The contents of this blog are matters of opinion formed over one more visits. There has been some artistry applied and metaphors and similes should not necessarily be taken literally.
I picked this up from the freezer aisle of a local Asian grocery store. The picture on the label promised juicy, fatty, braised pork with pickles. I expected the pickles to not be a major ingredient, firstly because they were left out of the picture, but also because of the text that said “meat only goodness”.
The pickles were, in fact, a major component. The bowl, heated up via a combination effort of steaming and microwaving, was probably 50/50 pork and mustard greens.
The flavour of the food was quite strong and salty, though we ate it by itself rather than accompanied by rice, which I assume is how it was designed. The mustard greens and sichuan pepper contributed the majority of the flavour, in addition to an enthusiastic quantity of soy sauce.
The pork was a combination of fatty pork belly as well as pieces of lean meat. The pork belly bits were delicious, fatty, and delivered the characteristic melt-in-your-mouth quality despite having been frozen and reheated two ways. The lean bits of pork were in my opinion too lean to be enjoyable.
Overall thoughts: Promising, but way too salty for me to buy again to eat without rice.
Xianjiuji Sichuan Braised Pork with Pickles 香九记四川扣肉 EAN 9301168240064
To take my mind off some disastrous performance in a practice examination, my friend and I had lunch at this Uyghur Chinese restaurant on Burwood Road towards the top of the street where a number of Uyghur restaurants are. It was a no-fuss, very straightforward ordeal where we chose a number of the most popular options from the menu.
The XinJiang Style Stir fried noodles ($24.80) were quite good with tender beef, noodles that were ‘jin doa’, and a slick of oil coating every single mouthful (but in a delicious manner.) The flavours were good and there was a nice variety of vegetables and a balance of flavours, textures, and components.
The stewed beef with vegetable ($24.80) was delicious and tasty. It came loaded with glass noodles, however it probably would have been good with extra rice, given the sheer quantity of gravy. Despite the fact that some extra rice probably would’ve been optimal, it was however just fine without it, not too salty, and not neccessarily needing a second carb to dilute the flavour. The beef was fatty and flavourful, without too much gameiness or agriculural scent, and the vegetables a mind-trick into pretending we were eating something slightly healthy.
The lamb skewers (4 for $16) were pretty good when they were fresh out of the grill, not too spicy and in fact probably could have actually used a bit more spice. Sadly my friend is a white man and we wonder if that may have affected the amount of spice that was laid onto these skewers, but we wouldn’t want to assume for sure. It’s sad that these skewers did get a bit less appealing towards the end of the meal, once the heat had been radiated away to the environment. It is not physically impossible to avoid degradation of lamb skewer quality throughout the course of a meal, by the application of a heated plate or using a heating element, for example, a candle under a plate, however this was not in practice in this restaurant, or to be fair any other Chinese restaurant I’ve been at. The Koreans have this down though.
Overall I felt the meal at Xin Jiang Hui Min Hand Made Noodle Restaurant was quite good and quite a reasonable price for the amount of food that we got. We left quite filled and with leftovers that continued to taste good after a trip to the microwave.
I would recommend this restaurant to a friend or colleague.
Xin Jiang Hui Min Hand Made Noodle Restaurant (新疆回民手工拉面) 193 Burwood Rd, Burwood NSW 2134 (02) 8971 5876
I went a little off script and bought us xiao long bao from a brand that isn’t the one that we have for years established that my wife loves. These are the pork & crab meat soup dumpling 冷凍鮮美蟹肉小籠包 from Synear 思念, which was obviously always going to be a problem because it’s rare for her to have a seafood and enjoy it.
The instructions on the box were clearly written in English. I scalded my right forearm as I was placing them into the steamer and had to run my arm under water for 15 minutes – the perfect time to cook these XLBs and then let them cool a little before eating.
I did not have any particular adverse feelings about these xiao long bao, though my wife had one and immediately did not want to have any more. They didn’t taste extremely crabby to me, though I did think there was some particulate matter inside them, kind of in the texture of a thin prawn shell (though it must have been something else, as this is not in the ingredients list).
Would I buy again? As a single man, maybe. But as a husband of a woman who hates them, no.
I didn’t ask my partner to take me to 6 different places in one night to generate content for pegfeeds, but this she did.
One of the stops on our February trip to Burwood Chinatown (written as if it’s not within 2km of our house) was Kwafood Fried Skewer 夸父炸串, a stall where customers pick out raw foods on a stick (a-la skewer malatang), but instead of being boiled in soup they are deep friend and sprinkled with seasoning.
Each skewer is pretty bite-sized, meaning that a lot of variety in textures can be had for quite a small price. Here you can see that the minimum quantity for mushroom is half, and the minimum quantity for corn, for those who want to try, is a micro-riblet.
What Kwafood doesn’t particularly offer in terms of variety is taste, however, which is generally the same as all are coated in the same mildly spicy seasoning upon serving.
It’s really cheap for a snack, under $3 for the above pictured skewers, but I don’t know how much it would cost to actually fill up an adult and ablate the need for further food.
I took myself to Peko Peko, around the corner from my hotel whilst I was in Melbourne a couple of weeks ago for a workplace based exam. I found this restaurant through a combination of Google Maps but also upon reading a blog post at Sweet and Sour Fork, a new website to me, which seems to fulfil a very similar niche to this one, but with better execution and better results.
On this particular Tuesday evening there was a varied mix of couples and single Chinese adults eating alone. Food was served rapidly, as was my consumption of it, with the order to food arrival time approximately 5 minutes and the food arrival to payment time approximately 15 minutes.
It’s not usual for me to just order a whole thing of fried rice, however Peko Peko’s sausage fried rice ($20) had particularly good reviews online and I was quite keen to try it. This fried rice had a strong copmonent of wok hei within it with lots of umami from the luncheon meat, shallot, and generous quantity of beaten eggs. Quite unusually this fried rice was also topped wiht these fried wisps of batter that added an extra crunch and textural interest to the meal. While I find that fried rice is often just a commodity stomach filler, Peko Peko really managed to make it something special and worthy of a dish by itself.
I was, of course, not crazy enough to just have fried rice alone, and my giant bowl of fried rice was supplemented with this chili chicken ($21), which was really more like a slightly spicy sweet and sour chicken The actual depth and strength of spiciness was not very much, and I think it could have been more, with the whole chilies included really adding more of a fragrance than a spice itself. The sweetness and sourness was slightly unlike your regular bright-red dyed sweet and sour chicken, and probably had a bit more of a zhejiang vinegar kind of sourness to it. The batter was extremely crunchy despite the whole dish being doused in sauce, and remained crunchy throughout the meal.
I was unable to finish all of my food for the low price that was charged, and packed up my leftovers in complimentary takeaway boxes, though I did eat a bit more of it the moment I got home, because it was just so yummy. The restauranteurs said “see you next time” as I was leaving, and while it’s unlikely that I’ll come back due to it being not where I live, I honestly wouldn’t rule it out. The whole meal was quite good.
