Firepop
Firepop is very new; my friend mentioned it to me amongst other hip and cool restaurants in the Newtown/Enmore area, and this one appealed to me quite a bit - I love places that cook with fire, and the description of the place sounded right up my alley - chicken hearts! Chicken tails! Padron peppers!
Look at the fish bones drying for stock!
My friend and I went for the a la carte menu since I wanted the chicken bits that weren't included in the set menu, and it turns out that it's possible to try all the things on the menu (not the mains or salads unless you have a super big appetite). We went through the priority items first and then later went back to get the things we missed!
This was the lamb marrow and it was my first time eating lamb marrow, it was good!
They didn't have oysters that day, but instead had some really nice hapuka with really tasty watermelon radish!
This is a terrible picture of a really nice wagyu cube. It's not as dark as it looks, and the flavour was good and it was nice and tender! I actually think this would go really nicely with some wasabi rather than the garlic chips, but I'm not complaining!
Wagyu slices, which did come with wasabi! It was also soy marinated so it had a great flavour.
And here are the chicken tails! I love that fatty goodness, it's so bad but so good!
The chicken hearts were really delicious too, maybe one day I should think about possibly cooking with chicken hearts?
They actually had a grilled tofu option which was really interesting, had a slightly spicy sauce if I remember and was quite enjoyable. I had been complaining lately how a lot of cheaper, almost fast food places (and even not cheap fast food places!) often don't do tofu well - I have no idea how. It's so simple to make it tasty, and Firepop demonstrates this well!
Ahahaha the padron peppers, with a side of shishito peppers. I love chilli roulette, and there was a frozen long grape on the side if we got the spicy one. Because I have no spice tolerance though, it's hard to tell if I actually got a super spicy one. I think I can gauge whether or not something is spicier than normal for me; the final padron pepper was noticeably hotter than the previous one I ate, and the heat continued to build up well after I stopped eating more, so I imagine I might have hit the jackpot, and so I asked for an extra frozen grape. I should really freeze some grapes as edible sweet ice!
And here's where we went back to the top of the menu and ordered the things we skipped. Corn ribs with a mountain of cheese, one of their popular dishes, and with good reason! Very tasty corn!
The lamb was also very impressive, I actually don't eat enough lamb but whenever I order it, it's so good. I really think I should look into learning to cook more cuts of lamb too; I didn't cook lamb forequarter chops very well once (I had no idea how long to cook them for) and usually end up specialising in backstrap and cutlets, both of which are some of the most expensive cuts ever. Lamb ribs and lamb leg seem to be grisly? I have no idea why it'd be grisly? So shoulder is the only cut that I really enjoy slow cooking - it's so good! Maybe one day I need to find a cut that I can short cook well.
And the pork belly, a classic, tasty stick!
Okay, this panna cotta was actually amazing. The chef mentioned that they make everything from scratch, even the buttermilk, which is really cool! There was rhubarb and strawberry that cut through the panna cotta nicely, and also the drops of olive oil in there were really nice too! The panna cotta had a texture similar to the type of custard that Teeter Bakery in Perth makes, it's smooth, rich, very, very nice!
What a cute little restaurant that makes tasty food! It's so simple and we could try everything without feeling overly full (I managed to save enough stomach space to go a few doors down and try out some vegan salmon sushi lol - which was fun to eat!). Hopefully they'll do well!
Reine's BBQ and kitchen adventures
Yeah I know I didn't post 2020 Christmas cooking, but it was kinda boring lol. This is far more interesting!
Cube time!! I wasn't planning on using this on Saturday, but I'd found a cheap fish and figured it was the perfect practice object. I already had the coal and firelighters for a situation just like this, so here we go!
I added just one firelighter at first, not knowing exactly how many I'd need since I only wanted a small set of coals. But the first one burned out after a while and I started panicking, because some of the coals were hot and I wasn't sure I could get in close enough to light a second firelighter as I only have normal length matchsticks. But, I was successful! And so most of the charcoal started turning white. Gosh, the firelighters STINK while they're heating up the coals. Luckily I'd already closed the balcony door as I'd seen first hand how BBQ smoke outdoors can set off an indoor fire alarm when it happened to my flatmate XD
Here is my fish! I put some garlic in the belly cavity, and seasoned both sides with salt - just something simple, as I decided I would finish it would more salt and lemon juice once it was done. Good simple flavour. Why cabbage? Because there were sugarloaf cabbages at the shops, and a while back a few food people on my feed were posting about them. They're a conical shape so I find them fascinating. I don't think they taste that different from an ordinary cabbage, maybe they are a tad sweeter based on the name? Plus it was more expensive than the fish lol. I like cheap meat and expensive veg.
Once all the fire went out and it stopped stinking, I put on my fish! For some reason I figured that meat cooks slower than cabbage, when I should have actually done it the other way around, or put everything on at the same time. Here goes nothing!
Why am I moving my fish all around the bbq? I have no idea lol. The head cooked much slower than the rest of the fish, but my goodness it started smelling good real fast. I attribute that to the garlic! But it was just a good cooking smell in general, and the cabbages actually smelled good grilling away too!
After a while, I felt everything was ready! Hopefully. The fish was already done but the cabbages weren't, but I figured raw cabbage is fine haha. I had no idea how long everything cooked for, since I'm an instinctive cook so I just wait and hope for the best, but I was tracking it by the look of the belly since i could sort of see inside a tiny bit, and also by poking the back to see how firm it was.
And the final result! Fish, cabbage with kewpie, and a sriracha, vinegar, salt, sugar marinated apple cucumber and tomato salad. Apple cucumbers seem to taste like normal cucumbers? And these were pink roma tomatoes. It was a fun adventure in cooking, I call it a success!
Now for part 2 of cooking adventures - "fake xiao long bao"!
So, I decided to revisit a chef's Instagram account to see if he'd posted any more recipes, but he hadn't, so I did my usual scrolling thing and found an image of dumplings. I don't know why, but I decided that the instructions of "200g flour, 170g boiling water > Filling: ground pork, ginger, chive, pork jelly." was sufficient for me to give it a go. Am I crazy?! That shouldn't even be a question!
Ok full disclosure, I actually did look up one of his gyoza posts too and revisited the shallot pancake recipe (that I followed successfully!) to get more understanding about how the dough would work. I did the boiling water thing, and then kneaded it till the gluten activated and then it started sticking to itself, and let it rest. However, the ratio was off? Even though I followed it to within 3g? Either that or the warmth and humidity affected my dough, so after several hours when I was finally ready to use it, it was extremely wet and sticky again :(. I had to compensate by dusting the board heavily which helped a lot!
It turns out you really don't need a large amount of dough at all per wrapper! This was one of the first wrappers that was way too large.
I did find it extremely easy to roll each one to super thin though! That wasn't a problem at all. It was very satisfying, albeit very time consuming.
It's embarrassing just how much size variance there is in this dumpling set haha. The final four were because I wanted to ration out both the dough and the filling, since by some insane miracle I'd portioned it almost perfectly.
Into the steamer they went, and lo and behold, dumplings!! Wow!!! Ahahahaha I can't believe I managed to pull that off, especially as I was convinced I had messed up at the dough stage and had been thinking about going to plan B (which was "noodles and stir fry, where I'd just spaetzle the dough and then fry up the filling haha, but luckily I didn't have to execute this plan!). Perseverance pays off!
YAY
So, I originally wanted to do this with the pork filling, but I didn't have the time to buy the ingredients for, and prepare pork jelly. I wanted to save it for the next long weekend, but at the same time, I figured I should do a test run first to make sure I could at least get somewhat close. So I'm really glad! But, now I'm not so sure I want to make them again. I'm really proud that I managed to make handmade noodles and shallot pancakes using 3-sentence recipes (and maybe I'll make shallot pancakes again? I bought beef tallow for the next attempt!). But these are all things that are incredibly time consuming. Now I really appreciate the advantages of modern machinery for food making, because even though the raw ingredients are cheaper, the amount of time and experience you need to make these things from scratch is mind-blowing. I remember reading an article about how a Chinese food vendor can't raise the price of his dumplings for fear of losing out on business as he's already operating on razor thin margins, but at the same time, it's not reflective of what it costs him to make them. Man, such a tough situation, since Chinese food is still considered "cheap". Definitely not. I was fairly confident I could fold up the dumplings to a somewhat passable stage, but I fell well short of my own expectations. It takes a long time to learn how to do this efficiently!
I love cooking!!!
