Fresh Bread attempts gardening: Greening the Balcony

Way back in December when I started this blog (wow, it’s only three months old! December feels like SO LONG AGO!) I had visions of making it all about food: eating it, cooking it, discussing it and growing it. I even said as much in my opening post and my about me page. Well: I’ve sort of done that. But this blog has become hugely focussed on restaurant reviewing with a little bit of cooking. It’s time to talk growing food.

I should preface this talk of gardening by saying: I kill everything. Mint! I’ve killed mint! How does one kill mint? It’s a weed for chrissake!

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I’m here to tell you how to kill mint. Never let it be said the Fresh Bread food blog can’t enrich people’s lives. To kill mint:

1. Strip nearly all of its leaves to make mojitos.
2. Forget to water it.
3. Repeat.

Hey presto! Dead mint. You can thank me later.

So I’ve established I’m a novice gardener. For Christmas due to some carefully dropped hints, I got a Bunnings voucher and The Edible Balcony book by Indira Naidoo for some inspiration. I live on the sixth level of a relatively modern apartment block. It gets moderately windy up here and the balcony is south-facing. I invested part of my voucher in two plants at Bunnings: a thai basil and a thai chilli.

The thai chilli plant is already covered with chillis which are proving medium hot. I have, so far, only added a couple to minestrone soup to give it a bit of background oomph. They worked well. I can see when it wants a drink, because its leaves start drooping. So far, I haven’t killed it.

The thai basil hasn’t got a strong thai basil flavour (it’s a Floriana cut and cook version). In fact, it tastes like regular old sweet basil. But a large big box hardware retailer couldn’t lie to me, could it? I’ve been throwing it into everything: pasta sauce, on top of home made pizza, rice paper rolls… I’d show you a photo but I’ve denuded it of a lot of its leaves and it’s looking a little sad. (I’ll show you a picture when I eventually kill it, of course!).

So two weeks passed with me tending to the thai basil and thai chilli, and neither had died yet. Time to add to the garden!

I got some pretty cool pot holders (wow, that’s a sentence I never expected to type in my twenties) from Bunnings as well, in the process draining the rest of my voucher. The next step was getting some mint, rosemary and sage cuttings from Mum’s garden last weekend in order to take this balcony garden to the next level.

LHS: Sad looking mint cuttings. RHS: rosemary and sage cuttings.

There seem to be two, or maybe three schools of thought on cuttings. One is: keep them in a glass of water until you see roots, then plant them in potting mix. The other is, plant ‘em straight away (root hormone powder also sounds like a good thing – I didn’t have any) and keep them well watered. I was too impatient to wait so I chucked them straight into the pots. Let’s see how these cuttings go. If I’ve killed mint once, I can do it again.

Is there somewhere on the net that has really active gardening forums? I’d ideally like an Australian based forum with lots of newbie questions in which I can lurk and read to my heart’s content. Suggestions welcome! (And any other balcony gardening suggestions/herb comments also very welcome!).

Edited to add: since I wrote this post and had it sitting scheduled to be posted, I read this great post by Fatbooo about beginning his own balcony garden! Check it out. I like that both of our posts mainly revolve around attempting not to kill our fledgling plants. I look forward to checking in on the progress of his herbs too!

Fresh Bread cooks: Pork with Lemongrass and Chilli

I was obsessed with lemongrass and chilli in Vietnam, so much so that Mr B got tired of me ordering variations of the same dish just about every time we ate out. The best thing about lemongrass and chilli is the flavours are so punchy that the recipe can be quite simple!

Since I’ve got back, I’ve cooked this dish a number of times, a couple using pork and once using chicken. Oddly enough I haven’t been using the cookbook that I got from doing a fantastic cooking class in Hoi An, but simply googling Luke Nguyen’s recipe from the SBS website, which can be found here - but it doesn’t include all the ingredients he uses in the accompanying video (an excellent blog post by Bubbles n Squeaks on the same recipe is here).

Anyway, you use what’s in your cupboard and adapt the recipe to what suits, so here’s my version.

Interesting side note: I learnt while in Vietnam that your fish sauce has oxidised and the flavours have gone off if you can’t see your fingers through the bottle when you hold it up to the light. Well… I need to buy a new bottle of fish sauce. But this turned out all right regardless.

Oxidised fish sauce with a couple of other necessary accompaniments - lime and sugar

Edited to add: here's the new fish sauce I bought. Check out the difference in colour!

Pork with lemongrass and chilli (adapted from Luke Nguyen’s recipe)
Serves 2 

Ingredients: 300g meat of your choice, chopped into bite size bits (I used free range pork fillet because it was reduced for quick sale at Woolworths. Pigs who get to run around taste happier, right?)
1 stalk lemongrass, the white end, finely chopped
2 big red chillies (the big ones aren’t the super hot ones), finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
2 tbsp fish sauce
2 tsp sugar
Juice of one lime
1 tbsp oil (for stir frying)
1/2 cup coconut juice (I didn’t have coconut juice OR milk on hand this time so I dunked half a cup of dessicated coconut in some hot water for a while while I chopped everything else, then strained out the lumpy coconut and used that. Authentic? Probably not. But it did the trick. Actually I’ve since found out that it’s totally legit to make coconut milk this way.)
1 spring onion
Steamed jasmine rice, to serve 

Creating coconut "juice" - dessicated coconut soaking in hot water

Start by chopping up all your lemongrass and chilli and garlic. And the pork.

Combine the fish sauce and sugar and half the lime juice (that’s my addition to the marinade, I think it helps tenderise the meat and add a bit more tang to the dish)  in a bowl until the sugar dissolves.

Add the pork to the fish sauce mixture and half of the chopped up chilli, garlic, lemongrass. Cover and marinate the pork in the fridge for as long as you can. 1-2 hours or overnight is ideal, this time Mr B & I were hungry so it only got half an hour.

Heat the oil in the wok and add the reserved chilli, lemongrass and garlic mixture. Cook until it’s browned and then dump in the pork with all its saucy bits. Stir fry until browned.

Pork, lemongrass and chilli in a dirty wok

Then add the spring onion and coconut juice, reduce the heat and simmer for 8-10 minutes. You’re supposed to cover with a lid, but I don’t have a lid for my wok, so… *shrug*. Plus you might end up with too runny a mixture – last time I cooked this I added a smidgen of cornflour at the end to thicken it up a bit, worked a treat.

Serve on rice with vegetables of your choice! Voila! I threw in some broccoli this time – authentic, no, nutritious and delicious? Yes. 

Pork with lemongrass and chilli (and broccoli and rice) - the finished meal

Is eating at China Red like dining in a giant vending machine? (Melbourne CBD)

China Red
Shop 6, 206 Bourke Street
Melbourne 3000

EDITED TO ADD: Well, this is a quick turnaround – I’d posted the following review on a Wednesday or Thursday, and at the same time unbeknownst to me, our PA was booking a leaving lunch for a friend on the Friday at China Red! So… somewhat reluctantly…. I went back. But this time I enjoyed it. I shared dishes with three friends (non-vegetarian) and can recommend the xiao long bao (not tough at all! and the soup was delicious!) and the sizzling chilli beef with water spinach (just the right amount of fire for my friends, I could probably have a little more heat but it was pretty good). The only downside is that we ordered pork buns expecting char siu but got plain pork in the white dough. Our menu reading at fault there, I think.

On the whole, it was a much better experience this time. I’d now go as far as to recommend China Red, as long as you order carefully (and get the xiao long bao).

I’d heard about this mysterious dumpling restaurant where you order off touchscreens from the cronies at work, but didn’t know anything else about it (such as, it’s a sibling of Hutong, which I learnt from I Eat Therefore I Am’s review). Ordering off touchscreens sounded like something I’d like to try next time I had dumpling cravings though, so when my friend and I were looking for a quick bite to eat before heading to see Royksopp at the Palace (food for the ears!), China Red popped into mind.

When you get there, they ask you if you’ve been before. We said no, expecting a long-winded explanation about the touchscreen, the process, etc. but refreshingly the waiter was succinct in his explanation: “Press dish, press yes, NO CANCELLATIONS!”

O-kay then. We think we’ve got this. Anyway, we only wanted a smallish dinner, and my friend is vegetarian, so we scroll through the menu (below).

No cancellations! Touchscreen at China Red

In the end, we ordered peking dumplings (pork) and two serves of the vegetarian dumplings, because I’m quite partial to vegetarian dumplings in general. Seems fair, right? A plate each, and a plate for the table?

I’m sad to report that the dumplings were not the best. Sure, it’s hard to really stuff dumplings up. But the dumpling skins were thick, tough and chewy, and the pork ones tasted like they had been steamed hours before. Maybe we came on a bad night? Now I know it’s a sister of Hutong, I’m even more disappointed in them! The pork dumplings too, repeated on me for hours. HOURS. I was dancing… and burping.

Tough as Peking dumplings at China Red

The vegetarian dumplings were much better. The filling was a nice mix of veg and chopped up tofu, and I liked the green colour of them. However, the skins were still tough and stuck to our teeth (but not in a good way). I’ve had better dumplings at David and Camy (and Shanghai Village, and Hutong, and…).

All in all, we were not impressed.

Slightly more steamed vegetarian dumplings

Positives though: the decor of the restaurant is really nice. Oh, look, there’s more positives than that:

• No, per the title of this post, it is not like dining in a giant vending machine – in fact you get nearly as much human interaction as you would at the other dumpling joints, in fact even more and nicer service when you take into account the sometimes surly staff at a couple of the places I mentioned above!
• You can see the chefs preparing the food upstairs (although we were seated in the basement)
• The chilli oil had Szechuan peppercorns in it.
• The lychee drink I ordered was a great foil to my liberal over-use of chilli and vinegar on the dumpling.
• And the food came at lightning speed, without begging the waitstaff to ‘go and see if the vegetarian dumplings are coming’ – as I’ve had to do one too many times at Camy for example.
• You can continue to play with the touchscreen after you’ve ordered – sometimes I really wish waiters would leave the menu with you so you can peruse it and decide what you’d order next time, or an extra dish if you’re hungry – the touchscreen obliges!
• Plus, instead of catching someone’s attention, you can just press “request bill”, and it comes to your table. Total cost of meal was approx $15 each, so also a bit pricier than some of the other Chinatown joints for what we ordered. Gotta pay the rent on the spiffy new place, I assume.

Final positive, and possibly the greatest of all: if you’re anything like C and I, the touchscreens will spark conversations like:

“Do you think humans will all be replaced by robots one day?”
Leading to speculation on whether you could continue along this technology bandwagon to completely take out the hospitality staff and have food delivered by conveyor belts to the table (dismissed as unlikely).
You may then move on to considering at what point the machines will realise they need to protect themselves from being unplugged, and as a tangent to that, explore your beliefs that the Director’s Cut of Blade Runner is far, far better than the original with voiceover (table unanimous).

It’s quite the conversation starter.

I’ve heard good things about the larger dishes here, but on the whole – would I go back now I’ve tried out the novelty screen? Probably not, based on this experience, unless I was going in a group that really wanted to go. If I did, I’d try different dishes such as the xiao long bao and some of the stirfries.

Other bloggers that have been to China Red include Because I Can’t Cook, who also thought the dumplings were average; Nouveau Potato, who enjoyed the vegetarian dishes (must have had the dumplings on a better night!); and Foodie About Town liked the experience.