Restaurant 360, Dubrovnik, Croatia

When we arrived in Dubrovnik, we asked our taxi driver about the more famous Restaurant Nautika what he thought of it and his reply was "oh, it's for old people and politicians", but when we asked about Restaurant 360 the reply came "ah, that's a lovely restaurant, it's cooler and for young people!" 

And because, you know, we're hip and kosher (at least I think that's what the cool kids say these days) we decided on Restaurant 360. Thanks Mr Taxi Driver!

So the entire restaurant is literally inside the city walls, you eat on top of the walls with a panoramic view of Dubrovnik (hence the name...). It's all very cosy and romantic and posh without being stuffy, which we really liked.

Would we come back? Definitely! Think worth a flight to Croatia just for this restaurant :)

Onyx Restaurant, Budapest

Continuing on from my Budapest post, my friend and I decided to foray into out first overseas Michelin star restaurant at Onyx, in the centre of the city. Onyx is one of the two Michelin restaurants in Budapest and we choose this one as it looked more, well, funky. Funky is good.

There was a LOT of food. So I'm just going to jump straight into the photos :D

Hungary in Budapest

I know, I know. I couldn't help it. It was just too easy.

Bad pubs aside, I wasn't actually that hungry when I went to Budapest last week, partially because I was stuffed up my eyeballs in goulash and goose liver most of the time. And what a good week of goulash and liver it was.

Oh, and the views in Budapest aren't too bad either.

(That's Buda Castle in the top left photo. I'd say the building's very Disney Princessy. I love it.)

Chinese New Year 2013

Happy New Year!

The best part of Chinese New Year? The food. Hands down. The bringing together of families over sticky rice cakes and dumplings, the smell of delicate steamed buns and spicy lions head meatballs, the effort put into cooking fabulous feasts for your loved ones.

And the inevitable part where you stuff your face and can't move for hours for fear of exploding.

And boy, did I experience a lot of the inevitable.

Last weekend, I came back from China after spending New Years there with my family for the first time since I can remember. So what do we do at New Years, you ask?

Well, the first thing I did as soon as I got of the plane in Shanghai was to find the nearest restaurant in the airport that served xiao long bao (steamed buns), shove about a dozen in my mouth, and only then was I able to carry on with my life.

So, let's start with food. In fact, let's begin, middle and end with food. That sounds good.

Barcelona baby!

So I've just finished my penultimate term of University! I've done my last ever dance society's annual show, I've handed in my dissertation (sadly only a draft), I'm home for the last ever Easter holiday before I enter The Real World. 

I must warn you, however, that my brain has been turned into frazzled mush from last term at uni. Most days, anything that goes in one ear comes out the other as"blah blah blah Economics mumble mumble supply and demand yada yada yada profit and loss! ZzzzZzzz", therefore I apologise if this post is a bit all over the place.

So, last week I went to Barcelona with my parents. I'm not sure why. I really should have been revising instead. Hm.

The food was good though =)

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A man (a busker man?) playing the guitar in the Park Güell.

Summer Sunshine

Christophe Roussel macarons in Paris

I'm not dead! I was just very busy... (it's practically the same thing).

I've now finished my internship, and am now back home for a few weeks before I go back to uni for my very last year (sob). So, I have some exciting things to post in very soon, watch out for:

- I've got a new bento box! (i.e. a new bento post to come)

- My guest post for Jill Colona from Mad About Macarons! (Yes, the very one)

- A little giveaway and info about Le Cordon Bleu cookery school

- Um. Cakes. Lots of them.

And as to The Internship, unfortunately I didn't get the offer from the investment bank but I'll be doing grad applications until I physically cannot type anymore (or get RSI, whichever comes first). If... you know anyone from an investment bank in equities sales who may be able to get me an interview, I will bake you the most MASSIVE TASTY YUMMYLICIOUS cake you could ever want. Ever. And I'll teach you how to solve the Rubik's cube too...

It's really an offer you can't refuse.

But before I leave to go bake/cook for my next post, I'll leave with some photos from various places I've been/things I've done this summer.

Hello Kitty cakes in Chinatown (London)

From China With Love: Departures

01/01/2011

I’m not sure that I will be choosing to fly on New Year’s Eve again.

It was –6C outside, it was about –4C inside, but this time, I wasn’t sure if I had just lost the feeling in my toes, or if they had actually fallen off and I just hadn’t noticed.

We were catching the coach from Nantong to Shanghai airport, which was pretty standard. Except we forgot that it would be heaving with people, so carrying four suitcases between two people across a sea of people who don’t seem to quite grasp the concept of personal space was an effort. But (hurrah!) in the end we made it to Shanghai, to the airport, and to the check in desk. Happy happy :)

Only problem now was that our hand luggage exceeded the allowance. But, being Chinese (gross generalisation here? I hope not?) they were stuffed with… food (and, you know, good food, the sort that your mother would tell you off for eating the whole packet of when you were little). So it was either throw it away or eat it all.

We choose the latter option.

However, we realised after about 20 minutes of furious power-snacking that if we were to munch through 7kg of food (it was like Mary Poppins’ bag… don’t underestimate our packing skills!) we’d die. Feeling sick is probably more likely, but saying dying makes me feel less guilty about the amount we had to throw away.



We’d also come up with a ingenious plan – fill our pockets with the excess food – they won’t weigh our coats.

…there’s nothing quite as satisfying as walking around an airport with a bag of pickled cabbage smuggled in your hoodie pocket. One word: stealth.

Then we got on our flight and went home, spending every single time zone’s New Years on the plane. (But I think next time, I will rather be out in the garden watching the fireworks instead!)

I’m always ready to leave China when I do, then on the way to the airport I always miss it. I don’t really have a photo to sum it up, just a collection of some more (mostly foodie) photos to end my trip.

Lesson learned today: Chinese food rules! (And puddings and pies, too, of course.)



This is the Dong Po Pork (braised pork belly) that I made for my family the day we left. Recipe blog about this to some soon – a bit time consuming to make but definitely worth it!


Three little pigs: steamed custard buns. I can’t make these…yet ;)

And now, me sat at the airport waiting for my transfer flight, typing and finalising my blog posts.


Oh and…


HAPPY NEW YEAR!

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Copyright Pudding Pie Lane 2011 at puddingpielane.blogspot.com

From China With Love: Christmas

25/12/2010

I’d say Christmas in China is more of a thing than Chinese New Year in the UK. I even managed to find a Santa walking around the electricals bit of the department store handing out leaflets. He was evidently embarrassed by the outfit and didn’t want to be recognised; either that or didn’t know that beards don’t usually grow around the eyes…


But the main part of this post is of course: CHRISTMAS DINNER! We had two meals, the first was in a restaurant with about 40 family members, and it wasn’t really a Christmas meal. As in, my grandparents invited all of these people for a meal because we needed to thank them for visiting my granddad in hospital, and the 25th worked – not because it was Christmas, but because it was a Saturday. But hey, beats turkey and pudding any day :)


And three guesses as to what this is…


So that was lunch. Moving on (absolutely stuffed, so we were moving on pretty slowly), we took a quick walk to work up the appetite again.


Next stop, sushi!


There was salmon sashimi, tuna, octopus, some white thing, squid maybe? And something else yellow and slushy which I just ate and it tasted…slushy (if my taste buds allowed for colours, I’d say it probably would have tasted yellow too).


I don’t think I’ve ever eaten so much raw fish in my life.

And I liked it.



This was a platter thingy that we ordered. Most interesting was the chicken heart (second from left). I was offered some – “Xinmei, have some chicken heart!” and my gut instinct was to reel away and protest “euurrgghh, no.” Which as soon as I said that I regretted but it was too late and was snapped up (or chewed up and swallowed) by my cousin.

It came out to about 158 yuan per person (about £16), which is very very expensive in China (though that might have just been the restaurant, I have no idea, I followed my uncle… and the smell), although I would choose this over Yo Sushi any day!

Lesson learned today: Christmas isn’t just about turkey and stuffing, it’s about food that brings people together, for instance, duck tongue. (Yes, that’s what it was, how many guesses did you use? Ha! Bet you weren’t expecting that! ;)

p.s. duck tongue tastes like rubber.

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From China With Love: Rice.

22/12/2020

So originally I said I was going to leave out the boring part where ‘we eat lots of rice’, but my friend wanted a post on it, in which I replied that I had already done one, but he was persistent, so I took up the challenge and wrote…an ODE TO RICE! Oh yes, you’d better believe it.


Ode To Rice
by Xinmei Wang, age nine…teen.

Oh rice, oh rice, why are you so nice?
You fill me with carbs but I guess that’s the price.
”I just made some rice dumpling, would you like to try it?
Oh, I’m sorry, you’re on a gluten free diet”.

It’s rice, it’s always rice! Can even make it into drinks,
Let it ferment, it’s alcohol in two winks.
Be careful not to boil too much, remember 8 cups is a lot,
It would be heart breaking just to see all of this rice rot :(

And rice, and rice, my bowl is full of you,
Wouldn’t have it any other other way, and that is the truth.
So dedicated am I, that I eat you with chopsticks,
Hope you appreciate that, I can’t use them for…toffee. (I know, let down, sorry)

Dear rice, dear rice, you’re so easy to make,
But saying that, you’re quite versatile to bake.
I can cook you in the oven and I can cook you on the hob,
I can even cook you in the microwave slot!

My rice, your rice, his rice, her rice,
That old lady who works at the checkout’s rice!
We all eat rice! We all love rice!
And now I’m at the end of the poem, if I say rice one more time I think I might die.

Authentic Chinese ‘sao mai’ – gluntinous (sticky) rice wrapped in wonton skin type things and steamed. Nothing like the Hong Kong version of ‘siew mai’, which doesn’t even have rice in it! :O

Lesson learned today: You can love the afore mentioned foodstuff, then write a poem on it and lose all craving to ever eat it again (note to self: never, EVER, write a poem on desserts).

Copyright Pudding Pie Lane 2011 at puddingpielane.blogspot.com

From China With Love: Out and About

17/12/2010

As soon as I got used to the freezing temperatures and accepted the fact that I probably wouldn’t regain the feeling in my toes for the next two weeks, I finally left the house and went scouring the streets for food and photo opportunities. There are loads everywhere, literally about 2 minutes down the road from my grandparent’s house will be someone selling fruit and vegetables:


And two minutes down the road from that, will be street vendors selling ‘little eats’. I once found the best Chinese sweet onion pastry thing, and wanted a fresh one for breakfast the next day.


Except breakfast for everyone here is about 8am, which (ha!) isn’t going to happen, so when I woke up at 10.30am, I ran out in my pyjamas (it’s er…a fashion statement back in England), but to my dismay, they had gone :(

Most of the street vendors set up at night, usually on a busy road or next to the street markets.

Xiao Long Bao (‘Little Lion Buns’), are like steamed buns but with soup inside, which annoyingly always seems to dribble out when you bite into it. Tasty though!


Here, she’s making omelette with potato strips, egg, frankfurter sausage, and seaweed. Who would have thought, “I think it’s missing something… I know! Let’s add ALGAE!!”. And this wasn't the type that you normally put into soup, it was the crunchy, and slimy (does that have bad connotations? Is there a way of saying nice-slimy?). Just to Asian-fy what could have turned into a Western dish.


All the tea you could ever want – or think of – in your life. Also makes great pot pouri.


’Old Beijing’ toffee apples…and now they’ve also branched out to strawberries, pineapples, kiwis, oranges, even cherry tomatoes. Which is probably good, because I swear those apples were a bit rotten under that mountain of sugar crust.


And last but definitely definitely not least, cakes! Surely they can’t beat my ‘baked with love’ cakes? We shall see (I bought two of each, came to about 80p)….damn, these things are nice.

Lesson learned today: it’s not just sugar that you can put onto anything to make it taste nicer, it seems seaweed does the trick too!

From China With Love: Arrivals

15/12/2010

A big snowy dizzy blur. No update on the food front as of yet, having been in China for four hours and only managing to briskly stomp past the ‘restaurants’ selling 20p dumplings and noodles.

This was because my mum and I needed to catch the train from Shanghai to Nantong. See now, I am going to emphasise the plan to ‘catch the TRAIN’. So obviously as soon as the bus from the airport dropped us off some half mile or so away from the train station,, we were bombarded (and I wish I were exaggerating) with private (i.e. illegal, but we shall use that term very loosely here) taxis asking us where we were going:

”Where are you going? Take our taxi!”

”To Nantong, but we’ve already sorted out our transport.”

”What, no! Take our taxi, only 300 yuan! You’ve got too many suitcases. There’s no way you can carry those yourselves!”

”We’ve already got transport, we’re taking the train.”

”Don’t be absurd. Take our taxi, 280 yuan.”

”We’ve got transport!”

”Take our TAXI!!! There’s no fricking way you can carry all of those suitcase by yourselves!!! We’ll drop you by your door!”

”No, we’ve got transport, okay?! Leave us alone.”

”260 yuan?”

”Aaaarrrghhhhh!!!!”


Oh, I have missed China ;)


Lesson learned today: The customer is ALWAYS wrong. Or absurd, apparently.

Update: when we got to my grandparents home, my grandma was so sweet and waited up for us, and cooked us a lovely dinner (which I preceded to take many photos of) which we were eating at 11pm:




All I can say is nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom.

Leaving On A Jet Plane

Today I fly to China! Which means, no baking for TWO AND A HALF WEEKS! No melting 70% dark chocolate in short bursts in the microwave, no licking of the mixing spoon clean afterwards, no dropping of the cake mix on the way upstairs to use my neighbours oven (not that I’ve er, ever done this)…

However, this does open up a whole new blogging opportunity to me. What do they eat in China? Chicken’s feet, pigs tongue, rotted duck egg, oh and smelly tofu – a favourite! I shall try my best to be the weird obnoxious foreigner at the dinner table in restaurants and take lots of photos of the meal. I would say I’ll also go round the food markets and wade around in fish slime and take photos too, but this will be heavily dictated by what my family want to do – my grasp of the Chinese language isn’t fluent enough for me to venture on escapades alone and not get mugged/ thrown fish at.

Hey, could happen.

Then, hopefully I might write something vaguely interesting about it (think the food speaks for itself), and post it up (I’m going to ignore the boring part where we eat loads of rice). But you won’t hear from me for a while, as the Great Firewall of China also blocks Blogger, so you will have to be graced by these posts upon my delightful return :)

So that’s it for now! I’ve got two photos to show you; presents from the UK to friends and family back home:


We’re trying to fatten up our family, whilst giving them type II diabetes, obviously. And judging by those Burberry perfumes, we think that they smell, too.

Anndd some delights from China (this photo was taken in on a trip to Beijing in 2007):


Regrettably I didn’t try any. I really should have, because, you know, at least these maggots were cooked. And dead.

Lesson learned today: always be prepared for mugging or spontaneous fish throwing. Always.

Blog from Borneo, Raleigh rations and whole lotta food.

Selamat Pagi! Sorry for the lack of updates recently, but I have now finally returned from my Travels In the East (i.e Borneo) with Operation Raleigh. Not having any electricity, it was quite difficult to blog whilst out there, really. It took a little while to get to grips with technology again, but now I’m sat with my trusty laptop and typing away, so prepare for a mammoth read coming up! 

A little about what Raleigh does: “Raleigh is a leading youth and education charity and since 1984 our expeditions have inspired over 30,000 people from all walks of life, nationalities and ages to be all they can be, helping them develop new skills, friendships and volunteer to make a genuine difference to communities and environments across the world.”

With sponsorship from UBS (an investment bank), off I went to the Sabah region of Borneo for 5 weeks to build a gravity water feed system in the remote village of Bombong Tiga for the first 3 weeks and then trek in the Sabah jungle for 1 week (I know that doesn’t add up to 5, but there was training in between those times). There’s so much to say about what I did and how I found I found it (tough but amazing), so I’m just going to concentrate about what I did In The Kitchen and sum up the rest of my trip in photos:

Where we stayed during our project phase in Bombong Tiga

            

                                                   Inside our home                                                                                    My bed

Working hard on project

The kid we named Spiderman

Et voila! A water system!

Cooking in the jungle

First night it the jungle with tropical rain and my leaky tarp :(

That was pretty short summary of my time (I thought that maybe posting my 1 and a half hours worth of video would be a tad excessive) there. But on the food side, the summary won’t be as long!

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During our project phase we were living in the community hall (as pictured above), which was our bedroom-come-kitchen-come-dining room-come-living room. We worked pretty hard to make a hut a home:

This was our kitchen area – many culinary delights were created here. Well, as delightful as you can get with tinned Raleigh rations:

Chicken lucheon meat, anyone?

Every day we had 3 people on chef duty. Dinner was just crackers and spread (not much to blog about there except that it was boring to eat) but lunch was pretty inventive. Served in our mess tins and eaten with sporks, it was definitely a time to bond over instant noodles and beef curry…

 

We even had some pretty good baking opportunities! Cinnamon cake, bread and butter pudding, peach crumble, Milo fondue, Milo flapjacks (Milo is a chocolate malt drink really popular in Malaysia, and pretty damn addictive… maybe because it was the only form of chocolate we had…) and smiles all round!

   

 

We had quite a lot of tinned peaches, so one night we made *drum roll please*… peach crumble! I was panicking slightly for not having any scales (the last time I tried to improv a cake it tasted like feet – but I did go and add every single ingredient in the cupboard – maybe some soy sauce got into it?), I was slightly anxious, but the recipe for Bombong Tiga peach crumble is actually pretty simple to do and also pretty damn good!

This pretty much sums up the cookathon during our project phase. During the adventure phase (trekking in the jungle) we didn’t have as much food (okay, we barely had any food because we didn’t want to carry it), and all that was required was to boil purified water and rehydrate instant pasta.

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Before the trek we had two days training in a camp (not quite the same as you’d get in the UK, more like a flat piece of grass with a ‘toilet’) with some challenges that we had to complete as a group to win points. There were food related challenges, and one of them is something I’m not going to forget anytime soon…

I swear I could still feel them wriggling around in my stomach.

There was a lot of gagging and coughing involved after I ate one, but I’m pretty proud of it :) I think it tasted a bit like a wriggling lychee, but I wasn’t about to swish it round my mouth to find out.

When we were in the jungle, our two jungle guides would cook for us every night, as served them jungle style. The last night was my favourite: bamboo root and tapioca collected during the day trek, the former stir fried with seasoning and the latter boiled with pea leaves:

Fruit was pretty abundant in the jungle, and I was lucky enough to try lots of exotic fruits. And as a personal reminder to myself, I rated and commented on each one :)

So all in all, being In The Kitchen during Raleigh Borneo was pretty exciting, I’ve learned there’s quite a lot that you can do with tinned food, and lots about Malaysian food in general. I think my friends from my project phase picked up on this foodie thing pretty quickly because for my birthday I got my own personalised recipe book. And I plan to make every single one and blog about them, so watch this space!

Coming up next: Xinmei’s birthday recipe book and the culinary delights of Kota Kinabalu (the capital of Sabah).

Lesson learned today: Traditional Malaysian food is delicious. Maybe except for the maggots.