Fresh and Bright When I'm Not Feeling It

I wasn't going to post today.  Over these holidays I've been curled in on myself, a bit like a millipede when they feel uncertain or under threat.  I have been still and quiet and reluctant to push myself out. It would be counterproductive to say more than that, I think.

My breakfast, this week, is the very antithesis of what I've been feeling.  Colourful, fresh, bright, enthusiastic, if food could be considered such.  I'm normally a toast girl.  I love toast.  It is my very favourite thing.  A piece of toast with raspberry jam and I'm good.  But I don't think my mind and the rest of my body quite agree.  If all I ate was good sourdough bread my mind would be so happy.  And my body would be very ... difficult.  Therefore, I have been trying to find a good alternative to toast that I'm happy to eat day in day out.  Because breakfast is the only meal I'm inclined to be staunchly dedicated to one thing.  Every other meal needs to be the height of variety.  Interesting, different, tasty.

On the bottom I have plain coconut yoghurt.  I was introduced to this at a food exhibition hubby and I flew to Sydney for (and that is a whole story in itself!!).  We tasted the CoYo brand, and it is amazing.  Their guava and plum yoghurt?  Oh. My. Goodness!  Delicious!  Their ice cream?  I could dive right in, and I don't adore ice cream.  Well of course, I can't get that brand in my little excuse for a Woolworths store, so I've had to experiment with what they have on the shelf here.  I tried the Nudie brand, and I wasn't thrilled.  It feel smooth-but-gritty (don't ask me how that's even possible), and the flavour was kind of watered down.  Then I tried Nakula.  It is pretty close to the CoYo, so I haven't gone any further.  And it's cheaper than the others, so that's a bonus.

Over the yoghurt is some organic berry cluster granola from Aldi, and then fresh strawberries on top of that.  I'm not a cereal lover, but I like it with the yoghurt and fruit as a crunchy texture in something otherwise smooth.  Also, I just felt like I needed to chew something, and yoghurt doesn't do that for you.

An interesting observation with the coconut yoghurt:  I prefer it to regular yoghurt.  If you're someone interested in plant-based food or you're intolerant to dairy, this is a magnificent alternative.

Perfect Lunch Partners

 

There is only one thing better than the yummiest salad on earth, eaten at lunch time.

Pairing it with my other very favourite lunch thing - Mum's rhubarb relish on crackers with cheese.

At Mum's house.

This has been my weekend partnership, whilst at my parents' home in country Victoria.  In return, I made brownies.  My mother's delight over brownies was equal to mine over rhubarb relish.  Except I get to take a jar of relish home with me!

What are you eating for lunch this week?

Stop What You're Doing and Make This For Dinner

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Last night I had my kids rolling their eyes at me.  Probably because I said "Oh, this is soooo good," about 300 times too many.  You know how young adults get.

But this recipe was absolutely that good.

I tripped over it, only because I was reading Jen Hatmaker's Facebook page (no, I am still a staunched  hold-out, but I can read the public stuff, right?), and she's on a Whole30 journey.  Me?  I'm just looking for food that tastes good and provides us some positive nutrition.  Quick, simple, non-processed, delicious.  Lofty ideals in a fast-paced, Masterchef kind of world with all its extremes of take out to fuss and bother.

This recipe fits my profile for good, yummy food.  I give you Rosemary Balsamic Sheet Pan Chicken with Bacon and Apples.  OK, so the name is longer than the drive from Melbourne to Sydney, but if you can overlook that you've got a winner.

Of course there is always the requisite little tweaks a person makes for one reason or another.  The recipe calls for chicken breast.  I had drumsticks, so that's what I used.  The recipe calls for apples.  You will want more apples than that.  Just trust me.  Double the apples.  I used 3, because 2 looked like a piddly little amount in the pan.  I wish I'd done more.  And you can use apples that are starting to feel like you wouldn't want to eat them.  Winner!  Also, I grew up in the 70s when people boiled their cabbages to death.  I don't love Brussels sprouts.  When I say I don't love, I mean I have not touched one since I left home.  Plus Aldi doesn't sell them right now.  Bummer, right?  Instead, I served this with our favourite cabbage dish, alongside which is just shredded cabbage sautéed with spring onion and bacon.  Talk about perfect!

Now obviously, this meal fits a set of nutritional criteria that doesn't include starch.  So if you don't need to worry about that you could add potato cubes to your pan as well.  Miss Mischief seemed to think that would make it perfect.  I was pretty happy without.

Enjoy

Even Better Than 'Just' Salad

Even better than just a salad....or a salad with wholemeal toast, dug from the depths of the staffroom freezer:

Salad and a baguette from The Artisan Crust.  With butter.

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You can't even begin to imagine how good lunch was yesterday!!!

First Mason Jar Salad...In Tupperware

I'm not a huge salad lover.  Salads are OK, but by the end of summer I'm after some good old fashioned cooked veggies.  For me to find a salad I love enough to eat more than two days in a row is quite a thing.

Enter Shauna Niequist's Greenwell Salad.

This is my go-to salad for lunch.  We don't have pears and grapes available at the same time, so I use an apple, and I've never seen dried cherries.  Dried cranberries work well instead.

I took all the bits for this salad away with us over the weekend, so this was my lunch.  Miss Mischief likes this one as well, so she also had salad one day.  And then I had some goats cheese left yesterday morning and nothing else to take to school for lunch.  Hmmmmmm.

The apples need to be covered in the dressing so they don't go brown, but everything else needs to stay out of it.  That's when I remembered reading about mason jar salads...where the dressing is on the bottom and only gets mixed with the top things when you tip it into a bowl at lunch time.  So I began layering up in a Tupperware container that was the right size and shape.

Apple & dressing
grapes
walnuts
salad leaves
goats cheese
(yeah, I didn't have a few of the ingredients)

It ended up being perfect at lunch time, even with the missing onion and craisins.  I tipped it into a bowl and found some wholemeal bread in the staffroom freezer, so I made some toast to go with it.  This salad just seems to go perfectly with buttered bread/toast.

I'm not sure I love any salad enough to have it four days in a row.  I'm not at school today so I'll find something else.  But tomorrow, this will be back.

Best Post-Indulgence Breakfast

Same smoothie, different mug.  Still my favourite:  banana, raspberries (frozen), cinnamon. I prefer almond milk for this (and only this!), but since all we had was regular jersey milk that's what I used.

Lazy Day Dinner

Post-nap dinner:  Butter chicken sauce from a jar with a whole pile of veggies, served over rice and accompanied by roti bread.

I used what veggies I had: sweet potato, potato, carrots (all cut into chunks), broccoli, cauliflower, mushrooms.  I augmented the jarred sauce with onions, garlic, garam marsala and a can of coconut milk to make the sauce go further.

Mr Busy got his braces tightened yesterday (the boy people didn't think the date of that one through very carefully!) so tonight it's post-braces-potato-and-leek-soup night.  Bread for the rest of us, just soup for Mr Busy.

Considering the approaching excesses of Christmas Eve afternoon tea and Christmas Day meals, the idea of a few veggie dinners is not such a bad idea.

Christmas Ham

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We've finally begun our Christmas preparations.  In our house this begins the day after I finish school.  I'm definitely a one-thing-at-a-time kind of gal; working and Christmas is more than my brain can handle at once.

Miss Sunshine put the tree up on 1 December, and we have been enjoying twinkling lights and strings of gold beads instead of tinsel.  The girls and I went shopping on Thursday and managed the bulk of our shopping.  Mr Busy has planned to do his with some friends (I'm trusting the girls he'll be with to help him out if he gets stuck!).  Miss Mischief has turned her thoughts to our Christmas meal.  She has one thing on her mind.

Christmas ham.

We have our favourite recipe.  We used to use my brother's recipe, and it was delicious.  But our new favourite recipe is even better.  We use Nigella's "fully festive ham" from Nigella Feast.  I've never seen a raw gammon, although I'm sure they're probably available with some effort.  We prefer shoulder ham in any case.  It's smaller, cheaper and more tasty than a leg ham so that's what I go for.  I remove the rind, score the fat layer beneath and stud with cloves and the coat with the glaze (recipe also found here).  I bake that at 130C for about 3 hours, basting every half hour.  Mmmmm.  Yum.

I also use Maggie Beer's "slow roasted pork" recipe for the stuffing (sans hazelnuts) to stuff a whole, de-boned chicken roll.  I don't enjoy turkey, probably because my mother never made one, and neither did my grandmother.  Dh's family always had turkey and I was never impressed.  So we're glazed ham and roast chicken people.  The kids will determine salads they may want and I'll do roast potatoes (with olive oil instead of goose fat).

Our only dilemma?  Pavlova or lemon and raspberry trifle?  And if we choose pav, do we have Granny's pav, a chocolate pav, or a coffee pav?  Oh the choices?

What are your favourite Christmas foods?

A Great Spring Lunch - Moroccan Quinoa Salad

One thing that helps keep me sane, when I'm working and participating in a fast, is having things in the fridge that can be grabbed quickly.  Especially when I'm getting school lunches ready.  This Moroccan-inspired quinoa salad helps boost the protein in my diet while giving me the flavour boost that makes eating not quite so boring.

~ Moroccan Quinoa Salad ~

1 cup quinoa, cooked by absorption method

2 spring onions, finely sliced

1/2 red capsicum, finely diced

1/3 cup currants

1/3 cup pine nuts, dry toasted

finely chopped parsley

zest of 1 orange

olive oil

salt and pepper

1. Once the quinoa and pine nuts have been cooked, combine all the other ingredients in a bowl, up to the parsley, and mix well.
2. Zest an orange and add to the bowl, then add the juice of the orange.
3. Drizzle a little olive oil over the salad and then sprinkle with salt and pepper to taste - mix again to ensure all ingredients are well combined.

I'm sorry I can't give you a measurement for the olive oil.  I have a bottle with a metal top that lets me drizzle more slowly than straight out of the oil bottle.  I just drizzle 'til it feels right.  You could also add in any other ingredients you enjoy, like avocado or celery...anything that can be finely diced I guess that seems to fit with the other flavours.

If I were eating meat I would have this for dinner paired with chicken fillets that had been rolled in dukkah and then pan fried.

A Season of Fasting

My favourite smoothie

Our church routinely has a season of fasting each year.  In the past it has been during Lent.  This year it is the first three weeks of October.  I've started a little early, because I have a couple of events on my calendar for which fasting just won't be practical or appropriate.  Also, the detoxing at the start is not something I wanted to do as I begin the school term next week.

And so it begins.  A season of physical restraint to see spiritual release.  I have a couple of specific areas I'll be praying about through these next few weeks.  And in the day-to-day I'll be trying to negotiate the challenges of what to eat, and having the kids cooking!

This year, unlike others where we've chosen our own fasts, our church is corporately doing the Daniel fast.  If you've read here long enough you'll know this is the fast we chose to do in the past two years.    I feel somewhat prepared.  I have quinoa and brown rice in my pantry.  There are a number of fruits with which I will make a fruit salad today.  Avocados are ripening in my fruit basket, and there are a mountain of different vegies in the fridge.  Meanwhile, I need to freeze the stock I made for the steamboat the other night and meat products that need to be frozen.  A little bit of reorganising, if you will.

Some of the things that see me through well include:

• My favourite smoothie: almond milk (unsweetened), banana, raspberries and cinnamon
• A very grainy sourdough toast with avocado and then topped with diced tomato & basil or cooked mushrooms
• Fruit salad
• Plain popcorn
• Almonds with dried fruit
• Vegetable curries with brown rice
• Vegetable stir fries with brown rice or brown rice vermicelli
• A plate of roasted & steamed veggies
• A Mediterranean style salad made with quinoa instead of couscous

I know that legumes should probably fill a larger place in what we eat, but none of us enjoy them overly.  And certainly we don't enjoy the after-effects.  I have discovered that legumes soaked and cooked at home, and then stored in the freezer have the least impact....but we still don't enjoy them.

A Season of Fasting

My favourite smoothie

Our church routinely has a season of fasting each year.  In the past it has been during Lent.  This year it is the first three weeks of October.  I've started a little early, because I have a couple of events on my calendar for which fasting just won't be practical or appropriate.  Also, the detoxing at the start is not something I wanted to do as I begin the school term next week.

And so it begins.  A season of physical restraint to see spiritual release.  I have a couple of specific areas I'll be praying about through these next few weeks.  And in the day-to-day I'll be trying to negotiate the challenges of what to eat, and having the kids cooking!

This year, unlike others where we've chosen our own fasts, our church is corporately doing the Daniel fast.  If you've read here long enough you'll know this is the fast we chose to do in the past two years.    I feel somewhat prepared.  I have quinoa and brown rice in my pantry.  There are a number of fruits with which I will make a fruit salad today.  Avocados are ripening in my fruit basket, and there are a mountain of different vegies in the fridge.  Meanwhile, I need to freeze the stock I made for the steamboat the other night and meat products that need to be frozen.  A little bit of reorganising, if you will.

Some of the things that see me through well include:

• My favourite smoothie: almond milk (unsweetened), banana, raspberries and cinnamon
• A very grainy sourdough toast with avocado and then topped with diced tomato & basil or cooked mushrooms
• Fruit salad
• Plain popcorn
• Almonds with dried fruit
• Vegetable curries with brown rice
• Vegetable stir fries with brown rice or brown rice vermicelli
• A plate of roasted & steamed veggies
• A Mediterranean style salad made with quinoa instead of couscous

I know that legumes should probably fill a larger place in what we eat, but none of us enjoy them overly.  And certainly we don't enjoy the after-effects.  I have discovered that legumes soaked and cooked at home, and then stored in the freezer have the least impact....but we still don't enjoy them.

Things I miss...

Chinese Steamboat last night - a roaring success!

I've been working full time for just over a year now; oh what a year it's been.  Two different schools.  Two different year levels...three actually because I currently teach a composite.  Lots of highs, lots of hard days.  Lots of learning how to do what I've been trained to do.

I think that no matter what you do for a job and no matter how much you love it and jump out of bed in the morning to get into it, there are things about what you do that aren't so fun or exciting.  In the last three weeks of last term I keeled over and crashed a bit before I really could.  I went on school camp one week, got sick the next, recovered and pushed hard to get all those end-of-term assessment tasks completed.  I have felt blanketed by heavy exhaustion.  And these things lead to some self-reflection about the things I miss, because I work full time.  Things like:

1. Balance.  This is just the season I'm in, with a new career; one that consumes every waking moment, plus many of the non-waking ones.  Almost every thought I have is about something I haven't done, something I need to do, someone I need to follow up, finding some way to reach that kid who has that problem with that thing....It means many nights are spent curled up on the couch with my computer, never fully relaxing.
2. Time with friends.  I dearly miss having the space to catch up with a friend during the week.  I go many, many days/weeks without having that input.  Whilst my colleagues do fill this void, it is often when rushing between this thing and the next thing.  Just not quite the same.
3. Cooking.  I'd love to feel like I had the mental wherewithal to cook a meal at the end of the day.  At the moment the thought of making dinner causes me to lose the will to live.  And I miss those slow food meals that take time and attention....like handmade pasta or gnocchi.  Or even lasagna!  And having people over for a meal?  Oh my goodness, that feels like climbing Mt Everest!!!
4. Time for self-care.  One thing I need to do and have been unable to figure a way forward with, is things like exercise.  My work days are long so finding time to walk, even, seems impossible.  Especially through the winter when the only time I'm at home is when its dark.  But I also don't seem to manage to get to things like doctors appointments, or taking my kids to doctors appointments, or orthodontists, or optometrists.  

The antidote?  Do all some of the things I've been missing.  As I type (Monday afternoon), we're preparing to have a Chinese steamboat with a friend from work, and her two adult children.  We share a surname, although we are completely unrelated.  Our children have adopted one another as 'cousins' and I'm sure our evening will be filled with laughter, because we all love a good laugh....and all these kids are just very funny!  Perhaps this is the antidote to the things I miss and the feeling of overwhelming and exhaustion that crouches just behind the door.

I have two pots of stock simmering delightfully.  Miss Mischief will make a mountain of wontons.  We'll lay everything out and take our friends to China, via our dinner table.  Slow food.  Good company.  Yes, I think this may just be what the doctor ordered!  So.  A little chopping now and plenty of fun later.

Edited to add:  We had a great night (see photo above!).  A fun meal, lots of laughter and chatter and shared memories with people we adore.  So good.

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Breakfast Anyone?

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We are people who love to go out for breakfast.  Usually just me and hubby, but occasionally the kids as well.  As you can imagine this means we are ever on the look out for a new little cafe that does a good breakfast, and we've become quite the breakfast connoisseurs!  Miss Sunshine found us a new little spot a half hour drive from home.  A nice drive out in the country - more country than we are already.  We visited there on Monday, thanks to a public holiday, and then Dh and I were there again on Saturday thanks to a rainy morning that prevented Dh from going bike riding.  On Monday I had the french toast and yesterday the smashed avocado, without the eggs.  You know what?  This was so incredibly good, and is an easily reproducible breakfast for home as well.  So there is no reason to feel too sad if you can't make it all the way beyond the outer reaches of fair Melbourne town.  

This morning I found an avocado, some goats cheese and some dukkah, so I got a second go.  At home.  Without the travel and without the mushrooms (which I love, but they had all been gobbled by other people at some point through the week).

I toasted my favourite grainy sourdough bread (from Aldi), buttered it, lightly mashed half an avocado over it and then sprinkled some herbed goats cheese (also from Aldi) that I broke up into little chunks over it.  I had some zesty lemon dukkah and salt to sprinkle over, and, well....YUM.  If you're a mushroom fan you might want to have a go at sautéing some button mushies with balsamic glaze and thyme.  At least that's what I would attempt to do if our mushroom monster had not eaten all the mushrooms!

Have you discovered the wonders of going out for breakfast?  What's your favourite thing to have?

School Holiday Lunch

I got the idea for this meal while we were in Ballarat over the Easter weekend.  We stopped at a little cafe for morning tea on our last morning, on our way to Mum & Dad's place.  I'd had breakfast so it was just a chai latte and some banana bread for me, but something on the breakfast menu piqued my fancy.  Breakfast bruschetta with with roasted cherry tomatoes and lemon ricotta and basil leaves.

My version has tomatoes, basil pesto, sauted mushrooms and some lemon infused ricotta.  Once the tomatoes are roasted it literally takes me as long as the bread takes to toast to pull it all together.  Pane di casa bread takes a little longer to toast so I throw the mushy's into a pan when I put the bread in to toast.  Two minutes later it's all on the plate.

After a breakfast of cooked fruit with some butter and maple syrup, topped with the same lemon ricotta, this has been the perfect thing to hit the holiday spot.

Wintery....bbbrrrrrrr

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I asked Siri what the temperature in Our Town is.  She tells me it's 6C (42F).  No wonder I've been cold every time I've stepped out of the house.  I feel validated for shivering!

This afternoon?  More crocheting.  Perhaps some planning for school.  Both while sitting under my fleecy blanket.

An afternoon tea cheese platter.

All after a lunch of my very most favourite Greenwell Salad (today's version: cashews instead of walnuts and apple instead of pear).  Cold salads might be counterintuitive on a cold day, but it feels alive and perhaps it has some illness-fighting qualities.  It feels like that.

Off to the couch with the blanket.  I'm sorry Step Counter App.  It's too cold and wet to walk outside today.

A Smug Homemade Pasta

Not the best photo, I'll grant you, but this will be the best lasagna!  I am beginning my mission to protect our family from a life of pretend meat, take away and other unhealthy meals for the sake of lack of time and energy.  Tonight I'm feeling a little smug.  Homemade lagasne noodles and two full dishes of lasagne to boot.

Sunday's are slow days in our house and slow days sometimes means slow food.  The kind that takes time but tastes so good.  And feels a little bit like love on your plate.  With any lasagne the time it takes to make means I want to make two because all that time should could for more than one meal.  But today I gifted myself a glassware baking dish that can also go in the freezer.  This is going to be a kitchen game-changer!  Oven to freezer to microwave or oven again?  I think this stuff is going to be my best friend!

I pulled out my "Chicken Plan" (by Kim Tilley) yesterday and perused recipes I haven't made in quite some time. This is my school holiday job; stocking the freezer with pre-prepared meals that the kids can pull out and cook on days when I won't be home til tea time.

So far:  pizza dough and sauce, lasagna….I wonder what else I can get stocked away this week?

What are your crockpot and cook-ahead favourite meals?

New Lemon Season Ahead

I tried out a new recipe last night, which required lemons.  I picked my way through wet grass and growing, lush lawn weeds out to the very back corner where our productive little lemon tree resides.  Wouldn't you know it, there are new-season lemons deep in the foliage, near the bottom of the tree.

Hold on to your hats, people, in no short amount of time that tree will be weary with the burden of holding all the fruit it bears!

They're not super ripe yet, but they were good enough to try out this recipe.  Since I needed to pop into Aldi to pick up the chicken and beans I also snatched up, as I passed by, a pack of chocolate chip brioche buns.  And those become the best bread-and-butter pudding I've had in a long while.

Before we even got to dessert, however, we three girls got texts from my SIL - a new Tim Tam flavour is out.  Three Bean….coffee, vanilla, cocoa.

Tira Misu, or Chocolate Coated Coffee Beans, in a biscuit.  YUM

Lazy Friday School Lunch

Reasons why some mothers (i.e. me) would pop out to one of the five bakeries and pick up something special for the two who still go to school:

• It's Friday.
• Miss Mischief is handing in her 93-page folio (A3 sized pages of trials, photos of trials, all annotated by hand).
• Miss Mischief also has an English Lit SAC this morning.
• Mr Busy's jumpers are too small or need washing.
• Making another chicken and salad wrap seemed cruel on such a cold morning.
• It's winter.
• $4.80 is way cheaper than the $10 it would cost if we bought food from the school tuck shop.

The two who are still at school feel spoilt when they come out in the morning to find this is their lunch. I feel spoilt because I didn't make it.

One thing that has always amused me, however, is the number of bakeries in our town.  We have five, if you include Safeway.  Five bakeries for a town of 3,500 people.  I learnt a thing or two the other day about picking the right bakery.  The bakery I used to go to first thing in the morning would sell out of these types of rolls really quickly so I would be out the door at 6.30am and still not necessarily score what I wanted.  The bakery closest to Safeway, however, has these easily available well after 7am (much more sane!).  This morning I got there are 7.30am and their rolls had only just come out of the oven, so there were plenty and a greater variety of fillings to choose from.  The second bakery is now my go-to choice for an early morning trip for a lunch treat.

How do you treat your kids on days when you can't be bothered making lunches?

The Lamington Wars

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In our church there has been a raging debate about lamingtons.  Specifically, the debate is around whether they should have jam or no jam?  I think, as a some-time lamington-maker, this is the wrong question.

Yesterday we had after-church gatherings around food to celebrate who we are as a community and to foster engagement and relationships.  We had the most brilliant morning!  A week or two ago we were approached by one of our pastors, who whispered in Miss Mischief's ear; a special request for her lamingtons.  She had made lamingtons for him when he was over for dinner once, while his wife was overseas.  He felt special and spoilt and…well who could possibly deny a man who asks so humbly, and we had to bring something anyway?  

Funnily enough, others had the same thought.  Lamingtons everywhere!  It should have been dubbed "Lamington Day".  Very few were homemade though, so many offerings had jam in them.  I think this has happened with the advent of pre-prepared food and bakeries.  When I was a child, and all lamingtons that were consumed were made at home, there was no such thing as jam lamingtons.  And I know why.  They are fiddly as all get out to make.  And time consuming.  When you are dipping squares of cake in runny chocolate icing and waiting for them to drip off a little and then rolling in them coconut at 10.30pm you are not dealing with jam and slip-sliding pieces of cake as well.  Your people are lucky to be getting lamingtons at all because they are truly a labour of love.  Your people would do well to remember this!

So yesterday I heard of one pastor who asked quietly "who would bring lamingtons without jam?" and I saw another pick up a lamington and put it down to get a different one.  I caught him doing it and in true mother-form I asked "did you really just pick that up and put it back?  What are you doing?" (we have a good relationship!).  He responded that the first one didn't have jam.

Hmph!

Neither of these men have ever made lamingtons.  At 10.30pm at night.

The question, dear pastors, is not "Should lamingtons have jam or no jam?".  The question should be "Do we have lamingtons or no lamingtons?"  Because if people are making them at home they're not doing jam!!  

Recipe: Sar Hor Fun

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Tonight's dinner was a little trip down memory lane for Dh and I.  When we were going out we used to eat at a local little Asian restaurant fairly often.  It was nothing to write home about, and a peek into the kitchen would have been a tad off-putting for the germ-o-phobes amongst us (I am not one - six years in a third world country cures one of these things if ever they had an issue).  The food, however, was delicious, cheap and plentiful.  It was a mix of Chinese and Malaysian and the owner of the restaurant knew what we loved and could pretty much order for us.  Really, ordering our meal was more about confirming that nothing had changed than actually placing an order.  Dh always ordered Char Kway Teow.  He still does when it is available.  I can't remember what I would order.

One of the dishes served at that restaurant, and one I adored was Sar Hor Fun.  It is a fried flat rice noodle dish with a mixture of meat and seafood with a soupy kind of sauce over the whole thing.  It was completely delicious and tasty and not spicy.  A perfect counterbalance to the Char Kway Teow, which is quite spicy.

Armed with fresh rice noodles and a package of pork balls from our trip to the Asian grocery last Monday this meal popped into my head this afternoon.  Thanks to the internet recipes for such things are not too difficult to find and I chose my recipe based on the pictures that went with it.  This one looked exactly as I recalled it should look and so with a quick trip to Safeway to pick up the three things I needed I set about recreating a meal of my memories.

It was perfect.  I sat there, eating my dinner, saying "Oh, this is perfect - as good as any I've ever had in a restaurant".  I kid you not, it was that good!  How often do you try to make some recipe that you've had in a Chinese restaurant and been disappointed that you can't make it taste the same?  I know, right? Well, this recipe was everything I desired and remembered.  So good!  Dh agreed it was really good.  Our kids wondered what was going on....what is this slop?  what are you making us eat?  what is this odd thing in here?  I don't think they'd ever had pork balls.

This recipe was very simple and not too time consuming at all.  A few little tips that might help you out:

• I soaked the rice noodles in boiling water for about five minutes, drained them and then separated them afterwards.  Because much of the oil had been washed away I added a little back when I mixed them with the soy sauces.
• My packet of rice noodles was 1kg instead of 300g.  I used the whole pack and tripled everything else except the stock...that was 500ml plus a large splash of water from the kettle.  It was perfect for our family of five adult eaters, with a little leftover for someone's lunch tomorrow.
• I fried the noodles then removed them from the pan.  Then I did the garlic, prawns and pork balls.  I added the stock and sauce to this, thickened with cornflour and then added three whole eggs as per the instructions.  Then I added the noodles back in.  It looks sloppy and messy.  Don't be put off!
• I wasn't able to get squid, so I had 300g of green prawns and the pack of pork balls that I had sliced.  I think something seafood and something either pork or chicken will work.  This part of the recipe doesn't have to be prescriptive.
• I splurged on good quality organic chicken stock.  It was worth it, unless you happen to have some on hand.

Go here for the recipe.  Go on...you'll love it!