with the dusted icing sugar and mint twig. While the savoury layer has some ancient branch like rosemary decorating it. The proportions looked small but boy were we wrong! I'll explain what's what when I go through individal bits, I'm pretty sure I had one of everything hahaha.

Cream cheese and smoked salmon sandwiches! A chicken and filo pastry with a blob of some super tasty tomato relish! We spread that bad boy on everything, we scraped the dishes dry.

Tomato relish and a chicken filo pastry!

Classic smoked salmon and cream cheese

This is the juice I got, I was super tasty but I had just been walking around for an hour in a black dress. I had a sip at the very end and it tasted super sour I dunno why?

I will try it again! For science!

A potato frittata and a chicken sandwich from the GF side. The chicken looks a bit scary on second thought, a bit too pale pink. This was the first time in ages I've had GF bread and I found it to be quite good, fluffy with the seeds providing a good textual crunch. However, they seemed a bit dense and cakey almost? L., adored all the GF food, she kept peeling off the bread and making D., eat the filling hahaha. Those tasty little pepitos really made the bread!

Gross looking stuff.

My peppermint, lavendar tisane, I was the only one to actually have tea at high tea. Although JGirl did have a pot of green tea later on, once VGirl arrived.

Mmm herbally.

I didn't get any cucumber and mayonaise sandwiches cause JGirl admitted to later eating them all. There were egg and mayo sandwiches too, they were tasty as anything.

These are the normal caramel macademia slice, walnut brownie and the raspberry slice. The white chocolate was like licking a block of sugar, it was so tooth jarringly sweet. The brownie was very dense and dark, not quite as sweet as the other desserts. The raspberry was very crumbly, nicely balanced.

Top, going clockwise
Caramel macademia slice, walnut browning and raspberry and almond slice

These were the GF ones I picked. Same as the above with the addition of an apricot and date slice. I didn't find there was actually much different between the two which was a nice change for GF readers.

As above with the gross date slice.

This is what was left over. The thing on the skewer is a really bland vegetarian frittata, the egg was not seasoned, the carrot was 50% of the piece and it was all precariously held together by a toothpick.

We forced ourselves to eat everything in this picture.
We left the garnishes though.

At some stage we ate the little Lash Cafe signs, they were made of sugar plaques as well as the little cupcakes which were just plain butter cupcakes, heavily tinted with dye.

My sister's mocha and lemon slice, also GF. She said they were quite good.

When we were almost done with our meals, I had started to whine a bit about not receiving our scones when a waitress appeared with lots of apologies, saying we had been neglected. They arrived piping hot straight from the oven. The raspberry jam on the GF side was a winner, sweet, tangy and just tart enough to be a nice contrast to its sweetness. The strawberry jam was average, despite being homemade, a good consistency but just nothing fantastic.

Plain scones with strawberry jam and double cream

GF scones with raspberry scones.

The scones are a bit ugly and mismatched though, is my only complaint. The GF ones taste terrible, but L., liked them, they reminded me and D., of badly done scones where it gets all lumpy and floury.

My other major complaint about Lash Cafe is the hit and miss service. I've definitely had worse service, don't get me wrong, but we were sorta left to our own devices with not much interaction going on. We sat down, ordered our drinks, which was a bit weird because we were offered no drink menu and it was hidden away in the newspaper pile. There seemed to be no liaison between the front desk and the kitchen to get our high tea organised, no one came to reassure us that the food was coming, or that my vouchers had been accepted. We waited about 20 minutes before we received anything.

During the high tea, the cafe was constant but not busy. There were frequent times when the front counter was unmanned. While we were eating, I kept hearing frequent little murmurs from other parts of the cafe, the group that sat down beside us of about 5 older ladies, were apologised to on their second round of coffees. Apparently, the waitress who had been serving them had gone home and forgotten to inform anyone that they had wanted some more coffee. The same thing happened to us after an older lady took our order, and then she came back with a younger blonde lady, who had been making the coffees, and asked us to repeat the order to her.

I'm presuming the older lady was the owner, because she was very interested in how we started to choose GF, or if we were celiacs. All our celiacs actually bailed on us, but we managed to chat with her a little bit about it. She was very attentive, clearing away our tables, giving us our scones, but I think she kept getting pulled away to the back.

I also wanted a choice between strawberry and raspberry jam. Double raspberry jam would've been fantastic +_+

Beef Stroganoff

As requested by my older sister like friend H., We once did a dinner swap at work, when the rest of the ward had ordered pizza. I had a box of frozen beef stroganoff that I had made while H., had made a vegetarian dish, it was a steamed veggie curry, literally a curry sauce topped with steamed veggies from a freezer bag.

At the time I didn't know what H., had in exchange cause she didn't remember either. Imagine my surprise when we went to dinner and we swapped meals. I ended up eating the pizza I think haha, and H., ate all my beef stroganoff and half of her steamed veggie curry. She said my beef stroganoff was delicious and she could imagine her boyfriend loving the dish, so she wanted the recipe. She ate every drop of rice and sauce, and scrapped her curry cause she was so full. Apparently that was only thing left in her house though, cause she bought in more of it the next day.

Anyway here is my recipe.

Beef Stroganoff

Uses: winter comfort food, dominating food swaps, making your house smell delicious in a slow cooker

Ingredients:
600g-1kg cheap beef. Anything with sinew/fat running through. I favour chuck casserole steak.
300g-500g of mushrooms. Button, white, swiss, brown. I favour button and white.
3 tablespoons of smoked paprika
2 tablespoons of plain flour
750-1000ml beef stock
1 large onion
1 tablespoon tomato paste
1-4 cloves of diced garlic, I normally use one large one.
Cream/Sour cream to taste.
Oil

Junk you need:
Large pot/saucepan
Patience to cut a billion mushrooms
Tenacity to scrape off burnt bits

Instructions:
1. Slice your beef into thumb sized chunks.

Yes, the expiry date is the 14/07/2012.

2, Move into a large bowl and mix in paprika and flour to coat

Why does this beef look so gross?
It was in the freezer for like a month.

3. Dice up your garlic and onions.

I should stop taking pictures of garlic and onions

4. If you have large mushrooms slice them thinly, if you have a billion small mushrooms, just peel and wash them and throw them in whole when I tell you to. They will shrink and darken in the sauce and look really cute at the end. Slices are just slices though.

I had 300g of 20c sized button mushrooms
It took me 15 minutes to peel and trim them all.

5. Set your pot/pan, to a medium heat. Heat the oil until warm and saute your onions first and then garlic

Onions.

6. Begin browning your beef off in small batches. Don't be afraid of burnt bits, they add character are are delicious

I walk on the wild side and don't heed my own advice

7. Once done browning everything, shove it all back in the pot and throw everything into the pot, barring cream. I suggest stock first, so everything has a soft landing. Don't be afraid if it looks like the stock isn't enough, mushrooms and beef both shrink when cooking.

This guy first

And then it looks like this.

8. Set to simmer for at least 2-4 hours, occasionally scrap the bottom of the pan/pot to prevent sticking.
9. Remove fat and scum as necessary. You're using terrible beef, of course there's going to be lots of oil. That is why its also delicious.

Beautiful

10. I can't season my stroganoff properly without having cream in it, so I pour mine in and that's me done. Alternatively, you could always add cream as needed to the dish. Without cream, it freezes a lot longer. Like a month, compared to three months?

I will finish my post on Lash Cafe one day. I took way too many pictures, I assure you the post is half done. I just have lots of feelings okay ;w;?

RJIE: Potato Chips 1: Unagi Kabayaki flavour, Pejoy, Sakuraya tea

After we went to Lash Cafe, we went to Sunnybank and hit up the market to buy random snack foods. This is one of the many snack foods I purchased that day, I spent almost $15 on random chips, drinks and desserts. With me were VGirl and JGirl, VGirl picked us up from Lash Cafe and JGirl came along for the ride.

I allowed VGirl and JGirl to pick the snacks I was going to test. VGirl had terrible opinions, its like since she became a vegetarian she has no idea what tasty food tastes like, or what fake tasty food tends to taste like. The vague criteria for my final choice of random Asian snack were, something amusing, something that catches your eye and a vague idea of what it should taste like.

I'll write up the others as I consume them but from that day I had green tea pejoy, some herbal tea with grass jelly, the unagi kabayaki flavoured potato chips as well as my Sakuraya drink Florida Citrus from the world tea series. I won't talk about the tea cause it was terrible, however there's still like a can of peach juice drink, some random snacks and a rice seasoning mix to go.

My sister picked this snack because we had previously found Green Tea Pocky at this store and she had been searching for it ever since. We found out the green tea Pejoy had expired after we started eating. It had expired back in April 2012, despite this we soldiered on. Its from from Glico the same brand that does Pocky, despite this I haven't been able to find much on the internet about Pejoy, at least on the English side. I wonder if this is like man Pocky vs normal pocky, man Pocky being made of dark chocolate and having a slightly bitter taste.

Green Tea Pejoy

Eh it was alright, there was a weird cheesecakey flavour to the coating that I'm not sure whether its normal or from the fact that it expired almost four months ago. The biscuit was still crisp though. Not sure if I'd buy it again.

Delicious herbal tea and grass jelly

Good ol' herbal tea with grass jelly. This is just the original flavour, you can also find a honey and lychee flavoured version. I always remember having this drink when I was younger, and it was super tasty. Its a dark drink with a slightly sweet taste, sweet for Asian palates, probably a bit bland for Western. It has a distinct flavour from the addition of the grass jelly, which is quite odd because grass jelly doesn't really taste like anything. I always find the jelly settles far too easily to the bottom and the can feels super heavy. You can find them for about 70-90c a can but if you buy them from the fridge its like $1.20 a can! I would buy cans and cans of this stuff!

Looks gross

And so does this jelly

The unagi kabayaki chips were the surprise hit. We picked this based on the fact that it looked super fancy and was a rather unusual flavour compared to Western potato chips. On close inspection we found other Japanese flavours such as a takoyaki, okomiyaki and maybe a sukiyaki? I might be making the last one up. Anyway, the kicker for this dish was also the fact that the potato chips came with a flavour sachet of the unagi kabayaki chips.

Air and unagi kabayaki chips

JGirl reassured me that kabayaki is always delicious and I really have to agree with her. Kabayaki is a style of Japanese cooking where a fish, typically an eel, is split into two along the spine, deboned, gutted, threaded onto skewers and then dunked in a sweet soy sauce before being grilled over a charcoal fire. Its also the style of eel that sits on top of unagidon from memory. Oh god, I'm getting hungry just thinking about it.

What did they taste like? Freaking delicious. The flavour reminded me a lot of the old Lays Texas honey BBQ chips they used to have here in Australia, before Lays left the country, a very smoky, salty, slightly sweet and fishy taste though. I guess that was the eel element. However, the potato chips aren't the best I've ever had, they were crunchy but they had this weird almost slightly stale/ exposed air texture of chips you've forgotten about in your cupboard. They just didn't have that same crunch as Western chips. That being said, I would buy this again, its a pity it was almost 3.50 for 50g of the stuff ):

Midnight Madness and Salt and Pepper squid

Making and eating tasty food at work is difficult. You lack all your pantry staples, basic cooking equipment, utensils and finding the time to even do that is a monumental task within itself. With that being said, my profession encourages versatility, problem solving and creativeness, so its not surprising that we found a way to make food whilst at work.

Using a sandwich press that we carefully scrubbed clean enough to be sterile, we turned out this:

See below

Toasted garlic turkish bread. Fried haloumi from Olympus Cheeses. Lime from my dad's house and a pot of Black Swan hummus.

Super speedy L. nabbing some haloumi

And that was it. Let's not kid ourselves here, the fact that we pulled it off was a monumental task in itself.

Oh yeah and these crispbreads were tasty too

One of my many plates.
Its a very small plate honest!

Rumour abounds that one of our sister workplaces has an actual toasted sandwich maker that is used to make waffles, pancakes, pikelets, cook bacon and every sort of egg dish under the sun. So immensely jealous.

Oh for those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about. A sandwich press just tends to have two flat plates to press against, and once heated up, cook really fast. The closer you are to the middle and the back of the plates, the faster your, usually bread, will cook since of the way the hinges are at the back. I also find bread tends to get squished in a wedge shape due to this, you can press down to make it more even though or even tie it down. The top plate tends to be quite heavy, so bread may end up being very flat.

Sandwich press

On the other hand, a toasted sandwich maker, has marked depressions to separate your sandwich into two distinct halves. Most toasted sandwich makers have too small a depression, or too small a section for anything besides stock standard bread, so expect cheese to ooze out, or your toasted sandwich maker to be unable to close if you put too much in. Its also the best cooking equipment for a uni student to have. TOAST EVERYTHING. The secret to magic with both is to butter the sides when you are toasting.

Toasted sandwich maker

H. and Mr M for Megababe insisted that I leave my haloumi and turkish bread behind so they could eat the rest of it at work. Why did I listen to them? Mr M for Megababe is even bringing in mornay oysters left over from his man date to work! They insisted I come in and share, but I respectfully declined. Its okay though I have salt and pepper squid for breakfast now that I've stolen a capsicum from VGirl's fridge!

Salt and Pepper Squid

Uses: Beer food. Snack food. Its not real food. Diet prevention.

Ingredients:
300-500g cleaned, squid tubes cut into rings. Or cleaned squids chopped into bits. Mmm tentacles.
125g of self raising flour
125g of tapioca starch. Possibly sub in rice flour or cornstarch
1 small red capsicum, cut into squares
1 small green capsicum, cut into squares
1 large onion, cut into square and separated layer by layer
3+ cloves of diced garlic
Lots of vegetable oil
Salt
Black Pepper

Assorted junk:
Colanders
Large dishes
Assorted large bowls
Scooping thing
Something to stir quickly with

Instructions:
1. Shove your squid into a small amount of water. Add about a tablespoon of salt and pepper into the mixture while you get things ready. This will allow everything to soak in

So attractive

2. Sift your flour and leave aside.

All my spices live in old gumball containers.

3. Cut your capsicums into smallish squares. Do this by slicing down the middle, removing seeds and those weird yellow bits. Cut this half into another half. Cut down in 1cm stripes and start getting your squares.
4. Dice all your garlic
5. Cut your onion into half. Remove that weird spindly bit in the middle, it was not meant to be square. Cut your onion into squarish bits, you might have to do this at an angle. Separate all the square bits of onion into layers.

Coreless onion.

Like this!

Beautiful.

6. Dunk your squid into the flour. Before frying, try and shake off all the excess flour.

Still disgusting.

7. Pour oil into a large pot. Put onto medium heat and begin frying the squid off in small batches, making sure not to overcrowd the pot. Turn off the heat, and pour into a colander, this catches all the gross bits of flour which will no doubt burn and taint the rest of the squid. Pour oil back in and repeat until all the squid is cooked.

Tasty.

Look at that oil @_@

8. Saute the garlic with some oil in another pan until light golden brown. Immediately remove off heat and throw the garlic on the cooked golden squid rings. Wipe down the pan and remove all garlic

GARLICCCCCCC

9. Saute the onion until fragrant.

ONIONS

10. Throw in the capsicum and stir briefly until they are combined.
11. Throw in your squid and garlic bits. Stir probably twice and remove. Don't leave it for too long otherwise the heat and moisture from the onions/capsicum will soften the crunchy batter.

My god, its beautiful.

12. Carefully remove all squid first and arrange in a pretty circle. Shove remaining garlic, onion and capsicum mix on top.

Shishi and I are organising a dinner out in the nearby future. Hurray for enabling behaviour! Let's go to all the cool food places in Brisbane!