Diary on "Try A New Thing Week"

17/9 1130pm - Watch "Julie & Julia" on DVD.  The scene where Julie tries poaching an egg for the first time in her life sticks in my head.  The last thing in my head before I fall asleep is that I should try at least one new thing each day for a week, just to see what discoveries I make.

18/9 - Attend Regional Producers' Market at Queen Victoria Market.  Try liquor-filled chocolates from Rutherglen Chocolates (tick!), and I am stunned at how good tokay goes with milk chocolate. For dinner I take out a Korean recipe book I bought in Singapore and make chicken kimchi dumplings (tick!) using shop-bought dumpling skins.  The recipe takes me approximately one hour to complete while watching TV and yields me enough to cook 1/4 for dinner (pan fried they are excellent), cook 1/4 for work lunch and freeze 1/2 for future consumption.  Must try the same recipe on beef mince the next round.  Tag for future use.

19/9 - AUD2.05 for a pair of pig's ears (tick!).  Cleaning the ears is arduous - must buy a disposable razor blade if I want to do this recipe again so I can get rid of the stubborn black pig's hairs.  Even my sharpest knife has trouble.  Scald the ears with boiling water.  Then I braise them for two hours in a self-concocted mix of ground white pepper, whole black peppercorns, Chinese wine, sesame oil, light soy sauce, dark soy sauce, chilli powder, five-spice powder and chicken stock.  By the time I turn off the gas, the lid on the pot has decided to fall apart and the flat smells of five-spice powder & soy sauce.  I know they are cooked because my chopstick went straight through when I poked to see if they were tender yet.

20/9 - Fingers get a shock from handling nettle leaves (tick!) even though the leaves are meant to have been tamed.  Hurriedly wash them while wearing gloves before throwing them with hot pasta.  Salt, pepper, grated parmesan, dollops of blue cheese to form the sauce.  Slice up a pig's ear and pan fry to throw on top of the pasta.  End up with a sticky pan and delicious pasta, though just a touch bitter - maybe too much blue cheese?  Nettle reminds me of kale.  Would have preferred the pig's ear to be crispy but cannot complain about the flavour.

21/9 - AS, the seasoned pig's ears gourmet, asks for my braised pig's ears recipe which I take to mean that the taste test over lunch is a success.  I turn up at JJ's place for a Mid-Autumn Festival (aka Mooncake Festival) hotpot dinner.  Try a slice of cold blackforest mooncake (tick!) and think that it tastes more like chocolate ice cream in a little no-melt cake form.  We all start talking about our favourite mooncakes over oolong tea while FH plays with her lantern.  Then she comes in and we all start talking about our childhood lanterns.  Sigh.

22/9 - I remember the AFL Grand Final Morning Tea that I am hosting which asks for staff members to wear their footy colours and bring foods which reflect those footy colours as closely as possible.  I decide that I will produce a French fruit tart in a single rectangular form to meet the requirement on my part (tick on so many levels it is scary).  I line, chill and blind bake half the box of Careme Pastry vanilla shortcrust pastry with guidance from, where else, the inside of the Careme Pastry box (tick 1).  I put the inverted packaging into the Hints and Tips section of my recipe collection book for future use.  In the meantime, Margaret Fulton ('s Encyclopedia of Food and Ingredients) guides me through making a creme patisserie (tick 2) and I realise the wonderful quality of the vanilla pods from Bougainville that I purchased at the Meat Market Christmas fete last year (tick 3 - 1 gone, 29 to go, yeah!).  Margaret also guides me through the making of the glaze (tick 4) and the whole assembly process (tick 5).  I wonder about making my own pastry the next time, but decide that I am not that brave yet, judging by the pile of dishes and pans in the sink I see after I place the tart into the fridge to set.  I wonder how my sister copes with making little individual fruit tarts (including pastry) from scratch while taking care of two children under eight...

23/9 - The raspberry and blueberry French tart is quickly cut up on the morning tea table after the guys realise that it is not a store-bought dessert.  One colleague asks for the recipe, and another wants to take home the leftovers.  A third comments on how well my fashion and food met the morning tea criteria.  I am so pleased that I stop by Oriental Tea House after work for a light yum cha dinner with Happy Tea (tick!).  Happy Tea is not a bad concoction but I decide that I still prefer a traditional tea, like Pu-erh with crysanthemum flowers.   

24/9 - I confirm that Toby's Estate Brunswick has closed its retail operations, becoming a full-time roastery and training school while its retail operations get transferred to weekdays at a little CBD-placed box.  The loss of the best retail coffee in Brunswick depresses me so much I mope around on Sydney Road for half an hour, eat pad thai at Tom Phat before 11am and drink two coffees in one sitting at Seven Seeds.  Fortunately Taylor is at the machine so I perk up after a medium body, not too bright Costa Rica San Jose long black and a still-a-little-too-sour but perfect milk temperature Seven Seeds house blend 3/4 latte.  I go to a forum that is totally unrelated to food and end up meeting new friends.  By the time PN feeds me homemade mother-in-law eggs with sweet chilli jam (tick!), I am chirpy and ready to be an entertaining companion to my fellow diners.  I am surprised that few Thai restaurants in Melbourne serve this delicious dish, and struggle not to grab more than my allocated one egg.  More rice and tom yum soup please, slurp!

25/9 - The week has gone by so quickly and I have actually had a lot of fun exploring new ingredients and dishes.  This day becomes the eighth day of this Try a New Thing week when I go for floating yum cha with friends (tick!), enjoying the warm spring weather on the boat around Williamstown and Port Melbourne.  The food is nothing to shout about, but it is a great opportunity for us to catch up and I get to see the insides of a Yarra River boat especially designed for events and functions. 

Then I remember the kohl rabi sitting in my fridge, and wonder how to treat it...###

The Tyranny of Exclusivity

12 dollars for a glass of Panama Hacienda La Esmeralda La Geisha, done either on the siphon or the clover machine?!  10 dollars for an Ethiopian Nikasse?!  Wow, it should be disturbing that the Hawaii Kona looks cheap at 5 dollars for an espresso, or that Jamaica Blue Mountain just lost its status for most expensive seasonal coffee at 7 bucks a pop.  Yet then again, here I am savouring the fruity, wine-like body and complexity of an Ethiopian Yirgacheffe Grade 3 clover at 5 bucks a glass in Proud Mary.  In the meantime, the person next to me is declaring how good he finds his little sample shot of the same coffee but how it pales in comparison to the Panama La Geisha.

Ok ok, so the only batch of the Panama La Geisha that is available in this country come courtesy of Seven Seeds and they did pay a pretty decent auction price.  That probably justifies the cost...right? 

Are Melburnians truly spoilt when it comes to coffee, happy to pay any price to have a taste?  Or is this the new reality of coffee prices for brews by baristas?

Ways To Save $ on Coffees (Without Resorting to Instant Coffee) and Still Get Diversity:

• Bring a friend or two, and join Toshi at the daily free 10am cupping session in Market Lane before sharing a pourover Coffee Flight.  At AUD12, you get to taste three types of coffee with the equivalent of two full coffee cups per type.  You can extend the flight further by doing your tasting blind before relying on the provided notes. 
• Try a coffee at the cafe in the style that you would have at home so e.g. a coffee that you enjoy as a siphon, clover or pourover will probably work at home on the French press and pourover.  Then buy a batch of the beans you like for home use.  Bonus: some places like Toby's Estate offer one free coffee with every 250gm of beans bought.
• Frequent drinker cards - use them wherever they are available.
• Consider and implement the most likely way that would make you have coffee at home instead of a cafe.  The French press, filter, Chemex and pourover systems are all effective at home and in the office environment while the stovetop is suitable for the weekend home brunch (and weekday breakfast).
• Invest in a good grinder.  This will allow you to play with blending different coffees as well as enjoy single origins while the coffee is still fresh.  Whole beans keep a lot better than ground coffee.
• Buy beans and split them with friends.  The beans go faster which means you are less likely to compromise on freshness and the cost gets shared around as well.
• Discipline.  Lock in a schedule of days in the week when you SHALL only have coffee personally brewed.  Coffees brewed in the work environment have the benefit of your ability to use a colleague or two as your sharing companions to keep you in check.
• Grow green leaf vegetables.  This one sounds left-of-centre but used coffee grounds are good as compost for these vegetables, which mean that the coffee you drink become beneficial for the environment and your health (when you harvest fresh vegetables to throw into your cooking).

Any more tips?  Send them in!

Another reason to make my own coffee

Despite increasing green beans price which gives coffee bars the reason to increase their retails coffee price, there's now one more reason I prefer to make my own morning coffee.  One of the best coffee bars in Sydney started campaigning on 'Coffee Pooling'.

They 're trying to solve the increasing waiting time for coffee by suggesting customers to team up and order the same coffee or at least same type of milk.  So that it 'll be more effeciency to make coffee.  They further suggest that the most effeciency way is by trying to team up to create even number of shots and a full jug of milk!!!  The other benefits from coffee pooling, from their perspective, is to reduce carbon footprint.

Hmm... I can understand that it'll be more effeciency to make coffee.  But I still think making my own coffee'll be more time efficiency and reducing more carbon footprint.  At least, I don't have to queue up to buy coffee and it takes about 5 minutes to brew my own coffee, from grinding to brewing.  Plus brewing my own coffee creates less carbon footprint; don't have to write down my order in a paper, no napkin, and no paper cup, etc.
 
Will I not drink coffee outside?  Definitely not, I'm still happy to pay for good coffee.  Since good coffee and bad coffee're charged about the same price.  I just try to drink my own coffee if I want one during the rush hour.       

Night Out On (Off?) Chapel Street

Warning: this is a blog with no pictures because the circumstances did not allow for decent photographs.

It always feels strange being in the opposite direction of home on a school night.  Even stranger when your friends, who had just encountered the hazards of peak-hour outbound trains for the first time in their lives, are counting on sharp eyes in the night to look for the dinner spot...

Thanks to a tip-off (aka "a little bird told me" aka "I heard on the grapevine" aka "I read online"), we were heading to Market Lane for Coffeekids Latte Art Throwdown via Windsor station instead of the more-usual Prahran station. The purpose: to find a tapas bar off Chapel Street known as Pandora's Box.

We arrived early enough to avoid being rejected for not having a dinner booking, and soon settled in the dimly lit industrial space.  This being the first time FH was having dinner with AS, everyone was terribly polite around dish selection but we managed to settle on scotch quail egg with salt cod, braised lamb's tongue with white port & golden raisins, duck jamon with quince sauce and aged Angus steak with bone marrow & herb chips (sliced for sharing).  In our usual unintentional manner, we managed to attract the attention of the floor manager when it came to choosing a red to match the dishes.  We were recommended the Pandora's Box pinot noir, made locally and specifically for the restaurant, which did really match the dishes well.

By the time our first dish was served, the restaurant was rapidly filling up.  The scotch egg was rich and creamy, though we did have trouble adjusting to the idea of a thumbful of yolk in the otherwise regular-sized scotch egg.  FH and AS both commented that the lamb's tongue was honey-sweet and charcoal-savoury, which reminded them of char siew pork.  We all agreed it was incredibly tender and certainly not what we thought lamb's tongue would taste like. 

The duck jamon came in a chicken drumstick-like shape and the meat fell apart at the mere twist of a folk.  Its smoked rareness melted in the mouth, cut by the sour-sweet flavours of the quince sauce.  Just when we were about to agree with food critics that this did deserve being the dish of the place, the rare-going-on-medium rare Angus steak came.  Cubes of bone marrow intertwined with zucchini and a red wine jus around the meat.  Oh the tenderness and how it melts in the mouth, mmmmm the richness and the good jus that the herb chips are so happy with as well.  Blissful silent chewing.

Unfortunately we did not have the opportunity to peruse the dessert menu and almost had to run to Market Lane.  We arrived just in time to see the crowd cheer on the first throwdown, and I had to hunt down the beer section to grab the very cheap StoneandWood beers while munching on a hunk of cheddar cheese.  FH resorted to standing on a chair (with us eyeing her stability very carefully) in order to be able to see anything that was happening at the espresso machine.  Dead Man Espresso took responsibility for cheering on its representative via Twitter and its blog, providing one of the three judges and the cinematography of the night, which meant that I was very tempted to stage a hostile takeover so we could have a steady hand over the proceedings. 

Once Toshi took out Will in the second round (a 2-1 decision over the most complicated art of the night; no idea what the technical term is but to us laypeople it looked like they brought in the A-Game of the night with three rosettas), it seemed a foregone conclusion from there onwards that Market Lane was going to be in the Grand Final throwdown.  I managed to get a free cup of coffee, one untouched by the judges who started poking their fingers into the coffees in passing judgement.  Then I remembered that I was not a big fan of the Market Lane seasonal blend.  The milk was perfect though :P

For me the night was fun - it helps when you can almost identify every barista who stepped up to the challenge and your weekday baristas convince you to cheer them on which means you have licence to be as loud as possible.  AS confessed afterwards that dinner had been the highlight of his night while FH was utterly bored an hour into proceedings.  Which just goes to show, we really should explore Chapel Street more :)

Congratulations to Market Lane for the successful event that raised AUD1700 for Coffeekids and provided a fantastic networking event for Market Lane's retail customers, fellow Victorian roasters and coffee fans!

Pandora's Box

Food and Drink - 4 out of 5 stars.  It would have been fun to see how the kitchen handled dessert, especially considering the head chef's previous experience at Movida.


Atmosphere - 3.5 out of 5.  I think I would have liked to have a better visual idea of what colours my food was in, and I can only imagine the noise level around those who were sitting at the bar. Tiles, concrete, wooden tables and vinyl cushions do not absorb sound too well.


Service - 3 out of 5.  The first waitress had to refer to her notes halfway through her narration of the specials, a second waitress came to take our wine order and the floor manager ended up sharing the role of filling our glasses with the second waitress.  There was also the situation of dishes being placed on the table during conversation without so much as an Excuse Me.  Room for improvement I say!


Value For Money - Tough call on this one.  The food price-wise was similar to Movida, but we had a nasty surprise when the bill came as the house wine cost AUD71 a bottle.  I did not have a chance to investigate the wine menu and so am unable to say whether the rest of the wine offerings share such a price markup.

Dealing with coffee dilemma in Sydney

After whining about how hard to find good coffee in Sydney to my fellow caffeine buddy for almost half year, I think it is time to stop complaining and look harder for good coffee.  I can't find my usual coffee place here.

It is not the case that Melbourne has more great coffee bars than Sydney.  I think it's more the case that Sydney's much larger than Melbourne.  That's why great coffee bar in Sydney isn't cluster in some areas like what's happening in Melbourne.

Part of my problem's I almost always after single origin coffee.  There's nothing wrong with the house blend, though.  I just like to play with s/o, it's such a fun.  So, my issue here's I have to find places that have house blend that I like before I try their s/o coffee and they should change s/o daily.  I know... I know... I'm very spoiled when coming to coffee.   

Thanks to Jasper, Dancing Goat, BBB, SevenSeeds, Eclipse, MarketLane, Chris who turned my coffee world upside down, and last but not least my foodies team :D

So, I settled for the second best options.  I won't have my usual place but just go to each cafe once a week since most of the places change s/o once a week, give or take.  Thanks to technology, I'm now following coffee places on twitter to keep track on s/o.

My best love cafe'd be Workshop Espresso, who uses Toby's Estate coffee.  Their extracting's so good that they can convince me that Harar can be up to my liking which no other places can do before.  Plus, they change s/o daily but the downside's their place's so small that I feel guity if I hang out there for long.

Campos'd be a place I go if I crave afforgato.  I like their blend as well 'cos it's chocolaty and nutty.  Plus baristas 're dedicated to coffee.  I witnessed one of them dumped latte down the sink 'cos it wasn't up to his standard.  Luckily, he did that because it supposed to be my latte.  How I knew that?  'Cos I sat next to coffee machine.

Mecca, the city branch, always crowded but s/o always so tempting.

Toby's Estate, City Road, is the closest to my place.  I went there today since I craved afforgato and it was raining.  So, I didn't walk to Campos.  I didn't have afforgato in the end since s/o on filter catched my eye.  It was Panama Kaiser Serracin Gesha.  Bloddy damn good coffee!  Very clean and complex.  If I did the blind tasting, I 'd think it isn't the same coffee.  Coffee profile keeps changing according to temperature change, from floral to citrus (lime, I think) then to dark, smooth, and syrupy.  Who care it's $8 a filter!  Can't drink everyday, though.  Now, I'm afraid to think about a price of La Esmeralda and how good it'd be!  It should be very very very good.  Since other Central America Gesha're fantastic.  LS already fell in love with Costa Rica La Candelilla Gesha this season from Marketlane.

Klink handmade espresso is the newest in my list.  So very cute cafe where I can wait while my mom does some shopping.  Another place with passionate barista.  He refused to sell me coffee since he doesn't know the tasting note of one estate s/o.      

I'll keep searching for more places.  Next in my lists'd be Coffee Trails and Bangbang.  I guess I should give Single Origin Roasters a second go, too.

This Is A Coffee Plug

Last week, the big news among caffeine fiends (and other more sane coffee drinkers) related to the increase in coffee commodity price due to bad weather coupled with increased global demand (seen a Columbian, Panama CoE or Honduras recently?).  This distressed the Foodie Team less than one would imagine, given that now we are all armed with our own conical burr grinders to use at home and so we have the real option of just spending the money on beans to brew at home instead of drinking coffees by trained baristas.  Even if those baristas are now acquaintances and occasional verbal sparring partners, meaning that we would not like to see them without jobs, or worse, discerning consumers who keep them on their toes.

For a few minutes, we did ponder the possibility of becoming CoE subscribers.  However, viability was a real issue. After all, the Team could not claim this subscription as a tax-deductible expense, even though it makes absolute sense to claim that "it is imperative we have decent coffee to stimulate our brain activity to work effectively for the day, and the methodology of brewing the coffee at home has been proven to present a better Value For Money solution than grabbing a take-away cuppa every morning".

In my ear, SL was blustering about the immediate price impact in Sydney cafes ("House blend, I tell you, it was a house blend and the barista actually burnt the coffee and STILL they dared to charge that sort of money!").  FH was talking about how she preferred to drink her stovetop coffees and pour overs at home for most of the week compared to espressos elsewhere.  Even I was beginning to feel the pinch from walking past my regular cafe(s) every weekday morning. 

Someone suggested to me that maybe the Foodie Team should use this blog to plug for money so we could "support the fine dining lifestyle, earn a bit of extra cash like every other blogger out there".   A cafe owner described to me  how he was wining and dining some better-known food bloggers to ensure they put in a good word about his cafe to their readers.

I wondered, I considered, I pondered whether it was time to turn this blog into something more than just a casual hobby...

Then I received an email about a charity event happening at Market Lane Coffee this Wednesday night.  I tend not to go out too late on a weeknight, but I cannot resist the words "throwdown", "espresso" and "free" all on the same advertisement...

So there.  We are using this blog to plug for money.  To plug this event, really, for money.  Go have a good time, drink up on those coffees and beers, cheer on your nominated barista contestant, loosen those purse strings and support a good cause.  The benefit of an event like this is that you know the people there will be happy happy happy (beer!  espressos!  competition!) but cannot stay too late because most of them have to be at work before 7am :)

Now, let's say a fond hello again to my Sunbeam Grindmaster...##